Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Wow, be like a secret service agent and have one of those around the ear microphone sets for your iPHone. It’s called the 500K which is a pretty mean looking. Can’t wait until ships.

Having lost two sets of $180 Etymotics (4s and 4p) and two sets of $125 Shures (SE210s). I’m feeling miraculously stupid about holding on to anything. But at least I can try a new set of phones. I tried the $120 Shures for a while and they just don’t fit my ear that well. Too…

Wow, amazing, for $700, you get a Western Digital enclosure with 2x2TB drives. It  is also mirrored out of the box so you get redundency. Amazing. Western Digital rolls out new dual-drive My Book World Edition II Western Digital has already dialed things up to 4TB with its My Book Studio Edition II hard drive,…

OK, cool things that you can get, which is Flash drive that is so small the connector is larger than the flash. Called the With prosumer cameras all use Compact Flash and there are SDHC to CF convertors, so you can go to all SDHC card purchase if you can get a SDHC that’s fast…

Now that 3.0 has shipped, the iPhone is a pretty remarkable device, the big holes left are lousy battery life (maybe the 3GS will really be better???) and lousy, lousy coverage. In Seattle, you get deadspots driving from downtown Seattle to Bellevue on I-5, you are guaranteed to lose the call in three places. Right…

Well, I was going to get a Garmin 1300, but with the iPhone 3.0, you have some new choices. AT&T is offering a $10/month service that has turn by turn. The one to get might be the TomTom accessory that comes with a mount that has a better GPS antenna and also a speaker so…

Here are the new magic URLs for the conversion by Apptix of their ASP-one to Exchange 2007. Everything changed again. What a strange set of URLs: There is now a magic new user name that is randomly generated. You have to get this from your admin. He or she gets it from cp.collaborationhost.net which is…

You’ve been warned. I have a lock code on my iPhone 3G, when i did the 3.0 update, it trashed the nvram so that there is no wifi hardware detected. Only solution is to go to Apple store and get a new phone. Took some digging, but here is an answer that makes sense Apple…

If you spend a week in East Oahu, some notes: Wet-n-Wild Hawaii. Its a nice splash zone. Only about 40 minutes from Kailua. Just acquired and renamed Wet’n Wild. In the coupon books, get a free icey if you buy a regular admission. You don’t need the additional $5 charge for doing the wave riding…

 Perfect for your office fun are the new Nerf guns. Life has sure moved ahead. Head over to Target to get these or Amazon if you are too far away and there is an entire website nerfhaven dedicated to modding theses things. Magstrike. I’ve never seen anything fire so fast in my life. $18 worth…

Random list of useful home things for the summer 🙂 Aerobed’s are really useful when there are guests. Nice that it is raised and also that it has its own pump 🙂 Waring Pro WMK300 makes really amazing Belgian waffles. The thing beeps six times when it is ready, put the batter in flip and…

Got a Waring waffle makers. So how do you make Belgian waffles, here’s the recipe from Waring: Servings Makes 10 Belgian waffles. Description Enjoy this traditional Belgian waffle recipe from the Waring Pro Belgian Waffle Maker instruction booklet. Classic Belgian waffles have a crispy outside and are soft and moist on the inside. They are…

Some songs just hit you so strongly it is hard to believe…wow Missy Higgins gets it right. Life is complicated. Missy Higgins Where i stood I don’t know what I’ve done Or if I like what I’ve begun But something told me to run And honey you know me it’s all or none There were…

Well, Apple still doesn’t support Blu Ray which is surprising as they have all new MacBooks, so if you want to get high definition from your Mac, how do you get ready. First, you can get 1080p movies into iMovie via the import function, but to produce them, you choose Share/Export with Quicktime and chooise…

Just so you don’t think I’m a complete Mac bigot, I’m having problems with both a MacBook Pro not sleeping and also now our unibody MacBook has lost its Bluetooth. Much on this in discussions.apple.com but apparently, there is a wiring problem inside the MacBook, the wires are too long so you have to open…

