Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

It’s a sad day when the best battery reviews are found buried in an Amazon rating, but there is someone who actually went ahead and tested batteries but: AAA Alkaline. AC Delco. the no-name AC Delco came up on top and for less than the cost of Amazon Basics even?…

Seems like there is some sort of strange bug in the USB driver on MacOS Sierra and Vuescan. I’ve been having trouble with hangs for a while and this seems to have gotten worse with Sierra, although El Capitan had the same issues. The calibrate for this 35mm image scanner…

Well with my troubles with Bluehost, time once again to see who the best hosting partner is. Now that Bluehost is owned by a mega-corporation, I wonder what else is out there. A quick test at webhostinghero.com does show the speed issues with this site. Bluehost has been pretty decent…

I spent a couple of days tearing my hair out. Word to the wise, if you are on bluehost and hit the Spam Experts trial (which I gather I did at some point). What happens is that when the trial ends, it silently queues all your mail into the spam…

(A small refuge from all the political news), here are the latest recommendations: 9V Batteries. if you use them in smoke detectors, etc., then you want one with lots of charge. But Powerstream.com recommends the Energizer Industrial has 450 mAH or the Rayovac Industrial Plus. They have nearly 50% more charge of…

Well figuring out how to get useful data from your car is definitely an obscure art. Here are some notes for noobs: There is a standard connector for all cars after 1996 which is called OBD. (Onboard Diagnostics), you have you to google your car to figure out where the…

OK, there are a couple of ways to save some money: Cashback Monitor will tell you click through sites with discounts. Right now Top Cashback is offering an 8% discount if you click through to the App store on a Mac. pretty good. Once you click through, you should if…

Two quick notes. Since upgrading to MacOS Sierra, I’ve found that DxO in both its version 10 and version 11 is a little strange so some quick notes: The main window seems to get stuck in a highly vertical view. You have to click between the crop and move buttons…

Well I guess if you’ve built 20 machines by hand, it is inevitable you are going to get hardware problems and boot problems. Here are some and what to do to solve them: Ubuntu 14.04 gets stuck in a logon loop. I’ve had this problem twice now. You reboot your…

I’ ve been hitting quite a few these days, here are two annoying one: iPhone Upgrade Program. The actual loan you take from Citizen’s is managed by a site called fdec.com. Just be aware that this site does not work on either Safari where you get a blank page when…