Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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. 

So if you don’t have an unlimited hoster (like bluehost) and don’t want to maintain your own gallery (like zenphoto), here is what you can do. There are a zillion of these things according to wikipedia: * Flickr. This is 1TB of storage which is pretty close to unlimited for free. They also allow seamless…

MacBook Pro this morning turned on but no bong and the screen is black. Google searches leads to either a motherboard failure or try a PRAM reset. That means hold down the on and then p, r and the option and command key. Quite hard to do but it worked!

Well every release of OS X seems to break our trusty old Drobo Pro. The things that really don’t work: iSCSI initiator. The one they use needs an old Java 6 and is pretty flaky, but there are not complaints like the Firewire and USB. I’ve had lots of prior issues with this as having…

Now that world is moving to 4K displays, it’s interesting to see what hardware actually works where. This is 4x more pixels than a 1080p display and double (about) that of a retina display (which is 2.8K or 1800p depending on the measurement system). So here is what seems to work. There are two semi-deep…

Weird assymetry, you can control an iTunes from an iOS device, but not from any Mac OS X computer… Here’s how to fix that… lion – How can I control iTunes from another Mac? – Ask Different I’ve got a Mac Mini running Lion that stores my iTunes library. It’s hooked up to my receiver…

PSQX4645ZA_TD7695_OI – KXTD7695.pdf This phone’s off mode is pretty obscure, but one day one then another of our phones looked dead. The battery showed fully charged, but when you pulled out of the charger, the screen went completely blank. Well, it turns out that unlike most devices, this just means the phone is off. It…

Well, if you had a bunch of time on your hands and just wanted to fly somewhere (loving adventure), then you’d want to maybe fly in the best first class seats in the world, so here they are: Etihad Airways continues winning streak as it’s First Class seats are named the World’s Best in the…

When looking for things for the home, I use three sources. First is Consumer reports (subscription required) and they do some nice tests Then, Cooksillustrated.com (subscription required) which is mainly about recipes, but they do some great tests of kitchen stuff Then there is the meta site, The Sweethome which is a branch of the Wirecutter.…

How do I password protect my albums? « zenphoto forums. I haven’t used zenphoto in a while, but still like it mainly because it is file system based, so I can do big reorganizations of my 7,000 photos without painful user interface interactions. In this case, the main thing is how to get the right…

Hey it’s freezing up here. So how do u keep warm? Pelonis. Not a super choice. The delonghi hmp 1500 is very popular on amazon $79 and is very small and light and not ugly like the oil filled radiator models. $69 at newegg. $64 at Walmart but out of stock, $80 at best buy…

I remember when figuring out a font was impossible, but now it’s easy, just myfonts.com/WhatTheFont  or whatfontis.com by feeding it a jpeg of the font you don’t recognize and it popts it back to you. When you get a match, then you can see how to download it by typing the name into google. There…