Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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 Nothing like buying a camera that is obsolete in two months!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…

Hmmm. I just noticed that one of my old time capsules suddenly things it is “December 30 2042” I sure wish it were, then we go warp to Andromeda and back in time for lunch. So the basic setup in Airport Utility doesn’t seem to give you a way to check the dates. Fortunately…. Also,…

Maybe the definite post, Ming Thein analyzes the different systems A question of sensor size – Ming Thein | Photographer I’m surprised not that the largest sensor with the biggest pixels wins in most categories, but that the results are so close at all; small sensors have really become quite good. (In fact, I suspect…

In looking at how alternatives to DxO and Adobe which are both ramping prices like crazy ($180 a year in DxOs case with forced upgrades and of course Adobe does the same. The Australian site says that Raw Therapee is not a bad free substitute. It includes per camera lense distortion correction (my favorite feature…

I can’t get a Mac to pair with a Bluetooth keyboard, so needs a reset, this didn’t work for me. What I found was that even with a reset it wouldn’t work. I had to change the passcode option to generate one automatically (it was defaulting to 0000) and this worked. It seems that at…

I just keep needing more and more (or rather losing more and more). For $11, the Kingston Data Travelr GE9 2.0 is hard to beat. It is small and has a big strong ring in aluminum as Kingston Digital DataTraveler SE9 16GB USB 2.0 DTSE9H/16GBZ. And they make a gold plated one for $12 for…

Got some ancient hardware I’m trying to use: Resurrected iMac 24″ (early 2008). Not a bad 24″ display and it is decent for processing. Bummer that the mini-DVI port on the back (before displayport) won’t work in target mode so you can’t use the beautiful display for much. But otherwise decent even though it only…

Well, I’m going through old photos that have been scanned or otherwise digitized, so there is nothing to tell you when (I can usually guess where). So sometimes it is nice to know when it snowed in Seattle say 10 years ago. How do you do that? Well NOAA has a precipitation record they keep…

I put my dearly loved All Clad no stock 8″ pan into the oven to heat and ruined the coating (no to self never over heat the pan or put in the oven ever!). It’s my second $90 pan I’ve torqued in five years. In looking at Cook’s Illustrated. They love the $140 French Omelette…

At least for nerds. We looked at building a quadracopter, but at $500 for the kit plus $400 for a RC controller (?!!), it does seem a little expensive. Still for $1500, you can get a drone which flies for 15 minutes, gives you a first person view through a small CCD camera and has…

Someone was asking me, so what would you get if you wantd to just read a book. It’s an interesting question as there are so many units to choose from. The big three are of course Apple, Kindle or some Android thing (Samsung). But there are so many models. Toptenreviews.com did a quick overview showing…

While RedHat (and its derivatives like CentOS) have lots of packages that you can install, not everything is there. Repoforge seems like the other big source of packages. Here is how to get your CentOS to know that repository: AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge – CentOS Wiki Download the rpmforge-release package. Choose one of the two links below, selecting…

Find your IP Address on a Mac You can find your IP address from the Mac System Preferences: From the Apple menu pull down “System Preferences” Click on the “Network” preference pane Your IP address will be visible to the right Find your IP Address on a Mac Launch the Terminal located in /Applications/Utilities/ Type…

Mac OS X: find the program running on a port « databasically // Kansas City Small Business IT && Ruby on Rails Programming   Sometimes, there’s a program running on a port and you don’t know what it is. How do you find out? I find this happens when I start a webserver up to…

Mac OS X: find the program running on a port « databasically // Kansas City Small Business IT && Ruby on Rails Programming   Sometimes, there’s a program running on a port and you don’t know what it is. How do you find out? I find this happens when I start a webserver up to…

Somehow, there is a curious fact that sometimes with Get Info or Disk Utility, you see that you are almost out of disk, but when you go to the Finder, it looks likes things are fine. What is going on? Apple has a new feature with Time Machine Backups where where it creates an invisible…

Seems like everyone is doing reading on electronics now. So the question is what is the best reader. In looking at reviews, for general purpose tablets, it does look like the ipad mini is a great form factor. The main issue is that the ipad mini 2 is coming out probably in September so it…

What a convergence we are seeing in the PC world. The world used to be filled with lots of different buses (serial, parallel cables, IDE, PCI) but as performance has increased the world has converged around serial buses (because it when things go really fast it is hard to make the signals across multiple lines…

Scott and i have been getting super nerdy about reviews and image quality. It turns out that figuring out resolution of a camera is incredibly difficult and depends quite a bit on sharpening. If you use JPEG, then there are lots of settings and all cameras need some sort of sharpening. If you use RAW,…

I haven’t seen many tests of this lense and lensrentals.com and photozone.de are one of the few shops that shows the results. Here they are shot at a standard Imatest distance of 18 feet. As an aside, the big question is what he is really measuring. Not too many entries on this, but here’s a…