Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well the summer is here so here are some of the best gizmos: UE Boom ($170 from Best Buy and Amazon) is pretty cool and small. You can get 1.5% off via a Best Buy rebate and also they have a rewards program with an additional 2% off, so pennies, but they will add up!…

It has taken me that long to open up the cabinet and give iRule a try. But with our Comcast Motorola DVR dead, we replaced with X-1 which means most of the our old Crestron programming doesn’t work. So I’ve installed a Global Cache iTech IR to IP with POE (now that’s an acronym full…

Wow, this 300mm f/2.8 is quite a lense according to slrgear.com and also lensrentals.com. It has no distortion even wide open at f/2.8 and a very slight resolution improvement at F/4, but it is really good even at f/2.8. I cranked the shutter speed to 1/800 and left it at f/4. In bright daylight, it…

Never thought you’d see those two words on the same line. We are working away at more overclock. The old Sandy Bridge runs at 4.95GHz reliably (48×103) as long as the mineral oil bath stays cool (less than 98F), but the cooling fans alone don’t do that when running a video game. It looks like…

Chase Freedom. Has 5% on categories and the big one is Amazon is 5% in the fall. It is also no fee so a great way to build up credit.  When you combine this as a grownup with the Chase Sapphire or the Ink Plus (the business card), then you get lots of bonuses: Use…

Well that is a lot of acronyms, but right now if you are last generation camera owner, that is have a 20MP or so full frame like a Canon 5D Mark II, it’s been pretty unclear where to go, but right now there are 2 1/2 entrants to consider and some great choices. Personally, I’d…

Well having used Bash quite a bit, we finally got to the point with single stepping via a flag where it was pretty usable. Now with Sublime and Anaconda there is a good system for looking for autocomplete, definitions and for doing simpling linting  and you can use the Anaconda menu to find definitions. It…

Wow I hope github.com gets this running soon. It lets you manage large files with version control in a github repository. I installed the whole thing and then discovered the welcome mail I got wasn’t actually a welcome but just a reminder that I had signed up. Blah. The main thing to know is that…

Well, it’s never too early to start building a good credit record (assuming of course you are responsible). Here’s a quick survey of the cards and what is recommended by Nerdwallet, The Simple Dollar and Get.com. Nerdwallet even has a cool calculator to estimate what you save with one of the cards. As a final aside,…

Nothing like going through a list of things for this camping season, I’m wondering what we need: Bivy sack. We needed one and I got a Outdoor Research Helium Bivy. At 18 ounces, it even has a hoop. It hasn’t been super durable although the three week trip through the desert wasn’t the best. An alternative is…

Well not a bad time to look through Wirecutter for the many miscellaneous gifts I haven’t had time to buy: Ooma. For $109, you get telephone service that is free. What a great deal compared with the $20 a month that Comcast charges Cable modem. If you cut the telephone cost, then you can get…

Ok, I’m trying to use Scons and finally had half a day to finally get some sort of IDE going. Anaconda for Sublime is pretty cool. Complicated to setup, you actually have to paste in Python code if you can believe it, but the punchline is that it lets you do a goto any definition…

One of the most annoying things that Comcast has done is to turn all their customers into unwitting public hotspots. Not to mention the potential security problems, this creates a new entry point to your network. They have buried it under three layers of menus, but you can turn it off: Goto comcast.net and log…

I fat fingered the password and couldn’t remember it, but it’s easy, just hit the reset for a second and you five minutes of no password required. That’s smart! Thanks Lena!

Wow, I’m pretty impressed. Read up on UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol?) which runs SCSI over USB in an alternative mode. Supposed to be supported natively by Windows 8 and Mac OS X  and Ubuntu as well, I popped in a slower Corsair 960MB SSD to see. Here is what I got using the Blackmagic…

While it is nice to use the various photo processing applications, sometimes it makes more sense to change the underlying data. Here are some ways to add geotags directly into the JPEGs. This is most useful for dSLRs or for scanned images that don’t have it. I’ve used iPhoto for much of this, but Photos…

wow what a bazooka of a Lense. And a 36mp sensor. Took some time to learn how to change things. It’s got lots of buttons. Shooting a regatta and got this and a te14 and te2 teleconverter.  Photozone.de has a nice technical review. It shows that maximum center sharpness is at f/2.8 but while center declines…

Well, we keep using these and running out. Finally settled on a high, medium and low mix strategy: Low mix USB 3.0 keys that are bullet proof and that can live on a key ring. They aren’t super fast, but they are tough. The two contenders are the Kingston SE9 G2 which is decent on…

I fat fingered the password and couldn’t remember it, but it’s easy, just hit the reset for a second and you five minutes of no password required. That’s smart! Thanks Lena!

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…