Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Well time to get back to bicycling. Don’t really want to buy a $10,000 bike, but some cool gear makes sense. Most of the advances in the last few years have been in electronics. Now there is a standard called ANT+ that lets different wireless devices talk to each other. Of course Polar doesn’t use…

Well, the market is changing quickly, would say that it is not clear, but holding off on buying a compact camera makes sense. Fuji is rolling out their FX100 and Nikon will announce at the end of March. Mirrorlessrumors.com is a great site for monitoring all this…with a good roadmap Wolfgang Lutzky from Nikon Austria said…

OK, these will probably evaporate soon, but tuaw.com reports: If you text “yes” to 11113020 you will get 1000 free rollover minutes from AT&T Mobility If you enter your Amex card number you will get five free iTunes songs. If you are an Amex platinum user, then you sign up for an airline (like United) and…

I use Google Calendars a lot for schedulling, but the colors are never quite right. In fact, now I have all the different calendars as brown. There is no easy way to set colors, but if you have a jailbroken phone, you can actually hack SQLlite, or most simply, you just add calendars one at…

OK, here are some great tips I’ve found. In random order: Vuescan for the Mac actually works well, but has glitches. The main issue is that sometimes it gets the colors all wrong even though the prescan looks good. The solution is to restart you Mac and then the colors are right. Vuescan also hangs…

We’ve got a bunch of these helicopters that are tiny and micro and they are fun but hard to control. Brookstone has gyro-stabilized helicopters that are much easier to fly and more stable for $40 but in Popular Mechanics, they point out that Horizon Hobby has more expensive ones called Force RC that let you…

The “Old” Apple software is like anything on the PC kind of quirky. Here are some of the asymmetries 1. The iPhoto slideshow is beautiful and most of the web says you can’t just turn it into a movie. You have to use iDVD. Turns out that in fact there is a hard to find…

Well despite all the things going on, I’ve been working through scanning old images. Been using an iMac with Vuescan 64-bit for Snow Leopard. And an old Minolta DiImage Elite 5400. Lots of settings for vuescan for this thing, so here are some notes on usage. Also see Robert Feinman’s notes It is hard to…

Rather than some huge expensive things that rotates the focus, these guys decided to use the software inside the camera and it turn the focus using the autofocus already built in. Clever! So the USB Follow Focus is small light and elegant:

Well of course there is the Verizon iPhone, but the main thing that’s depressing is no GSM compatibility so not really a good world phone for us.  There is CES Best of Consumer

The Internet Movie Firearms Database. There is nothing cooler. Here are the weapons on the Expendables! All star action case, but the weapons were amazing: The single action colt revolver Like Black Ops, the Dual Wield Kimber The F2000 which is a bullpup and in Call of Duty as well\ The coolest is the AA-12…

  Skiing Magazine has the most complete reviews but makes it all but impossible to find things. No sorting at all on anything, the default appears to be by greatest width to narrowest as if that makes sense and somewhat by date, although 2006 reviews appear quite often which is either a database error or a…

Watching the Forbidden Kingdom reminds me of all the Chinese i haven’t learned yet 🙂 Sun wu Kong is the Monkey King ??; Yù Huáng or the Jade Emperor

Things that Dad wants for Christmas (next year!): Armada JJ’s. Although Mark says the Rossignol S7 are great too as does Skiing Magazine. Rockered and reverse cambered. Work on hard pack and the deep powder Bibs. Socks. Seems stupid until you spend 8 hours a day for a week and your dogs hurt. Swear by…

I keep losing how to install this for the custom paper I have from Red River, here’s how but when I do all this the photo comes out very red when I use it with PhotoPro RGB color space (a 16-bit space) but still looks over red even with Adobe RGB and then there is…

They don’t ship it with 8×10 borderless printing, so the workaround is to fool it by telling Photoshop you have 8.5 x 11 borderless and then printing as if it was 8×10…   Have you tried this: 1) Creat a 13×19 white (or transparent) document of appropriate color depth and resolution in your image editor…

If you want… Free science fiction audio books, at Librivox.org Latest free audiobooks from Librivox.org by clicking itpc://librivox.org/podcast.xml Nonstick skillets for omelets. I’ve used All Clad for years. Very expensive at $87 a throw and only lasts a few years. Cook’s Illustrated (subscription required) found T-Fal Professional Total Nonstick Fry Pan is just as good…

I’m not quite sure why I bought a dedicated Blu Ray player since the PS3 seems pretty much good enough, but since I have one, I get to live with glacial startup times and then it rejects disks all the time because of firmware issues. Anyway, the answer is an update you do via a…

Well I still have that huge box of 35mm photos that are negatives, slides and prints that have been sitting for five years waiting for me. Finally getting back to it mainly because of this book project. Amazingly the old Minolta 5400 Dimage Elite still works and connects to the Mac and my Vuescan software…

Some of the coolest gifts are personal. So looking for good Photobooks and there are billion providers it seems. A quick google found a great review and for quality (and price) they like adoramapix.com. I love Adorama as a general photo site and mpix.com is the other site I’ve meaning to try. Both are targeted…

Here are the tricks as I had a major outage… 1. Reboot the router and cable modem and if you have an Apple router, use the Airport Utility to see if it is up and what it is complaining about. If the internet is down, it will complain or say there is no DHCP server.…

Turns out that modern TVs have the equivalent of lag because they are processing the image. I’ve never noticed but Calvin did. If you dig through the guts of the Samsung TV menu, there is a mode called Game Mode which disables a bunch of the processing. You lose a few frames per second so…

This means you mistyped your password too many times. It is obscure what to do, but Apple says go to a magic URL http://iforgot.apple.com/ which doesn’t appear on any user interface like the iTunes store or your iPhone and reset your password ;_0

Tried to buy a ticket on jetblue.com, but it connects to verifiedbyvisa.com and then it fails on Safari. You need to use Chrome and it works. Also jetblue.com won’t select preferred seats correctly on Firefox on the mac on the second seat. Man sometimes things can get so buggy!

When Apple decided that users shouldn’t know about a file system, they basically made it impossible to move a simple thing like an iMovie project around. Here is the workaround. You have to look for the iMovie Events and iMovie Projects directory and move the stuff in there. How wierd is that…see http://imovie.maccreate.com/2010/01/19/making-your-imovie-09-projects-transportable/ iMovie 09 doesn’t…

Nothing like a little romance and a proposal and what a way to do it all. Technology does rock :-0 See frankandkasey.com. Someone once told me you can never say, “never or always”. While that is probably true, I believe what my buddy John told me which is that, that is probably true, but I’d rather…

A wonderful person, good bye Eleanor

This Akamai junk is a peer to peer downloader that Adobe uses, causes all kinds of nasty interactions with the firewall as random machines try to access your computer. Uninstall is the answer! It’s not easy, there is no visible graphical uninstall program, but googling shows you the command line you have to do: To delete…

Here are some sites to try: lastminute.com latestays.com agoda.com  

These are just astounding how good time lapse can be on just a plain Canon 5d Mark ii and Adobe Aftereffects as Mark Ferrell shows: Landscapes: Volume One from dustin farrell on Vimeo.