Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Man I’m sure sad Yakima is discontinuing the whispbar. More expensive and not as strong but they really are totally silent and have essentially no impact on gas mileage.  We have whispbar on a 2013 Honda Fit and it is terrific. We have the new jetstream on a 2016 fit and it’s super noisy. May…

A zillion years ago, the old Campy computer told you what gear you were in. How much work is it to get back to that. Also Shimano is introducing synchronized shifting. That is, one shift and the bike computer decides when to move the front derailleur. Pretty handy. But getting it on an existing bike…

Well, I think that keeping a drone investment safe is pretty important, so for about 30% of the cost of a drone, here is what you can do: Insurance $99 DJI Refresh. This is like Applecare, you buy at the DJI Store and then within 48 hours of activation type in your drone serial number.…

OK more strange accessories: Be careful when you plug a modular connector into a power supply. There isn’t a standard. So if you lose the bag of connectors, don’t just find a random one. It is expensive to buy replacement cables ($50 for cables when the power supply is $120 feels like highway robbery), but…

Well the gig or outsource economy is in full swing and since it is impossible not to interact with it, I thought I’d note the last three and make some observations: Buying with e-certificates at Lowe’s. This shows why competing with Amazon is so hard. They offer huge discounts vs Amazon. Beside free shipping, if…

Ok for the truly nerdy, did you know that if you sign up for earny.co it will track your purchases and if you have a chase or Citibank card, it will take a 25% commission, but will automatically handle the refund process. A pretty good deal. If you want to do it manually, then Chase,…

OK, for a long time this was one of my favorite brands, but then they bulked out and got less athletic, so I don’t normally buy their stuff anymore, but if you are lucky enough to have a discount on them, here are the best things in their line: Mens’ Stretch Ozonic. The best thing…

Well it is nice to have an actual working controller. First a hat tip to B&H Photo Video, they have a 30 day return policy and it is really just a phone call and you get an RMA. As I said before for things like this, you really want to use a local store because…

OK, feel free to skip past this post, but it took an evening, but right now I feel like the worlds expert on toilets and all things modern (and no there will be no yucky talk here). But here’s the scoop: TL;dr We’ve been using the Toto Drake II 1.28GPF which is a “flagship” model at $350…

Man, I can’t count how many $$$s I’ve lost with expiring rewards points, but with a disciplined use of 1Password, so at least I know what accounts I have, plus a subscription to Awardwallet, hopefully this will be a thing of the past. Some notes, (by the way I was dumb, the old price as…

Well there isn’t any doubt that DJI has the best drone on paper with the Mavic Pro, but here’s what to watch out for: Hardware issues. Out of the box, the brand new Mavic controller would not pair with the drone. I’m sure they are selling like hot cakes, but this is the first time…

Well if you are getting back into cycling, it’s a great time to instrument up and DC Rainmaker has the best reviews and for apparel the most important thing is a good big with a good pad Bike computer. I have an old Garmin Edge 800, but many folks are loving the new Wahoo Elemnt…

Well you do run out of power all the time, then here are some good choices: MacBook Magsafe and special tip. This is the only system that I found where you have a plug in and it works directly to charge a MacBook Pro MagSafe (pre 2016). Also this system uses a five pin adapter, so…

Time once again to look at SD cards as on a shoot you don’t want to run out or have ones that are too slow. The main news here is the increase in performance to U.3 UHS II which is 250MBps way above the previous 80-100MBps on U:1 UHS I. In looking at the reviews,…

Well now that I’m settling down on USB C connectors, time once again to look at various peripherals: Mantiz Venus. Ok this is expensive at $400, but it a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with room for an nVidia 1080Ti graphics card for instance. It also include full 87 watt power delivery on the USB C cable.…

OK, so this is a dumb one, I was looking for a shared folder that someone had sent me, a couple of notes: When you get a share, you want to make sure you choose Share and do *not* create a link and share that. The former semantics are that this is a synchronized copy.…

OK, just went through this again and I blogged it, but here are some of the quick notes: When you get the Edge Router, the first thing you should do is to upgrade the firmware. The EdgeRouter POE installation didn’t have any Wizards, so you need to go to the System menu at the bottom…

Well the world has moved way beyond the clipart of Microsoft PowerPoint, so now what’s a person to do if they want really great artwork and beautiful slides. TL;dr First get pretty icons to with Gsuite, you need to export them to WMF and stick them in Google Drawing The Noun Project. This is *the*…

This drone has been sitting around for a year, so now it’s time to see how to get it back to life. It isn’t super easy as all the firmware is out of date, so here’s goes a long evening of fixing things: Getting the batteries charged, there is a charger with two outputs, pop…

I’ve been using Unify for home installations for a while now, so here are some notes on how to use them: Do not just hit the buttons willy nilly. Some like UAPSD can cause big problems as the Wifi access points power down. The admin console is pretty nontraditional, basically, you have a dedicated machine which…

This seems like it would be so easy, you can do it if you load it into iMovie, but if you want to do it really quickly, you have to use 5 year old software. mpegstreamclip does this, you just load the file and choose Extract/Video and it works. Useful if you want to just…

Well windows has sure gotten more complicated. Getting telnet running take three steps  You need to run the Super Administrator mode for the command line. This is pretty hidden right now particularly if you are Running a windows tablet and it is not clear how to right click. The trick is to long press and…

Well if you want to capture multiple videos from a Mac and potentially mix them here are some applications to try: Capturesync. Best Software has this, in experimenting, it is nice because it puts all of the video into a single file. Since it is recasting files it is CPU intensive. Works fine with three…

Well it seems pretty clear the Mavic Pro is the most awesome drone right now, but as usual, you need a host of accessories. The drone was really hard to get a launch, but now there are bunch of places which will set you back about $1500 mainly for the batteries. DJI Mavic Pro. This…

Well since I’ve been buying so much now’s a great time to ask how to optimize for purchases. Two pointers: Amazon. You can get 3 JetBlue Points per Amazon purchase just by clicking through. That’s about a 5% discount. You can also get a straight 5% off by using an Amazon Store Card, so that’s…

OK, for the third time this year, I’m outfitting someone’s home with enough of a backend that they should be relatively stable, here’s a guide to how to do this: The right NAS Synology DS216J. There are a host of models that Synology has, but even the most basic $170 computer gives you a RAID-1…

Well it’s time once again to make USB boot disks, I’ve been using Diskmaker X forever, but with Sierra, there are some idiosyncratic things: Download from the Mac App Store the Sierra download. This will take a while as it it is over 4GB, but this is the image that Diskmaker X uses. Make sure…

For a while I could not get file transfer to work from an Android phone. Tried: Take a movie and use Google Photos to upload, this was incredibly slow trying to get 4GB up there. Same with a OneDrive upload Airdroid uses Bluetooth to do the same and it was way too slow Trying Android…

Ok, when you get a new car, here are some tips and tricks: If you have a fancy high resolution GPS like the Vsport, then you will see lots of dropouts, so you need a GPS antenna and ideally it should be on the roof. The so called ground plane cuts down the multipath reception…

Nothing like waiting 30 years between buying bikes. Finally brad got me back so I’ve been trying bikes for theee days solid. Great interval training! Thoughts are to read the reviews. There are many good ones so I’ll stack rank the important things Budgets. Well this is the hard one but there are definitely shelf…