Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

Sigma has been really doing a great job lately and the coolest thing now is that you can download firmware into their lenses at home rather than needing a factory adjustmnet LensRentals.com – Photo/video thoughts from the largest rental house I am certain, though, that Sigma Photo, Inc. has changed a lot in that time.…

Sigma has been really doing a great job lately LensRentals.com – Photo/video thoughts from the largest rental house I am certain, though, that Sigma Photo, Inc. has changed a lot in that time. Truth is, they’re making serious waves in the photo industry these last few years. They’ve improved their repair service and quality assurance.…

Scott has really figure this out, the important figure of merit for a lens+body combo are the number of lines it can resolved for every physical millimeter of the sensor at an MTF-50 (where you have 50% contrast). The Sony RX100 actualy does the best at 270 li/mm mainly because it is easier to design…

Well, if you are off on a long trip, how do you make sure your clubs make it in one piece. Here are some tips: Golflink. First is that you pay a premium if the bag is big and heavy. They cost about $100 and you want to find one with a pull handle and…

The various specs are so confusing. Imatest which pcmag.com and imaging-resources.com uses and dxomark which dxo and dpreview now uses are different metrics for the same thing. How good is a particular body and lense combination. Truth is that a great body (NEX-7) can turn in a low resolution camera with a mediocre lenses (it’s…

The various specs are so confusing. Imatest which pcmag.com and imaging-resources.com uses and dxomark which dxo and dpreview now uses are different metrics for the same thing. How good is a particular body and lense combination. Truth is that a great body (NEX-7) can turn in a low resolution camera with a mediocre lenses (it’s…

Well shopping for a monitor for work and the big question is shouldn’t we just get a flat screen instead. If the environment is light controlled, it seems like the latest generation of projectors is probably the way to go. And if you can stand waiting, this new generation 4K projectors is just coming on…

Let the drooling being, this is a massive monitor. 4 times the size of a 1080 display! ASUS launching a 4k 31.5-inch monitor – but don’t expect to hook it up to your Mac just yet … | 9to5Mac ASUS today revealed that it will launch a 31.5-inch 4k monitor late next month, its 3840×2160 pixels…

Well real cases go for thousands, but if you want something that gets you down to snorkel depth, try it and the main thing it needs is a filter kit to take care of the loss of red at that depth and of course, how do you make the touchscreen go while underwater 🙂 Sony…

Well, since spending $1000 for some editing software just because iMovie doesn’t grok AVCHD seems a little dumb. Instead, I’ll waste way more than that in time moving to an open source video editing tool. Actually, this all makes sense with Adobe jacking the prices up so significantly and the high price of NLE video.…

Well as Scott says, it is all about the lenses, but it is interesting to see the moves Samsung is making with their cameras. They are first more open in that they are open source now, but are they good cameras. the first previews are coming from Ubergizmo.com and Cnet.com OK, not really, but it…