Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

We’ve been debating which is the right next generation camera. With Bob opting for Fuji, Rennie for Olympus and John for Samsung. But maybe this is the tiebreaker? It does seem to have every feature under the sun: Sony NEX-6 Review: Digital Photography Review Sony NEX-6 specification highlights 16.1MP APS-C format CMOS sensor 2.3 million…

It is always so hard to keep up with the Joneses. First it’s hard to spell, second, you have to acquire a lot of loot (or debt!) to do it: The average American household owns 2.3 vehicles The average number of children in families is 1.86 The average number of pets per household is 3.7…

Hey these sites are our sisters with specific purposes. Will see about making cross posting easier, but they are: The Marketing Playbook. With my buddy John Zagula about broader marketing and business strategy. Durian PC. Well the joke is that we smell (figuring out technology) so you don’t have to. Focused on PC technology. Think…

I’m getting back into WordPress and there are so many different plugins and things that it is so confusing for someone who is not a complete noob (where the defaults work well) and not a major hacker (eg a professional developer). So here are some things that I’ve learned: You want to use Jetpack. It…

In the new world, so often software has to get integrated into hardware. It’s one of toughest things to do. As soon as you get to a single physical piece you have inventory risk and also almost everything is contract manufacturing and that means a trip to China. Finding a partner there is…

Well, trying to find a decent webcam with good picture quality (1080p), low light capability (F/1.8 and fast enough), connection via Wifi, and also easy access (so it dumps the videos somewhere reasonable, like a file server and you can view it with a mobile app or through any browser). this turns out to be…

It is so complicated to figure out jailbreaks, but jailbrea.kr seems to be the simplest place to figure it out… Running iOS 6.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.2, 6.1, 6.1.1, or 6.1.2. Use evasi0n by the evad3rs. Running iOS 5.1.1. Use redsn0w+absinthe2. Running iOS 5.1. iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and the new iPad: nothing. Other devices: a tethered…

Nothing like feeling dumb all over again. Trying to do some documentation using Sphinx as the language and Github as a repository. There are lots of dependencies, so here’s a cookbook: Get a http://github.com logon Download Github for the Mac Download repositories from there, you will see your repository in your home directory. While the…

Argh. Leaving AT&T I thought that things would get better with Verizon and I must say coverage is better at least. Sigh. We were trying to get Canadian roaming as we usually due and Verizon says no u can’t because u owe $70 for 3 days of usage before your main account started?!! Apparently u…

Well I’m still on the hunt for the next generation lense system to update the five year old Canon 5D Mark II. As we all know, there is so much changing in the camera world right now that the interchangeable lense systems are really overtaking the full frames as smaller and more practical. And the…

Well now that the Raspberry Pi is running and I actually understand it somewhat, its time to move on to the Fit PC-2i that I’ve had in the closet. We got it running a build of routing software but since then I’ve been failing and failing. It has a 120GB SSD in it and a…

I finally got my SD card and so spent the evening trying to get the Raspberry Pi running. Which i finally worked. Although it wasn’t super easy even if you know PCs. Here are some notes: There is no BIOS at all, so to get it running, you have to take the SD card and…

Well, these devices are getting so good. CES shows that they are moving fast. But by the spring, you should be able to get the ideal camera. One that is high definition (1080p or 720p), has night vision and also is Wifi enabled. This is a big trend…The annoying thing is that most of these…

Most credit cards have programs where if you click through a particular portal, you get additional. Here are some I use: Mileage Plus Shopping. It doesn’t even matter if you use someone elses credit card. If you click through this portal to say Newegg, J&R or Blue Nile, you get a boat load of points.…

Mac OS X Recover Lost Root Password | a Tech-Recipes Tutorial If you have the password to an account that is an administrator on the system, then it is easy to recover the password using the sudo command. Open a terminal window and type the following: sudo passwd root You will be prompted for your…

We have one of the original MacBook airs (2009) and it is sloooow. Geeksbench verifies that is running about 2500 compared with a modern MacBook Air (2011) running at 5000. The main issue though a the hard disk. It just grinds along. Can take minutes for it to boot. Other world computing offer an expensive…

Try saying that three times fast. Here is the scoop. USB 3.0 is very fast. I can be faster than a hard disk. You can get speeds up but it depends on first having a USB 3.0 controller on your computer. Only the latest macs and the latest pcs have it. Right now 32GB seems…

ll I guess it had to happen, left the freezer door accidentally open, the microprocessor didn’t like trying to turn the whole house 0F, so instead of just grinding away, it crashed and turned the entire refrigerator off. Apparently fairly common, you have to do a “reboot”: Flip the circuit breaker off or unplug it…

Well I switched to generic RAID-6 and added three additional 3-TB drives successfully, so I haven’t had a data loss. Also switched to two link aggregated gigabit channels and jumbo packets (this is complicated to setup!) Right now Blackmagic Disk test reports that I’m getting 100MBps read and write over the network (?!!!). That’s pretty…

Ok, with all this digital content everywhere, chances you are licensed to things and you don’t even know it. Here is a guide to finding things: Matcha is a really nice application. It shows you want is available online and where. For instance right now Bourne Legacy is only available on Apple iTunes Store and…

As usual, there are a ton of formats: ePub. Mac. Nook for the Mac seems like the best reader on you Mac OS X or ePubReader from within Firefox. iOS. This is the format that the embedded Books reader understands. You do have to jump through hoops to get it there as it requires a…

Well of the four TiVo boxes I’ve had, three are now dead or dying with hardware issues. The hard drives on these things are just not that reliable. I sure wish they had SSDs. In any case, Comcast has definitely caught up quite a bit with programming of their Motorola boxes via the web and…

Well, now that our main Tivo Series 4 is dying. We are trying one last step, but now using the Comcast DVR alot and Plex from the Mac Mini. Seems like this doesn’t work super well as this requires KMTTG to download from yet another Tivo.  To get rid of this dependency time to try…

Well, I was playing with Synology (which seems decently stable). It is a pretty lousy Plex server mainly I think because the processor is slow and it can’t transcode. On the other hand, it is incredibly fast. Running with 1GB ethernet, I regularly get 100MBps which is pretty amazing. Faster than the local hard disk…