Quite a day for Apple, they announced a small refreshe to the iPhone with a 3 megapixel phones and 30% better battery life (yeah!). Also the new iPhone 3.0 comes out with copy and paste at last for all their phones. I’m soooo happy about that. It’s launching 19 June! The big features are Video…

Gradually figuring out how this IP PBX stuff works so I can do it myself. Basically, if you’ve got a house or small business with a bunch of old telephones and some old analog lines, here is what you need: Audiocodes MP-114 FXO. This connects 4 analog lines into your IP PBX. You then have…

Been doing lots of photo editing lately. Finally got Canon Digital Photo Professional working again. Had to rebuild a Mac. One obscure option is color space. This is essentially what the range of different colors that are in a photo. Here is a quick reminder of color space are. Basically the main idea is something…

On a Saturday night hanging out, wondering what people think boring really  means to me…Well thank goodness for Google, here’s the definition…Boredom – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Boredom has been defined by C. D. Fisher in terms of its central psychological processes: “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack…

Net, net, the Garmin nuvi 1350T seems like a good choice. It is part of the bigger 1200 and 1300 series that is thinner and a new platform. the big thing is free traffic subscriptions which is great and is ad-supported. Alternatively the 1390T has this Junction View which is also pretty nice. I don’t…

Ok, the only bug I’ve found so far with iDVD ’09 is that for long scrolling credits, it seems to have a memory pointer problem and creates hash for the scrolling credits. I’m guessing that this is because scrolling over an image is really hard on the encoder. It works fine from iMovie ’09, but…

My goodness, the biggest problem with the video mode in the 5D is that it is set to auto exposure and everything. That means that you can’t even set the F/stops and that plus the fact there is no useful autofocus makes it pretty useless unless you have still subjects. Now version 1.1.0 at Canon…

Replace your iPhone 3G battery for $6 | iPhone Atlas – CNET Reviews Meritline sells a iPhone 3G-compatible 1600mAh battery for $5.99 shipped. The standard 3G battery has a capacity of 1150mAh, so in theory the replacement should give you about 50 percent more runtime. Now it’s time for some surgery. The iPhone may look…

Well, I’ve been using iMovie and iDVD quite a lot. But now in a 20 minute movie, I see that there is a obvious bug in the encoding problem. From iMovie, I have a nice 20 minute large.m4v file created by Share to Media Browser. Rooting through the .rcproject package, I can see <i>large.m4v</i> and…

Evom beta takes up iSquint’s mantle, effortlessly converts video formats While still in beta, Evom (from The Little App Factory, makers of iPodRip) looks ready to pick up where iSquint left off. It easily and quickly converts videos to formats compatible with iTunes, YouTube, your iPod, and Apple TV. It couldn’t be a simpler drag-and-drop…

Four iPhone Models Ranging From 4 GB to 32 GB Coming? – Mac Rumors GB to 32GB — that’s one hell of a range, but we’re hearing from a trusted source that new iPhones in 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB capacities just garnered approval by the PCS Type Review Certification Board, the standards body responsible…

Well, its time of year, if a run to the Target isn’t satisfying enough, it is amazing Check out toysplash.com which might not have the best prices, but the simplest selection and shipping is free too 🙂 If you have glasses, then aquagoggles.com has presciption lense up to -10 diopters. Plus a sale on pro…

Well, been laboring away for a week on this. It has never been easier with iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD to do this. Remarkable really. Here are some notes: Import the movie with iMovie, it supports lots and lots of formats. Only bummer is that older camcorders need Firewire. You have to either find a Firewire…

Finally decided after two TomTom’s have been stolen (one smash and grab in the front of the house and one from the glove compartment when I left the car accidentally unlocked), I would look to see what else is out there. They are all pretty close now Magellan, TomTom and Garmin. But, Garmin according to…

please call after 10:30 AM the next business day to check on your item. When contacting the lost and found, it would be helpful to know the: Description of article lost color, brand name, fabric Route number of the bus Date and Time item was lost Where you boarded the bus Where you were seated…