Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Sadly this is way harder than you would think. Audible for instance does allow book sharing, but only with one other adult in your Amazon Household. The other option is to use Overdrive and borrow from a library. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to buy an audiobook for everyone 🙁

Wow, I had forgotten how complicated it can be to do the simple stuff. In this case, quite a few of our cars have had terrible problems with batteries. One nice thing about electric vehicles by the way is that they are a lot harder to ruin. But over the years, we’ve had lots of…

OK, I switched to using JPEG-2000 in 16-bit mode lossless for archiving images, this brings a 5400 dpi 35mm slide from 220MB to about 150MB. Moreover, you can also create a 16-bit lossy one and you get 16-bits. Now that many camera phones can record more than 8-bit color (the iPhone is 10-bit), Apple has…

OK, if the zombie apocalypse ever comes, I will definitely die of thirst because without this video, I could never figure out how to drink from the Ultimate Directions Kicker Valve. There are two tricks. First, because it is a bottle for running, you have to pull the valve out with your teeth (Argh). And…

Wow it is amazing how much data just lives out in the real world. Someone was just asking me about car sales and a quick google got me to a bunch of sites that track sales amazingly closely… Overall View The Wall Street Journal has their own overview of car sales because it is such…

Well, it’s spring again finally and all those little things I didn’t get last year, I’m determined to get for this year, so here are some recommendations. Arm Warmers Yes these don’t really wear out, but I keep losing them, so there are quite a few to choose according to Cycling Weekly from the Carney…

OK, there is not much written about this, but Apple has a highly private (they don’t look at your photos), scheme for doing both object and face detection across iPhone and Mac. It is hard to figure out how it all works and there don’t seem to be any papers written about it that summaries…

Spent the day working on presentations, so learned a few easy things: First is that when you use Google Slides, it’s really good for collaboration but quite different from Mac PowerPoint for graphics. Buy yourself a subscription to Noun Project. This is a great set of icons that you can load. Goto Google Slides and…

OK, I’ve recorded three events with the DJI Osmo Mobile 2. It’s a nice $129 stabilized mount that fits an iPhone X pretty much perfectly. There are quite a few tricks to using it, so here’s a short list of notes. Setting up The thing is actually pretty hard to figure out. The instructions are…

Well, the DJI Osmo Mobile 2 is an incredible stabilized mount for doing recordings at live events with an iPhone, the video quality is unbelievable and the controls are great, but the sound quality is just so, so. The iPhone has just a small monophonic microphone, so that’s one thing to fix. Here are some…

The Washington Post This is normally $10/month, but with Amazon, you get a deal where it is $4/month after a six month trial for Amazon Prime member. Nice! Photo by charlotte on Unsplash

I don’t know how big a category this is going to be, but there are definitely some interesting resources to look at. For instance, we have… IMPACTBASE. This is a “partial” database of institutions offering various funds and how much capital is committed in them. I have gone through to see how accurate it is.…

Hat tip on pointing Image Size by vsmedia.de as the perfect app to down res photos. Needed if you post to WordPress or need an avatar for a site…. — Read on helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/scale-down-an-image-in-windows-mac-ios-and-android/

It’s so sad to see so many Amazon Choice products with D ratings. The spammers are winning so please don’t buy there unless you check fakespot.com As an example this highly rated 4.8 star watch band is 68% fake even after Amazon purged most of its reviews a month ago.

OK, I admit it, I’ve been a nerd about the US Navy since I was in the 5th grade and wrote a report on them. (Maybe the fortune teller was right, I was supposed to be an oil tanker captain :-). Anyway, was cleaning out the PDFs stuck in iCloud Drive and I found the…

Well now that we have AirPods (and love it), plus these ultra cool Sony headphones, it just makes me want to make everything a Bluetooth device. Fortunately for $27, you can do that. Just get the Mpow Bluetooth 4.1 Transmitter/Receiver, this thing is a tiny device that is micro-USB powered. It has a little switch,…

I don’t often see how much WordPress has moved forward, but this is definitely one of them. It used to be really hard to embed things into WordPress posts (Medium is the same way, you can’t add bullets, you can’t add videos, afaik). But they have an incredible number of things that they can embed.…

Wow what a powerful song, I’m just catching up on the Hamilton Mixtape and it is awesome. Particularly love Wrote My Way Out. I had not realized that the playwright who did Rent died just as it was going into previews. And listening to the stories that Rap can tell is pretty incredible [youtube https://youtu.be/_zhR6d6LDzM]…

(Note, this is the start of my Medium friendly posts, so away go the bulleted and numbered lists which it doesn’t support at all and up with headings and subheadings. Hat tip to Blog2social for a nice plugin that cross posts). Creating a Go environment: Github Well another month, so another language, have to learn…

OK, I don’t know why this is a bug, but it definitely exists as an edge case. I’ve been slowly importing my photo library to iCloud, if you take say 4,000 images (I know I have a lot of them!), then it will take MacOS Photos about a week to upload them. However, if you…

It is incredible how fast a MacBook disk can fill up, here’s how to clean it up: Buy Space Gremlin. yes it costs money, but it is worth it. It will give you a graphical view of where all that hard disk space went. iMovies, I do occasional edits and because of the way it…

Well if you are using a VPN regularly for privacy reasons, you can see definite slowdowns or outright denials. Reddit picked it up first, but apparently Amazon is blocking VPN addresses, trying to go to Canada or perhaps to obfuscated will help. Apparently people are using VPNs to get into other countries (like the US) to…

Was a different kind of tool, but the guide to Smart Home is started and is up. Kind of a pain to use a different tool, so off to figure out how to cross post from WordPress. I’ve tried the Social plugin, but the fidelity is low. Medium doesn’t seem to like Markdown and the…

It’s kind of surprising what is allowed and not allowed. One problem is that the iOS Instagram client makes it essentially impossible to navigate through a big photo library, you can search and it is really intended just to load the most recent photos. Plus it’s a tiny screen to scroll through 7,000 photos and…

Wow it used to be that a 200 lumen headlamp was great, but with LEDs comes even better stuff. Here are the top rated things I’ve found thanks to Outdoorgearlabs.com and Switchback Travel: Coast Optics. Buying smaller brands can be great, this is a Portland company and their HL-7 is top rated, but the FL-85 which…

OK, I’m trying to see if iCloud Photo Library is a good place to store things. So I tried uploading 6K (that’s actually a small percentage) of my photos up there. What I found is that Mac Photos hangs after a while. It is showing strange messages in the console like cloudphotod sending spurious data in…

Man having a Tesla vs having a Bolt, it really does feel like a Mac vs Windows. Normally with Tesla updates, you get an icon and a popup saying an update is available (I’m dying for 18.10.1 by the way for the new vision updates). But if you have an early model Bolt, then over…

We got our Comcast bill down quite a lot (believe me I’m not looking to how much we will have to pay with net neutrality gone :-(), but I was surprised to see the bill pop to $80/month just for Internet. Here’s what I learned: TL;dr. If you are in Seattle and don’t need a…

This is actually pretty hard. You either have to just accept the lower resolution you get with Whatsapp or iMessage, or you have to go to great lengths to share high resolution photos. here’s a guide… If you don’t care about privacy and let Google index everything you own: Also if you want full resolution,…

One annoying thing about AirBNB (there are many things to like!) is the way it handles currency conversions. If you just take the defaults, then you end up paying in your home currency and not the local currency. AirBNB actually charges a 3% conversion fee and it is not clear how to get around it.…