Category: technology and virtual life

As much as I find myself using my android phone a lot for taking photos, many a times, I still prefer to use my trusty point-and-shoot camera.

I think it’s still the more superior choice when taking photos – it loads up faster, the picture quality is better, and I could just leave it for weeks and the battery would still be full.

When I first got my little blue camera, I was very happy with it. It was sleek, had interesting functions and using it, I started and learnt how to create HD video blogs. And I always put it in my bag, ready for a photo opportunity.

It’s just that … I’m so clumsy!

My trusty camera has probably been mistreated more than by a regular person. It’s been dropped countless of times, one of the worst fall it had was while we were in Viterbo and I accidentally dropped it on the cobblestones as I was trying to reply to my ringing mobile phone.

You can imagine how bad I felt as it dropped on the surface. It was badly scratched, and the battery cover didn’t close properly but thankfully, the LCD screen was whole and the camera still worked fine.

I promised myself to be more careful next time.

But recently I was horrified to find out that the shutter won’t open and close properly since a few days ago. Like something was stuck inside. Inspecting it, I realised that it smells of strawberries.

Even though I did ate and take a picture of a strawberry ice cream, I’m usually very careful when doing food photography. I don’t remember dripping anything on the camera. It doesn’t make  scientific sense. Ice cream drips down! And my camera was always pointing up.

This is a Magnum Strawberry Ice-cream covered with White Chocolate by the way. Was it worth killing my camera for this shot? I don’t know -_-

It was till when I noticed my camera slip cover. It had dried strawberry ice cream inside it. I must have had dripped ice cream in it some how.

And now all my shots look like me waking up at 5 am.

Sigh.

I feel like such a bad owner. It’s not like I’m doing it on purpose and I know it’s not a living thing, but my heart hurts each time it gets damaged. And as a blogger, I should be taking better care of my camera. But for something that has lasted for about 4 years, it’s not that bad right?

At this point of time, I’m eyeing on this. It’s just that … I don’t want to break another camera!

Cart introduced me to Ingress some weeks back.

Ingress is a multiplayer game for android devices. In this game, you are supposed choose to fight for the enlightened (green team) or the resistance (blue team) and basically the aim of the game is to establish different portals.

Portals are usually public landmarks, like sculptures or murals. We get points by hacking, deploying or recharging resonators and linking portals. These actions takes an amount of energy, but you can refill them easily by passing by areas with the tiny floaty lights as seen below.

So many enemy portals to hack!

When Cart told me about the game, I thought that it was a great way for us to spend time being more active together and perhaps indirectly, start to be fitter like how a friend did after playing this game for several months.

We chose to be part of the resistance team but the first time when we started the game, it was quite confusing for me though. The learning curve is high as the interface is overwhelming with information and it takes a while for my GPS to stabilize and be in range for the portals.

Eventually it got easier to understand, the more I played it. And it got quite exciting as Cart and I work together and try to claim and fight enemy portals. We’d go exploring different places in our neighbourhood just to search for these portals. It’s real time, so whatever we do gets updated and seen immediately on each other’s devices.

Some of the weapons I got by hacking

What I liked about the game is that it makes you more aware of your surroundings as you try to spot the portals. For example, despite living in my neighbourhood for a while, there is a statue near my house that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it weren’t for Ingress.

And there are a lot more portals to be found the more popular the place is. So tourist destinations like Piazza del Popolo, or the Colosseo or Piazza Navona would be filled with them so it’s easier to level up there.

The only thing I don’t like about the game is that it’s a huge battery sucker. I’d play the game for a few minutes and my battery would go down to almost half. On top of that, my phone lags a lot and it takes time for it to see me as being in range even though I’m right there! It’s extremely off-putting so I’m not so active in this game.

Cart on the other hand absolutely adores this game and plays whenever he gets the chance. He’s now almost at level 5 and I’m still stuck at level 2. I doubt I’d ever catch up to him.

Unfortunately, whatever motivation I got about Cart being more active is diminished when I found out that he’s been hacking in portals while driving his car! I don’t know about you, but I feel like that’s cheating.

Use a bicycle at the very least -_-”

Here is a video for a more in depth information about the game :

Just upgraded to wordpress 3.8 and it looks so pretty!

I’m liking what I’m seeing so far. When I log in, the biggest change I see is how uncluttered the navigation buttons are, which is great because it means that there is more space for us to type in.

I’ve also upgraded the theme to Twenty Fourteen, which looks like a simple beauty, that I love. It’s just that it doesn’t quite look the same when applied to Marina’s bloggariffic.

I can’t figure out how get the grid to work even after making my posts ‘stick’ and tagging then with featured so I think it needs a little bit of work. I really miss my Cart and Rinaz header!

