Category: technology and virtual life

As many of you have heard, Posterous would be closing their doors on the 30th of April. Which, to me is quite saddening.

When I first migrated to Rome, I wanted to do microblogging. At the time, my main computer was still under custody of the Italian Post, but I still wanted to share some of the random, interesting daily snaps of my life using my camera phone at the very least.

Like, why is this poor bra left hanging on a tree by itself?

Comparing how fuel costs (Wow, it was much cheaper then in 2009!)

And this interesting custom for kids to dress up in costumes before Lent.

Anyway, I was using a Samsung Innov8 at the time, and then moved to Nokia E72 and at this point, I’m using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Posterous was pretty easy to use, and all you had to do was to write an email, attach one or as many pictures as you liked and send it to post@posterous.com.

I loved how beautiful and clean the interface looked like. It was like, every function was thought of from a user’s viewpoint. It wasn’t confusing and it just … worked! The image gallery for example, was simply beautiful.

There wasn’t a need to embed videos and audio from external websites (although you could do that) as Posterous deals with it by itself.

And I liked that for every new post that you do, it will autoposts links to your social media sites, like twitter, plurk and facebook. Which was very convenient, you didn’t have to take the additional steps, linking here and there. And I think for being in 2009, this feature was pretty innovative.

To top it all, the people at Posterous were really friendly too – I even got a reply from THE founder, Sachin Agarwal himself, which to me, is quite big (Maybe I should write to my favourite actors and writers too and see if they write back, haha!)

Of course, since then, new services emerged, like the wildly popular Instagram. While I enjoy playing with the filters and peek into my friends’s pictorial updates, Instagram doesn’t allow me to stick a code in it for checking stats (don’t judge me) and when it wouldn’t embed my pictures into twitter which quite turned me off, even before the picture selling scandal.

So it was natural to go back to Posterous. And then the news of them closing down. How sad. Almost poetic even.

Anyway, I’ve already done a backup and am still considering and weighing the pros and cons on to which site I could use to replace it.

Oh wow, 600 megs of memories. I cannot emphasize enough that it is such a shame that Posterous had to close down. I know for some, it is quite silly to be sad and to be emotional over the loss of a website. But when you invest time, and moments and memories into something, you’re bound to feel nostalgic about it. It is like discovering your old diary at 12 years old and remembering the silly and fun things that you did at the time and how things have changed since then.

To me, Posterous was a wonderful platform and a worthy rival to Tumblr – clean, classy and has a sort of simple sophistication. In any case, I would like to wish all the best, and many many thank yous to Sachin and all the staff at Posterous for giving me the joy of expressing myself.

To end, I’m putting up a screenshot of my very first entry in posterous 4 years ago :

Bye bye! You will be remembered!

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy my tribute to :

• 12seconds.tv
• Geocities
• Joost
• There.com

Hi everyone!

I stumbled upon this page yesterday and thought that this was too good not to share if you’re interested in learning a new language.

The website is called memrise.com. Intruiged, I signed up an account with them for the fun of it (it’s free at the moment) and tried out a Mandarin course, and I’m quite surprised at how fun the whole experience was!

Here, you could try out different courses like the Arts, Maths and Geography. Although I think the language segment is the most popular. Once you’ve decided to participate in it, you’re given unlimited time to learn and complete each segment (although the quizzes are timed!)

I like the idea of how we plant the seed when we start a segment and harvest flowers when we’re done with the segment! I’ve never played farmville before, but I think this is better than farmville. At least you get something tangible out of it :p

Here is how the lesson starts. I love how you are given mnemonics to help you to remember the words (or figures) With Mandarin it’s interesting as a lot of the characters can be re-imagined as pictures.

After that the game starts and you’re quizzed on the words that you just learned. It gets progressively harder as you go along. First 4 multiple choices, then 6 and then you have to type out the answer.

