Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Wow this is a great thing for those of us who want to save a few things by using the Monoprice store on Rakuten. Rakuten has some good discounts (right now they are running a site-wide 10% off) and they also have a point system (1% rebate). Combine that with…

Well with the market changing so quickly, our top choices of just two months ago (the the ASUS PB-27Q and the Benq 3200PT remain. The big problem is that the ultra nice Benq 3200PT has shot up in price from a decent $620 up to $750, so is pretty out…

Well since we are all on Mac Mail, here are some typical issues and problems. Normally the thing works fine, but there is something strange with how it stores things and sometimes it forgets the SMTP password. Here are some of the tricks: You want to run IMAP and SMTP…

Ok, doing the final purchase analysis as usual, the process was: Initial price on Amazon Check price on Newegg Check similar prices through rewards portals (BoA) to Rakutan, Overstock as these guys have better prices usually. See what the rebates are on with cashbackmonitor.com and what coupons are with slick…

Ok, nothing like learning a new stack everyday. It sure feels like I do that these days. This one is digitalocean.com running node.js, running the ghost blogging platform using handlebar for templating and bootstrap for the front end. What fun! Here are some tips: Digitalocean’s one click install really works.…

Well it is probably unfashionable to still use the same editor that I first learned in college, but heck, vi is still around. It is arcane and hard to figure out, but man is it efficient. There are two modes, edit and command, but that means that your fingers never…

Well, Twitter’s Bootstrap is the most popular front-end framework and it works against just about any backend. WordPress, Ghost, whatever. So it’s a good time to figure out how to use it: The most minimal form w3schools explains that it is entirely hosted on the web, so you just need…

Well we are testing ghost and getting away from WordPress. It’s been a great ride, but nice to learn a new system that is running on node.js and which is much simpler. I’m going to run the two in parallel for a while at tongfamily.com and richtong.org, so stay tuned.…