Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

It is hard to find reviews of these and most seem like junk. Monoprice does a budget set for $83, but Sound and Vision just did a review set and for not very much, you can get a nice sounding set of outdoor speakers: Niles OS5.5 Black (Pr) 5 Inch 2-Way High Performance Indoor Outdoor…

Well time once again to figure out how small and low power you can make something. Let’s look at form factor, chip set, processor, memory, disk, in that order for a basic Haswell system. Here are the recommendations for a Linux running Haswell simple single board computer (and following some models like iafeche) for $584…

We’ve tried this before and the graphics drivers are the big pain. Got an Atom processor and their GMA500 graphics were such a pain to get working. Linux users: watch out for last-gen Intel Atom It hit the market during the last few weeks. Last generation of Intel Atoms: CedarView (D2300, D2500, D2550, D2600, D2700)…

Some kind of cool treats you don’t often see in the US, but thanks to Amazon, you can get them: Here in the Netherlands, it is apparently perfectly normal behaviour for an adult to merrily sprinkle some fruit or chocolate flavoured sprinkles on their bread at mealtime. from No. 3: Hagelslag | Stuff Dutch People…

We don’t use the Kindle too much, but pretty soon it gets reall cluttered. There are book loans from our library that don’t get cleared for isntance. YOu have to manually whack each one in the web app or just hide them from the Kindle app itself: If you are talking about the Carousel, which…

It is hard to find reviews of these and most seem like junk. Monoprice does a budget set for $83, but Sound and Vision just did a review set: We really liked the Niles OS5.5, and we thought the Definitive Technology AW5500 and the Klipsch AW-525 were both pretty good. Review: Outdoor Speakers | Sound…

As Scott says, with cameras getting so much better, we’d all better learn how to shoot and what makes a great photograph. Here are some lists of these, starting with Ken Rockwell’s list: Ken Rockwell’s What Makes a Great Photograph.. He’s a great resource and puts things into plain English. In this case, his point…

Well, it is not so much obscure as local, but we had a chance to visit Agriloro and meet with the owner. He’s a wonderful guy and reminds me of the day when winery owners had the time to meet with customers. He even got into his car to try to find us as we…

I have a bunch of the orignal Camelbaks (the MULE amongst them), but now that every backpack is hydration bladder compatible and these things get dirty (you want to get a cleaner for them especially the tubes). It’s time to see what a good option is for just getting a new set of bladders. Outdoorgearlab.com…

Well, if you are every going to Basel, it is indeed beautiful, but on Sundays most of the shops are closed, so what to do, Wikitravel has some good tips: Kunstmuseum Basel, St. Alban-Graben 16, city center, +41 61 206 62 62, [29]. Basel’s exquisite art museum houses an impressive permanent collection of 19th and…

While digital means you mainly just share photos, sometimes it is fun to make a photo album during a party. We have a Canon iP100 and it produces incredible quality prints up to A4 or Legal size, but it is slow and the automatic paper feed doesn’t work super well. We used the Selphy CP900…

Just a reminder about how to minimize your roaming costs when you are overseas: If you are on Verizon: Sign up for the $25 for 100MB international data plan. Works in most European countries (and China) When you call, use Skype to call the US using the international data. Way cheaper than the $1.29 a…

Been using and playing with virtual machines a lot and it is pretty clear, you benefit from having an SSD and more memory. While the latest macbooks are faster, etc., even a five year old machine still work great. I’m amazed at the quality of the keyboard and the cases and the displays. The SSDs…

Bluehost has been good to me, even though expensive at $10/month (can’t believe that is expensive), the only limitation is that it is pretty insecure to use FTP and they don’t like large files (greater than 1GB), so it isn’t the perfect server for everything. And they only allow the main account to use SFTP.…

We are using Mailman for simple lists. And got this peculiar errot What does “message has implicit destination” mean? – Documentation – Confluence 2) The message was BCC’ed (blind carbon copied) to the list, and was actually not addressed to the list directly (not that you can see). If you’re running an umbrella list, you…

Been trying to figure out what to get folks for their birthdays, etc. The default choice is of course an Amazon Gift Cards, but you can do better than that. I usually check Wirecutter for instance as a place to find geek gifts.

Well, I have nearly everything, but our little pen thing broke (which purifies water), so back to the drawing board for something. It is a confusing topic but outdoorgearlab.com has some good advice. There are three kinds of systems: filter, chemical and UV. The net is that a filter doesn’t take care of viruses, but…

Nearly everyone needs one now, so here’s the free exam and then you mail a form in and $10 and get your certificate.

If you ever need to use a script to remotely copy, mount a dmg and then run a package, here is how to do it Installing packages from the command line – Mac OS X Hints I sometimes need to install updates remotely on a server I maintain. I already knew about the command line…

Yuck! But the Monterey Bay Aquarium has been hard at work on the exact place where you buy salmon. In summary, if you care about salmon, you literally can’t order salmon without asking lots of questions, but here is a the best choice list: Tank farmed salmon in the US Sockeye from Fraser River in…

This is awesomely cool (for once from Canon). They are using a new proprietary sensor which embeds focusing into the sensor array itself. Claim 30% focusing and it works while doing video. This is all about making this work well as a video. Canon 70D DSLR With Dual Pixel CMOS AF: First Impressions | Popular…

How could you put two identical slots next to each other. I haven’t used SD cards much so didn’t think about it, but it is a common problem and plenty of rube goldberg solutions. I like the vacuum cleaner idea! And it seems like it is so common the Apple store has a dental instrument…

 Nothing like buying a camera that is obsolete in two months! Wish the rumor sites had picked this up earlier…but the RX100 is definitely a nice camera anyway, just wish I had that extra stop as the main limitation is really at night. I’m not sure how useful the Wi-Fi is as I have an…

In looking through the best android phones, has a great list including from the top: HTC One. All aluminum body and $600 Samsung Galaxy S4. Beautiful with a great camera, but folks didn’t like the plastic back, the slow user interface and just 9GB of the 16GB are free. If you want a camera focused…

I’ve been using Bluehost for a long time and it seems reliable, but the prices have been moving up. I just did a comparison vs GoDaddy for grins and domain registration is 30% more expensive ($13 vs $10) and hosting is about double $9.95 vs. 4.95 a month. These are all nominal amounts, but it…

John and I saw them and we now have “his and her’s” version plus hopefully a homebrew one we build ourselves 🙂 This is part of the movement calle Reprap which sure feels like the old Altair 800 kit computer days. That product was what gave start to the Microsoft with Altair Basic and of…

So how much real throughput can you actually get if you saturate a Wifi channel. Here are some examples. The net is you get about half the effective throughput. So for most devices that are doing 802.11g at 54Mbps, you are geting about 25Mbps. How does that translate? Well with my Sony RX100 camera, the…

How many times have I thought this was happening to me… Resistance Is Futile – Television Tropes & Idioms We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” — The Borg, Star…

The big problem with getting cell phones now is that you get locked into expensive data plans. AT&T as well as Verizon want an incremental $40 per phone (although it does come with unlimited text and voice) for two years. Even T-mobile which is inexpensive wants $10 for voice/messaging plus $20 for data. The easiest…