Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

It used to be really complicated to mount a television on the wall, now that televisions are so small and light, it’s pretty easy you just need: Television mount. The best are tilting stands. If you have the little bit of space, this $85 unit also swivels a little which…

Wow there are lots of things to think about for hard disks, the main one is the warranty and performance. Paying a little more for an enterprise drive makes some sense for a consumer because you are not BackBlaze. A failure takes time to resolve and with RAID arrays too…

Ok with 10TB hard disks and 10^16 UBER, you really can’t build raid arrays anymore, because a complete read of a 10TB disk is very likely to have an unrecoverable bit error. So what’s a person to do? Well two strategies for a 12 disk array (like the Synology DS-1512):…

OK this must be the adventures of dining weekend, but if you are making fresh (vs farmed salmon), you should use a slightly lower temperature for doneness. Cook’s Illustrated recommends 120 degree F for wild salmon and 125 for farmed (blech! don’t get farmed, not good for the environment, Alaska…

We use these rescue traps and there are two flavors of traps for the Rescue: A water trap that uses an attractant and then a vial that you put into water. Then below another vial where you can buy a 10 week supply that is $5 from Amazon. Or a…

We have seven Samsung televisions masquerading as computer monitors in the office, so getting them to work is a challenge. Here are some cool things to do: The remote does not like having lots of televisions in the same room. Something as simple as scrolling doesn’t seem to work. You…

If you are lucky enough to spend $500 for a 43″ (?!!) 4K monitor, you will find that managing the windows is just terrible, fortunately, Alex has studied this and there are a few solutions: Divvy (http://mizage.com/divvy/) which let’s you split the screen into a “grid” so that you don’t…

Well, it is so confusing monitors. it took some digging, but it looks like the Samsung MU6300 has a pretty special screw requirement. For a different model of Samsung, they need a M8x45mm course threading (1.25mm/thread). The 45mm is an estimate, but it is definitely deep. The mounting doesn’t have…

I love the insider hookup and the service (particularly in big cities like Seattle),  but be careful when you add a new line, we just did and there are some peculiarities with doing this: Even if you have Autopay enabled, it will not give you the Autopay discount unless you…

Well, if you are thinking about alternatives to UIber, Lyft isn’t bad, and for a limited time, you get 15 JetBlue points per ride and 1 Delta per dollar spent point overtime you ride (it’s 3 points for rides to the airport on Delta).