Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Sadly this is way harder than you would think. Audible for instance does allow book sharing, but only with one other adult in your Amazon Household. The other option is to use Overdrive and borrow from a library. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to buy an audiobook…

Wow, I had forgotten how complicated it can be to do the simple stuff. In this case, quite a few of our cars have had terrible problems with batteries. One nice thing about electric vehicles by the way is that they are a lot harder to ruin. But over the…

OK, I switched to using JPEG-2000 in 16-bit mode lossless for archiving images, this brings a 5400 dpi 35mm slide from 220MB to about 150MB. Moreover, you can also create a 16-bit lossy one and you get 16-bits. Now that many camera phones can record more than 8-bit color (the…

OK, if the zombie apocalypse ever comes, I will definitely die of thirst because without this video, I could never figure out how to drink from the Ultimate Directions Kicker Valve. There are two tricks. First, because it is a bottle for running, you have to pull the valve out…

Wow it is amazing how much data just lives out in the real world. Someone was just asking me about car sales and a quick google got me to a bunch of sites that track sales amazingly closely… Overall View The Wall Street Journal has their own overview of car…

Well, it’s spring again finally and all those little things I didn’t get last year, I’m determined to get for this year, so here are some recommendations. Arm Warmers Yes these don’t really wear out, but I keep losing them, so there are quite a few to choose according to…

OK, there is not much written about this, but Apple has a highly private (they don’t look at your photos), scheme for doing both object and face detection across iPhone and Mac. It is hard to figure out how it all works and there don’t seem to be any papers…

Spent the day working on presentations, so learned a few easy things: First is that when you use Google Slides, it’s really good for collaboration but quite different from Mac PowerPoint for graphics. Buy yourself a subscription to Noun Project. This is a great set of icons that you can…

OK, I’ve recorded three events with the DJI Osmo Mobile 2. It’s a nice $129 stabilized mount that fits an iPhone X pretty much perfectly. There are quite a few tricks to using it, so here’s a short list of notes. Setting up The thing is actually pretty hard to…

Well, the DJI Osmo Mobile 2 is an incredible stabilized mount for doing recordings at live events with an iPhone, the video quality is unbelievable and the controls are great, but the sound quality is just so, so. The iPhone has just a small monophonic microphone, so that’s one thing…