Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

I’ve been using a VPN for privacy particularly on wifi networks (Starbucks). I’ve been using Tunnelblick for a while, but in the most recent releases on Yosemite it has become pretty unstable. Seems to hang and then OpenVPN underneath breaks and network access stops. So I’ve flipped to privateinternetaccess.com’s own VPN utility. I’ve no idea…

OK, if you are really into nerdville, then you know that the DNS queries (what tells the computer where google.com is) is easy to spoof and hack. This let’s people divert traffic from google.com to their own servers. Bad, bad, bad. So there are three solutions: DNSSec. This essentially means that every DNS record you…

Now that there are so many cloud providers, it’s actually pretty complicated to figure out which set to use. It is pretty clear that you have to use a set and when you are in the cloud, you also have to think about privacy and who can look at what, so here are some tips:…

Well, Adobe keeps getting more powerful and with the latest Lightroom, they added panorama and HDR, still it does seem like staying out of the way of companies with a lock on the market isn’t a bad idea. Here are some alternatives: Photoshop This is a product I don’t use that much but it comes…

Well a bunch of things definitely break when using your Mac in a secure way. I have two problems. First is with Tunnelblick, the open source VPN connection. It keeps hanging Yosemite. I finally uninstalled it and am trying privateinternetaccess.com’s own client. Also. I’ve been having trouble with iCloud and with so many hacks, decided…

Well it certainly is a great time to try new high end cameras. In looking at lensrentals.com, it’s a great way to test them without spending thousands. Here’s my drool list: Blackmagic Design 4K Production Camera. This is 4K with a Canon EF mount system, so a great complement to all that Canon glass if…

Well I’ve been using Vuescan and suddenly it started doing dark blue scans and ignoring things in the user interface. it would continuously scan four times. The fix seems to be the age old delete all the preferences and start over. Here is how on a Mac Go to Finder and hold the Option key…

So given all the photos that are happening, where’s the best to store things. Much has changed and it has gotten incredibly cheap to store photos and see them everywhere. So I’ll sort the list with two criteria, size of storage, privacy and convenience: Photos in the cloud Amazon Cloud. They just announced that Amazon…

Adobe continues the drum beat of including everything. Perhaps this is the right subsittute given Apple Photos issues. The latest Lightroom has a bunch of the separate utilities I’ve been using: HDR Merge. This works with Raw and is like the Photomatic I’ve used or HDR Luminance (open source) Panorama. Like Hugin which I’ve loved…

They don’t even make this anymore (heck Minolta became Minolta-Konica and then I think Sony bought them). But it is still a good 35mm film scanner. As I get nostalgic, I’ve reinvigorated the desire to index all those old photos my Dad and I have taken. Here are some operating notes:  Firewire vs USB 2.0…

Wow incredibly useful things that I didn’t know (hat tip to Cult of the Mac) on using Finder in OS X. I’m almost a power user: Get a full-screen slideshow, complete with available index sheet, by hitting Option-space bar with several files selected. You’ll be able to scroll through them all with the arrow keys,…

I don’t know what is going on but it looks like others are hitting this “bug”. With “don’t copy” checked, my 400GB photo database is generating a 250GB (see Apple support comment on discussions.apple.com, macrumors and on reddit) which is consuming essentially all of my hard disk. There’s some debate as to whether these are…

https://launchpad.net/~mamarley/+archive/ubuntu/nvidiaThere are so many different notes about how to do this. Basically, the default appears to be Nouveau open source drivers, but you can also used the proprietary nVidia ones. The main problem is that with Ubuntu 14.04, these proprietary drivers don’t show up in the driver user interface. So how to kick it when…

Now that I’ve got the basics of Swift, time to start learning how to use AVFoundation to take photos and videos. With James’ tutorial gives you the very basics and here are the gotchas: If you plug your phone in for the first time while running XCode it may not work properly. I had to…

All this trying to see the lunar eclipse made me want to: a) get a telescope which I’ve always wanted and b) take some astronomy photographs. Well with modern cameras, it’s so much easier to do both: Mark explains how to take “wide field” photography. The main trick is that you use ISO 1600 and…

Well, imagine my surprise. We suddenly had an access point pop up and I thought it was the neighbors. Actually there were three. One called `tsunami` and another call that started with PS3- and then a PS4- So here are the steps to keeping your network clean: Run an IP scanner, it is incredible, but…

So this can work if you are getting more than 1.87% from your credit cards. This is also potentially a good way of hitting your minimum spend limits, but it does cost you Here are the two lowest cost tax folks I could find: Fed.choicepay.com. They also charge 1.87%. I don’t know about their yearly…

Well, this is indeed the best time to wait for the perfect camera to arrive. Although high end camera sales have literally collapsed (they are 50% of sales compared with 2012!). There seems to be more innovation than ever. So here’s a list of cameras I’m dying to try what with 4K arriving for video…

Well, Apple is changing things again. Now they have stopped development of iPhoto and they have basically ported Photos from iOS. Here are the problems for folks with a decent number of photos (how about 20K!): Apple is focused on people with relativeliy small collections and everything is stored in the iCloud. You have to…