Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Been a while since I’ve shopped for one of these. I remember the one from my childhood like it was yesterday. So amazing to have a cool room in humid climates. Now we need another one and Consumer Reports (Subscription required) is a good resource as it a quick check of Amazon ratings which shows people liking…

Life seems to be filled with the monthly data breach. In this case it is Home Depot soy can get protection by clicking on https://homedepot.allclearid.com so you can data monitor. In this day and age, you really should have every credit card transaction appear in your email. It is a lot, but with these monthly occurrences…

This is a pretty nice looking speaker and shows you how hard it is to make all this work, but the long and short answer is: You can put the speaker on your own wifi network, it then become an Airplay source, so any iOS device will see it and can audio to it On…

I’ve been laboriously going through old negatives and while you can use services like ScanCafe to do this, I find that it isn’t the scanning time, but the time spent looking through the negatives and getting clues from the photos themselves (like when the prints were made) that is the real value. Today, we never have…

This used to be a small obsession of mine, making ring tones. I used to use audacity to find a 40 second clip and then make an AAC version and rename it to m4r and it would just work with an iPhone. Lately though I found a kind of hack way to do it with…

Well, Rich’s Excellent Adventures in learning the last 20 years of computing continues. This time with learning how to use Python the right way. Here are some notes: Python versions. There are two major ones, the 2.7 which was frozen back in 2010 and the new Python 3.x. Most systems (like Scons) haven’t updated to…

What a terrible error message. When you install it, you get file not found and you think the application has crashed. No it hasn’t, it is just that if you have it set for automatic install and then you accidentally deleted the virtual machine, then it will say “not found” The fix is to go…

A long running problem with build 3.2.7 for Unifi controllers on Mac is that it seems like it needs Java 6. But the real problem has to do with pointers to locations. This one liner gets it to run properly with hard links with the latest Java 8 from Oracle: <p style=”margin: 0px; font-size: 11px;…

Wow their tech support is good, but they don’t document what to do with the Mac Firewall on. It is pretty simple if arcane (and maybe this is why tunnelblick has been such a problem): Download Private Internet Access Choose settings and select TCP and port 443 That’s it and it is confusing because the…

These days it really doesn’t pay to get anything less than Cat 6 (so you are ready for 1GB) and the prices are really amazing if you shop, so here: Amazon.com. As usual this is the benchmark. With Cablematters 5×5 feet at $11 ($2.20 a cable), 5×10 feet for $17 ($3.40 a cable) and 5×14…

Well here’s another interesting thing, if you didn’t get AppleCare , then you really want it for your MacBook Pro, it retails for $349, but here are the deals. S3142LL/A looks like the auto enroll for the MacBook Pro 15 and 17 and MD012LL/A is the non-autoenroll version part number. There is also MC247LL/B is for older MacBooks…

Well here’s another interesting thing, if you didn’t get AppleCare , then you really want it for your MacBook Pro, it retails for $349, but here are the deals. S3142LL/A looks like the auto enroll for the MacBook Pro 15 and 17 and MD012LL/A is the non-autoenroll version part number. There is also MC247LL/B is for older MacBooks…

This seems to be the fastest low profile card that will fit into an Antek ISK-300/150 box. Here are the best prices but it is the eVGA GT 730 DDR5 2GB card: PCPartspicker.com. $71 from SuperBiiz which is cheap although their resellerratings.com are not the best (6.9/10) Neweggbusiness.com. $76 with $3 off for this week…

They really do have incredibly low prices and you can these days quadruple dip with: Go to cashbackmonitor.com to find a direct rebate Use your credit card which has points Search retailmennot.com and other sites for promo codes. Right now they are $15 off of $100 although this doesn’t seem active now Rakuten has its…

This stopped working, but was just great. Thank goodness for Google, looking at http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=190&t=94567 and it points out it is a security issue, you have to go to Package Center and select Any Publisher in the settings as this application isn’t signed or approved by Synology. However, the folks at the Synology forum working on Crashplan (http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=190&t=100449)…

