Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

It was kind of fun to do a series on what my life has been like in different things I’ve used… My life in languages: Shanghainese, Mandarin, English, French, Russian, PDP-8 Toggling, Basica, Mac-80 Assembler, C, Pascal, Mandarin (again!), RPL, C++, 1-2-3 Macros, Excel, HTML, PHP, Mandarin (again!!), Bash, Python,…

OK, maybe it is just a philosophy, but I do think that everything you need to learn is already in a book somewhere. After all with 7 billion or so people alive and billions who have written books literally, the only problem is finding the right one, so here’s my…

No one is getting any younger, but Calvin mentioned in a a very cool webrtc conference call (appear.io is incredible) that his grandfather worked on information theory. It is one of those things lost in time, but 60 years ago was an incredible time for the basis of information theory.…

Well, in the last two years, I’ve been way to glib about things. So now is the time to straighten up. There seems to be no really good guide about how to do this, but the steps are basically: Secure your passwords The advice here is good but it takes…

We’ve been using mythtv for a while, but now it has a corrupted mariadb so nothing records. We have to start all over and the instructions are clear about getting rid of the software but not the man configuration and database files thanks to Mac Ports, this is much easier.…

OK, more stuff that no one cares about. About two years ago, we got a Razor keyboard. It cost more than many computers do ($140), but it had the famous Cherry Blue switches. These reminded me of the original IBM PC. Click and clack, but boy did they feel sure…

I was stupid and installed Ubuntu on top of a Windows 7 and Windows 8 dual boot configuration. The result was that Ubuntu was fine, but those systems were lost. Googling, I found I could create a USB boot from an ISO with Rufus from a running Windows system. The…

Well it has been a busy two weeks of hacking away. Two main things have been struggling with understanding how Scons (a kind of super make works) by wrestling with it controlling the installs of a Cmake, Bjam and Node-gyp and npm installed programs. This stuff is not easy particularly…

I should not have enter so fast, I wanted to install Ubuntu next to Windows 7, but by default it wipes out the boot sector of the main drive. Argh. Now I can’t get to Windows (for all those wonderful games?!), so what to do? I don’t know if this…

I read somewhere that Apple doesn’t say it, but they do design their machines to last ten years. That’s pretty incredible in an age where a phone is obsolete in two years. I have to say that it does feel like it is true. I’m typing this right now on…