(As a sidenote, the Italian course is kinda simple for me. Nevertheless, there are still several words that I’ve never seen before, so it’s still nice to play with)

The plus factor for me is definitely the quiz section. I may not be a competitive person, but I like the challenge of seeing 100% accuracy.

AND seeing my name rise in the leaderboard is very very motivating! Woohoo! I want to try to get to top 10!

I love this website! The only small thing that I can think of in improving it, is perhaps allowing some of the courses to be edited by a non author. I was at the Malay language segment, and as a native speaker, some of the choice of words didn’t seem flow well to me.

We’d normally use Malu instead of Segan. And Lambat instead of Lewat and Lihat instead of Tengok. To me it sounds more colloquial, but hmm … I may need a second opinion. Also, there are no audio for this particular lesson, and I’m pretty sure that there are others who would be happy to contribute 🙂

All in all, I may not be fluent at the end of my Mandarin challenge. But I’m having fun playing with memrise and maybe one day, it may come useful if I ever read a Chinese menu in China :p

(Hey wait! I could go to the numerous Chinese restaurants here in Rome. THAT would be so cool if I can make out the words there!)

Hello world! (that’s what we always had to type in beginning programming classes)

If you manage to read this, congratulations! We’ve made it! Marina’s Bloggariffic has migrated to a new home. While I still have about 3 more weeks with the old host, but then I thought to myself, “Why wait?” and went ahead and moved last weekend.

As it takes up to 48 hours for the nameserver and DNS to stabilize, it was pretty wonky the past few days, which was why the blog kept switching back and forth from the old template to the new. It was so intermittent to the point that I couldn’t even log in, so I pretty much just let it do its thing.

I’m currently using budgethosting, recommended by my friend, Ed Rowan Lee. So far, so good. The person that has been handling my account has been really helpful and professional. I’m currently paying 30 SGD hosting + 15 SGD domain yearly, so it’s a lot more economical compared to my previous hosting. In fact, I could probably cover the hosting with adsense come next year, making this site self sufficient.

I’m not sure if the package is enough for me for the moment, but lets see for now. At this point of time, I’m uploading about 8 years of material online and am already hitting 25% of my 5GB space.

I’m still a little upset that at this point of time that for my previous host, new users get to pay 3.95 USD a month while longtime users like me are charged 7.99 USD a month (I kid you not) It doesn’t seem fair but ah well, onwards and upwards!

I guess I should apologize for tricking a lot of you into thinking that I’m quitting from blogging, but I’m surprised that no one picked up on how I worded my previous post. I think I wrote something like, “As I have no intention of renewing with bluehost, my last post here will be on the 25th November.” “Here” meaning bluehost, not the blog. You’ve been pranked! Hehehe! Aren’t I a sly one? 😛

There is still a lot of tidying up to do and I anticipate broken links and missing pictures when I load the archives, but do make yourself comfortable as we settle in. And thank you so much for sticking with me all these years, my dear bloggariffic family! You’re awesome! I extend a hand to you, and lets go on to our future adventures! 🙂

P.s I’m really digging this new plugin by wordpress called Jetpack. It’s awesome! You could could do stuff like embed social media sharing, set mobile theme, set contact form and what nots. While previously I had to install a separate plugin for each. So beautiful!

Uh oh

Hi everyone,

I got this in my email some weeks back and I realised that it was time to renew my hosting plans.

Come November 25th, I’d have to pay slightly more than 200 USD (192 USD for hosting plus 14 USD for domain renewal)

The thing that was going through my mind was, “Woah! So expensive? I don’t remember having to fork out this much the past times.”

I’m a longtime user with bluehost since 2006. And while I think that their service has been 90% excellent so far (apart from the several downtimes) I’m sad to say that I think that I’d have to let go of the hosting … It’s just costing too much.

Even with adsense running at the side, it’s not enough to cover the hosting fees

(HOW SAD! ME NOT FOFULAR!)

It doesn’t make sense to be paying this much for a personal blog, hence I have no intention of renewing. And thus rinaz.net, as well as my email rinaz@rinaz.net will stop functioning here on the 25th November.