We had a bunch of slowdowns on iPhones here. Dropping to 600KBps on the network rebooting the comcast router seems like the main cure.  But macs have suddenly become unreliable. I’ve been battling vpn software for a while. Used tunnelblick for a while but it seems unstable. Moved to privateinternetaccess’a own vpn but looking at…

Man this medicare stuff is complicated. Here are some notes and tips on: Plan A This is the hospital related. You pretty much always get this if you worked or your spouse every worked it is free. Otherwise you have to pay a premium of $400/month or so to the government. Part B This is…

Now that there is 1TB for free per account up there, it’s time to figure out how to use it, here are some tips: There is an automagic uploader, it watches files on your Mac and when it sees a change, it does an automatic upload and discards duplicates. It automatically sorts the photos by…

Well, while Photos may look good, it surely is sad to lose iPhoto for a couple of reasons: Storage. If you don’t use Photos to store you library, then it creates a resources file that is unlinked which can double your disk usage. This makes Photos essentially useless for those of us who want to…

Well I haven’t had time to analyze things, but late breaking facts: Intel SSD 750 vs Samsung. The new Samsung M.2 will be x4 PCI Express with NVMe, they give a real run for the money for the Intel PCIe Express slot cards. I love the idea of a 2400MBps read with 70K IOPs and…

Well the portal may be dead, but they do have this Amerideal thing. You have to opt in but some incredible deals are: 10% off of Starbucks purchases which is incremental to the points you earn. 15% off of Sears and combining that with a click through Alaska Airlines of 5 miles/$ (worth about 10-11%)…

Last year was just an also year for getting more point. We got over 50K incremental points just by using the BoA portal. He deals were amazing. 15 points for beats at one point.  The top purchase sites were overstock, Rakuten, best buy and staples. As well as Walmart and target.and quill. And that site…

Well, I got the SLI actually running, but it looks like you get some pretty strange artifacts when you run nvidia-xconfig –sli=auto, so you are warned. I’m not sure what the right approach is here, but the code looks like. Also if you have two monitors connected, then if you make on them primary, but…

OK, I’m probably the only person who has ever had this happen, but it is confusing. We have two monitors setup going to two computers. One has DVI connected to both and the other has HDMI connected to both. This allows each computer to drive two monitors or when both are up, you just switch…

We need a real NVidia card for testing and it’s hard to find a low profile low height with Techreport doing a great analysis. The short thing is that the Antec is very low profile and also single slot with less than 20mm thick.  The analysis is interesting and shows the onboard i5 Is actually…

Well there are definitely some tips and tricks here to get Windows 8.1 to live on one SSD and Ubuntu to live a different SSD and then finally to have a data SSD that both can use. Here’s how to do it: 1. Install Windows 8.1 first because Windows doesn’t work with Ubuntu. The easiest…

Well what is fast? That’s the hardest to say, but here are some results for the two machines which are: ASRock Z97m OC with Intel Core i7-4790K (Haswell) at 4.5GHz overclock with DDR3-2400 (no overclock ram) and a pair of SLIed Asus Strix GTX 970. The overclock is +200MHz on GPU and +250MHz on VRAM.…

I’m going to be trying this bad boy out in a little bit. Thanks to lensrentals.com for making it easy. It was good to see what lenses to use as at 36MP, you really need good quality glass. I found the same last year with the Sony A7, you end up using lots and lots…

This has got to be the densest systems I’ve ever built. Here are the specs: ASRock Z97m OC Formula. This is a micro-ATX motherboard Intel Core i7 4790K. This is the mid range overclockable. 4GHz (40x multiplier on a 100MHz bus). For grins, I tried the ASRock Formula Drive and it said 4.3GHz was stable.…

Gosh darn it I’m so frustrated confused, I spent a day trying to get two GTX 970s to be recognized. Now today. I turn the thing on wander through the ASRock BIOS, confirm there are really two graphics cards there in the BIOS (there is a system browser under tools). Boot and there it is???…