Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

Well, after twelve years, the tires on our Volvo are finally giving out. Tirerack.com is a great source for tires and has reviews as well (although they’ve discontinued their mileage based ratings sadly). Good news is that evrewards.com shows there is a 4% cash rebate with them using bigcrumbs.com. And…

Wow, some of these rewards are really pretty amazing if you have a Rewards Shopping Mall based credit cards, here’s a stack rank of vendors to choose from when buying for electronics (see allretailers-byoffer.htm for a list of all retailers sorting by bonus points offered), so if the prices are close…

Ok, for the real geeks, here are the ways to make online shopping pay and pay again. Here is the math if you have the time to do it. First figure out what points are actually worth. These vary quite a lot. For instance on our best card with the…

Most of the documentation for this seems to be pretty obsolete as things have really shifted around. The main issue that there are two big security holes right now and the big tradeoff is that you can be more completely open source and use OpenPGP, but you can’t use your…

Well lots of discussion, but the first two lenses for the A7R have been amazing, so maybe like the 5D2 (may mine RIP) the overhype and the under hype will meet on the Sony. Also, the 24-70 F/4 lense is coming January 24, so will be the first test of…

So Christmas is over and the bargain hunting is just beginning. Still, when looking at the gift guides, there are a few items I really do wish I had gotten (and may soon). They tend to fall into two categories: a) things from really cool niche vendors who care about…

It is pretty amazing to me how little has been automated in all these years for a IT “dad” who has to maintain a bunch of computers for the extended family. While there have been lots of lockdown technologies for servers and some draconian things for desktops, really the effort…

Amongst the many projects I’m working on (as I wait for Windows to run its updates, do virus scanning with Windows Defender), so in looking at WordPress, I’m helping someone update from a traditional static layout to a nice front page that has a blog in the front for recent…

Wow, I’m back to Windows hacking, here are some things that are going on with Windows 8.1 and Sony Vegas Platinum 11: Just running Make Movie is failing to render properly and reportedly doesn’t create enough for a DVD. The rendering is also using just 50% of processing power on…