Rich Tong Rants

A good note if you are doing this for your parents or friend. It’s a jungle, there are a zillion websites, but to cut to the chase: First you need to login to SSA.gov, this requires you have a login to, well, login.gov which is the authenticator for all government apps You are going to need a camera phone and a physical copy of your passport or drivers license and you need to have a real US…

Sorry been way too busy to post, I will try to get the automated Agent updates working but probably next weekend, but so many things queued up: US Mobile is great; Google Voice for numbers, but remember to send a text every month The incredibly reasonable cost of cellular service in SE Asia and how to get multiple Whatsapp working but be careful about how you use WhatsApp business.

OK so this one has been driving me absolutely crazy. You’re on your Mac, everything is working great except when you try to log to one of those pesky Public Hotspots. These are the ones that do DNS magic (they basically seize any DNS request and redirect them to the logon screen. I tried the usual things, is NordVPN or ProtonVPN active, if so, it will try to do a connection and prevents the…

Well, I finally decided to get three more pens, and I ended up losing one to my stupidity, so here’s the latest on my fountain pen hobby. OK, for those of you new to the hobby, I’ve had these pens for a while, and I’ve never had a jam. But I took my cheapest pen, the $50 Narvalur, on the road, and the thing just stopped writing. I took some internet advice to stick the nib into soapy water,r…

More notes on this. As of August, a big change is that Verizon/Warp now has more than 100 roaming partners. Still less than T-mobile/light speed and at&t/dark star but much better. It’s really quite a win. I’ll be sad when some gigantic conglomerate buys US Mobile out. But in the mean time, it’s been working great of rus. They have a great promotion now for dark star that’s $300 for a $400 a…

Well I discovered in my mom and dad’s stuff a GTE labeled pen. It must be at least 40 years old and I help but want to use it again. But what is the cartridge. Well a little sleuthing helps. It is ¼ inch in diameter and 3 7/8 inch long. Turns out this is a Parker G2 standard cartridge and is now ISO-12575-2 so you can actual get a new refill for it. Thank goodness for standards. Looking on…

OK, I’m not sure what is up with my installation, but it used to be that if I hit “Caps Lock” twice, it would switch input mode,s and then there was another command to bring up the emoji viewer. All of this broke with the MacOS 26 Tahoe upgrade. The Input  menu no longer appears in the menubar And the Toggle in System Settings > Keyboard > Press 🌐 > Emoji & Symbols Also the Ctrl-Space The…

Well, we’ve had two cases where we want to access our Unifi network at home. In one case to get a Time Machine backup finished and also to access the home servers. The documentation is just terrible, so here’s a quick guide as of October 2, 2025 Teleport: Load WifiMan then login Teleport. This is their one-stop shop for getting access. The problem is that I couldn’t get it to work well over…

Well for a variety of reasons, all of our ultra cool agents, we have a nearly 6,000 line single YAML file that is our base configuration. So it is nearly impossible to figure out what is wrong because it is not incorrect syntax, but the tool (TNE Compass if you must know) is very picky about semantics such as: If there is a blank field like “description:”, this particular app will fail the…

We just had our main SSL certificate “die” on Netlify. I’m not sure why but a TXT record got truncated. This reminded me I’ve had another long standing issue with tongfamily.com where every so often I would get an invalid SSL certificate. Well, I tried gemini-cli to figure this out and it led me to the Inmotion Hosting > Cpanel > Security > SSL/TLS > Certificates (CRT)section. And there was a…

Another short test with YouTube, LinkedIn, but actually, the content is sort of interesting, how to do prompting and think of it like a programming language

Another LinkedIn Live I forgot to post on audio channels. Sorry about that. This is from May 15, 2025 which seems like ancient history. Good news is our 2024 predictions were pretty good!

Well, I somehow forgot all about podcast publishing, things get too busy, but now things from way back in February are getting caught up. Here is one where Steve Suarez and I talked about Deepseek R1. A little dated now in September, but for posterity

You can forget how obscure errors can be, but today we got a B1 service light and then the TPMS light turned on. I made sure the pressure was OK, but it was still on. Then I checked out the YouTube Video that said you just have to power the car and hit the TPMS reset at the very lower left of the console, but it didn’t work. What this means is that B means you need your oil changed and 1 means…

There are so many strange things you have to do with LinkedIn Live. First of all Zoom you can now stream directly so here are the steps: Schedule your LinkedIn Live. For some reason I find this super hard. Go to zoom.com > My Account > Settings > Meeting if you are not an admin. If you are an Admin it is in `zoom.com > Account Management > Account Settings >

So proud of Grace and her latest adventure, which is rolling out today. Great piece in NW Asia Weekly. Come one come all 🙂