In the meantime I think I’ll put this little picture of Cart and Rinaz in construction hats 🙂

Last week, I was helping my friend set up her new tablet – a Samsung Galaxy Tab2 10.1 and we encountered a very interesting problem. We’ve been trying to get on Skype. However, her husband has logged in Skype with his account and we’re stumped at how to log off from his account.

Searching for solutions online doesn’t seem to help much and I poured over this problem and finally found out how to do it. I’ll share it with you here.

1. First you open your profile. It’s the one with your icon on the top right.

2. Next you press on the three dots at the bottom right.

3. Now you open up your settings

4. And remove the tick for ‘Sign in automatically’

5. And finally go on back and sign out from that account

6. And then sign in with your other account. If you like, you can set it to sign in automatically again.

There! Quite easy. Can’t believe it took me such a long time to figure it out. Hope this is helpful to you 🙂

 

(I should present it like Strong Bad! Haha!)

My computers have been bonkers for a while – my netbook just wont start (probably having motherboard issues) and the desktop will insist that there is no HDD installed (probably a Hard Disk Drive failure. I still would like to fix it nevertheless. I don’t want to throw it away)

So at length I got for myself a new laptop while I was in Singapore. My pre-requisites were simple – it should be powerful enough for me to do multimedia projects but shouldn’t cost more than $1.3K SGD . After all, I’m not a rich woman 😛

(Should I send this picture to Where Bloggers Blog?)

Initially I had my heart set on the HP Envy Notebook PC since it seems to fit all of my requirements. After visiting Sim Lim Square and trying out some computers however, in the end I got for myself a Lenovo Ideapad Z500. (My brother wanted me to get the Y500, but at $2k SGD, it was way above my budget and I really can’t stand the obnoxious red backlight keyboard)

Aint it a bewdy?

The specs between the Envy and the Ideapad are pretty much the same actually – both are running core i7 processor and has an 8GB of memory. The Ideapad had more storage though, and comes with a DVD drive. But what won me over was their keyboard. I type a lot, so the more solid keyboard from the Ideapad is better for me compared to the soft, rubbery one from Envy.

Nevertheless, I’m still trying to get adjusted to it. Mainly because after years of typing on a netbook, typing on this laptop feels like typing on a giant’s keyboard. I still feel the need to use Cart’s spare laptop when I have to type long posts like the Langkawi series.

In any case, I’ve been enjoying my new laptop. It has Win 8 OS but the clerk installed an app called Classic Shell where it makes the interface look like a traditional windows desktop, so it’s less confusing for me.

The computer is freaking fast by the way! It takes just a few seconds just to start up that it makes me go “ooh!” each time. And every program that I’ve installed takes such a significantly short time to process.

For example, I got for myself Adobe Premiere Elements 11. It’ll take a while for me to familiarize myself again, as there are a lot of changes since version 4. Nevertheless rendering a 1 minute video on that takes just a few minutes now instead of hours. So cool!

(Uploading is another story though, we are doomed to using Fastweb, which is actually slow and makes me even more unmotivated to make more regular video blogs as I used to do)

Other graphics intensive programs, such as Secondlife looks gorgeous to me. Looking at the small details like the water ripples, and the colours of sky makes it even more immersive and beautiful. That makes me want to try to play more games, maybe stuff like Tomb Raider or The last of us … except I’m a little scardey-cat when my characters risk to get hurt. Hahaha!

(Thing is, the direction buttons on the keyboard is kind of dinky. So it’s not that comfortable to move my avatar around)

Speaking of graphics, the screen seems longer at 1311×737 compared to the 1280×780 screens that I’ve been used to so it’s a bit of an adjustment seeing the wider screenshots in my computer. Maybe I should have gotten the smaller Z400 instead?

Nevertheless, I love my new laptop. It’s blazing fast, so editing and rendering is much more time efficient for me which in turn makes it more enjoyable for me to use. I hope to find a shop somewhere in Rome where they could do stickers so I could personalise my laptop with a rinaz sticker! Like how I did for my netbook 🙂

Sidenote : I would have gotten myself a tablet too, cos trying to use this in bed is really cumbersome, but the tablet I wanted, the new gen Nexus 7 wasn’t out yet. Bah!

Hi everyone!

As you probably know, my computers are going bonkers. Both of them! It’s like they both had an agreement with each other to go on strike at the same time.

Nevertheless, it’s been almost 5 years since I’ve had them. While I still prefer that they were still working, and I still love them, I think it’s time for an upgrade and I’m impressed that they’ve lasted so long.

I’m a proponent for desktops, but I’ll go with laptops this time round as there could be the time that arises when I need to do some editing on the go.

