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

What a pain this actually is. Here are the steps assuming you have Photoshop: Take your photo against a white background (a wall for instance). If you can turn on the grid feature of your camera, so that you take a “square” picture. On a 3:2 system that means you want to chop off the…

Just got one to try for our long trip. Was starting to use it and suddenly the screen went blank. When you try to change things like RAW to JPEG, it would refuse to do it. And when you try to initialize it would fail. Argh! I’ve never had camera firmware crash so hard. But…

Oh my goodness, this is the most obscure product on planet earth! It is crazy how hard it is to get work. I have had it working for a few seconds and then it seems to die. Been on the line for hours with Sony Tech Support and their basic strategy seems to be to…

Yuck, we have no less than four different remote systems for the various flat panels around the house. And now the venerable Crestron is giving us fits. Josh recommended we try iRule. At last something that makes some sense. It is programmable (like the old Philips Pronto) and it is IP based (sort of like…

Well there always seem to be new ways, but reading http://millionmilesecrets.com/2013/01/03/airline-miles-expiration/ here are some easy ones and that site has the right links: United Buy something through the United portal. Can be a $1 iTunes gift card. Use Bcksgr which gives you miles if you like companies on Facebook (free!) If you have a credit…

OK, going on a trip and I just have to try the new Sony A7r. The A7 is probably really the right one for me for general use, but the A7r as a landscape (auto focus is slow and it doesn’t have phase detection so can’t take videos) product it is pretty superb apparently. And…

Wow, finally got this to work on a Mac. Amazingly reliable with the HD HomeRun Prime. The main limits right now are the premium channels (need Windows for that or a Comcast DVR). But it works with good performance on a 2010 Mac Mini. The main thing is how to get a remote to work.…

Wow, I’ve been on a tear thinking about this. Right now this has yielded probably an incremental 20,000 points probably worth $1000 just from Christmas shopping and buying various year end things. So once you have that, it makes me think about how to maximize. Here is an architecture to think about your own lives:…

Well I’ve been trying to get a Mac based DVR going for a while. Maybe I should just use NimbleTV and pay, but here is the home-brew option: Install macports Download macports from the site Install Xcode from Appstore From Mavericks, command line tools are installed in separately or by running “xcode-select –install” Install mythtv by…

OK, for our conference room we got a Sony X900A and boy is it a learning curve to get it working right. Here are some of things: 1. It was working fine and then I changed some of the network connections and to the FMP-X1, I know get a Cannont Connect to 4K Media Player.…