And though I think it’s very kind and generous, there is no need to contribute or donate any money.

Thanks for accompanying me in my journeys and listening to this woman ramble. It’s been lots of fun 🙂

Oh wow, this is quite unexpected. I got a Samsung Galaxy Nexus as a belated birthday present from Cartcart and my brother Naz. I didn’t even asked for it from them, I guess they read my previous post, huh?

Thank you so much! 🙂

Anyway I’m not going to do a full review on it as there are a plentiful of reviews online, but I’d just give a few quick thoughts after playing with it for a couple of hours.

1. Opening it from the box, it’s so thin and looks kind of plasticy. I really hope that I don’t physically damage it.

2. The screen size is really huge compared to my old phone. I could read webpages comfortably with this, especially as it also auto rotates.

3. As this phone is a dedicated Google android, trying to log in for the first time was a PAIN as I had a 2 step security! In the end, I left the sim card on my old phone to wait for the pin while setting up the Nexus.

4. As I’ve been a Nokia user for the longest time, there is a learning curve for me when using it for the first time. It took me a while to change the settings like wallpaper, network settings and so on. Too many buttons 

5. I still prefer my qwery keyboard on my Nokia E72. Typing on the Nexus, seriously takes FOREVER! On the other hand, I could have it record from speech to text, but it’s never always accurate. I say rinaz and it thinks I’m saying rhino.

6. On the flipside, getting to the apps is super fast. A swipe, a tap and you’re there already. Opening the apps itself doesn’t take any time at all.

7. Speaking of apps, they are designed very elegantly. Beauty with function. I like little touches like how you could just drag the top on this twitter app to refresh.

8. Because the Nexus uses gmail contacts, over the course of years, I’ve over 300 contacts on my phone. But most of them are not active anymore. So does that means that I have to delete them manually? If so, oh boy!

9. I finally have instagram! Now I can play with useless filters! Hahaha! The funny thing is that I wanted to dedicate instagram to my twitter account but I keep having the “Please check your username and password” when I try sync in my twitter to instagram. Even if it’s the correct one. Boo!

10. Like what I’ve been worried about, the battery life is significantly shorter than my Nokia E72. Just a couple of hours and the battery drains to half. I’ve yet to bring it out for a  normal day use though. Wonder how that’ll be like.

But the biggest irony of it being a phone, is that I haven’t been using the phone option. However to be fair, I don’t think that we’ve been using this feature a lot ever since the uprising of social media. Even on my E72 

Sidenote : Cart tried to download Angry birds into my phone. I didn’t let him!

And so, it has started …

I love my phone. I really do – it has an awesome battery life and can last for over a day with normal use, without recharging. And with the physical qwerty keyboard means that I can reply to messages really fast.

Unfortunately the Nokia E72 phone that I love so much is starting to get halfway obsolete …

As Nokia uses a symbian platform, it doesn’t support newer social media apps like instagram and those newfangled image editing program. Sometimes I feel so left out when I see my twitter filled with instagram feeds, but I can’t even sign up for an account with them!

And then, I can hardly open programs nowadays without having the dreaded Memory issues. Facebook app, Foursquare app, even opening just a webpage gives me issues. It’s especially frustrating when you are on the road, and am lost and want to use the Nokia maps but can’t because there isn’t enough memory!

But that’s the only app that was open …

There are days when I just want to throw the phone to the wall because sometimes it’s just easier to go without a phone rather than live in frustration. Already I’m getting jealous of Cart when he can log in apps faster than I do.

But urgh! I don’t want to buy a new phone! I still want to use this one! Why do phones get obsolete so quickly? At least I could still use my whatsapp …

Ever since I’ve started tutoring, I asked Cart if he had a printer for me to use for printing out handouts, worksheets and whatnots.

Cart owns an Epson stylus photo printer that he bought some years back. At the time, he was impressed by the print quality as because this particular model uses two types of ink cartridges : a  5-colour cartridge and black one.

