Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

Well, this is indeed the best time to wait for the perfect camera to arrive. Although high end camera sales have literally collapsed (they are 50% of sales compared with 2012!). There seems to be more innovation than ever. So here’s a list of cameras I’m dying to try what…

Well, Apple is changing things again. Now they have stopped development of iPhoto and they have basically ported Photos from iOS. Here are the problems for folks with a decent number of photos (how about 20K!): Apple is focused on people with relativeliy small collections and everything is stored in…

XCode is just so complicated that even the very good Ray Wenderlich Tutorials typically leave something out causing errors. So for the Swift Tutorial Part 2, here are errata: When you are looking at main.storyboard, the tutorial talks about the navigation Document Outline. This is only visible is you right…

Ok, I admit it, I’ve really liked the Sony RX-100 and then the RX-100 Mark II. Actually, the additional depth of the Mark II at least to me wasn’t super worth it, but now I seem to have misplaced our RX-100 Mark II (I know, I need to put a…

Until now, I have spent much time on hotel credit cards and optimization. The first thing was a big focus on getting airline status (better seats), then on more credit card points (thank you The Points Guy!), then airline business portals (Easybiz) and then internet portals (evrewards, cashbackmonitor.com) now hotels…

When you are trying to eke out a simple machine, there are a few things to think about: Ubuntu uses Unity which requires 3D acceleration. On a Atom Z550 this is unbearably slow. You can actually convert to LXDE with a simple `apt-get install lubuntu-desktop` Then when you log off…

Well, if you have an old Windows XP machine then its easy to forget all its passwords. What’s the easiest way to get it back. Well you can try to use a password cracker like ophcrack which is complicated and uses brute force techniques to find the password. Or you can…

Getting this stuff to work on Linux is actually amazingly easy: Deskjet 3050 is part of the HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging Program) that is now part of Ubuntu. You can download an update from hplipopenrsource.com To actually run the setup, you need to do `sudo hp-setup`

Strange and strange, but for our old Atom Z550, we weren’t able to get Unetbootin to put down a reliable image, but when we followed the Ubuntu directions for using DD, it did work. Go figure, utilities that don’t actual make bootables. It would instead say the bootable image is…

This is last time in the next twenty years to see this, but we are on the third for four lunar eclipses that happen in two years. It will only be a few minutes long, but worth watching. But how to figure out where it is. First thing is figuring…