Tong Family

OK, we are using U.S. Mobile for cheap data. They are an MVNO for 5G on Verizon and for 4G LTE on T-mobile and with Verizon, you get pool plans that are pretty reasonable. Basically, $9/phone, and then you pay for the data pool you use which gives you 40GB for $80. So for 9…

Argh, why is it that nearly 50 years after the invention of the PC, just configuring a printer is so hard? We just got a new HP Neverstop Laser 1001nw and this is a tiny little printer, but the best thing about it was that setting it up for the Mac was a breeze. But,…

Ok, time once again for figuring out how to be productive to the max on the Mac, so first asking ChatCPT3, so straight from the collective mouth of the Internet and then culling to the most useful ones, but the ones that I use most often are ⌘-⌥- left and right arrow will move applications…

OK, I saw a post on Mastodon about open-source tools for photo and video editing and it reminded me that I’ve been using DxO PhotoLab for more than 10 years and it is time to see if the open-source tools have caught up. I generally liked DxO over Lightroom because their defaults seem closer to…

Ok, this has to be in the department of infrastructure breaks too much, but I never log in to my MacBook Pro 2017 that I use for backups, and to review here is how I handle backups right now based on the 2022 strategy which has been working pretty well, but it’s a six-layered backup…

I just listened to Why We Sleep. I don’t know how scientific it is, but it sure scared me. With an Apple Watch if you set the sleep time properly by setting your sleep time in the Clock, not knob do you get a notification to sleep as well as a wake up alarm, but…

Most of the time when I get a reference quality Blu-ray, I will use Handbrake to make an archival copy. I find that with a 60GB Blu-ray if I set it for H.265 MKV 2160p60 as the default and make a custom one that matches the frame rate. For instance, NTSC is a really bizarre…

Wow, who would ever have thought we would get to this, now this is Comcast territory so not symmetric, but I’m getting a 1.4Gbps download and a 40Mbps upload now. This required some significant changes to the network. I had been using an Arris SB8200 which is a 32×8 DOCSIS 3.1 modem that has two…

Well, now that we have 4K HDR finally setup (thank you for all those year of isolation), it’s time to find the best movies that show off the soundtrack and the 4K HDR. So here are some of the best scenes thanks to Digital Trends, Shane Lee, Denon, Cinelux, Whatnerd (Feb 2021) and What Fi….