Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

I haven’t spent much time optimizing car rentals and rewards because they haven’t seemed that interesting. But now Hertz and United are doing triple points so it is good to understand. In the old world, 75 United points weren’t super interesting (at 1.8 cents/point). But the latest promotion is 1,250…

Well week 3 of intensive Mac Excel hacking, so learning lots of new handy shortcuts. The mouse is slow when you are doing a lot of Exceling: CMD-T Paste Format CMD-V Paste Value CMD-F Paste Formula FN-F9 Evaluate the highlighted part of a formula (great for debugging)   Then for…

OK, I’ve been battling this for a while and haven’t seen many posts on it, but here is what has happened and the best explanation seems to be a combination of iCloud sharing issues and this new “automatically maintain settings” in Apple Mail Mail interacts strangely with iCloud Keychain and…

Well, figured this out for SMTP, but what about IMAP? Well it’s a little simpler, basically there is port 143 for unencrypted and port 993 for encrypted. You really always want to encrypt, so 993 works best. Most modern servers handle encryption on 143 as well.

I have almost forgotten how to use Ghost. It was a great experiment in building something with node.js on digital ocean and figuring nginx. Kind of proud it all actually works. Now its time to do some site validation and I need to be able to put a static page…

OK, nearly there with Google Apps, but now I get to learn about SMTP which I’ve never really groked: We are trying to migrate a single user and have everyone elses mail forwarded to the legacy mail server. When I turned this on, some of the mail seemed to get…

OK, now that we are getting through the SUMIFS nightmare, there are two things to know: SUMIFS are good when they work and COUNTIFS give you some debugging. The main problem is that there isn’t any way to figure out what rows are actually summed up, so no way to…

If you are trying to migrate from your own Exchange server (in our case we are using Mac Kerio Connect which emulates Exchange) to Google Apps, it is a little mysterious how to do it, but the basic idea is similar to the Office 365: First signup for Google Apps.…

If you’ve got a small business and want to move to Office 365 or to Google Apps, the main choice is whether you want 1TB of storage per user (Office 365) for $5/user/month or unlimited storage (Google Apps) at $10/user/month. We are going to try Office 365 as we’ve not…

The empire strikes back! Canon fights Mirrorless Sony with a 50mp full frame. Drool. Drool!canon 5ds