Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well when you get a new car, the really important things are the kit that you need for those emergencies (that hopefully won’t ever happen). Here’s an updated list thats great for christmas 🙂 Flashlight. You want one that is going to be bright and last a long time. This is a good application for…

Well there are quite a few that are out there now. 9to5mac.com has a long list, but here’s a short list, Apple’s lightening to usb is $19, but Boxwave sells one for $12 and there is also a retractable version for a similar price at iphonemod.com

Seems like the rechargeables that we use just keep finding new uses. This is great as (except for the Wii controllers), everything seems to like them. But time to buy some more. Using a combination of Amazon and Thomas Distributing, here are the best buys: Battery charger. I have a bunch of these and the…

Well have instability with our old BIOS, but just upgraded our ASUS P8V77-Deluxe and did an update (why does everything require updates all the time). The original nVidia driver also needed an update, so you have to download the beta driver but didn’t have an SLI profile. YOu need the latest 310.61 beta driver with…

Well, the initial reviews of the Canon EOS M are coming in and it looks more and more likely that a move to the E-mount Sony line is coming. Sad that Canon has these kinds of problems, but on the other hand, the 5DII is a pretty amazing camera that is going to soldier on…

Well if you are a professional film makers things just got way better. Sony just announced a 4K capable (that is four thousand lines vs HD which is 1080 lines) camcorder that shoots in RAW and does something called global shutter. This means that the entire frame is taken at once and you don’t rolling shutter…

Wireless speakers. Now that the 30-pin connector is dead, seems like wireless speakers are going to be more and more important. If you just want a local solution then you can use Bluetooth adapters to connect any speaker set Belkin makes one for $25. Airplay actually works better because you can communicate on Wifi. We use…

Some little tidbits for mac users and iDevices I get back to wanting a nice clean database of my songs. So artwork for each and lyrics for each song. Well this is easier than ever with Lyrical. This one does seem to work. Select a song in iTunes and it adds it.  Adding more storage. There…

Few quick things about Apple: Well it turns out that the “Fusion” drive technology works old Macs and across any SSD and any hard drive if you create a proper “storage” group with diskutil command line. Also you can use ZFS on top of it. Of course I can’t figure out how to ZFS (no…

Well we are up and running and we are definitely on the bleeding edge right now. Puget Systems has been great answering questions, but this is the kind of thing where there isn’t much out there on the Internet on what is going on and how to make a mineral-bath PC really work. They essentially…

Hope everyone on the East Coast weathers Sandy OK. In the mean time, if you ware wondering how the Caribbean is faring, there is a great site for monitoring what is happening at the ground at stormcarib.com And of the course the National Hurricane Service site is terrific.

Mexico: http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/worlds-most-romantic-hotels/38 How can you go wrong with Paris? http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/romantic-winter-getaways/24 The next James Bond hotel! http://www.tierrapatagonia.com http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/romantic-winter-getaways/17

Most monitors are limited to 60Hz or maybe 75Hz. This works fine most of the time, but higher refresh rates like 120Hz make things appear much smoother. If you watch the upcoming Hobbit, it was apparently filmed at 240Hz (240 times a second rather than 24 frames per second which is film standard), so it…

Well there are Blu-ray 3D, but how can you play 3D movies from the computer. There as usual a confusing array of formats for this. Most are in MKV format and the decoder ring is: Full Side-by-Side. This means that each frame is encoded where the left and right are side by side in a…

Wow, this was really cool. New iPad (with A6), iPad Mini (7″ no matter what Steve Jobs said), MacBook Pro 13 with Retina (drool, drool), but the coolest thing is a 5mm thick 27″ computer. I want one! Apple’s industry-leading iMac desktop received a major update on Tuesday, with newest all-in-one design featuring a form-factor…

Well if you are in the market now, things are pretty good. You can get a really nice TV for well less than $500. 3DTV Buying Guide and wirecutter.com seems like a pretty good resource for this. But basically, if you are buying a new screen, given the small premiums, it makes sense to get something that…

Well the cheapest blu ray player in some ways is the Sony Playstation 3. You get for $250 a Blu Ray player with 3-D plus games. But if you just want a simple player, both wirecutter.com and hometheatermag.com agree that the Panasonic DMP-BDT220 is the best. It has Bluray, does 2D to 3D conversion. What…

Well, its raining and another season is starting. Now that Skiing Magazine has changed their review criteria and doesn’t print any numbers at all, so our traditional system of using them doesn’t work. Freeskier.com Atomic Bent Chetler. Editors choice for powder ski. to still does though and here are their 123mm underfoot but with its reverse camber…

Now that we’ve gotten our gaming rig more or less stable, its been time to look at the other pieces. We cobbled together a nice three display system with a set of the best monitors of the mid 2000s (:-). So we have two old 4:3 19″ flat screens and an old 24″ flat screen…

Well besides reading this site, noticed The Wirecutter (an ex-Gizmodo guy) does these kind of recommendations. Good stuff. Here were some interesting recommendations: Monoprice 8320. I’ve bought a bunch of $3 headphones which have been unreliable and have broken, but Wirecutter likes the $10 headphones. The monoprice guys are pretty smart by the way, if you…

After the Olympics, our TiVo Premiere started to crash. That is, it would stop and not respond to web requests. I’ve tried a full reboot and even a full restart. The TiVo forums show 28 pages of problems with TiVo Premiere hangs which is a bit daunting. It sure feels like the hard drive is…

Four more cities has been added where you can get Xfinity on demand on your Tivo. Wow! Minnesota* Seattle/Tacoma, WA Kansas City, MO Olathe, KS via Xfinity on demand – TiVo Community.

20MHz channels at 2.4 GHz (Channels 1, 6, 11) Now that I have a pair of Ubiquiti UAP Pro access points and an Airport Extreme, its time to look at the right frequency design given that all of these use huge 40MHz channels to get 300-450Mbps, but this diagram from wikipedia is instructive. It’s worth…

Apples Lightning Cable Contains TI Chip Likely to Have Security Features – Mac Rumors. We were debating how small a computer can be. Well here are some of the answers, there are no fewer than four chips inside the tiny little connector inside a the new Iphone 5 charging cable…

Why build a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and not a Retina MacBook Air? | 9to5Mac It turns out there are a few reasons, but let’s start with the Retina display: the Retina Display on the 13-inch MacBook Pro will be 2,560-by-1,600 (for those scoring at home, that resolution is the same as the discontinued 30-inch…

Privacy Fix is instructive.?Who knows how accurate it is, but I bet it is directionally correct. And it says that FB makes about 5 cents a year off ads delivered to me, whereas GOOG makes about $32. I have most of my privacy settings cranked up (on both GOOG and FB), so maybe FB does…

It is pretty clear that the world is moving to virtual machines and also phone and tablet front-ends. And it is amazing what you can do to study it yourself. So here are some things to try. VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only…

We’ve been using MacBooks so long now that quite a few are past their three year Apple warranty period and unlike PCs, they are still in remarkably good shape. So rather than throw them away, these seem like things that work well enough to be repaired. Here are the top few that make sense for…

Mid-range Liquid Cooling, Automated radiator fan control. – Cooler-and-Heatsinks – Overclocking. I’ve always just tied my fans to headers on the motherboard and then used something like Speedfan to control them. With this outboard radiator, things are more complicated. We’ve mounted nine fans onto this huge outboard radiator, but there don’t appear to be any…

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but Handbrake still works. The only trick is setting the encoding, I like to use X.264 and Handbrake.fr says to use RF Quality 20 for DVD and 22 for Blu Ray. This Constant Quality setting should work pretty well. The other setting which isn’t on by default…