richtong1

[richtong1]

net: Clean copy in neovim and custom mode strangeness in Roo Code

OK, to summarize annoyances today: We are using extensively using Agents in our development and so I’m copying and pasting a lot of YAML The problem is the Neovim with Lazyvim is so clever, it loads everything with lots of characters so it is hard to copy and paste. Note that if you use the neovim commands this is not a problem, so don’t use copy and paste with the clipboard; use the neovim…

[richtong1]

inet: Getting Audio with Google Meets

Ok, this is a good one. If you are using Google Meet extensively, then the Google Meet app works well; it’s just an encapsulated browser, but still. The real mystery has been trying to get the audio to actually flow. Zoom does an incredible job of this, but with Google Meet, it looks like you can only share audio from another Chrome/Brave/Chromium Tab. This makes sense, it’s a browser…

[richtong1]

cell: US Mobile magic multiple networks

One of the cool things about US Mobile, besides the incredibly low price of $33/month if you pay annually, is that it includes 100GB of data in the US and 50GB of high-speed hotspot data per month. Plus, you can choose between Dark Star (AT&T), Warp (Verizon), and LightSpeed (T-Mobile) by TelePortal.Besides better coverage, no matter where you live, pick Dark Star if you are traveling. You get…

[richtong1]

wp: The nightmare that is an IP address change at InMotion and the miracle of warp, 1password

Wow, what a crazy thing, I’m traveling a lot and then suddenly, our main site, tongfmaily.com suddenly goes down with a strange message that just lists the underlying hosting site. I had gotten a notice that some backup files were on the site and I didn’t have a chance to delete them and I did, but things were still broken. Finally, I’m all over trying to figure out what is going on and I…

[richtong1]

net: Making Zoom Backgrounds with Apple Photos and Final Cut Pro redux

OK, I think I’ve finally figured out a bunch of things about making Zoom Backgrounds. The first is that it will only accept 1080p SDR videos, so here’s the easiest way to make them for yourself: Taking the Photos, prop it, shoot in Action Mode or 4K and HDR The first thing is that you don’t want your Zoom background to wobble. So the easiest thing I found to do is to either have a tripod (lots…

[richtong1]

tax: The many ways to Pay US Taxes

This is such a confusing subject because besides writing a check, there are so many way to pay, here are some of them: IRS Online Account for Individuals. This is nice because it will give you the IRS notices that can get lost in USPS mail and also you can pay your 1040 and 1040ES either with an ABA transfer or with via third party site (for credit cards). IRS Direct Pay. This is a different…

[richtong1]

Mac: Annoying "would like to access data from other apps"

You get this warning a lot these days with MacOS Sequoia. What is happening it that if you do not set in Settings > Security > Disk and Privacy > Full Disk Access then this comes up. So be careful what you give the rights too, but for instance Terminal and item are good candidate.

[richtong1]

nvim: The Missing Manual for NeoVim v0.9 2025-03-31

Neovim has become such a rich product that even though it is a very fast command-line tool (unlike VS Code), I still use it extensively because you don’t need a mouse. You can do all this in VS Code, but if you want to be that Ferrari 1960s vintage driver with no assist at all, read on. (Before we are off using warp, cline, cursor or windsurf), I thought I would see what is going on. LazyVim as…

[richtong1]

net: Google Shared Drive Missing Manual v0.9 2025-03-31

Well, we finally moved from using shared folders to Shared Drives adding a whole new level of permissions confusion. We have a few goals: Only allow a small number of users to share externally (before any one could) Have a dedicated External shared drive where we could keep track of it all Reorganize our many random Shared Drives into something sensible with useful permissions. This turned…

[richtong1]

read: From the CDL Reading Group with Ken Liu

Wow that group is awesome, but some great short stories 50 Things Every AI Should Know About Humans Idols Passing of a Dragon You should read them all!

[richtong1]

vm: Ubuntu on Mac with UTM or Lima

Well, I try not to use Docker too much, but for compatibility testing, it is sure nice to have a QEMU like thing that I can bring up and down. UTM is a nice tool for this that uses the hypervisor stack for graphical applications. Quick notes, when you download the Ubuntu 22.04 images, it isn’t clear what the passwords are, but they are “ubuntu” and “debian” for those respective images. The…

[richtong1]

fcp: The Mystery of Final Cut Pro Captions

Well, they finally added automatic caption creation, but of course they are biased towards the apple itt format so nothing much happens. So here is a guide to making captions work: Create your movie as usual When you are done, look for the magic wand that is in the middle of the screen and choose Transcribe to Captions This will fire up an AI model and you will see a new section of the screen…

[richtong1]

obs: HDR Output not looking great

OK, I’ve been doing a lot of HDR work and it’s been mysterious how to set OBS to do this properly. I tried to do one and the colors were way off, but looking at Reddit, you get to the OBS notes and it says that is it. using the latest Screen Capture Kit from Appl,e and the precise setting you need are: Settings > Advanced > Video Color Format: P010 (10-bit, 4:2:0, 2 planes) Color Space: Rec.…

[richtong1]

net: Google Drive Sharing dual layer

OK, so we have Google Drive for sharing things and man has it gotten complicated. The problem is that sharing is more restricted now and the default is that you cannot share things with non-workspace members. It is confusing because when you try to share with someone, you set it and then it doesn’t take, rather than giving an error message. So in this modern hackable world here is what you should…

[richtong1]

dev: ubuntu 22.04 google chrome and asdf strangeness

Well, asdf, direnv and the plug asdf-direnv are wonderful when they work, but very mysterious when they don’t. As of today, you need to use my build of asdf-direnv and you also have to do some work to setup it up if you are on a out of date Linux Ubuntu box. Here are the quick notes on getting this running. We have not run this machine in a year, so not suprisingly quite a few things…

[richtong1]

dev: The pain of moving from wsn to ws fixing ComfyUI Desktop, asdf

Sam showed me years ago a great way to organize your local machine. Basically you create workspace directory ws and then you put git, data, cache and everything else you need to build for that project. For a long time ws was my home GitHub project I keep at richtong but lately we’ve been so focused on work that I want to switch it so the main work repo is ws and my personal user one is at…

[richtong1]

mac: No space because of Time Machine hidden in Restricted Files

I had totally forgotten that I had setup one of my machines with Time Machine. Most of the time it has no impact, but when you are trying to download 500GB of LLM models it makes a difference. Time Machine is supposed to be smart about local snapshots, but when you delete a lot of things like 100GB, then Space Gremlin will show that this is Restricted Files which are really Time Machine…