Each ink cartridge uses a chip (like what you see on top there) which will indicate to the printer of how much ink that is has left. Which is quite smart (although my old printers have the same function even with no inbuilt chip)

However, after using the printer, Cart eventually found out that one undesirable thing about this printer is that if either one one of the colours run out, the printer would not function at all.

So lets say, I use a lot of blue in my printwork and eventually the colour runs out. What will happen is that the printer will lock up even though the rest of the cartridges are full! Even if I just wanted my next document to printed in black.

Yikes! Making consumers buy a new cartridge altogether when just one colour runs out? What a waste of resources. That’s strike one.

But well, we sucked it up and headed to an ink cartridge shop to get some new ink and did a few print test page on it to get the ink flowing. The colours were faint at first but slowly ink started to flow out and I was feeling hopeful. But after a few nozzle cleanings, to our horror, the printer indicated that once again, it ran out of ink!

Huh? I was befuddled. The inks were brand new so they shouldn’t be acting up like that! What a waste of money!

And once again, the printer locked up. Strike two.

Something seems very fishy about the whole deal and Cart was so furious that he did a search online and bought for himself a chip resetter which costs about 10 euro. What it does is that it will reset the chip and make the printer think that the cartridge was brand new with full ink.

And behold, we were able to continue printing. It’s not a perfect print, but it should get better as the ink flows.

But what was interesting is that we found out later that using the chip resetter with the old ink cartridges, the printer was able to whip out a fully coloured document! Which means that the cartridge was not empty in the first place. Look at what Cart printed out.

Epson. What a deceitful thing to do. Who was the smart person who approved of this concept? If they think that this is a profitable idea of forcing consumers buy more printer ink, instead this will make users boycott this brand even more.

No more Epson printer for me.

Cart and I both use linux as an operating system for our laptop/netbook. He’s using Ubuntu and I’m using Jolicloud. I’ve always liked these two distros because they are pretty straightforward to use and they load up pretty fast.

While waiting for our connecting flight in Beijing, Cart started to play Diablo. It’s a game that I used to play a lot while I was back in Jurong Institute. My favourite character was Rogue since she could attack from a distance and I remember feeling chills when the Butcher comes out of the door, sneering, “Aaah! Fresh meat!” Its so creepy that don’t remember if I managed to finish playing the game even.

I played Diablo 2 but it didn’t have the same effect and Diablo 3? Blizzard has been announcing and hyping out the release for what? 3 years now?  Is it even going to be released yet? It feels so anti climatic.

Anyway, seeing Cart playing it on his laptop makes me keen on revisiting my favourite game classics. Since my netbook probably has enough juice to run a late 90s and early 2000 game proper, I thought that I’d try installing Roller Coaster Tycoon 1. Its a game where you create your own theme park and I had fond memories playing it.

I wish I am in my own theme park!

Theoretically, installing a pc game in a linux based netbook should be straightforward.

1. First on your pc, you make a CD/DVD image of the game using MagicISO or Daemon Tools

2. And then transfer the .iso file into a thumbdrive and plug it in your linux computer.

3. Mount the ISO file. This will create a virtual CD/DVD drive in your computer and you don’t have to waste burning a CD or a DVD. I’m using Furius ISO mount while Cart is using CDemu.

4. Now open the installer with WINE and click on install.exe or setup.exe or autorun.exe

By the way, all of these installers could be installed through Synaptic Package Manager. Its kind of like Install or Uninstall a program through the control panel in Windows.

5. Once the game is installed, find the folder, click on the game.exe you’re good to go.

Or so it seems.

I cant get any of my games to start! Each time I’d get an error trying to install the blasted thing or even when I’m done installing, the game wont start at all!

Urgh. I’m so sad 🙁

Yes, yes. I know that I can continue playing on my windows pc. But I’m lazy and I’d much prefer to use my netbook and play the game lying down.