Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Again from Brad a good list of touring companies that do higher-end bike tours with decent bikes too: Butterfield & Robinson. Highly recommended by Brad. Backroads. This seems to be the most common group, seem to have many friends who have taken them with great results. They have decent spec bicycles too with Di2 shifting.…

He’s a super smart guy in all things, but the bike advice is terrific, from Bsilverberg.com, he gives a couple of great tips: The Garmin 1030 is great for navigation. You download to it from Ride With GPS. Also get the XERT application so you can constantly see your FTP (functional threshold power) which tells…

Last things first. Wow finally subscribed to Strava for $60 a year. Nice to see the power analysis but they bury the fact they give you a CTS training regime. Buried on the website you can subscribe and you get a daily email on what to do.Requires you to do a CTS Field Test. Basically…

Well now that it’s clear the Stages LR and the Garmin 1030 are great choices, where’s the best place to buy them. It’s pretty clear that like cars, in bicycles technology has taken over. First looking at cashbackmonitor.com, the best place right now is jensonusa.com, they are offering 6% cash back and this applies to…

Very sad and strange but an Horizon ground staff took a Q400 and flew it. This caused NORAD to scramble two F-15Cs from Portland to intercept which a plane spotter took. Made want to exercise my inner geek and figure what the planes were… These are F-15C, if you look, then have a balanced load,…

Well, it used to be that maintaining a bike was a relatively simple matter of making sure the chain was well lubed and clean and making sure that the derailleurs were tweaked, but now in the 21st century it has gotten more complicated, so here’s a pretty complicated guide to all the things you need…

OK, I had no idea this was so easy (and so hard to remember). I’m glad the days of function keys are over because remembering these is impossible but from Apple, here’s how to do screen grabs without having to start the screen Grab app: Shift-Command-3 will grab the entire screen. You will hear a…

If you’ve gotten a new Mac, you do have to make some te it is safe and sound. Looking at https://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-antivirus,review-2588-6.html the big thing is to find a decent antivirus program and then install the following Avast which is free and well rated Turn on the firewall in system preferences/firewall Make sure that you have…

Well it’s that time of year when kids are going back to school and for those lucky enough to attend college for the first time, it’s time to figure out what laptops to get. Here are the good, better and best recommendations. Good: Dell XPS 13 (2018) $1300 This is the premium ultraportable laptop. This…

Regardless of whether or not grilled meat will eventually kill you, to me it is kind of worth it, there is nothing like a double thick cut of T-bone grilled at 600 degrees and then moved over to the radiant side to cool to a perfect medium rare. Wirecutter.com actually does an awesome job of…

Well, I hope everyone is doing the basics of keeping safe. Right now there are so many phishing attacks it is ridiculous. To review the recommendations they are in priority order with difficulty of doing listed: Use different password for every account. This is actually pretty hard to do, but using the same simple password for…

Vlad recently asked me for some advice with biking and getting start again, it made me thing about how getting people into sports is so important. I’m so grateful that various folks like Brad, Steve or Mark got me into cycling and skiing. When I think about it, I realize that most of the time…

Well someone asked what you should get when you go car camping, here are some suggestions, the first is that you want to maximize comfort and fun. The whole point of car camping is to make sure your family and friends want to go again. With that in mind, here are some recommendations on what…

Ok this is a little bit of a nerd topic, but Tesla updated their Model X 75 and 100 sometime in mid 2017 so they produce more power. It is pretty incredible that you can do this in firmware, but the power went from 380 horsepower to 430 horsepower. Wow, that is pretty awesome, the…

With the Tour de France in full swing, it’s time to look at the latest in bicycle technology. This year the big news is that disc brakes and aerodynamics are all the rage. Most of the new bikes have only an ounce or so difference, so if you have the money, you can get disc…

Silly reason really. But if you have some audiobooks that are formatted as mp3, then you can’t just use iCloud Music Library. The reason is that files that are less than 96Kbps are marked ineligible and will not sync with iCloud, so you have to go back to the ancient (last century!) way of plugging…

So two friends have recently gotten different urban or commuter bikes. Bike sharing: short rides The main thing about the bikes is, of course, that if you don’t care about performance and don’t ride far (and don’t care about your brain), then the various bike sharing services are pretty good. The bikes fit terribly (they…

Well in looking at all the bike components, it’s amazing how little I will read the mainstream publications, it seems like the really good technical reviews are being done by talented enthusiasts. So if you are looking to really understand some aspect of buying a bicycle, here are the nerd sites to watch. Bicycle Rolling…

Well, while scanners can handle up to 3200dpi, there are very few prints that have that much resolution. So how do you keep from just scanning noise. Most inkjet printers for instance are 300 dpi, so for most prints, when you get into the 1600 dpi range, you are really just scanning all that noise…

All US and Canada reservation holders can now order their cars! So what to decide and what to think about. It’s complex because different models have different availability. But what if you have been called to configure. What should you do? There are five models that people can choose from: Short range, long range, dual…

One of the things about maintaining a Ubiquiti network at home is that you need a dedicated controller. I’ve been using a Mac to do this, but when you reimage you have readopt everything. Instead, there is another option, use a small $70 dedicated computer that acts as a controller. It connects to the Unifi…

Well in thinking about bike upgrades, I seem to be traveling down the familiar road of needing out to save a pound on the bike. Was super fun then and it still is now. So if you have a nice bike, what should you upgrade. Well here is the conventional wisdom from 10 years ago…

OK, we just signed up for 150Mbps from Comcast (only real choice in our neighborhood). When I try to use a speed test, I get 60Mbps, this is from Ookla, but when I try the Comcast speed test, I get 120Mbps, I wonder what is going on. The results seem variable, but one test shows…

OK, electrek is not a bad source. net, net, these make me feel better that there isn’t a near term Tesla competitor https://electrek.co/2018/06/25/bmw-next-gen-electric-powertrain-technology-ix3/ points out that BMW sees this just as a compliance car business. They are going to do hybrid cars mainly and don’t control their pack supplies. They are using low volume prismatic https://electrek.co/2018/06/15/electrek-podcast-jaguar-i-pace-tesla-restructuring-musk-boring-compan-chicago/is…

Time now to update how my personal workflow is operating. The big changes are that DxO went into receivership. Not much data on what is happening, but some speculation that it is because of their hardware business. They did spin off DxOMark, so that’s another indication they wanted some protection. I actually don’t know how…

OK time once again for an update on workflows. The big news is that DxO went into receivership, so I don’t know how stable it is. I hope they do survive. I also had a great conversation with the folks at Mylio (hat tip to Rob for that and David is always wonderful). Anyway, in…

A couple of folks have asked me should I buy now or wait. It’s a complicated question. We are kind of right now in the iPhone 4 world. Things are getting better but for most people the rate of change is high and it’s still inconvenient compared with gas. The latest Tesla shareholder meeting however…

OK even with the best hard drives, you will get failures, right now we are running our main disk array with btrfs against shr2. Last night one of the 4TB disks failed and it immediately sent an email which is pretty cool. Here is how you remove the old drive and fix it. It’s a…

OK, this really isn’t about starting a company, it’s about creating a presence for a new organization. While there are many ways to do this, here is a simple method that will give you. Bootstrap secrets, email and phone One question is how to deal with passwords. You want to start secure so download a…

We seem to be in major home focus these days, but we have a set of chairs that are really hard on the hardwood floors. Well there are some easy things to do. The first is to get a felt protector that glues on the bottom. The main problem here is that you want to…