richtong1

[richtong1]

cell: At&T Hotspot strangeness and the magic of APN profiles and "dun"

Long story short hotspotting is great and we had great luck on light speed (T-mobile) on US mobile with Nexus 6 phones but sigh not this time: Us mobile had a great promo. Get dark star unlimited premium and then they give you flex starter for free for a year. The connection to my old iPhone X and xiaomi 13 pro worked great as long as you have a physical sim and you hand set the APN on Android…

[richtong1]

edc: Setting Time on Casio Promaster C660

I know I’ve posted about this before, but with the very cool looking CITIZEN Promaster C660 ECODRIVE, I can never remember how to operate all the little buttons to change the time, but there’s a manual online: First of all, press the crown all the way in and rotate it. You will see the minuscule dial that is closest to the “six” time; this is the mode of the watch. The mode at the 12 o’clock…

[richtong1]

ai: Local Builds and how much VRAM

Peter Kukol asked. Great question from months back. How do you run big models like DeepSeek AI or Meta Llama4 on consumer hardware? Should you go big on CPU DRAM or not?Long answer but…Yes, that’s what most people are doing:g buying a big CPU and lots of RAM and a few big Nvidia processors (depends on how insane you are) The main issue is that DeepSeek is a “dense” model, so it needs all 600GB…

[richtong1]

ai: Best Local Image Models July 2025 and Comfy Missing Manual Addendum

Well, I’ve been keeping track of the latest models in Ollama. This is pretty easy because they have the latest list and we just rotate off old models, trying to keep the total models on the machine to 600GB (wow, that’s a lot!). It is convenient to have the latest sorting, so we can churn things off, for example, right now they are: mistral-small3.2:24b gemma3n:e2b and e4b. Which are laptop,…

[richtong1]

vid: Final Cut Pro fix for glitchy OBS recording with AIFF

OK, we are the remote site and needed some audio for a slide show. I then realized that I had an OBS Studio recording so why not just use that. I took the MP4 and put it into Final Cu Pro and the audio started glitching. It was strange because the audio sounded perfect with OBS playback. Looking through Google and it came up with Reddit which said that Final Cut Pro really doesn’t like OBS…

[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…