Tongfamily Website

Right now if you can hang on, wait for the new Intel processors that are coming in April. But if you can’t wait, CNet has a pretty good list:

OK, well time to buy a few more, but quick note on golf clubs for newbies, here is what you need to get. Most iron sets include all the irons you need, so what is harder are the driver (1 wood) and then I need the 3 Wood, have a 3 Hybrid, so need a 4 and 5 Hybrid too.

3 Wood

4 Hybrid

5 Hybrid.

For those of you who don’t remember, the Hybrid is between the Wood and the Irons. Irons are harder to hit and hybrids are easier for newbies like me. So what is hot in the wood area for 2012 form Golf digest

Taylormade Rocketballz Wood

Taylormade RocketBallz Rescue

Form an independent site called Rankmark, the best high handicapper Hybrids were the Adams a12 and Nike VR Pro. For mid handicappers, it was the Adams a12 and the Cobra Baffler

Just like energy efficient cars, the amount of innovation in the market for the so called mirrorless or ILC (interchangeable lense) cameras is amazing. These are small cameras that can at their best be super portable and have the image quality and most importantly the low light performance of a dSLR. Here’s the list of terrific choices. The ideal is a camera that can go from F/1.4 with low noise at ISO 1600 upto a 10x zoom with high quality. No one quite does it but folks are getting close.

Here are the contenders and you can see the imager sizes are really the key. The bigger the images typically, the better the low light performance. You can see the traditional compact cameras with their 1/2.7″ sizes imagers are the problem while APS-C sized now have ISO 1600 performance which is truly incredible.

Canon G1 X. Actually this one isn’t interchangeable but is simply an all-in-one with a big imager in a compact camera. I say just but it is nearly as big as an APS-C sized sensor. It is 14 MP, so it has the same pixel sizes as the Canon Rebels! And it can even output 14-bit RAW (so lots of color depth). The main limitation of course is you can’t swap the lense, but at 28-112mm equvalent at F/2.8-5.8 you might not have to. it is also optically stabilized to four stops and has a built in 3-stop neutral density filter. Big disappointments are it can only shoot 0.7fps with autofocus, so don’t expect to take sport photography with it. It has decent 1080p HD video with autofocus, but it doesn’t have an external mic jack. It weighs a little over a pound at 534g with battery. And of course for us old fashioned folks, it has a optical viewfinder still!

Nikon V1 and J1

Panasonic GX1. This is a micro 4/3 camera, so the sensor is about the same, but the lense can be swapped. It’s kit lense is 12-42mm. They have solved many of their noise and focus problems so you can shoot up to ISO 800 now at 16MP. It is expensive at $900 incuding the lense.

Fuji X1 Pro. This won Best of CES 2012 with a 16MP camera and super fast fix focus lenses. (As an aside Simple.TV seems like a better solution than the HD HomeRun Prime hack but simpler if you can get over-the-air HDTV).

Sony NEX-5 and NEX-7

Olympus E-PL3

Very strange problem. But my iPhone after an update to 5.0.1 now thinks i thinks it is in the Netherlands so caller id doesn’t work etc.

Here is the fix

Well. You can make it half way around the world and there r so many ways to find out what is going on…

1. Flightstats.com gives u real time location of your airplane.

2. On your iPhone flight track does the same and for a few scheckels more u can look at a flight board of all flights from your airport. Great for delays.

3. Airmets. This is the actuall meteorological information for airman.

4. Wartherbug is great

Well eventually all cars fail, and what a difficult year it is to buy a new car. There is so much innovation happening in the car business right now, it is hard to believe and so many new models for 2012. So the big decision is essentially, what to do until those come out and we can all figure out their true reliability, but here are a few of the upcoming ones of high efficiency cars from hybridcars.com

Ford

Well if you need an all wheel drive call to go skiing and camping so forth, the only choice has been the Ford Escape Hybrid. This gets discontinued this year. They have a new Ford Escape but not in hybrid. The C-Max ships in late 2012 as a crossover front-wheel drive car that looks like a hatchback and is like a cross-over SUV.

It seats five. The hybrid version competes with the Prius V and should come in under $30K.

The Energi is a plug-in version will be more, but can reportedly run as much as 15 miles in electric only. This is a nice compromise for someone who mainly commutes very short distances (in which case they will get their 100mpg equivalent for electricity) and then 45 mpg as a hybrid. Wow.

Ford Focus Electric is the other option for in town driving. It has the same battery as the Volt so should get about 70 miles per charge. It is also a hatchback.

Toyota

They are rapidly expanding their line now from the original Prius to a whole line that includes a Prius-c (smaller), Prius-v (crossover) and Prius (the original prius is now called the Liftback). This is a compact version that is more for in town.

