Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

Well for a variety of crazy reasons we just drove 11 hours to Montana. It was a great trip and an easy way to see some beautiful country (with suitably scary revelations), but one of the highlights was listening to the LensRentals Podcast. I first started using LensRentals an incredible…

Well, now that the rendering of LaTeX worked, might as well get diagrams working the same way. It’s the same idea, there is a WP Mermaid plugin and there is both Gutenberg block and there is a shortcode [ mermaid ]. Note that after you install a plugin, you need…

Well, there are two good options: Use the Unicode characters for mathematics in simple one-line formulas and then add the Greek keyboard for things like pi or π by using the Globe icon 🌐 to switch to Greek and type a p. On a Mac, you get these with CTRL-CMD-Space…

Well, I’ve been putting off buying a new Apple Watch for years. We got the first Series 1 and it was hard to figure out what to do with it (this was before it became more fitness-focused and was supposedly a general application and notification platform). Like all first versions,…

OK, it’s been three long years since I’ve used a dedicated bare-metal Ubuntu machine. The last time was with house-made machine learning machines when the Titan was a big system, but we were amongst the first to build quad GPU machines running the then very new Ubuntu 14.04. Now of…

In these days of high gas prices. I was curious to see what the real energy cost savings are right to now. Back in 2017, we had the option to get a $5K rebate or unlimited free supercharging. This was because they dropped the price of the car by $5K…

Ugh, I’ve been trying to limp along with an Apple Watch Series 3 and it’s been hard. The thing doesn’t last very long battery-wise and is slow. Also at some point, I took a huge piece of glass out of the right corner but it still worked. Finally, it has…

I can’t believe how dependent I’ve gotten on two features. The first is iCloud Share Tab Groups, this gives you a single view of all your tab groups across all your devices. This is super convenient for those of us with multiple chores. Like taking care of Mom, the home,…

There are very few WiFi channels and most are congested, so the quest goes on for more spectrum and channels to avoid everyone else WiFi Access points. The 2.4 GHz band, the ISM band (Industrial, Scientific and Medical), is super crowded with only three non-overlapping 20MHz channels at 1, 6,…

Docker has become the default for lots of reproducible build system, but the sad thing is that although you get a defined image, the specification, the Dockerfile itself, is not reproducible. That’s because most Dockerfile do not have pinned dependencies: This is a simple example that starts ubuntu, installs some…