Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

OK, I saw a post on Mastodon about open-source tools for photo and video editing and it reminded me that I’ve been using DxO PhotoLab for more than 10 years and it is time to see if the open-source tools have caught up. I generally liked DxO over Lightroom because…

Ok, this has to be in the department of infrastructure breaks too much, but I never log in to my MacBook Pro 2017 that I use for backups, and to review here is how I handle backups right now based on the 2022 strategy which has been working pretty well,…

I just listened to Why We Sleep. I don’t know how scientific it is, but it sure scared me. With an Apple Watch if you set the sleep time properly by setting your sleep time in the Clock, not knob do you get a notification to sleep as well as…

Most of the time when I get a reference quality Blu-ray, I will use Handbrake to make an archival copy. I find that with a 60GB Blu-ray if I set it for H.265 MKV 2160p60 as the default and make a custom one that matches the frame rate. For instance,…

Wow, who would ever have thought we would get to this, now this is Comcast territory so not symmetric, but I’m getting a 1.4Gbps download and a 40Mbps upload now. This required some significant changes to the network. I had been using an Arris SB8200 which is a 32×8 DOCSIS…

Well, now that we have 4K HDR finally setup (thank you for all those year of isolation), it’s time to find the best movies that show off the soundtrack and the 4K HDR. So here are some of the best scenes thanks to Digital Trends, Shane Lee, Denon, Cinelux, Whatnerd…

Well we just got a flat with our Tesla and what a nightmare. They basically don’t provide you with anything that you need so here are the just haves so you are not like me: The main thing to realize is that Teslas are not designed with any failsafes if…

Since I last posted on the difference between .local and .localdomain where you get automatic naming from the hostnames, this really undocumented set of features has been useful and hard to debug. So some notes: Debugging .local Last year, the .localdomain was just the reflection of the hostname and appended…

Well, all this time at home has meant that we’ve put a lot of smart home devices into the house. Last week we had a power outage and I can definitely say that while more powerful, these devices are not particularly resilient to failures like this (particularly the cheaper devices),…

So this has really been the year of the watch for me. With the Series 3 finally dying (because the screen finally cracked and then it died), I ended up buying a new set of smartwatches and it revitalized my interest at the other end of the Watch barbell, so…