Category: technology and virtual life

As much as I love my Galaxy Nexus, it was starting to get obsolete. Even with it being rooted, it was starting to take such a long time to start programs and even worse, gets unstable with more than 3 apps open.

It became so cumbersome playing games like ingress on it, and I guess that I’ve been complaining so much about my phone being slow that Cart got me this for my birthday. I really love my new toy!

I’ve enjoyed the Nexus experience tremendously since I use a lot of Google applications and was really happy to be upgraded to a Nexus 5.

We happened to also be ordering a pair of USB cables so when the delivery guy arrived to pass me the box, I was surprised to see the phone instead of the cables when I opened the box as it was deceptively small and very light.

This was probably my first LG phone and the Nexus 5 comes in 3 colours – black, white and red. I asked for the red one as it’s an usual colour in a sea of black mobile phones. Seeing it in real life, the red isn’t a true red though, more like orange-red. Nevertheless, I absolutely love it, the phone is just so sexy.

(The LG Nexus 5 next to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus)

Everything about the phone is just so seductive – the colour, the shape, the sleek look. Just touching the matte back is just so inviting. Suffice to say, I think this is the most attractive smartphone that I’ve ever owned.

First I had to get my SIM card cut as it needed a Micro-SIM, and then get it updated to the latest android version which is Kitkat 4.4.4 at this point of writing.

The first time I first used it, I was ridiculously emotional at how speedy it was. With a 2 GB ram, opening apps was so fast that I can’t imagine how I managed to survive with my old phone. I almost cried happy tears in the mall when I managed to get memory intensive apps like Ingress started in just a few seconds instead of minutes.

Everything feels so smooth and basically just works. In the several weeks that I’ve been using it, I’ve never had any issues. Even though there is the extremely rare chance when the phone decides to restart by itself, at least it doesn’t take a lifetime to start again.

There are a few changes that I see. For example, SMS messages are now combined with hangouts which is great as every messages are in one place.

And now all pictures taken is now updated to “Photos” – I quite like the auto-backup which saves all your images to your google+ account. It’s a peace of mind in case something happens to the phone or makes a smooth transition when changing phones.

I really like the camera. There are different interesting functions like Photo Sphere, Panorama, Lens Blur and HDR+. Considering that the camera is just 8 MP, the quality of the images are quite impressive. Here are some of the snapshots that I took recently, not forgetting the ones I took in Orvieto.

Admittedly, these pictures are slightly enhanced using Snapseed. Nevertheless, you’d need to have a good picture to be edited into an even better picture. The roasted seafood picture especially, looked as if it could have been snapped using a DSLR 🙂

Another awesome function is “Ok Google” which runs really smoothly on the phone. But the part which I like a lot about Google Now  is the ‘Location’. Using this function makes you keep track of your friends all the time. I like this function a lot as I’d always know where Cart is so I don’t worry about where he could be.

I probably might talk more about this function in the future about how this affects relationships 😛

And I finally am able to do … emoticons! Probably something quite frivolous, but I’ve been waiting for this for the longest time. I can’t believe that this couldn’t be done in earlier phones. I didn’t want to install additional apps like Swiftkey which at 26 MB seems like such a bloatware.

To end this post, I just have to say that I really love my new phone. The irony is, I don’t use it much for talking and instead use it more for social media, ingressing and taking photos. I don’t even carry my point and shoot camera with me much any more.

Thank you so much Cartcart 🙂

Normally a lot of people would scoff at getting a made in China product, nevertheless I’ve been eyeing on the Mi Power-bank for a while. While it was originally meant for the China market, they’ve recently started selling their stocks to limited countries in South-East Asia.

At 10,400mAh, it is extremely powerful – that’s about twice the capacity of my older power-bank, and when fully charged, has enough juice to charge my phone for about 3 times. The best part is, that it costs only 14 SGD. That’s about 8 euro! I cannot think of anywhere else where you could get this much power at this price. Too bad that it’s not distributed to the rest of the world.

From what I’ve heard, it’s not that easy to get one. It’s usually sold online once a month at about 5 000 or 10 000 units at a time, and they are always sold out in 5 minutes.

Which was why I was really enthralled when my friend Renhao managed to snag some and has very kindly given Cart and I, one each, a  as a gift. Thank you so much! 🙂

I won’t go too much into the technical details of it as there are plentiful of reviews of them online but at first glance, I think that it’s totally gorgeous and I’m completely enamoured.

Opening the cardboard box, I was impressed at the simplistic beauty of the packaging inside. There is an opaque box with the power-bank and cable fitting perfectly inside. And that’s it. I really like that it was not overly packaged, so there’s hardly any wastage at all.

I don’t know if it’s that impressive for you, but to me I appreciate how everything fits in their own Zen. The whole packaging looks as if a lot of thought was given in the design process.

The power-bank itself looks extremely sophisticated – with the sleek aluminium finish and the white decals at the edge. Touching and holding it, it does not feel nor look cheap.

It’s significantly heavier compared to my old power-bank. I have yet to use it though as I’ve started to charge it in the morning at about 9.30 am. At 4.30 pm, it still needed another 25% more to go and I saw that it was finally fully charged when I reached back home in the late evening.

Despite that long charge, it’ll be able to complete charge my phone about 3 times. It’ll be useful when I’m using battery intensive aps and I can’t wait to try it out 🙂

With two power-banks under my belt, I am now an unstoppable mobile warrior!

