★ posted on 30 May 2010 at 10:05 pm under Computers, Life in General ★
We’ve been purchasing stuff to furnish the new place, and one of our recent acquisitions was a blow torch. Shown here is crème brûlée, a French dessert that’s made of vanilla custard. Once the custard is set, you dust the top with sugar and use a blow torch to caramelise the sugar. You get a nice cracking sound when you plunge your spoon through the surface to get to the soft, sweet contents below.
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It’s been painstaking from house hunting, purchasing to settlement, it seems a more casual affair with moving house. Been spending the weekends slowly moving stuff across to the new place. So far it’s been books, clothes and kitchen utensils. Heh, managed to cram an entire bookshelf into my car (the reason why I got a Honda Jazz, it’s amazing what the ‘magic seats’ let you accomplish when you fold it down) along with other stuff. Painted a wall over the weekend and it’s easier than I remembered it to be. Fortunately we don’t have too many walls to paint.
The end of financial year sales should start soon, so will start stocking up on furniture next month.
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Finally took out my résumé and it’s been more almost 2 years since I’ve looked at it. Have put through some changes and there are a few interesting jobs out there I’d like to try applying for. Don’t expect to even get an interview for the first few jobs I apply for, but the idea as always is to just get your foot out the door when it comes to doing things.
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While out shopping during the weekend, I stumbled across display demos of Apple’s iPad. The device was much smaller than I anticipated, but is a gorgeous device to behold. It’s like an iPhone, but the bigger screen gives it so much more functionality, as all the forms of media you’d consume on it are crisply presented on the screen.
I only spent a few minutes playing around with it but it does make a laptop seem cumbersome. Reviews have mentioned that it is heavier than it looks, but feels just about right in terms of weight in my hands. Your fingers just glide across the screen to jump from application to application, surfing through websites on the internet.
For an Apple gadget, it’s priced pretty decently and furthermore with the current drop of the Australian dollar, it seems an even more worthwhile purchase. I’d buy one just to experience this new form of computing. Heh, you can tell that I really want one.
★ posted on 14 Apr 2010 at 6:26 pm under Computers, Food ★
Trying to not post a picture of food every now and then. Heh, still taking public transport to and from work, so I decided to bring my camera out just to grab some photos. Put on the 85mm f/1.8 to try as I seldom venture further than 55mm these days.
The flowers were sticking out of the fence, and the 85mm gives the back of the fence that nice shallow depth of field. Also played around with the white balance to impart a blueish hue on it. I think it works pretty well with the picture. Trying something different as I usually try to make the colours naturally white.
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Geek rambling ahead. You have been warned.
Since I bought in Eee PC in late 2008, I’ve always wanted to replace the internal SSD as it’s been pretty slow. That plus the fact that I only had less than 450MB of space left on the SSD made it difficult for me to install more programs (poor program design, forcing me to install stuff on the C:/ drive).
Managed to snag one off eBay at a reasonable price. The SSD came with an external USB case/connector but the computer did not want to detect it so I just pulled out the older SSD and installed the new one. After fiddling around with Clonezilla and GParted, I managed to transplant the Windows partition on the older, slower 4GB SSD to the newer, faster 32GB SSD. Took me a while to figure some of the bits out, but eventually got everything working.
The SSD upgrade is like buying a new computer. My Eee PC feels as snappy as my desktop for most tasks (other than running Flash related media, where it slows to a crawl, hence the reason why Apple shuns it from their iPhone and iPad). Startup to Windows felt the same (although it was already reasonably quick to begin with, under 30 seconds). After that you could see the new SSD shine, as the previous one would take a while to load up all the startup processes before I could do anything with it. I tried Firefox initially, and there wasn’t that noticeable lag when starting up the program, or when opening new tabs and switching between sites. The most exciting part came when I tried Google Chrome. Startup was instant, and everything just loaded in a zip.
I feel now that my Eee PC can keep up with me and it’s one of those machines that seems to cater for only 2% of the market masses, as Asus has phased out my model and have not replaced it. None of the other manufacturers produce anything similar as well.
The 8.9″ screen is too small for most people and it makes people squint. It is however, exactly the kind of size I want as it keeps the form factor tiny enough and this is still the lightest netbook with a decent screen resolution at 1.1kg. Everything else is about 1.5kg, and every little bit of weight counts when you are travelling.
