Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

OK, there are a few tricks: If you have a Visa Signature card, then go to Fandango and buy $25 gift cards for $20 so you are saving 20%. They do charge an extra fee, but it is still worth it. If you are going to Cinemark, if you buy…

So quick summary, not that not everyone has already seen it: HBO Now is $15/month on the new $69 AppleTV MacBook Air is now 12″ and thinner than ever with Retina, clickless trackpad, fanless, USB C combines power, video, etc. MacBook Pro 13″ also get clickless Trackpad Apple Watch: Built…

Well, reading BackBlaze statistics (although the statistics are controversial), it is pretty clear that the Seagate 3TB have huge failure rates (25% plus annually). We have five Seagate 3TB from 2012 and now four of them have failed. It’s another reminder that it would be good to have RAID and…

Well they talk alot about a lifetime warranty, but here’s the fine print.  First they do honor it and will refund you up to the amount of the original purchase price so that is what the warranty really is. If the item has gone up in price since, then you…

OK, seems like the regular update on pens to buy. Here’s my latest favorites from Pen Addict: Pilot Iroshizuku Shin-Kai. The best fountain pen ink Uni-Ball Signo DX 0.38mm. You can only get form Japan, but it is a pretty awesome pen! TWSB 580 F Nib. We’ve bought three now…

Well, if you are worried about internet privacy, the first thing to do is: Use a more private search engine. Looking at google search history is pretty frightening. I’ve been using startpage.com with decent success. to use a VPN so that your ISP can’t snoop everything. Privateinternetaccess.com seems decent. It…

Well having the two operate together leaves to some strange conflicts as you might expect. Also I got this strange message having to do with an Icon file which has a carriage return in it. That is a Ctrl-M that really confused Git. But http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24186256/atal-reference-has-invalid-format-refs-icon explains that Apple or Dropbox throws an…

OK, United just announced that you no longer get “miles” in Mileage Plus, instead you get points based on your ticket price, ticket class and level. So according to http://mileageplusupdates.com if you are buying a full fare ticket (I would guess), if you are Premier 1K, you get 11x your purchase price.…

Well there are some tricks here to make this work right. Hat tip to Rennie on this: Setting up IOS Gmail has this notion of labels and always tries to archive vs delete mail so this can be really confusing. But fortunately with iOS, there is a way to fix…

OK, here are the tips, tricks and traps so far… IMAP Migration is a little complicated. You can do this as an administrator but need the user to give you type their password in. It is setup in the administration windows Google Sheets don’t work well in Safari. Seems to…