Last weekend while I was busy making my weekly cartoon strip, I had a curious message from my friend Sindy. “What happened to your blog?” She asked urgently. And when I checked it out, I realised that my site was hacked.

To see my blog in that state was such a rude shock. Luckily, I managed to reset my password, log in and found that my archives were untouched. However, there were things that I wasn’t savvy enough to fix, like the index page redirect and the curious username change.

The last time that this blog got hacked was back in 2007 but it wasn’t in such a scale like this. So thank goodness for my host being able to help. Within a few hours after I’ve sent the support team an email, they managed to fix the situation and my blog was up and running again. Another reason why I love them so much 🙂

I’ve been using my Galaxy Nexus for close to two years now and it is already starting to be obsolete.

Already Google has stopped updating its system and apps were starting to stop functioning properly. I kept having issues with twitter – it won’t open at all. The most annoying bit is when trying to play ingress and my location keeps jumping back and forth despite me standing in the same spot.

I was briefly considering on getting a new phone but our friend Lorenzo, who’s an android enthusiast managed to flash a ROM on my phone when he invited us over for dinner.

I’m not entirely sure what Lorenzo did on my phone but suddenly I now have Kitkat 4.4.

Prior to that, I’ve already backed up my pictures and the nice thing about android phones is that whatever you’ve installed previously is remembered by Google and the apps would instantly load by itself.

Kitkat looks interesting to me so far and navigating through the apps feels faster than usual. There are new functions like SMS messages being merged together in ‘hangout’ as well as ‘Google Now’ which I quite like – it updates its cards depending on your location and the sites that you commonly go to. Lets say that I have my location turned on, depending on where I am, it will recommend me restaurants to try, or let me know how long it will take for me to go home.

But I’m extremely amused especially with “Ok Google”. This is a feature where you can tell your phone what to do. I’m impressed at how I can set alarms, do searches and open applications without having to touch the screen at all.

Cart tried to install the same for his Galaxy S4 but it doesn’t seem to work as well.

I attended the WordPress di Roma meetup recently. Even though I felt a little overwhelmed as it was conducted in Italian, I still found it enriching and educational. Which is the main inspiration for this post.

When I started blogging, I used to use Blogger/blogspot as it was the standard to use in the early 2000s. I changed to WordPress some years later and it’s been about seven years since the switch, and I haven’t looked back since.

Blogger does have its own strengths like :

• You can get a lot of hits using Blogger.

Interestingly, I still get a lot of hits in my old blog even though I’ve abandoned it for many years now. Just imagine how it would be like if I was still active and posted content on it.

• You can run advertisements with Blogger.

As Blogger is owned by Google, you could easily install Google Adsense on it and maybe earn some passive income. You’re also able to do sponsored advertisments and advertorials which you’re not able to do on WordPress, unless it is self hosted.

But despite that, there are many reasons why I prefer to use WordPress :

WordPress lets you put posts in Categories

This was the main reason which made me switch to WordPress. As a person with diverse interests, I thought that categorising my posts was a useful function which made it easier for readers to arrow in the topics which interests them.

Various plugins for your different needs

There are so many plugins that you could use to help improve your blog and just makes your blogging life easier. All you need to do is to search the database the keyword that you’re looking for and chances are, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Among some of the plugins that I’m currently using are – Akismet which protects your blog from spam, the Broken Link Checker,  and Jetpack which was probably love for me at first installation.

Virtually unlimited Wordpress Themes

While it is possible for you to tweak your blog’s appearance in Blogger, for a non coder like me, I’m always pleased to see the virtually unlimited amount of themes, most of them being free for use.

Blogpost has a limited amount of templates, while WordPress, with its large community, has a collective of thousands of looks that you can use.

More control in WordPress

It was a bit of a learning curve switching over from Blogger to WordPress. As I’m using self hosting, I had to learn how to use cPanel, .Css and others. Some I still don’t understand till now.

Nevertheless, I appreciated the fact that I have full control over my blog – I can install whichever plugin I like, and insert the CSS codes if I wanted to. While you can’t do the same in the free version of WordPress, budgethosting, the host that I’m using costs an affordable $45 SGD per year.

WordPress is for serious bloggers

Blogspot has the unfortunate reputation for users who are new at blogging. Which is not necessarily a bad thing as while there were earlier blog services, Blogger was where I truly learnt the ropes of blogging.

However, once you’ve gotten used to it, and want to advance to something more customizable, it’s advisable to use WordPress for its rich features.

WordPress is Social Media friendly

With Jetpack (in WordPress), I could link up with various social media sites and all of them can be updated by one click which makes it extremely convenient. I love that with it, you are also able to share directly on the post with whichever Social Media that you prefer.

Blogger’s “gadgets” are very limited. And personally, commenting on many blogspot posts is very annoying to me as it forces me to sign in and does not allow me to link directly to my blog, but instead to my blogger profile.

Wouldn’t you prefer to comment on this :

Compared to this?

WordPress has regular updates

WordPress updates frequently, which may be annoying to some, but I like it as you’d always see new features and functions in each update. This means that the team are always trying to improve themselves.

Intuitive mobile App in WordPress

While I don’t know how it’s like for Apple products, I really love the android app for WordPress. It’s so intuitive.

While it’s easy to use, it’s extremely comprehensive. I can even change the blog theme directly on my phone itself and I love getting new notifications in real time without having to log on to my computer.

In conclusion, there is nothing wrong with Blogger but I’m happy with WordPress. Having made the switch about 7 years ago, I adore WordPress and have never looked back.