Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

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…

If you love sailing, well then why not play a simulation on your computer. It is not like most folks have $100M to run an Americas’ Cup campaign, so here’s a quick search of what is out there: Sailing Simulator 5. Shipped in 2010 and there is a Windows demo. First hit on google, so…

Argh. Darn Apple Maps, they think the Washington Athletic Club is down on 5th vs the actual address on 6th. Wandered around looking for it and got a ticket 2 minutes before I got back. Was there for 15. Wow, the ever efficient revenue generation of Seattle! And there is of course no way to…

The difference between a .dmg file…: Apple Support Communities explains a bunch to me. Basically, if you want to get a disk image, the Mac way is called .dmg. The PC way is called .cdr or .iso (they are the same). The Apple Disk Utility has a conversion that lets you swap. Just double click on…

Well that was quick, got one of these units. Supposed to be amazing on range and manageability. Has 3×3 MIMO at 2.4GBHz and 2×2 at 5GHz. Also it uses POE, so I should need a power cord. We have an old Netgear GS748TP switch and it is supposed to do power over ethernet automatically. The…

How apple innovates. They are trying to get incremental but important things like thinness or a smart connector done. Really admire them.

The big Photokina show happened and had a chance to look at the Fuji X1-Pro and talk about cameras, here’s the scoop on what looks good: Big dSLR With a Canon 5D Mark II already and a big investment in Canon glass, it is hard to switch systems, but I’d say that right now, it…

Well if you want to do composing and music, it is great to have a keyboard that plugs into your computer. Here’s what you can think about getting thanks the well named musiconmypc.com: Decide how many keys you need. A smaller 49 key will take you well into intermediate, but if you know how to…

I don’t play with Android phones too much, but had a chance to use an older Samsun Vibrant SBH-959T. So how to upgrade it as as usual, it is complicated as heck and hackable which is wonderful. There is no recent Ice Cream Sandwich release for it, but hackers have been busy: Fully rooted T-mobile…

Well, we’ve been working hard on getting the kit from Puget Systems to work. It is for true experts so needlesstosay, the instructions for it are pretty unclear as is the parts list and so forth, so here is a guide for dummies who want to build from it as we collect it. This assumes…

Wow that is pretty incredible…

The big camera tradeshow Photokina is happening now, there are some pretty interesting developments and some might call it the most interesting in years. The biggest news to me overall is that Sony is really leveraging their sensor development (24MP) and standard lense (E-mount) to produce a single family that can use lenses from mirrorless…

Wow this is pretty incredible from macrumors.com, shows the shipment rate of the iPhone, basically the original sold 1M units in the first 74 days. Not bad. But with the Iphone 4S, they sold 1M in the first 24 *hours*. The iPhone 5 announcement was they sold 2M in the first 24 hours. Whew!