Mitsubishi

They will be competing with the Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Volt for an mini all electric car called the Mitsubishi i

Hyundai

The leaders in the sedan segment are the (too big for me really), Ford Fusion and Toyota Camry Hybrid. Competing with them is the new Sonata Hybrid which uses Li-io batteries (not Ni-MH in the Ford Fusion so is 250 pounds lighter) and also a six speed automatic instead of a CVT. All are about the same fuel efficiency with this expected at 37/39 vs Fusion at 41/36 (city/highway).

Volvo

In Europe in 2012, they will have a V60 plug-in hybrid wagon and in 2013 it comes to the US. It cost $75K and goes 30 miles on electric alone. They are introducing a plug-in hybrid SUV as well called the XC60 as a concept for now.

Well Im in the middle of a little project to get an HD HomeRun Prime connected to a Mac Mini using Touchpad to control it for watching internet TV and also Comcast. More on that later, but it is pretty cool the way you can use an Ipod Touch or an old iPhone to control a Mac Mini. We will see if MythTV works well as well.

Well I supposed it had to happen, I’m getting a print head error on the venerable 8 year old Canon i9900, so what can I do. A new printhead is $125 which we can get as, so what are the other options…well here are some ideas. And this actually did work.

I did a little digging and combined two solutions that fixed my problem:
1) I pulled the print head and powered off the printer.
2) I then went through the process of resetting the code for waste tank cleaning.The reset code also sets your printer to new out of the box:

A) With the printer powered off, hold down the resume button and press the power button.
B) While holding down the power button, release the resume button and press the resume button twice in succession.
Now release the power button. The indicator will blink in green and remain lit in green.
C) Press resume 4 times (Green) for Waste ink counter reset.
D) press the power button. The printer will switch itself off after performing the function.

3) Next, I followed the advise of someone who had the same problem on another Canon printer. He figured that the the contact points might have become slightly oxidized:

QUOTE “Since removing and installing the print head caused the error message, I decided to focus on a bad connection condition. From years of electronic repair experience, a number of problems can be caused due to a poor connection. I made sure that the gold pads on the print head were clean. I used the eraser from a brand new pencil to clean them up. I also *carefully* used the eraser head to clean the wire finger connections on the sliding carriage, where the print head makes contact. NOTE: these fingers are very delicate; I used a “downward motion” of the eraser moving across the wires to gently clean them. The idea here is to remove the slightest film of oxidation to enable a clean connection between the finger wires and the print head contacts.”

4) I popped in the head and all the frustration went away. It’s now working! Hope this helps you others…

With an iPhone there are so many cool applications now. The best traffic one I’ve found is called Waze. Gives you free turn-by-turn navigation and nice UI (compared with GPS Drive which I used to use) and it has traffic, police and accident reports that are user generated.

But onto wine applications. What a pain to actually figure out what you have and catalog it. Mashable did a quick review and found Snooth Wine Pro that let’s you just take a photo of the label and then do automatic image recognition while Cor.kz Cellartracker does bar code scanning but doesn’t get good reviews and then there is Cor.kz which does get 4 out of 5 stars and gets decent reviews.

Well after having gotten various costs like cell phones down quite a bit (they are right now at an all time high as we transition from AT&T to Verizon), but that should be a six month bump. Thank goodness for family plans!

But what about content costs, here is where we currently are:

1. Comcast. This is really where most of the content comes from. Their triple play pricing is $120. To get at content cost, Internet costs $50/month while the phone is around $30/month (wow, I wish we could get rid of the phone charge, but certain devices need it). So the cost of content is about $40/month.
2. Netflix. This is right now $15/month for 1 Blu-ray and streaming as well. I actually don’t find the Blu-ray that useful because it takes so long to get around it. The streaming I actually don’t use that much. There are other alternatives like Hulu Plus but that requires $8/month and watching commercials without skipping. 

There there is how to view it, the question is what source device makes sense

1. Tivo. Right now, I’m on a $100/year plan which isn’t too bad, but they are raising the Tivo charge to $14/month, so $150 per year. A clear action here is to drop the Tivo subscription for all but one of the devices as Tivo allows you to copy from Tivo to Tivo. So that is $150/year at least until we see if the HomeRun Prime (see below) works.
2. HomeRun Prime HD. I haven’t got this box working yet, but it allows up to three streams of Comcast content across the local network so you can watch Comcast on your iPad, or on MythTV on your iMac connected to your TV. Long term this can potentially give a way to watch internet content and Comcast content from an Mac Mini to make a dumb TV a smart one This will need an additional Mac per TV though. And don’t know if it can work.
3. PS3. I’ve been using this (not Tivo, the Netflix client is not great) to see Netflix.