Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Ludwig is so terrific, need a web camera to monitor things and he recommends Izon. Expensive at $130 but it looks wonderful and all it needs is USB power and it connects automatically to wifi and streams things up to a private location on the internet so you don’t need a PC or anything to…

Give it to your kids with a cheap prepaid plan 🙂 Also as another aside, if you just want a cheap data plan, then you can enable your old  iPhone 4 with a prepaid account according to osxdaily.com by calling AT&T and then giving them your old iPhone micro-SIM number. To get it to work with data,…

Well besides Siri, the other big reason to upgrade from an Iphone 4 to a 4S is international travel…it is a dual mode CDMA/GSM phone, so potentially you can use the very good Verizon network here (or Sprint if the coverage is good for you and their prices are much, much better). Here are the…

What a pain. Have Mac Office 2011, it is very restrictive on activation, so have lost a few hard drives and now when I try to activate it says too many times, but there is no way in the interface to reset activations and when you try to call on the phone, it just fails…

I’ve lost 60K miles so far from American and BA and others when they expire miles. Here’s how to prevent that sort fo stuff: United. The best way is to donate 1000 miles to charity American. Donate 250 miles to charity If it is too late, if you pay money, you can reactive miles as…

Well, folks told me to try lightroom and I will, but for right now using best of breed tools, here is my current workflow: Shoot in raw and produce .CR2 files Download to the Mac and put each days worth of .CR2 into a set of folders that are :Year:Year-Month:Year-Month-Date, so that a 14th October…

Great stuff that you can find on WSJ: Itemizing your home for insurance and disasters. The sites they recommend are knowyourstuff.org, stuffsafe.com Tracking your mileage points. gomiles.com, mileport.com

Well the resources are really improving. I’ve been using Qingwen on the iPhone, Chinesepod for audio and Chinesedict online, but a quick search shows there are lots more now. Like http://popupchinese.com/chinese/news And lots of reviews like http://learn-chinese.mychinastart.com/

This is a box that takes cable input and then distributes over your internal network to various network devices. So that for instance you can watch anything on say Comcast from your iPad 2 or from your Windows PC. Sadly these appear to be the only devices supported right now. So if I wanted to…

Wel gizmo’s are wonderful, I have a Chef’s Choice 120 and it is a great knife sharpener which Cooks Illustrated recommended, but here are some other choices: Chef’s choice 110. Is decent a step below the 120, but cheaper. City Kitchen’s carries the 115 which looks pretty close to the 120. As an aside, for…

If you are really into it, don’t just use the JPGs that your camera produces, but take the literally raw output of the sensors and process it yourself. You get a lot more depth as JPGs support 8-bit color while most modern cameras actually take 12-14 bits color, so that translates into 1 stop more…

My bubble is burst. My favorite reality shows are fake. Oh well, I guess I’ll go back to watching Youtube… Storage Wars Kitchen Nightmares. Controversy here, he did win a libel suit in 2006 saying he didn’t fake things. I actually saw the Dillon’s episode and if it was so unbelievably bad as a restaurant that…

Haven’t been there in years but terrific place. Some notes or the early fall. For me anyway falls into three categories 1. Lighthouses. Nubble Lighthouse. Just inside Maine. On a mini island. Great views and if ur lucky y will meet Bill Hamilton painter. Two Lights. Great state park. And there is their lobster shack…

Ok now with cool clubs, you actually have to learn how to play (just reading Harry Penick might not do the trick). So like most sports (skiing for one), I’m thinking that one really good instructor is key…so here are some lists… Ron Hansen was 2007 Western PGA Professional of the year and is at…

What a pain. Have Mac Office 2011, it is very restrictive on activation, so have lost a few hard drives and now when I try to activate it says too many times, but there is no way in the interface to reset activations and when you try to call on the phone, it just fails…

Heard in a meeting, turns out no one knows where this comes from. Some think it comes from Buddhist second truth which is “Desire is the root of all suffering” There is a long list of quotes not from Shakespeare

I’ve got a whole set of Imedion and Eneloop batteries that are low discharge. The big advantage is they keep most of their charge for up to a year, so great for most applications (like remote controls) where you don’t use it much. And their capacities are pretty good. The older Eneloops were 2000 mAh…

Well so there are some good questions about how to integrate your iPhone to iCal. With some schools using webcal as a protocol for getting real time calendar information: Find the webcal: URL Email it to yourself Click on it on your iPhone.  

If you don’t want to wear a headset all the time, one alternative is the bluetooth speakerphone. I’ve been using the Motorola T505 for almost two years now and it works pretty well. Main issues are that it is OK loud, but on FM, it is really hard in Seattle because all the channels are…

Well, this is certainly complicated to figure this out and there are no specific instructions, but the main problem is that Boot Camp 4.0 and the web doesn’t give very good instructions and Windows 7 doesn’t have the right default drivers for the iMac, so the screen goes blank, but here they are: Start Boot…

OK, I play badly, but this is always another opportunity to buy cool hardware. Tried a bunch but here are golf.com’s reviews for people who need improvement (I love how they change the terms beginner, intermediate and advanced to max game improvement, game improvement and better player, what marketing!). As an aside, right now the…

Two year ago, I got a Drobo Pro eight bay and it has been working OK right up to a power outage (I should have had a UPS) that caused the SCSI controller to fail. Got a warranty replacement from Drobo (thanks Drobo!), but realized I needed more backup as having all your files on…

It is amazingly hard to get a listing of all the non-stops between US and China. Wikipedia appears to have the best list: United flies SFO to PEK and PVG ORD to PEK and PVG DUL to PEK LAX to PVG Continental flies EWK to PEK and PVG American flies ORD to PVG, PEK LAX…

Hat tip to Howie for this one… Garmin bought a power meter company and it is pedal mounted so easy to move. Expensive, but no more so than the others.  See Velonews

Ok getting a little stale on restaurants and after a Kitchen Nightmare marathon ready to try some new ones. Here is what a quick scan of the Seattle Times found Little water cantina. Mexican. 2.5 stars. Eastlake 50 North. American. Near Uvillage. 2 stars Golden Beetle. Brett suggests some others that I’ve been to but…

This is the answer to all of us who want electronic shifting but can’t afford it. Shimano takes the next step and announces a lower cost version with the Ultegra Di2. It allows fora  28 tooth gear in the rear which is good. It has the sizes we want: standard Ultegra with chainset options of…

The primary is coming up again and the most important thing in Seattle at least is the Aurora bridge replacement. So if you don’t want to see gridlock (or if you do, nows the time). Some endorsements from the left or Seattle Times for center endorsements as well.

Well, finally working through problems with Tivos and so forth and got the home theater running with a Tivo that isn’t connected to cable but does transfer from another tivo (I think BTW, I can now get rid of the yealry subscription on this thing and use it use for viewing Tivo content easily as…

Ok, here is where I am: Preview.app crashes. It looks like this is related to the number of files opened. If I open about 100 or so, I get a MALLOC error. So limiting it to 40 or so files and being careful about this strange new auto open every file preview has ever seen…