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

Well, the world keeps moving, just when I thought I had a NAS picked out two things changed: 1. The Synology shipped their DSM 3.2 which supports Lion so it is now OK to buy 2. The first 4TB (!!?) drives are now being released and there is a move to 1TB per platter, so…

For learning Chinese, I’m using Qingwen on the iPhone quite a bit. It has really good recognition, but mainly it has word lists which are great. It also gives example phrases and the ability to use Handwriting for Chinese is terrific. On the Mac, there are a host of resources that are scattered all over.…

Well, my buddy Scott recommends the NAS from Netgear I think, but when I look at reviews, folks seem to really like the Synology. They have their new DSM 3.2 which is finally Lion compatible so it can emulate a Time Machine. That is very useful for doing restores directly. So just to check, what…

Now with a choice of three carriers for an iPhone, its interesting to see if it makes sense to migrate off the AT&T network. In particular, if you go to Verizon or Sprint, then they will unlock your phone for GSM overseas. Great for us international traveling folks and no more jailbreaking needed! So how…

Ludwig is so terrific, need a web camera to monitor things and he recommends Izon. Expensive at $130 but it looks wonderful and all it needs is USB power and it connects automatically to wifi and streams things up to a private location on the internet so you don’t need a PC or anything to…

Give it to your kids with a cheap prepaid plan 🙂 Also as another aside, if you just want a cheap data plan, then you can enable your old  iPhone 4 with a prepaid account according to osxdaily.com by calling AT&T and then giving them your old iPhone micro-SIM number. To get it to work with data,…

Well besides Siri, the other big reason to upgrade from an Iphone 4 to a 4S is international travel…it is a dual mode CDMA/GSM phone, so potentially you can use the very good Verizon network here (or Sprint if the coverage is good for you and their prices are much, much better). Here are the…

What a pain. Have Mac Office 2011, it is very restrictive on activation, so have lost a few hard drives and now when I try to activate it says too many times, but there is no way in the interface to reset activations and when you try to call on the phone, it just fails…

I’ve lost 60K miles so far from American and BA and others when they expire miles. Here’s how to prevent that sort fo stuff: United. The best way is to donate 1000 miles to charity American. Donate 250 miles to charity If it is too late, if you pay money, you can reactive miles as…

Well, folks told me to try lightroom and I will, but for right now using best of breed tools, here is my current workflow: Shoot in raw and produce .CR2 files Download to the Mac and put each days worth of .CR2 into a set of folders that are :Year:Year-Month:Year-Month-Date, so that a 14th October…