Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Home Networking and Broadband Argggghhhh! I’m going to be so glad when Dynacenter has a product! I’ve been down for two days at home and Connie has been telling me about it. First of all, the only error diagnostic is that you can’t browse or connect. The modem is completely unhelpful. Just a bunch of…

Wireless Media Server. A great point by John Ludwig about a wireless media server that uses FM to broadcast rather than something fancy. Of course, who wants 16KHz limited FM. He makes a point of the FM range compression. I didn’t think that was true normally. Also, most 128Kbps Mpeg3’s are limited to 16Khz anyway.

Post to many blogs. I just love this tool from Brazil. Now, I can post to multiple blogs at the same time. In this case, you’ll find this message on Tong Family and Geek Fishing at the same time. Useful for sending to multiple places at once I think.

Geek Fishing. This is our new shared web page for Ignition affiliated folks who are interested in learning how to use Blogs. It is amazing how much interesting information is over there. It uses b2 cafelog as the tool. Longer term, I’m going to put Movable Type onto that server and then move www.tongfamily.com over.

Tom’s Hardware Guide PCs & HowTo: Reader How Tos: Build a PC for TV – How To Build a PC for TV, Continued. Martin is thinking about building one of the home theater PCs. Here’s a good guide using a piece of hardware I have. The main problem is that the SS-51G is a great…

cornerhost: low priced, reliable hosting with a human touch. Another boutique to consider. $10/month is the basic plan plus $3 for mysql.

Teen Open Diary. A teen oriented blog system. Claims there are 20,000 blogs on it. Wow.

Antville. Another example of the blog economy. This is a special tool for highly scalable blog hosting. They currently have 2700 plus blogs on a server of which 1300 are accessible. That is amazing!

Weblogs Compendium – Hosting. this seems like the definitive list of blog oriented hosters. No ratings though. Will troll through and see what is there. Interesting to see Tranquil is tops in a google search for blog hosting

BlogOmania :: There’s always room for one more!. It had to happen, here is a hoster that specializes in blogs. More food for John Ludwig and I to think about. Anyway, I’m going to sign up for either their $30/quarter plan which is 200MB, 4 MySQL databases, 2 mailing list. Of if Tranquil Hosting supports…

Radio Free Blogistan Blog Tool Comparisons. These I find more useful than just the checklist that Blogcomp has. Here is one about Radio vs. MovableType vs. Blogger. Basically concludes that Radio is the best of the bunch. Amazing what a year of development can yield though. These products aren’t that old at all. Bottom line…

DVD Playback on your PC Now that I’ve got DVD backup working, the next question is playback. There are two issues, how to get great DVD playback and how to get great DiVX playback. Here’s what I’ve learned DVDs on Your PC. OK now that the DiVX works, the questions are how to get a…

DVD to DiVX backup guides In the quest to backup my DVDs to a highly compressed DiVX file, I found lots of really great sites that explain what to do. I ended up picking the method that is more complicated but hopefully gets really great high quality DiVX with Dolby Digital (also called AC3), so…

Nokia Launches 9 New MMS Wireless Phones. Well the other shoe had to drop on the new Nokia line for this fall. Here it is. The new Nokia 6800 sure looks cool. The way the flip opens to make it a console is pretty neat. Not available until next year though. See it below Here’s…

a day late and a :: dollarshort.org. Mena is the author of Moveable Type along with Ben her husband. Here is here award winning blog.

JavaScript: need Scrolling side navigation bar. The one thing that is missing when I start the conversion over to a non-FrontPage web site is creating the navigation bars. A quick search shows there are bars aplenty. Here is quick list… http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/smith_menu/smith_menu.html http://www.treemenu.com/ http://www.webreference.com/dhtml/hiermenus/instructions/noframes/step1.html http://webreference.com/dhtml/dynomat/hiermenus3/ie/index.html http://www.bratta.com/dhtml/scripts.asp?url=scripts/scripts.asp?id=28&ac=7&order=created http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/navigate1.htm http://www.ivanpeters.com/

NetMagazines.com: Lowest Price Guaranteed with 1353 Titles!. I ordered a few magazines from them. They seem to have the lowest prices. Just make sure to use their various coupons and things. Their rack rates are the same as say Amazon, but not if you take advantage of their sales.

Google Rank back to 4. Hooray, my Google PageRank is back to 4. I’m so happy!

Freeware website software search continues OK, now that I’ve got b2 running on my machine along with PHP, I thought I’d try some other content management systems. This next one is a challenge since it requires an apache server PHP-Nuke. Another content management system to look at. Makes things look like a big bulletin board.…

Next PC to Buy I’m also going to put a new graphic card into Grace’s machine. Want to get an nVidia, but this piece shows, the new NV30 is the one to wait for in November. Otherwise, it’s a midrange Radeon. The couple of clipped articles here should give you an view for what I’m…

Tom’s Hardware Guide CPU Guide: Hot Contraband: P4 With 3.6 GHz – Comparison Of All P4 CPUs. I can’t believe it, but it is time for me to think about upgrading computers again. Our main server is a Pentium IV 450MHz. The screamer of three years ago. Grace has a very fast 2533MHz that I’m…

High Quality MP3 Encoding OK, this was one night project to figure out how to do really high quality. Some would say archival MP3s. Boy, did I learn a lot between 1AM and 10PM. Suffice to say that encoding is very complicated. The summary of what I learned is: MusicMatch is the easiest encoder. It…

Discussion of Audio Compression. I’ve been doing a lot of MP3 encoding. Finally decided to see who had actually tested it. This is a wonderful site with lots of information and ont much beauty, but it sure is helpful.

Rolling Requiem. Pretty amazing what the Internet can do. This was a project to play Mozart’s Requim around the world on September 11, 2002. From right here in Seattle too.

“The Family Man” Network This is another part of the study on doing a good job in home networking. I did this work for Dynacenter as they figure out the top tasks that folks will have. If you have random thoughts send them on to Steve. It seems to me that for the family scenario,…

Mike Nash. One of my best buddies. he’s got a terrible looking site, but that is probably because he is too busy working making the world safe from hackers at Microsoft. Here’s a much better corporate biography. David J.. Another buddy of mine from Hollywood no less. Of course as part of the Mike Nash…

Mike-Levin.com – Who Let In The Bees? – bees

General Colin Powell

Never Give In? – Winston Churchill never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Tongs and Friends in print Some great examples of times we’ve been in print and our friends. A great change from three years ago where I’d sweat bullets waiting for the latest PC Week article. Here are some recent pieces about us or those close to us: In Ghana, the beat of life is sounded…