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Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

rich
rich
@rich@richtong.org
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  • Canon 5D II

    OMG, hat tip to “John”:http://www.theludwigs.com, there is hope for humanity, on April 22nd, “dpreview.com”:http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1032&message=27125455&changemode=1 and some “additional specs”:http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/03/12/canon-5d-mark-ii-rumors-are-swirling-swirling/ reports that there will be a new Canon 5D, the specs are amazing. Drool, drool for those of us with Canons who are feeling bad with the incredible D300 that they have over in Nikon world: *…

  • Airport Express as travel hub

    Hey, I never thought of that. I’ve used a travel version of the Linksys, but “PC World”:http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143515/article.html points out the AirPort Express makes a nice travel router since it is just essentially a wall wart. Also you can use it as a cheap way to get a 2.4GHz 802.11b/g network while AirPort Base Station Extreme…

  • Rockin’ Fast Network

    Normally at work, we have two networks, an unprotected and a protected wifi network, here’s a cool way to implement this. We are going to try this at our Seattle office. h2. Internally If you are lucky, you have all new machines from Apple (yeah!) that are 802.11n. These are all the late model MacBook,…

  • Time Capsule Quirks

    “John”:http://www.theludwigs.com has been having some trouble with his Time Capsule. The two I have have been working great with the exception that backups don’t seem to start properly (may be related to passwords), but there is lots of “folklore”:http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/timecapsule/ about how to deal with Time Machine and also a very active http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1253 * If you…

  • Amazing statistic about Apple’s gain

    Well it share in the overall market including corporate is miniscule, but interesting to see what is happening at retail (which is really about consumers and small business). AppleInsider | Apple snags 14 percent of US-based PC retail sales in February Growth in Apple’s personal computer business continued to outpace the industry average last month,…

  • Airport Extreme + USB Drive = Time Machine (again!)

    Time Machine Now Works with Airport Extreme USB Drives – Mac Rumors Several readers report that Time Machine now supports backups to USB drives connected to your Airport Extreme basestation. This configuration essentially reproduces the functionality of Apple’s Time Capsule product.

  • IM on the Mac

    Now that things are reasonably stable, time to get IM working again. It is super useful to have IM. Need to get all our Macs connected to it. With Bonjour, it is easy to do local IM, so just need the folks to start using iChat. Also iChat allows you to connect to “Google Talk”:http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=24076.…

  • JVC Everio GZ-HD6 and Sony HDR-SR12 updates

    !

  • WordPress rewrites broken

    Arrgh. Something is broken in my WordPress installation. I can’t see any .php files that were created previously with MovableType. I can’t figure out what is wrong, so I’m deinstalling all the plugins. Interesting, I can’t even use “Internal Rewrite Viewer”:http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/wordpress-internal-rewrite-viewer-plugin/ which is itself does a rewrite I get 404 errors if I use the…

  • Arrgh Sync problems from Address Book to iPhone

    So at least I got Entourage to suck down vCards. When you have 7,000 of them, you take address Book, highlight all the cards and then choose File/Export/vCards. This creates a massive 2MB vCard file. Open Entourage and drag and drop it into the contacts window. Be careful though, Entourage gives no visual feedback that…

  • Lost my old site…

    WordPress seems to hide old files of mine, so although I have my complete MovableType site, when I type for instance “https://richtong.org/mt.index.php”:https://richtong.org/mt.index.php, even though the file is there, I get a 404 not found. This seems to a problem with rewrite rules as changing thename to mt.index.html lets you see the file fine. In looking…

  • Cool State Facts

    50states.com – States and Capitals Did you know the state song of Washington is Washington my home? On this site you can even find out the state tools of any one of the 50 states and much more

  • arrghh Plaxo really didn’t work!

    OK, I thought I was back in business. I synced my Mac Address Book to Plaxo and then had Plaxo create an Outlook Express CSV format file which I imported into Outlook. Bad news. It shorn off all the mobile phone numbers. So back to the drawing board. Also, Plaxo isn’t double byte enabled, so…

  • TomTom POIs

    While TomTom has a bunch of these points of interest in their TomTom Home, it takes forever to download them. “TomTom Forums”:http://www.tomtomforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=33 makes it way easier, just download the file and then copy the files onto your TomTom into the directory /North America. There should be a .ov2 file and .bmp file for each one…

  • Blackberry Rebuild and TomTom 720 Rebuild

    Been torqueing lots of hardware lately. After my sync catastrophe, my Blackberry refused to sync more than 3800 or the 7100 contacts on Exchange. So I had to wipe and rebuild it. Forgot a bunch of lessons, but to review, if you have to do this: # Download the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager # Make…

  • Downgrading from Mac Office 2008 to Office 2004

    This isn’t as straightforward as it seems, you first have to run Office 2008 uninstall. Then install Office 2004. However, you then have to go to Auto Update as the libraries uses by Office 2008 are newer and you will get the “Error when loading Microsoft Framework Library”:http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Board=OfficeX&Number=745129 message. You have to update Office 2004…

  • New Music

    !>http://images.nutsie.com/mcs-file/r03/3280187/21! Hey I’m not on the board anymore, but Bob has done an incredible job with “Nutsie”:http://nutsie.com. It works on the Mac, upload your iTunes playlist (not the songs), it then plays them for you in a random shuffle and recommends new songs for you based on it.

