Hong ⁽³¹²⁾

Green Gobbler is the most effective compared with Zep Drain Care, K-67, Drano and Liquid Plumr Foaming Clog Fighter. This is based on tests with a clog down far from a kitchen sink ( > 3 M). Drain Defense Enzymatic Drain Cleaner Powder had not shown…

Classic Investment The classic investment is putting money into a business that will eventually generate profits distributed to shareholders. This is still the bulk of modern investment, though the returns for shareholders are often stock price increases instead of distributed profits. For this type of…

Generally speaking, Google is better run than its peers. However, it cannot completely escape the bureaucracy and inefficiency of large companies. Google Play is excellent overall. However, its so-called "policy violation" handling is exceptionally poor. First, many instances of "policy violations" are false alarms that…

X-C skiing on a frozen river is safer than skating, snow-shoeing, and walking on it for the following reasons: Deep water with slow currents has thicker ice than that of shallow water with fast currents. The transition from thick ice to thin ice is usually…

Movie The Obama Deception is very intriguing. I highly recommend it to all who have an objective mind. In case the title turns off some people, it should be made clear that this movie is not a campaign tool used by conservatives to unseat the…

Shadowsocks is currently the best choice. There are excellent instructions for setup. Companies use VPN to allow their employees to access their computing resources by their employees from outside of their LAN’s. Foreign companies in China rely on VPN for one more purpose – accessing…

Windows Server's built-in VPN requires Microsoft's characteristic maze of configurations. Setup is complicated. It requires GRE protocol on the client side to use PPTP. It requires Active Directory to use L2TP/IPsec. OpenVPN is easy to set up for a client to connect to the VPN…

Storage rental is a competitive business. One usually can find a local storage rental with excellent reputations. Public Storage is excellent. Neighbor is a great place for renting a parking spot for a month or longer. 

iSun Affairs (陽光時務) is all about truth. It is published by iSunTV. Ping Chen, the Chairman and chief strategist of iSunTV is an intellectual of conscience, extraordinary courage, and utmost sense of social responsibility. His acquisition and iSunTV and directing it to be a place…

I always feel grateful when using any open source code. For this particular reason, I hesitate to criticize the code that its contributors usually spend an enormous amount of time working on. On the other hand, honest critique should be a part of the contribution to…

Rampant hypocrisies are no longer ab exclusive characteristic of totalitarian regimes which words often have little bearing on their actions and often use multiple standards. The following are major hypocrisies of democratic countries: Protest against racism in the US while being completely silent on the genocide…

WebSocket might have generated more buzz than it deserves. Websockets are not nearly as versatile as regular sockets. Reuglar sockets can support all transport protocols (e.g. TCP, UDP, ...). WebSocket uses an independent TCP-based protocol. To use WebSocket, both the client (a brower) and the…

Airbnb is the default choice nowadays and it is indeed the best choice usually. Close to 100% of rentals on Facebook's Marketplace are scams. Furnishedfinder.com mainly targets traveling nurses. One can find some good rooms. Craigslist mainly lists temporary rentals but they are not any…

If the recipient has a smart phone with apps such as WhatsApp, Viber, using these apps is the easiest way to make international calls. They are free. If the recipients do not have these apps and these apps are blocked (e.g., in China), there are…

Lafayette Campground to Highland Center (Franconia Notch to Crawford Notch) This is a report of a hike from Franconia Notch to Crawford Notch in New Hampshire, USA. Date: 2008-10-18 Total distance: 23.1 miles (37.2 km) Total Time: 13 hours 28 minutes Start elevation: 1700 ft…

There are few events that have the attributes of technical, educational, entertaining and interactive. Code camp is one. There are so many different types of computing devices (servers, desktops, tablets, smartphones, etc.), so many OS’ (Windows, Android, iOS, WebOS, etc.), so many different platforms and…

Prompted by an article on Business Week, I started looking into a Chinese firm (China Sky One Medical Inc)( CSKI) purely out of curiosity. It lasted for a short while because I concluded that I understood in a general sense what was going on, and…

Android's BitmapFactory.decodeXX such as BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray() is both time consuming and resource consuming. The following table shows the time to decode 100 images of 1280x720 by BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray() with differrent subsampling sizes. The performance benefit probably diminishes or even reverses with the increase of the subsampling size. The turning…

Windows 10 handling of Bluetooth driver is probably shaky. Bluetooth is often out of order even though the hardware is fine. If reinstalling, updating drivers, rebooting the laptop, etc. all fail, the following nuclear option always works:

Some use a laptop as their primary computer, so it needs quite some power. Some use it only for traveling and connect it to their workhorse remotely, so the laptop functions merely as a console. In this case, the screen size, weight and battery time…