Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well sometimes life seems to be a circle. What’s a great baby monitor is also a great way to monitor what’s going on with dear old dad. That plus a door sensor and you don’t need to worry. There seem to be two sorts of gadgets. Things like Dropcam Pro (I’ve used a bunch of…

Sad to saying it is closing the Bank of America mall is closing. We discovered it last year and got over 55K points just by being careful where you click. Probably makes your first choice looking at cashbackmonitor.com and en evreward.com, but neither are as tasty as those ML Signature Rewards points 🙂

Well it seems like hard drive failure month for me. Here are the drives, for personal machines, we are putting SSDs in as they are much faster and more reliable iMac 2009. Yuck, this one is going to be hard to get out. It’s buried and I have to figure out how to get the…

Have you ever had this problem? Sometimes, the keyboard and the mouse just refuse to connect. Dave Meehan has some good tips. Basically they are: For the keyboard, put in new battery and HOLD down the Power button while powering up, this will reset the pairing. For the mouse, if it doesn’t connect, oftentimes it is…

Well things are always getting easier: atom.io. This is a Chromium application written itself to be compatible with node.js and javascript. Wow how flexible is that. cdnjs.com. If you don’t want to host all those minified libraries when you are playing with Javascript.

Well, here’s the best reason to keep the information you put into a site at the minimum, the latest hack is from Amazon’s Twitch:   We are writing to let you know that there may have been unauthorized access to some of your Twitch user account information, including possibly your Twitch username and associated email…

Well another last minute purchase. We’ve got a camping hammock for the woods, how about a bivy sack and nothing like 24 hours to buy one! So here’s a quick look at reviews from Outdoorgearlabs.com (they only review a few, but it is the base recommendation) and also looking at reviews on rei.com (sometimes useful), amazon.com…

Well, our trusty Canon MX700 finally gave up the ghost. Sad to see, it is was quite reliable and we used the scanning and copying. The consumables were ridiculous, but at least they were the same as the Pro9000 we have. With camera phones, it isn’t clear how important scanning is anymore or copying for…

Time for every quarter hack of a major company. This time of you Premera. I hope you don’t use the same password for everything! Time to change passwords. Ugh!

Well, I never thought we’d really be here, but here’s a list of home healthcare things that hopefully you’ll never need. Many of these are reimbursable by Medicare, but you have to get a doctors prescription and then use an approved provider. Sometimes Amazon is just easier. There doesn’t appear to be a good place…

OK, there are a few tricks: If you have a Visa Signature card, then go to Fandango and buy $25 gift cards for $20 so you are saving 20%. They do charge an extra fee, but it is still worth it. If you are going to Cinemark, if you buy a e-gift card from them,…

So quick summary, not that not everyone has already seen it: HBO Now is $15/month on the new $69 AppleTV MacBook Air is now 12″ and thinner than ever with Retina, clickless trackpad, fanless, USB C combines power, video, etc. MacBook Pro 13″ also get clickless Trackpad Apple Watch: Built in speaker and microphone. Dick…

Well, reading BackBlaze statistics (although the statistics are controversial), it is pretty clear that the Seagate 3TB have huge failure rates (25% plus annually). We have five Seagate 3TB from 2012 and now four of them have failed. It’s another reminder that it would be good to have RAID and ideally get to ZFS with…

Well they talk alot about a lifetime warranty, but here’s the fine print.  First they do honor it and will refund you up to the amount of the original purchase price so that is what the warranty really is. If the item has gone up in price since, then you have to pay the difference.…

OK, seems like the regular update on pens to buy. Here’s my latest favorites from Pen Addict: Pilot Iroshizuku Shin-Kai. The best fountain pen ink Uni-Ball Signo DX 0.38mm. You can only get form Japan, but it is a pretty awesome pen! TWSB 580 F Nib. We’ve bought three now and one leaked, but the…

Well, if you are worried about internet privacy, the first thing to do is: Use a more private search engine. Looking at google search history is pretty frightening. I’ve been using startpage.com with decent success. to use a VPN so that your ISP can’t snoop everything. Privateinternetaccess.com seems decent. It has good coverage. They also…

Well having the two operate together leaves to some strange conflicts as you might expect. Also I got this strange message having to do with an Icon file which has a carriage return in it. That is a Ctrl-M that really confused Git. But http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24186256/atal-reference-has-invalid-format-refs-icon explains that Apple or Dropbox throws an icon file in which git…

OK, United just announced that you no longer get “miles” in Mileage Plus, instead you get points based on your ticket price, ticket class and level. So according to http://mileageplusupdates.com if you are buying a full fare ticket (I would guess), if you are Premier 1K, you get 11x your purchase price. I would presume there would…

Well there are some tricks here to make this work right. Hat tip to Rennie on this: Setting up IOS Gmail has this notion of labels and always tries to archive vs delete mail so this can be really confusing. But fortunately with iOS, there is a way to fix this. Go to Settings/Mail, Contacts…

OK, here are the tips, tricks and traps so far… IMAP Migration is a little complicated. You can do this as an administrator but need the user to give you type their password in. It is setup in the administration windows Google Sheets don’t work well in Safari. Seems to work fine in Chrome, but…

I haven’t spent much time optimizing car rentals and rewards because they haven’t seemed that interesting. But now Hertz and United are doing triple points so it is good to understand. In the old world, 75 United points weren’t super interesting (at 1.8 cents/point). But the latest promotion is 1,250 points per rental plus 50…

Well week 3 of intensive Mac Excel hacking, so learning lots of new handy shortcuts. The mouse is slow when you are doing a lot of Exceling: CMD-T Paste Format CMD-V Paste Value CMD-F Paste Formula FN-F9 Evaluate the highlighted part of a formula (great for debugging)   Then for formatting: CTRL-I Insert rows CTRL-(dash)…

OK, I’ve been battling this for a while and haven’t seen many posts on it, but here is what has happened and the best explanation seems to be a combination of iCloud sharing issues and this new “automatically maintain settings” in Apple Mail Mail interacts strangely with iCloud Keychain and Internet Accounts. Zombie accounts I’ve…

Well, figured this out for SMTP, but what about IMAP? Well it’s a little simpler, basically there is port 143 for unencrypted and port 993 for encrypted. You really always want to encrypt, so 993 works best. Most modern servers handle encryption on 143 as well.

I have almost forgotten how to use Ghost. It was a great experiment in building something with node.js on digital ocean and figuring nginx. Kind of proud it all actually works. Now its time to do some site validation and I need to be able to put a static page up there. This is a…

OK, nearly there with Google Apps, but now I get to learn about SMTP which I’ve never really groked: We are trying to migrate a single user and have everyone elses mail forwarded to the legacy mail server. When I turned this on, some of the mail seemed to get through, but the forwards didn’t…

OK, now that we are getting through the SUMIFS nightmare, there are two things to know: SUMIFS are good when they work and COUNTIFS give you some debugging. The main problem is that there isn’t any way to figure out what rows are actually summed up, so no way to know about doubling counting. For…

If you are trying to migrate from your own Exchange server (in our case we are using Mac Kerio Connect which emulates Exchange) to Google Apps, it is a little mysterious how to do it, but the basic idea is similar to the Office 365: First signup for Google Apps. There are third parties that…

If you’ve got a small business and want to move to Office 365 or to Google Apps, the main choice is whether you want 1TB of storage per user (Office 365) for $5/user/month or unlimited storage (Google Apps) at $10/user/month. We are going to try Office 365 as we’ve not used this system too much…

The empire strikes back! Canon fights Mirrorless Sony with a 50mp full frame. Drool. Drool!canon 5ds