Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

Well in the continuing quest to make this a HomeKit house, we spent some time looking for reliable garage openers that can be used with the Apple home application. There are quite a few smart garage door openers (and Wirecutter) but the best choice is not obvious. The Tailwind system…

Well, again about a year ago and fixing the house was a good chance to learn a few things about making things work: Silicone vs Acrylic Sealants. The long and short of it is that in damp climate and where there is rain, silicone forms a water impermeable rubber seal.…

Maybe you are wondering why is Tong posting so Much well it’s simple. In the switch to iOS 15 suddenly I have a count of open tabs. I keep a tab when I want to note it for later. Let’s just saying that seeing that I have 286 open tabs…

Well because of COVID we ended up getting four home filters for various folks and we even got an air quality monitor from kaiterra to monitor it. Net, net these things seem to work. When we didn’t have one on, our internal air quality rose to 84 on US AQI…

Well, now that the RainMachine seems to be working, the next project is at another house where there isn’t any sprinkler built in so how do you build something that can be HomeKit compatible so you can say things like turn the sprinkler on and and other general conditionals. There…

Ok, now that I’ve been on the bike for a year now doing 2,000 miles on an indoor trainer, its hard not to do some study and figure out thresholds for training. There is lactate threshold where your muscles start generating lactate and begin to burn out. The main idea…

Well, if emojis weren’t enough there is a whole new category of symbols so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is a great well happy or smug shrug and in fact iOS 15 will replace the word shrug with this set. It’s called a Kaomoji or face mark because it uses the kanji characters in…

Well if you headed off to Montreal it’s going to be very cold. It’s typically -5 C highs and -13 C so you really need a warm coat. Particularly when the cold winds move in. Or just use the Underground City to get around. But there are some good choices…

For a long time I’ve mainly been trying to get lighter helmets but the latest trend is going aerodynamic. This really matters at higher speeds. Like over 45 Kph. The road bike aero helmet have really evolved and best ones are wind tunnel tested now. This is really important for…

Ok a big problem has been there are so many ways to do scripting and cd/CI pipelines. There are basically three different approaches: Stuff everything into GitHub actions. With Act you can actually run GitHub action locally. So when you combine this with pre-commit you can have a single method…