For me, I need a computer which is powerful enough to handle heavy multimedia applications – I edit photos, create cartoons and make videos. Anything with too little memory makes me ragey when the rendering takes a really long time or worse, hang!

(Speaking of which, I really miss teaching multimedia to my former kids in Singapore. It’s been such a long time and I’m amazed at how much they’ve grown up!)

I’ve friends who are Pro-Macs. I really don’t mind one. I’ve used one when studying before and I think it’s good to be fluent in different operating systems. Moreover Macs are reputedly the best when it comes to multimedia. But the entry level Macbook Pro costs 1.6k SGD and that’s a little over the budget.

Or I could get their cheapest offering of the Mac Mini at 800 SGD. But it’s not really that portable – how are you going to lug a monitor around?

Unless I could bother someone who could get a Macbook Pro for me at a discount, it’s really not a viable option for me.

So I’ve been doing a bit of research online for a replacement computer. At the moment I found something that I really like – The HP Envy Notebook PC

The specs look really nice. It has the new Core i7 processor and a 8GB memory. So this should be doubly fast compared to my current desktop. So hopefully a 10 minute video will render in minutes instead of hours.

It doesn’t appear to have a DVD reader, but that’s fine as I don’t use it much apart from installing some software for the first time. Plus I’ve an external one anyway. And at 1.3K SGD, I think it’s a fair price.

Although I wish it had something like the Lenovo Red Trackpoint. I love that. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like a regular laptop touchpad, which is why I use a mouse all the way. I’m old school like that.

At this point of time, I’m not sure whether to get the regular one or with a 200 SGD topup, the touchsmart version where you could touch the screen and navigate with your fingers. Although to be honest, I didn’t use the touchscreen function much on my touchsmart desktop, unless my mouse runs out of batteries or when Cart decides to be annoying.

Win8 is supposed to maximize these capabilities, nevertheless I still have a bit of time for deciding anyway.

Sometimes I wonder, why go through all these hassle and get a computer from Singapore rather than getting it from Italy directly?

Two main reasons. One is that the Italian keyboard, which is quite different. It took a while for me just to find the @ and the ‘ symbol on an Italian keyboard, although using Cart’s spare laptop these past weeks, I’m getting a little bit used to it.

But the main reason is the price. Italy has a higher goods tax, so the same thing in Italy costs 899 euro which, when converted is about 1.5k SGD. A good 200 SGD more. For that price, I could easily upgrade to the touchsmart netbook! (Which I still have yet to decide on getting)

So I guess, a big probability that unless I discover a better option, I’d get the Hp Envy notebook. My only worry though, what if breaks down within the warranty period while I’m in Rome? I don’t think that it is covered in another country.

Am having a bit of tech maladies these days, starting from my netbook not being able to start properly (And now that I’ve finally got it to start, I put it under suspension instead of shutting it down to prevent the risk of it doing the same thing again)

And just yesterday, my main compy where I do video and picture editing had the same error as I had in September. “No problem, I’ll just back up in my trusty HDD reformat it again and re-install from the HDD”, I thought confidently. While compy seems fine now that I’ve done a fresh OS re-install, the HDD on the other hand, has this odd clunking sound at each rotation, which means that death is impending and I should try to rescue as much data as I can.

I managed to install some of the software that I backed up on the HDD before it went ker-plunk like Lightroom (for mass editing of pictures) and Powerdirector (for video editing). But I didn’t manage to install photoshop and flash which means that I probably won’t be able to do my ‘This is married life‘ cartoon strips for a while.

What? No …

The irony is that, powerdirector still has this squashed video effect even after re-installation (Yeah, yeah. I’m using old versions for all of them, but that doesn’t mean that the software should go bonkers)

I’m amazed at how nonchalant I am, considering that, that HDD contains all my digital memories from 1997 onwards and if it’s gone, it’s totally gone. But I guess I’ve gone through so much of these throughout the years that I really cannot be bothered anymore 😛

One silver lining on my dark cloud however, after trying different video editors like lightworks (too difficult to use) and Adobe Premiere Elements (the watermark is very annoying, and I still get the squashed effect) is that I found a decent software where I could do some simple video editing … and it’s free!

Microsoft Movie Maker! So old school – I used this the first time when I first dabbled with youtube and didn’t see it bundled in since Vista so I thought that it was taken out, so imagine my surprise when an ex colleague recommended it, and even more so when this current update actually worked for me in making unsquashed videos! Lovely!

So I guess to end, I’ll share a short video I took not too long ago of some street performers. I was quite amazed at how they were able to balance themselves without shaking even the least bit :

I know the secret now though, and shucks, now my sense of wonder and enchantment is burst thanks to Cartcart 😛