Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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???…

This really does work. Had a problem. Was too dumb to figure out a site. Posted a “veiled” note on this silly little blog and Lo and behold the ceo of the company emails me the next day. Wow those tools are really mandatory for any business. That and being responsive. 

Well, if you are upgrading a machine, right now here are the choices: ## Video Now you should probably wait a bit as the GTX980 family is (by video standards) long in the tooth and Computex is about to happen in June. The big things are getting to HDMI 2.0 so you can drive the…

wow I’m sad to say I’m shocked at how much I’ve spent! 24 projects ordered and waiting  6 projects ordered and waiting, waiting, waitin 12 projects got and liked 1 project got, broke but founder emailed me?!! Amazing! 4 projects got and they had issues  5 project got and didn’t try so probably didn’t need…

Well kickstarter has been a great adventure but it is one of those 20% of the things are complete duds. Since I posted this #8 actually emailed me back?! And offered to fix. Now that’s amazing!!! Here’s a list so far in reverse order of “insults to customers” and lessons learned. So here’s the letterman…

havent posted cool apps for a while but amazingly useful and well designed apps (at least to me) The first are essentially replacements for services I want to love but can’t: iOS photo deduplicator. Wow iOS and iCloud sharing is so strange. Now all I get are duneed duplicates that clog the “tiny” 5GB space.…

Well I’ve actually never really understood leasing and car financing, but with cars where you want them for a short while it makes some sense. Particularly where there is technology risk and you want to swap up in a short period without the backend risk of what the car is worth when you sell it.…

Well why waiting the new Canon 5Ds to try and also for the new Sony A7/9 announcements coming, so since I need to shoot a regatta, seems like a good time to try the Nikon system which seems to have gotten amazing color depth and noise reviews. Not surprising since it uses the same sensor…

OK, I’ve tried this something like a zillion times (and also for Ubuntu). Here are the mistakes: Do Not use Mac Unetbootin Finally if you try to use unetbootin on the Mac, it has been broken for three years (?!!). The things you have to do manually are to mark the partition as active and then copy…

OK, Maybe I’m getting nerdy (OK maybe more nerdy), but here’s a list of Fuji 35mm film codes from Gastonline.free.fr so you can read the edge codes on the film and map it for later processing or color correction: Superia 100: S-100 Superia 200: S-200 Superia 400 X-tra : S-400 Superia 800 X-tra: S-800 Reala :…

Well the world is changing, with so many pixels, I’ve been using Hugin to stitch things together. GoPro just bought autopano and it feels like panoramics are going to be much more common, so what to recommend via Quora: For stitching, there are have been two long time pay choices, AutoPano and PTGUI. They are…

Wow the new hardware these days isn’t so much about the processor as about the peripherals, here’s what’s in store this year in order of what will warm a power geek’s heart in David Letterman style based on real world speed you will get and when: More out of nVidia. With 4K and 8K monitors…