Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well now that you have your new iPad Air (or are waiting for Targets, $20 off plus $100 gift certificate Black Friday offer), you need all the rest in particular a case and also a screen protector. Here’s what Amazon says (sadly the review sites don’t really cover these small things anymore). What is most…

Well, I’ve been using the Vsonic VC1000 for a while and also its brother and my older Etymotic ER-4P. I have to say these are all fantastic headphones. The Vsonic particularly with the Meetronics tips are just great. The fit is very good. And at $125 or so a great price. So for Christmas here…

What a time to buy a camera. The move to interchangeable lens cameras (ILCs) also know as mirrorless cameras is happening at a rapid pace. A friend was asking what he should do and its a difficult question. Here’s an overview of what I’d be thinking and recommendations for this Christmas: Incredibly, for most daytime…

I was going crazy trying to figure out how to get rid a face I accidentally created. Not very obvious answer, you need to do a Command-Delete. To remove a person from your corkboard: Click to select Faces in the Source list. If you’re in full-screen view, click the Faces button in the toolbar. If…

Well, I read alot and my buddy Scott reads even more, but there is so much camera information it is hard to know what to trust. Normally, I’d say if you are serious, the main thing is to read some publications and then to actually rent the camera you want to try for a week…

Argh how frustrating, there is no Apple 4K display out yet so here are the options if you have $3,500 in your pocket 🙂 And I personally can’t wait for the day that these panels come down in price. There are other options out there like Asus’s 32-inch PQ321Q or previously mentioned 32-inch Sharp PN-K321,…

Everyone is thinking about this around me, so here are some facts I learned on the internet: iPad Air vs. iPad Mini Retina. They weigh about the same now, so the only difference is really the screen. Everyone seems to love the new weight and screen size of the air. As an aside, this fifth…

Wow more news coming on cameras and what is Nikon up to, I admit I don’t get their new $3K offering which is a retro looking Minolta X-700 look alike… In October we had that big A7-A7r announcement. But it won’t be long until we will get our next big Sony event: A trusted sources…

I just love Thewirecutter.com, a good review summary that I largely agree with: Scosche reVOLT c2. I have tried many, many usb chargers in the car. They break quite a bit. The Scosche is tiny and actually doesn’t disintegrate. It is expensive at $18, but does work. Apple Lighting Cable. Surprisingly it has fallen to…

Well, the first reviews of the iPad Air are out and they are pretty stunning… The iPad was never light enough for me to comfortably hold in my hands, suspended above my face while lying in bed or on the couch for long periods of time. The iPad 2 got close, but the 3rd and…

Seems like every year, I have to update this, but the good news is that international calling is getting cheaper and cheaper. Here are some of the great ideas: T-Mobile. They just announced that in 100 countries, there would be no data roaming charge. Wow that is great and although it is only 2G, it…

Scott reminded me about this important concept. Basically, you overexpose on a digital camera so that you lift the darkest regions out of the noise and then in digital processing, you put it all back again. It is kind of like the way Dolby C noise reduction worked in the old analog days (they would…

Spideroak is a company with their hearts in the right place. it is basically a dropbox competitor except that it is zero knowledge. Sadly, it just doesn’t seem to work. They don’t seem to have a forum or anywhere to ask questions, but just beware this is what happened: I got 5GB of storage and…

In my case, I got the double foul. My NAS tried to mount forever and failed; same with a Windows 8 PC on my network. The cause appears to be changes made in the networking stack made by Apple. Apple’s SMB2 implementation doesn’t work with a lot of SMB2 devices — even networked drives from…

Well, I got the Vsonic VC-1000 and then promptly lost them, but now I have all three and can report…wow… Joker is right (see http://www.head-fi.org/t/478568/) these are incredible headphones. I just looked for headphones rated 9.2 and which were amazing. I have to say, I’ve always loved my Etymotic ER-4S and Ps (over the years,…

Well if you are in the market for a new laptop, there is nothing quite like the Mac Rumors Buyers Guide (http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/) which basically tells you if a model is obsolete or there is something coming. Once you get a green light from them (literally!), go to the Apple Insiders Price Guide (http://appleinsider.com/mac_price_guide/) and get…

I’m a waiting for Mac Imatest…in the continuing adventures to have really accurate results from photography 🙂 When will a Macintosh version be available? As of July 2013 we are very close. the core program is working fine, but some peripheral details need to be completed. Stay tuned… . Imatest – FAQ.

What a great name for a web site. Well if you love Panini, here are the things to get: Breville Panini Duo. It is small but compact (and we love our Breville Toaster Oven, believe it or not a good toaster oven really matters). In this case this one is reported to have good temperature…

Found one of these four drive systems literally in a filing cabinet. We’ve been putting 4TB drives into our Drobo Pro so had some old (2009!) 2TB drives in the closet as well. Amazing how sometimes this old stuff works. Updated to the latest firmware 1.4.2 and Dashboard 2.5 and it actually worked with Mac…

Wow Lightroom is powerful and most of the things seem to be pretty manual. Scott suggested going through the tutorial and here is what I learned from Julianne Kost. Man this is a powerful product that you can’t learn just by clicking. There are so many strange UI ideas like click and holding and draggig…

While you are at it, it is pretty clear that 99.9% of all people should use Adobe. It is integrated and works well, but if you are a craftman, then you can try to roll your own with these separate tools. This works if you are a perfectionist and don’t have that many photos to…

Now that I actually understand Lightroom (that it does lens correction by default for point and shoots it knows about and for all micro-4/3 lenses), I’m off to compare them. Sadly, the reviews between the various products aren’t super helpful. They mainly focus on features rather than on image quality. And most importantly don’t tell…

Well now that Apple has launched the iPhone 5, iPad Air and iPad Mini, time to see what else folks are doing. The main thing seems to be to try to be Apple at half the price. Not a bad time to be buying stuff. Here is the buzz on products to try from the…

Well, a little late to the party, but PS4 seems to be sold out online at all the relevant stores, Walmart, Best Buy and Amazon, so what’s left is to either wait at midnight at Best Buy or Game Stop. Amazon has a host of bundles including a pair of the new DualShock 4s and…

In a massive OS X Mavericks upgrade over at this shop. I’m sure more memory will help, so for our older machines, how much more can they handle: Mac Mini 2010. 16GB of PC8500 (DDR3-1066) memory. OUr has 8GB  right now and I wonder if there are the usual issues with PC8500 vs PC10800 and…

I’ve been a fan for a while, but as they’ve raised rates, it does make me think that eventually people will move away from cable to over the top internet access.  For instance, right now you can either pay a huge bundle increase ($65 to $149) just to get HGTV or watch it on hgtv.com…

Say what you want about Apple, but if you are someone (like me) who wants simple, amazing and well built, it is hard not to lust for these many, many new products, in order of desire: I can’t decide if I want the iPad Mini more now that it has a Retina display or the…

OK, I’ve been trying to use Spider Oak as a secure and private replacement for DropBox and it is a big weird. Here are the things to know: It is sort of similar to Dropbox in that there is a Hive where all files are synced between machines But, each machine has a notion of…

I’ve been using DxO for years now and have faithfully paid the upgrade charges from DxO 4 -> 6 (skipped 5, really poor quality) -> 7 -> 8, but now it seems like everyone is moving to Lightroom and the key feature of DxO (for me anyway) was lens correction, but Lightroom caught up with…