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Passport Photos
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China Visas
China requires a visa for travel. There is a business visa and a family visit/tourist visa. You can get a multiple entry visa if you have a letter saying you have family there or you have a letter from a business there. Get the forms from Chinese Visa, Passport, Notarization & Authentication. “Additional Visa info”:http://www.chinaonlinetravel.com/visa.htm.…
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Multimedia notebooks
Besides the ultraportable, other folks have been asking me for the classic desktop replacement. Big and heavy at 6 pounds, but with a huge 15-17″ screen. These are great for music and video editing for consumer. As usual, reliability is the number one criteria, but the other ones are screen size and quality, DVD writeable…
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Spoken Word in Lame
Hydrogenaudio Forums – encoding the spoken word – settings?. Got a bunch of spoken word, here’s how to encode really small with Lame. You only need mono and a low bit rate. Some recommendations are to use a very low bit rate (-V 7) and also to use mono (-a) _lame -V 7 -a_ Another…
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Unsharp Mask
Understanding USM. OK, now that I’ve colors about right, now its time to futz with the actual images in Photoshop. Some of the things are understandable. Changing the Brightness (e.g., the Black Level), so if a picture is very bright (has a high black level), you turn it down, this means that everything looks darker.…
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Canon i9900 ICC Profile Guide
Well, now that I’ve got our Canon SD500 working and also calibrated all our monitors with the Spyder2 Pro, things are looking way better on the various monitors around here. The photos are way more natural and I for one can now really tell the difference between my LCDs. The el cheapo Optivision 15, the…
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Lame switches
Hydrogenaudio Forums -V n (in Lame 3.95.1). They keep changing the switches in Lame. First in the early versions, you used -r3mix and got the best. Then it was to use –alt-preset standard and then –alt-preset extreme Then it was just –preset standard and –preset extreme. Now they have converted this to the -V option…
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Sony VAIO for Ultraportable
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Holland America Gifts
Cruise Gifts – Holland America Line Inc.. These guys at Holland America are smart. They even let you buy gifts for passenger son board.
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NTFS Resizing
NTFS Resize Frequently Asked Questions. I installed my dad’s computer incorrectly. Got the system drive too big and then threw Windows on the wrong partitiion. To fix, I need to resize partitions. There’s now a freeware program that does this. You boot from a CD version of Linux and then run NTFSProgs. Wish me luck!
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Flight Simulators
I’m getting back to flight simulators after a long hiatus. Here’s a list of things to try: * FlightGear Flight Simulator. This is an open source project with realistic flight models and an open way to get everything. It doesn’t have the latest graphics, but is supposed to be very accurate. * “Falcon 4.0: Allied…
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Turtle Beach Riviera
Turtle Beach – Riviera 5.1 Sound Card. This is a $30 card that has a digital S/PDIF output perfect for plugging into a home theater. Ironically, the new Creative X-Fi won’t work but the older “Audigy2 ZS”:http://us.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=1&subcategory=204&product=4915 does because it has an SPDIF output in the rear. It lists for $100 and is probably a…
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G.Skill DDR650
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Creative Labs X-Fi
Tom’s Hardware Guide Peripherals & Consumer Electronics: Creative X-Fi: A New World of Sound – Introduction Now that I’ve got Zoom Player working, things are pretty good with my home theater PC. Just two problems remain. First is getting digital audio out. The onboard audio gives me five channels out, but they are five separate…
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Paris for Kids
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Zoomplayer Rules!
Home Theater PC News – Your Source for Everything HTPC Related. I’ve been struggling to get my home theater PC really working correctly. Both Windows Media Player and BSPlayer have trouble working correctly. When I go full screen, they always go to the PC Monitor rather than to the big HDTV display. Also, ATI Catalyst…
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Flatseat.com
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Great Airlines
4 Star Airlines in the Skytrax Airline Star Ranking Programme. While I knew a bunch of these airlines, there are definitely some surprises. The usual suspects are the 5-star airlines. The ones that no business traveler (I know) which are: * Cathay Pacific Airways * Malaysia Airlines * Qatar Airways * Singapore Airlines Then there…
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Changing Driver Letters
Changing Drive Letters. _This one thing has always driven me crazy. I like to have C as the system drive, D as the CD-ROM or DVD and E as the data drive, but sometimes, I get it wrong when I install. Here’s how to fix it._ To change the default letter assignment for drives: #…
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Geocaching with Google Maps
If you want to create your own geocaches from home without fancy GPS software how can you do it with Google Maps. Here’s how: * Latitude and Longitude Search. This is an amazing site that when given a feature on a map tells you the latitude and longitude. * “Google Maps”:http://maps.google.com/. If you feed google…
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Airline Toll Free Numbers
“Travelersnet.com”:http://www.travelersnet.com/support/tools/phone.htm has a list of all toll free numbers. It is amazing how hard these are to find on each airline’s site now. They don’t want you to call. It is expensive. Some ones I use: Air Canada 888-247-2262 Alaska Airlines 800-425-0333 American Airlines 800-433-7300 Continental 800-525-0290 Delta Air Lines 800-221-1212 United Airlines 800-241-6522
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Airline Quality
I don’t know where Air Canada is in quality. They are three star. Air Canada Star Ranking
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International Travel Bookings
Normally, I find the results between a travel agent, Expedia, Orbitz or any other discounter to be about the same in the US. But, I’m finding that for travel to China, there are vast differences. Also when we went to Europe, I tried to book via Expedia, Orbitz etc and the airfares were on the…
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Default Passwords
Default Router Usernames and Passwords. Handy guide to default passwords for various routers. In case I forget mine… | | Username | Password | | Actiontec | _none_ | _none_ | | Belkin | _none_ | _none_ | | Buffalo | root | _none_ | | D-Link | admin | _none_ | | Linksys |…
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China Travel
It’s tricky to figure out all the ways to get to China. Here are some notes: * United Airlines – Promotions: Air. United is constantly running promotions, but you have to register for them. For instance for fall travel, if you register your Mileage Plus number, you get an additional 5,000 miles for travel booked…
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Digital Camera Accessories
Single Slot Multi-Card Reader USB Flash Drive (Lexar-RW023001) – PriceGrabber.com. With all these different formats around, how do you read them all. This is a handy $20 device that takes all those tiny cards from SD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, MMC and xD Picture cards and converts them into a USB 2.0 interface. Very…
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USB Flash Drives
Tom’s Hardware Guide Mass Storage: Two Fast and Functional USB Flash Drives – Power Meets Intelligence: Who Wins? and the more recent “Tomss Hardware high speed review”:http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050520/index.html A much later review that the “Xbitlab’s 2003”:https://richtong.org/gadgets/2005/02/10/flash_drives.html review I used to get an Apacer USB Flash Drive, so since I lost my Apacer, here’s an update on…
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Digital Photo Tools
There are so many useful tools for post image besides Photoshop of course. Here are some I’ve seen as I’ve gone through reviews that I need to try: * Noise Ninja: The gold standard for image noise reduction. A Photoshop Plugin, Noise Ninja is the most effective and productive solution for removing noise and grain…
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Kids Camera
With film and developing at about $8-10 a pop for 36 exposures, it doesn’t take long to realize it makes more sense to get a $200-300 digital camera instead of a $100 film camera if you little guy is really into taking pictures and won’t lose the darn thing. Pays back after about 10 rolls.…
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Casio Exlim EX-Z750
We got the Canon SD-500 and it is great as a 7 megapixel camera. There are just three problems with it, it has relatively short battery life, there isn’t an aperature or shutter priority so you can’t take sports shots well and given the kids use it, it would be nice to have some anti-shake…