Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well there always seem to be new ways, but reading http://millionmilesecrets.com/2013/01/03/airline-miles-expiration/ here are some easy ones and that site has the right links: United Buy something through the United portal. Can be a $1 iTunes gift card. Use Bcksgr which gives you miles if you like companies on Facebook (free!) If you have a credit…

OK, going on a trip and I just have to try the new Sony A7r. The A7 is probably really the right one for me for general use, but the A7r as a landscape (auto focus is slow and it doesn’t have phase detection so can’t take videos) product it is pretty superb apparently. And…

Wow, finally got this to work on a Mac. Amazingly reliable with the HD HomeRun Prime. The main limits right now are the premium channels (need Windows for that or a Comcast DVR). But it works with good performance on a 2010 Mac Mini. The main thing is how to get a remote to work.…

Wow, I’ve been on a tear thinking about this. Right now this has yielded probably an incremental 20,000 points probably worth $1000 just from Christmas shopping and buying various year end things. So once you have that, it makes me think about how to maximize. Here is an architecture to think about your own lives:…

Well I’ve been trying to get a Mac based DVR going for a while. Maybe I should just use NimbleTV and pay, but here is the home-brew option: Install macports Download macports from the site Install Xcode from Appstore From Mavericks, command line tools are installed in separately or by running “xcode-select –install” Install mythtv by…

OK, for our conference room we got a Sony X900A and boy is it a learning curve to get it working right. Here are some of things: 1. It was working fine and then I changed some of the network connections and to the FMP-X1, I know get a Cannont Connect to 4K Media Player.…

Yuck, the problem with free printers and ones you don’t use is that they clog and jam. Printing is so 20th century! Anyway for this one, the documentation http://h20566.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/kb/docDisplay/?sp4ts.oid=4311836&spf_p.tpst=kbDocDisplay&spf_p.prp_kbDocDisplay=wsrp-navigationalState%3DdocId%253Demr_na-c02206095-21%257CdocLocale%253D%257CcalledBy%253D&javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken is incorrect. There is a Mac Utility to do this and it is in the printer driver area. We tried to run cleaning twice and it…

Run don’t walk to get your free $25! Free money from Radio Shack – The Frequent Miler RadioShack has an amazing promotion going on now through February 28th.  Trade in 5 portable electronics for a gift card worth at least $25.  You can trade in almost anything: old headphones, video games, digital cameras, etc. Free…

Well, in addition to the normal portals, the various cards also run promotions so here is a great quadruple dip: 1. Go to a site like Amerideals and see what direct cash back there is. These are a pain to manage in that you constantly need to sign up (which I think is the point),…

Follow Baldricks suggestions. Handbrakes constant quality mode at CRF 18-19 will give you very good quality. You can go to 17-17.5 for even better quality, at the cost of more filesize. via DVD to mkv with same quality as orginal?.

In my quest to get rid of closed source products, I’ve been moving over quite a few things. One important one is virus checking as you don’t want an exploit where they take your virus scanner out. There is only one for the Mac that appears to be open source (just like there appears to…

I’ve actually forgotten how to take a DVD from someone and turn it into an MKV or an Mp4. Here’s the notes. The main thing is to use right constant quality: For the Mac, download Handbrake Put in the DVD and pick that as the source The most important thing is to pick the Constant…

I confirm this works. If you get stuck creating the user account, do not login to AppleID and do not select the automatic timezone detection, and it will proceed to the next screen in 2-3 seconds. I am now sitting on the desktop, all good. via Setup Stuck At Creating User Account…: Apple Support Communities.

Time to get ready for winter (and regulations) and in looking through Amazon and their buyer’s guide, it looks like the Thule CB12 chains and the Z cables are the best rating. So how to figure out what you need? Which Thule or Security Chain? They have an amazing range of models and in general Thule gets…

Well, after twelve years, the tires on our Volvo are finally giving out. Tirerack.com is a great source for tires and has reviews as well (although they’ve discontinued their mileage based ratings sadly). Good news is that evrewards.com shows there is a 4% cash rebate with them using bigcrumbs.com. And they will deliver directly to…

Wow, some of these rewards are really pretty amazing if you have a Rewards Shopping Mall based credit cards, here’s a stack rank of vendors to choose from when buying for electronics (see allretailers-byoffer.htm for a list of all retailers sorting by bonus points offered), so if the prices are close online, then this is a…

Ok, for the real geeks, here are the ways to make online shopping pay and pay again. Here is the math if you have the time to do it. First figure out what points are actually worth. These vary quite a lot. For instance on our best card with the best redemption, you get 8.5%…

Most of the documentation for this seems to be pretty obsolete as things have really shifted around. The main issue that there are two big security holes right now and the big tradeoff is that you can be more completely open source and use OpenPGP, but you can’t use your iPhone conveniently as Apple doesn’t…

Well lots of discussion, but the first two lenses for the A7R have been amazing, so maybe like the 5D2 (may mine RIP) the overhype and the under hype will meet on the Sony. Also, the 24-70 F/4 lense is coming January 24, so will be the first test of a real zoom on this…

So Christmas is over and the bargain hunting is just beginning. Still, when looking at the gift guides, there are a few items I really do wish I had gotten (and may soon). They tend to fall into two categories: a) things from really cool niche vendors who care about their trade and b) classic…

It is pretty amazing to me how little has been automated in all these years for a IT “dad” who has to maintain a bunch of computers for the extended family. While there have been lots of lockdown technologies for servers and some draconian things for desktops, really the effort to maintain a good, virus-free…

Amongst the many projects I’m working on (as I wait for Windows to run its updates, do virus scanning with Windows Defender), so in looking at WordPress, I’m helping someone update from a traditional static layout to a nice front page that has a blog in the front for recent news and a schedule of…

Wow, I’m back to Windows hacking, here are some things that are going on with Windows 8.1 and Sony Vegas Platinum 11: Just running Make Movie is failing to render properly and reportedly doesn’t create enough for a DVD. The rendering is also using just 50% of processing power on a monster Core i7 4770…

If this isn’t the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is, but if you have a Samsung screen that is overscanning a digital input (apparently it does it for all inputs!). Then you need to fix it by physically changing the hardware connection. Only HDMI1/DVI *doesn’t* overscan. And then you On Saturday…

If you have a camera (like my Sony RX-100) that produces .MTS files for its H.264 format, then editing on the mac ain’t easy. Because you really want something like mp3trim which trims but doesn’t uncompress and recompress. Every once in a while I try to edit video in the .MTS format on m yMacBook with the built-in…

Wow some amazing results, it looks like the Sony A7R with the right lense (?!) is at the same level of resolution as the Nikon 800E but in a much smaller body. So it makes it every more likely that mirror less is (at least for me) the way to go. Interesting to see the…

Normally when someone asks me about getting a computer, I say, buy a MacBook with Applecare (three year warranty because it runs Windows and Mac OS X. And while it might seem expensive to start, they certainly are durable and the support is terrific. We have MacBooks bought in 2009 (so five years old) that…

FCP.co posted a 24-hour hands on with the new Mac Pro. They found read speeds of 880MB/s from the Mac Pro’s solid state storage, with impressive write numbers of 985.5MB/s. Further, the team discovered that new machine could post full 4K video with multiple color corrections, effects and transitions playing back all in real time.  Macworld saw even more…

Well we already had Drobo Pro, so now here is XBMC. YOu need a pre build of Frodo 12.2 for it to work.