Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

For everyone that is considering to buy the new Sony a7 camera – you may want to wait a little bit since Nikon is rumored to announce a new full frame hybrid camera with the following specifications: Nikon FM2 like design 16,2MP 36×23,9 full frame sensor (same as in the D4?) SD memory card 2016-pixel RGB image…

I don’t normally think of Google as a responsive company, so see my surprise when I got this note from a map correction we just did… From: Google Maps Re: Your report near Luritja Road in Petermann (10/8/13 7:13 PM) Hi Rich, Thank you for reporting this problem. We’ve reviewed your problem and you were…

I just loaded the latest build (3.2.3) and it basically works which is amazing, to actually get it running right takes a few tips and tricks: There is this funky thing called HDMI-CEC (what a name!) which let’s the Samsung remote control the XBMC on Raspberry Pi. This sort of works and XBMC says HDMI…

One of my favorite sites just did (photoreview.com.au) of the A7 (but not the A7r yet). It is sad as an aside that even the guy who runs canonrumors.com is buying one (and Canon has no more announcements planned until April of next year!). Here are the interesting facts: The Sony A7 is about the…

Suddenly there is a file /mach_kernel visible. This is probably the actual kernel of OS X as it uses Mach as its basis. It’s easy to fix as you don’t want to delete it, just make it invisible by starting Terminal and typing in: sudo chflags hidden /mach_kernel

Well, my Canon i9900 (which has been working for over ten years?!) has finally had a real problem. It is a 1403 Print Head issue. As Fixyourownprinter.com says, it is probably the print head which is clogged after all those years of use. The main point is that this happens if you don’t print for…

Well just finished ten days of using the Olympus OM-D EM-5 and I have to say it has been the best experience so far, but still not quite perfect. Lensrentals.com is a great site for trying things and here are some of my initial impressions: Wow, the combination of a 14-35 f/2.8 and 35-100 f/2.8…

Argh. I’m so stupid. Left my toiletries in a United bin and someone is now using my toothbrush and enjoying my glasses I’m sure 🙂 Here are the replacements: Sonicare. They charge an insane amount for their toothbrushes, but we are trapped. We have all the heads. Normally this is $80, but Amazon has just…

Been using the OM-D E-M5 with the Panasonic 12-35mm f/2.8 Pro and 35-100 f/2.8 Pro lense for a little bit. These are amazing lenses. Accorinding to photozone.de, because of defraction, this lense is actually sharpest at f/4 and declines significantly at f/5.6 (this is the defraction effect which occurs much earlier than with other lenses).…

Pretty cool idea, start with Accor and then get matched with Best Western and IHG Rewards. If you do after October 1, then you get it all the way through 2013 Some of these promotions may require you to be an elite member with IHG Rewards Club. You can always get Platinum Le Club Accorhotels…

Well as Rennie says, the main issue are the quality of the lenses (and I have a 16MP OM-D MD5 I’m trying righ now and it is tiny!), but Sony is working hard. They are naming their interchangeable lense full frame cameras, the A7 and the A7R and will announce on October 16th it is…

OK, here are the ways to get XBMC (and its various Airplay, DLNA input drivers) on: Raspberry Pi. RaspXBMC needs a hard-wired network connection and I have an EDImaxx USB wireless dongle. Argh. But at least it boots. OpenElec  needs a .img image on an SD card. Mrpfister has some great hints including how to…

Well if you are hunched over in your dorm room, it’s time to realize your back is going to really hurt, so here are some suggestions: Separate keyboard and mouse/trackpad. So that you can have them at lower spot than the laptop A laptop stand. This move the laptop up about 4 inches. We use…

Been trying to convert from Mac Mail to Thunderbird in the quest to get to more open source. Here are the issues: Thunderbird has this automatic identification of mail servers, but it doesn’t go to SSL encryption automatically, so you need to go to Tools/Account settings and change to SSL/TLS and this will switch the…

Bluehost offers a whole set of things that you can do to reduce spam. Here is what you do: Logon to yourdomain.com/cpanel Goto the mail section and enable Spam Assassin Then enable Spam Box Now create a folder called Spam in your email folders so that Spam Box can put Spam Assassin mail there Turn…

I’ve been on a campaign to use as much open source as I can and the next change is the switch from Mac Mail to Thunderbird. Here are some of the tips and tricks: With bluehost, the ssl that you use for el cheapo sites uses the bluehost SSL certificate. Thunderbird doesn’t like this and…

Nothing like starting all over again learning how to program. There are so many great free tutorials. Thanks Ray! And it is so cool that XCode is a simple download and it syncs with Github. How cool is that. I’m going to start with basic iOS and then try some tools like Xamarin. But can’t…

Super frustrating, but if you get your Trackpad in a wierd setting, it won’t pair. The trick is to hold the On button the *entire* time that you are pairing, see below: How to force a reset on Magic Trackpad: Apple Support Communities If you hold down the button for on the side of the…

You can do this automatically with Linux, but with Mac OS X, you still need to do graphical installs it looks like (or until I make a script for it all). Here are the things I need as a list with the goal to get as much open source software running that is inspectable and…