Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

9 to 5 Mac | Apple Intelligence Target has the Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1 TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U10000N for only $100. Newegg is $95. That about 1/3 off list price and the lowest total we could find for this 4 star-ranked hard drive. [Perfect for adding to a Tivo…

Taking iPhone screenshots 1. Navigate the iPhone to the screen you want to create an image of 2. While holding the Home button, press and release the Lock Sleep/Wake buttonYour screen will flash letting you know that the screenshot was taken 3. Navigate to your Camera Roll library (Photos)The most recent image should be the…

Wahoo, great news for all of use with crappy in home coverage from AT&T Apple Issues Update Signaling iPhone Compatibility With AT&T’s MicroCell – Mac Rumors Late last week, Apple issued a “carrier settings” update for iPhone users in the United States. While Apple provides few details on the contents of such updates, MobileCrunch discovered…

A buddy was asking me about these. Monster 170″ screen, what do you buy. AVS Forum has some good recommendations. You have 20x27x9 room and want 20fL as standard, although having 35fL makes the pciture amazing. The main net of this is that if money is no object the Barco DCI wins, right now the…

Best Buy Offering iPhone Discounts of as Much as $100 to ‘Reward Zone’ Members – Mac Rumors Best Buy this week is offering significant discounts on the iPhone to current members of its Reward Zone loyalty points program. Regular Reward Zone members can save $50, bringing the price to $149 for the 8 GB model…

Wathcing Oceans 13. Talk a out learning about style. Steve Soderbergh is a magnificent film maker and what an ensemble cast. The ultimate buddy flick about what real friendship is all about dressed up in 21st century style. And thank goodness for laptops, you can see Matt Damon and ask.. WikiAnswers – What martial arts…

Up way too late last night. But in San Francisco, really had the perfect day, I think. Burma Superstar is a pretty amazing place. It doesn’t look like much, but this popular place on Burma Superstar. Great tasting salads with fermented tea called the Tea Leaf Salad. Brother’s Korean Restaurant was a terrific place. It…

Sorry to everyone, when I fixed zenphoto rewrite to be sensible I broke the detailed categories. Rewrite rules were fighting. Should be fixed now, so all detailed entries end up in archives

If you just want to see what devices are on your network. On the Mac, this little utility seems like the simplest. it actually just bounces and fails on the latest leopard because you have to replace a symbolic link for a utility called ipscan with another Java framework file.

My buddy Darrell explained to me how you really get a poor man’s IP PBX are coming from. Wow you need three boxes, the IP PBX itself, then a box which converts existing analog lines to IP and then a box that goes from the IP PBX back to the analog PSTN. In order to…

How confusing what to do. Here are some things I learned at Yelp of all places: * If you hae kids clothes, then the Treehouse is a good choice, goes directly into their clothing store * Northwest Center has a big program, but they are basically just recyling for a fee directly into Value Village,…

OK, trying this new stream on the Mac with DPP and then printing to a Canon Pro9000 connected to a Time Capsule on this new paper which is Platinum Pro. Here are the notes on usage. The most important is that with the new paper you have to update the drivers. Both the regular and…

eDave was asking how secure Skype really is. Well, the NSA I’m sure can hack the 256-bit encryption, but you have to find the peer-to-peer connection first since there is no centralized server for Skype. There is a nice white paper that covers the technical details in good detail, but in summary, they use digital…

Man, some of this stuff isn’t well documented. I’ve had problems with mod rewrite on my system for a while and in looking around found there is a file htaccess.txt that has to be manually edited in each zenphoto installation with the subdirectory. Now mod rewrite works on my gallery and art installations. Wahoo. Still…

It is amazing that anyone can figure this stuff out. The long and short is that I’ve been using Zenphoto with great success for photos. But when I got my new Canon 5D Mark II, suddenly, images started failing. You can see the blanks in ZenPhoto Troubleshooting say in that you need 41MB of PHP…

Superbowl was exciting and we were rooting for the Cardinals too bad. In the mean time though, it was a 30 minute mission to get this new TiVo HD XL setup. Actually was amazingly easy if a bit frustrating. Some notes: You get these magic Cable Cards from Comcast. There are apparently two flavors, multistream…

Well, there was a layer of ice underneath the powder and then you break through and then you get to start “Operation Face Plant.” 🙂

OK, had the camera for a month and the pictures are amazing, now time to tweak things: First a note on lenses and how they look at high magnification. Canon 5D Mark II and lenses For instance, with the sharpest zoom I’ve ever used, the 70-200 f/4 IS L, it’s obvious, shooting at infinity, that…

Argh. Pots and pans are great, but they do accumulate grossness after a while. Consumer Reports says everything they tested work pretty well in cleaning off ordinary stains fro msheets. But, what about really getting the junk off of stainless steel pots and pans. It is a brown film of cured oil. I tried Bar…

Nothing like omakesase at Nobu to celebrate Serena Williams and Dina Safina win. Cool sake on this. Nobu is great but knowing the sushibchef is better!

Omg. A 43c day in Melbourne. Doesn’t even begin to describe how hot it is. Feels like living in a radiator. Now Serena Williams vs. Dementieva is like watching two power hammers motor away. In row C. Glad roof is up at open.

Wow. Weather forecast is out. Lots of 43C days in Melbourne. That is over 109F. So cooking hot. Also power demand is breaking records. They say it is 100 year heat wave. Having an open electricity trading system makes it so much easier to plan.

Cool places to hang out. The BOA Steakhouse and also the Viceroy for drink. I have never felt so trendy and cool. Except maybe in Shanghai :-0

Wow it does get hot here. Over 40C (104F). I don’t know how people play tennis in this kind of weather. The Crown Towers is pretty nice. Was top readers choice in Australia/Pacific in 2007. The Qantas flight was nearly a nightmare. The Airbus 380 needed a new part. So they delayed it from 11:15PM…

I’ve never used this thing as I’ve always resorts to DxO to process my RAW images, but now the DxO is just starting to support the Canon 5D Mark II and it doesn’t yet have a module for the Canon EF 70-200 F/2.8 L IS USM lense if you can believe that, so I have…

Well, HDMI has lots of issues but at least it is reasonably standard. We do have one now very old rear projection system that is 1080i with just component inputs, so how do you connect the Playstation to it. Got an el cheapo Gigaware cable that support component to Xbox, Playstation or just about anything…

It used to be that the main game in town for a compact SLR was the D40x and the Nikon 18-200 superzoom. Now the market has caught up and both Canon as well as Sigma and Tamron have shipped superzooms. So if you have a subframe camera, what’s a good choice? Well, unfortunately, if you…

I’ve been using DxO for a while now as a RAW converter mainly to handle vignetting, but also for things like highlight recovery. The 4.0 version was great, but the new 5.0 has had lots of bugs, so I haven’t upgraded. Now with a new Canon EOS 5D Mark II, I have to do something…

I think John mentioned this to me, but he’s right, the Greeks didn’t judge people by how they felt, but by what they did. In reflecting on the last three months, he is really right. People who I thought were going to stick with it no matter what turned out to be “Gone in 60…

Darrell turned me onto this. Already 2M views on YouTube. The future is here