Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

Well this has been kind of an on and off again thing, but we’ve had Rock Band 2, 3 and Beatles for a while but hated paying for DLC content and never really research how to use it. But here are the little tricks. I can see sort of why this franchise has died. It…

Apple. Now that is a class act. Love the video memorial of Steve…

a friendly guide for building ZFS based SAN/NAS solutions » ZFS Build. Reminds me that Bob has said that while I use DroboPro on a Mac Mini and a Synology 1812+, the real thing I want is a homebrew ZFS server. Reading a little about ZFS, it sure does seem attractive. People like Sonnet have…

Our TiVo HD runs like a charm (well OK, two of the three boxes have died with hard disk failures. Now our TiVo Premiere keeps hanging. I think it has a disk problem after the Olympics, but who knows. TiVos are IMHO amazingly unstable, but still easy to use. I may someday finally be able…

America’s Cup on NBC – October 7 – YouTube. Well, if you are following sailing, the America’s Cup is now a race series with identical AC45 (45 foot boats) and then in 2013, there is the main race using AC72, the big brother, which are all different. Finding this isn’t easy. In TiVo, they are…

So if you just want a reliable small car that is easy to drive and learn for the beginner driver, what are the choices? According to US News, you should consider: Honda Fit. This is small and perhaps too small for big drivers, but is inexpensive and easy to maneuver. Ford Fiesta. This is can…

I have three of these old things just sitting on a desk. Simpletech is long since gone, but they are still functional NAS that are good for storing some videos and so forth. So why not use them. Fortunately, the Internet let’s you do that: Retrevo has their original manual which is pretty nice You…

Well I’ve gotten HD HomeRun Prime to work on Mac MythTV and also Windows Media Center, but haven’t gotten much further. Mainly use a TiVo to record things with kmttg which also does ad skipping. What I really want is an easy way to do this with HD HomeRun Prime and get rid of the…

OK, getting back to Windows, so many things I’ve forgotten. If you want to run without a disk drive, but have the DVD what do you do? Well, if the DVD doesn’t have copy protection, you need to turn it into an ISO and then run virtualCloneDrive to mount it as a disk image and away…