When they can manufacture another laptop at that weight with more performance, I might consider upgrading. There is the iPad at 700gm, but it has no USB ports (for me to backup photos when travelling) and I don’t think I can type nearly as fast on it as I can with a physical keyboard (and as with the screen, the keyboard is too small for most people to type comfortably on,which makes me special, heh). The last bit is that I can’t service the iPad the same way I service my Eee PC. Parts are available on eBay and I’ve replaced a keyboard, upgraded an SSD and if the battery dies on me one day, I can easily procure a replacement on eBay. I don’t have to send it back to Apple and wait for them to replace the battery for me.
Having said all that, I am a geek and the iPad will appeal to the other 98% of people who would rather not have to do any manual repairs/upgrades on their own devices. So in general, what works for me usually does not work for everyone else. Heh.
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Heh, and I had to post a picture of food. My friend’s mum makes the best kind of laksa from the northern parts of Malaysia. The soup base is hot, with lots of chilli, fish and coconut. You top up the noodles with bean sprouts, lettuce, red onions and cucumbers before ladling in the hot, tasty soup.
I never fail to have more than one bowl of it everytime I get the opportunity to eat it.
★ posted on 4 Apr 2010 at 11:48 pm under Computers, Life in General ★
A cracked laptop LCD screen. Just a photo taken for archival purposes prior to me dismantling it. I had ordered a replacement screen from eBay and after that I just took the laptop apart, removing screws and other bits, yanking out cables, before throwing out the cracked screen and replacing it with a spanking new one. The entire process took me about an hour and after putting everything back together, held my breath as I turned on the laptop, and after what seemed like a very long wait, the laptop was back to its old self again.
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Maybe it’s that feeling of needing control sometimes, that I go and figure things out. I still remember my very first laptop from 1998, which I inadvertently broke installing some software. Lost some data in the reformat after sending my laptop to the shop for repairs. Heh, can’t remember how much it cost back then to fix it, but I wasn’t quite happy that I was helpless and couldn’t do anything about it.
I guess that’s how I taught myself to format hard drives and reinstall Windows on it. I subsequently learned how to do so many other things, install different operating systems like Linux, and trialling everything as I learned how to work around my laptop. Every now and then I’d do something silly and mess up the entire computer, but I’d always be able to fix it somehow. Perhaps it’s just a feeling of control, as I grew more proficient at tinkering with my computer, I was more comfortable ‘breaking’ it, as I knew how I’d be able to ‘unbreak’ it later.
Four years later, I assembled my first computer. It worked for about a month of two before one day it stopped booting altogether. The signs were already there when I first assembled it with a help of a friend, as the computer never could run at it’s default speed, and always running much slower than it should have. When the computer died, it was a painful lesson in getting some parts to replace the ones that got fried. Was still struggling with it until I found that ONE screw that wasn’t supposed to be on the plate that held the motherboard onto the case. After removing that ONE screw, the new parts ran flawlessly. This was after I thought I had received a dud of a motherboard and went to all that trouble trying to get it replaced as quickly as possible.
Heh, that lesson cost me some cash, but ultimately, I subsequently learned how to assemble computers properly, differentiating between parts and troubleshooting all manner of problems. In between I’m pretty sure I’ve broken more stuff as well as seen other people break their computers, and fixing it for them. All of that has given me the confidence to tear apart my laptop, and replace the LCD screen on my own. That’s something that would have cost half a grand to ring up Dell Support to send someone over to replace the screen for me. I did it at a fraction of that cost.
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I haven’t had that feeling for a long while now, being out of control. I’m just wanting to get my car fixed as soon as possible, and I hate having to rely on other parties just so that I can get something done. Heh, unfortunately, the tools and knowledge required to fix my car isn’t that simple. It’s not something I ‘break’ very often, neither do I want to do that, and it is cost prohibitive to learn it through trial and error (wrangling with auto repair companies to sort it out isn’t one of the things I’d like to spend my time on).
Used to only worry about the financial side of replacing/repairing things, but these days, time is also a luxury I no longer have as when I was a student back then. Heh, it’s just frustration, but I really hope that I learn something from this and not have to go through the hassle again.
makumaro.net is the rented space of HC Mak, built on 