  • Recycling Print Cartridges

    With our color printers, I seem to have dozens of empty BCI-6 cartridges and CLI-8 cartridges and feel sad about throwing it away. The top two recyclers, “freerecycling.com”:http://freerecycling.com don’t however recycle these, but they do higher runner bubblejet cartridges and also HP cartridges. So, it seem like they need to be thrown away. Sad. It…

  • Arrgh my contacts are gooneee!

    There seem to be some huge bugs with syncing. I’ve been trolling the web and apparently iCal’s new sync for Leopard is completely different and buggy. Also Entourage 2008 and Leopard do not get along. I’m trying to sync Entourage to iCal and Address Book and the sync eventually deleted all the iCal entries and…

  • February Photos

    They are really good looking, so see the February photos and this is an experiment. Eventually I have to figure out how to password protect all this, but for right now, here goes… [album=6,extend]

  • Nextgen Gallery

    With a hoster that provides a nominal 1.5TB in storage, it sure is tempting to put some photos up. In experimenting, Nextgen Gallery seems popular with WordPress and it seems to work (unlike Gallery which doesn’t). Here are some photos. Main thing I haven’t figured out is how password protection works but I think you…

  • Apple ships 802.11n Airport Express and 1Gb Ethernet notebooks

    !<http://images.macrumors.com/article/2008/03/15/162634-803.png! “Macrumors.com”://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=454621 says the $99 Airport Express is going to get 802.11n networking. This is a very nice piece of hardware that complements the Time Capsule mainly. You can use it to add a printer to your network (in essence, it converts a USB printer into a network printer), you can use it as an…

  • Mac Games

    Well, why not, let’s see if we can’t get some games going for those long trips. “Inside Mac Games”:http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/ has the most comprehensive reviews.

  • PSP Firmware

    Darn it, we upgraded our PSP to 3.51 and it turns out that “PSP-Vault.com”:http://psp-vault.com says you can’t go back now and run homebrew above this release without addition hardware. Amazingly there is a special “Pandora’s Battery”:http://www.psp-vault.com/Article1124.psp which unbricks and resets PSPs. You have to run a program on an already hacked PSP that converts a…

  • WP Spam Free error

    Well, watch out for the WP Spam Free utility, in the latest release, it blew out my comments. I thought it was the main module, but “whoami”:http://wordpress.org/support/topic/153402 figured it out. The error said reenable cookies and by searching the text, he figure out what it was.

  • Mac Open Source Software

    “Darwin Ports”:http://darwinports.com/ automatically downloads open source projects over the Internet and compiles and installs them on your Mac. Means the whole world of 40 years of unix tools is available with a single command line on your computer. (BTW, Darwin is the name of the core operating system under Mac OS X and Ports means…

  • Camcoder recommendations

    I’ve told people that if they can, they should wait on buying a camcorder, the move to HD is happening in fits and starts with the usual teething problems. Right now, it looks like the third generation camcorders may finally get it right. There are two leading contenders: * “Canon HF10”:http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Canon-Vixia-HF10-Camcorder-Review-34711/ is the first camcorder…

  • mp3 tagger

    OK, I use Tritag for making my mp3s have nice tags, but it doesn’t have either lyric finding or artwork finding. “Mactags.blogspot.com”:http://mactags.blogspot.com if you can believe it actually has a review of all Mac based MP3 taggers (talk about narrowcasting). Here are some good recommendations: “MP3-Info”:http://mactags.blogspot.com/2007/02/important-mp3-renamer-i-forgot-to.html. This lets you right click and look at tags,…

  • Mac Flac Converter

    “Flac”:http://flac.sourceforge.net is an format that is lossless, so you get the original quality of the recording. I almost never see it, but if you do, use “xACT”:http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21952 to convert it to AIFF, the Apple lossless format or to MP3 with Lame, the best encoder.

  • Sun Valley

    I’ve never been there, but its a fabled mountain. Like most it is really big and it is great to get a “guide”:http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/travel/escapes/22sun-valley.html so you don’t waste lots of time. The season lasts trhough the third week of April so there is plenty of spring skiing left. Some suggestions from the Ny Times: Sun Valley…