Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

OK I was a geek and got one via Verizon. Extremely painful at midnight. There was all kinds of bugs, but this morning at 6AM, it worked like a charm. Although it won’t ship until next month 🙁 Here are tips tricks and traps of buying a new iPhone Trade in bonus in the first…

If you’ve got some MP4 videos and want to quickly convert them to say just the audio track, it seems hard to find this. The simplest (if most arcane way) seems to be for iTunes 11: Start iTunes 11 Import your MP4 videos into iTunes Switch to the Movies, click on the Home Movies Tab…

Been a long time since I’ve had to buy various computer accessories to run Linux machines, but here’s a quick list: Monitors. We’ve tried both the ASUS PB27Q and the BenQ BL3200PT. They are both pretty amazing monitors. I really liked the extra size of the 32″ monitor and at 2550×1440 it is really nice.…

While we have battery jumper for all our cars, for the ones we don’t use too much, you need a Battery Tender. These are top rated on Consumer Reports and are trickle chargers: Amazon.com: Battery Tender 021-0128 Battery Tender Plus 12V Battery Charger: Automotive. $47 and this is a 1.25 amp charger There is a…

Time to get ready for skiing, so what sites to look at for an back-side all-mountain women’s ski: Onthesnow.com. Realskiers.com A very clean and easy to use website, realskiers.com is the first place to go when you are trying to decide which pair of metal rods you want to strap to your feet this year.…

I’m not sure why (maybe because of ad blockers), but two sites won’t handle ecommerce properly on my machines. I’m running Adblocker, Noscript, Ghostery so this may be the issue. I have disabled them all, but the transactions still don’t work. They do seem to work fine on Windows 7 and Firefox though. So maybe…

We have a great Osprey Talon 22 that we can use for big day hikes, but sometimes it is more like a quick two hour jaunt and it seems like overkill. So off to find a nice fanny/lumbar/hiking/trail running pack that let’s us carry say two liters of water and a phone and a flash…

After two years of loyal service, our Aquarium PC died and one of the graphics cards caught fire (as noted). We pulled it out and found the rest in good shape with the major problem being: 1. The CPU Fans (there are two of them) have always spun slowly because of viscosity of the mineral…

Crib Recommendations. (Subscription required) has a good set of recommendations. The main one is that you don’t want the older style where the sides drop (they are dangerous), so get used to hoisting your baby with a crane (:-) Some places to look and also looking at Amazon ratings Graco Lauren. This has a good…

Well our Razor mousepad seems to have just decided to start folding in on itself. Pretty inconvenient. So on to look for something better. There don’t seem to be many reviews of these things, but Amazon has a nice sort of mouse pads for gaming by rating: SteelSeries QTK+ is the highest rated at Amazon.…