Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

!

If you get to Canada often then there are two options: # If you have AT&T then get the “AT&T Canada plan”:http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/affordable-world-packages.jsp#4, they have a $4/month plan where roaming in Canada is $0.59 per minute and any calls from the US to Canada are $0.19/minute while and text messages to the US are $0.50 per…

Someone was asking me about cars and how to manage them. Well, if you live in Seattle, you can actually rent a car for $10/hour. it is something called “Flexcar”:http://www.flexcar.com. You call a phone number or logon to the web, you reserve a car in any of most garages in Seattle, then you use it…

Yikes, the Windows Student Edition was just cheaper, but “Anandtech”:http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3215&p=2 points out that this Mac version has a $130 student edition *without* Exchange support while the $350 version has Exchange support. I now own two copies of an absolutely useless Student Edition as a result. Arrgggh! There is an even more useless Special Media Edition…

If you’ve got videos say in MPEG2/DVD format and want to convert into smaller H.264 format, then the Mac choices are pretty different from PC. Essentially, you need four tools: # “Handbrake”:http://trac.handbrake.fr to take it from a DVD and convert it into a computer quality (e.g,. high quality .AVI or .MP4). # “MacTheRipper”:http://mactheripper.com. This is…

“Anandtech”:http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3226&p=23 has done the first full Macbook Air review that compares the SSD performance. As an aside folks are asking me how the new SSD is on the MacBook Air. First, the system is completely quiet. Second, for normal use, like Internet browsing and reading email, it feels just as fast and responsive as my…

Now that we know “comcast”:http://www.macworld.com/article/132101/2008/02/netneutrality2.html is shutting down traffic, its a good time to safeguard your privacy and make sure that you are in good shape with all those prying eyes. The first thing is to encrypt as much as you can. The second use a VPN or encrypted tunnel so no one can figure…

“Gamespot”:http://www.gamespot.com/games.html?type=games&platform=42&tag=header;logo has a good list of Macintosh games. With all the Macs, the kids are asking, what games can I play. Interestingly, they have Age of Empires III, Need for Speed Carbon and Prey all available on the Mac and they get good reviews from “Macworld”:http://macworld.com Also there is a really fun game called sketchpad…

Someone was asking me, so I love 35mm and love photography, but if I’m jumping in as a serious photographer, how do I really get started. Well, here’s a quick guide if you’ve got the bucks for the best price/performance today: # Nikon D300. Just reviewed in Popular Photography, it is expensive at $1800 or…

Hey if you go there frequently, “Alaska”:http://www.alaskaair.com/www2/Promo/Registration/PromoEntry.asp?pid=AS0803 has a double miles promotion but you need to register. Powered by ScribeFire.

With the new Macbook Air, I’m trying to live life without having to install Parallels and Windows OfficeLife h2. Life without Windows Did that with Macbook Pro. Just loaded Mac Office 2004 and found that Entourage was a good enough Outlook replacement and that of course Word, Excel and PowerPoint were fine. The only thing…

This is a pretty mysterious thing to me. It seems to work out of the box for HP printers that are network connected which is amazing. The net is that you can’t get an i9900 to work with a print server or off your Windows machines. It only works if connected to a Mac or…

OK, I’ve been printing a bunch of 8×10 photos on Red River Paper for Calvin’s basketball team and it just comes out way too red despite all the color matching. Super frustrating as the profiles for the Canon Photo Pro is perfect out of the box. So it is either time to buy a “Colorvision…

!http://www.planetside.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=24&g2_serialNumber=2!:http://www.planetside.co.uk/gallery/v/tg09gallery/CraterLake_aerial.jpg.html Alex showed me a photo and I asked where was it taken, he said, I made it with “Terragen”:http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/. This is another amazing free program that creates photorealistic landscapes. Kind of amazing how fast a computer can be and hold realistic things are. Powered by ScribeFire.

As “Gizmodo”:http://gizmodo.com/348753/macbook-air-review says, power users are going to hate it, but those of us who like simplicity and functionality love the Macbook Air. Yes, it doesn’t have enough USB ports for the true power user, but it makes up for it with three things that are hard to describe but really important (at least to…

Well “Ludwig”:http://www.theludwigs.com has one, so I have to have one too, the first solid state drive Macbook Air’s are arriving and the question is how do they perform. “Macrumors”:http://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/01/macbook-air-1-6ghz-hdd-vs-1-8gh-sdd-benchmarks/ shows that there is nothing too unexpected. The CPU is pretty slow at 1.8GHz but is way faster than the pokey 4200 rpm 80GB hard drive…

OK, I had some trouble getting an iPhone (jailbroken, but locked) to work and now it is always in recovery mode. After much searching, “iphone.unlock.no”:http://iphone.unlock.no/#recovery-restore-mode seems to have the answer, which is to downgrade to 1.1.1. The biggest problem is that I forgot that you have to recover the firmware back to the 1.1.1 version.…

When hacking away at iPhone software many times, you need old versions of iTunes. “Filehippo”:http://filehippo.com/download_itunes/ keeps track of all old versions. Very handy! In general, they have a great “list”:http://filehippo.com of common freeware likeAd Aware, etc.

Well, “iphone.unlock.no”:http://iphone.unlock.no seems to have the best advice for what to do and it is a great FAQ. In short: # If you have 1.1.2 unlocked and jailbroken, then there is now an official 1.1.3 jailbreak. You don’t need to re-unlock since 1.1.3 didn’t change the baseband firmware. Main thing is _DO NOT USE ITUNES_…

Well, the Macbook Air shipped today and everyone from “Engadget”:http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/25/macbook-air-review/ and on are running reviews. Not much new to report except that folks love the keyboard, the screen and the thinness and folks really don’t like: # Battery life is only 2.5 hours. I only get about 2.5 hours with my MacBook Pro, but it…

It’s been a while, but if you want to backup an audiobook that is on a CD, you don’t have to record it in full 44KHz glory, instead, you can use reduced settings. Here’s a guide for doing it with iTunes…. # Choose iTune/Preferences on the Mac (on the PC, it is Edit/Options I think)…

Finally got a replacement TomTom 720, here is what you do if you corrupt the software on it. This is very easy to do with the TomTom software. So, before you do anything, you should first connect the TomTom and copy the entire contents of the “Internal Drive” folder to your computer hard disk somewhere.…

Hey I actually googled my dad’s name and found his “patents”:http://www.wikipatents.com/de/2750000.html. He worked on data communications. Kindof cool to have patents. Kind of a cool site “wikipatents.com”:http://wikipatents.com Powered by ScribeFire.

Well just about everyone is going to be headed up there the february break, so here is a compendium of notes: # Unless you have a Nexus card, don’t just go to Blaine and pray. Consider taking one of the alternative like the Aldergrove-Lynden crossing which is about 10 miles further inland on WA-539/Canada-13 or…