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

The rumor is that in January (Christmas just a month late) at Mac Expo, we’ll see the new “ultra-portable”:http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/12/ultra_portable_apple_notebook_to_splash_down_at_macworld_expo.html that I’m already drooling over. The big give is that it won’t have an optical drive. This used to be a big deal for me when I thought I would watch…

Well, the iPod Touch is much like the iPhone but there are compatibility issues. The best site that covers this seems to be “ipodtouchfans.com”:http://ipodtouchfans.com. The main thing is that there are now repositories all over the web that let the Installer.app put things on the iPod touch and the “list”:http://www.ipodtouchfans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8180.…

Chinese input is not officially supported yet in any release of software for the iPhone or the iPod Touch, here is how to get a bootleg version to work for the latest jailbroken and unlocked iPhone (currently 1.1.1). Thanks to the posts at “iphone.org.hk”:http://www.iphone.org.hk/cgi-bin/ch/topic_show.cgi?id=2962&h=1&bpg=1&age=0 for explaining the 1.1.2 trick and…

OK, to get the terms straight. Jailbreak means that you can access the whole files system on the iPod Touch or iPhone. This comes from the fact that what actually happens is that you are “chroot jail” in Unix terms. That means that the root, or the top of the…

Tong Family Blog: Any Video or Audio Format Conversion We haven’t used our Sony SR-100 in quite a while. It is a hard disk camcorder that records standard definition into MPG (that is MPEG-2 format files). It is actually quite hard to crack this format, so if you have bought…

Someone asked me, what if you want to just send a fax these days. Well, like most things, the question is complicated. There are the really low end and ugly thermal fax machines, but with all-in-one printers just $180, it is not clear why you’d want one. So the house…

Someone was asking me what they could do about a car that doesn’t have a $3,000 GPS in it and what if they don’t want to buy a car just to get one. Well, TomTom, Garmin and Magellan are in a fight to the death to offer just such a…