Blogging, to a large extent, revolutionises the way people acquire knowledge. By continuously blogging about a certain topic, for instance, it is possible for a person to become more knowledgeable on the subject.
Pick any topic you have an interest in exploring and learning, and start a blog dedicated to the subject and challenge yourself to at least come up with three blog entries a week.
It is important that you choose a topic that interests, otherwise you are likely to give up blogging when the going gets tough.
Your interest in a topic is what keeps you going, spurring you to read and search for more information, and in the process allowing you to learn a lot of new things.
I spent the first 30 minutes of my waking hours this morning not by working out to burn the fat at the mid-section but to try out Gmail’s latest feature, which is, a web phone call service — something like Skype, but not exactly.
The first thing I did was to sign in into Gmail, click on the phone icon on the left sidebar, and from there, I was promoted to download and install Google voice and video software.
After installing it, the Firefox browser restarted and when I got it back, I re-signed in into the Gmail account, clicked on the phone icon again and out popped a dialer. I dialed my own number and I could hear an analog-type dialing tone as Gmail tries to reach my mobile.
Some seconds later, bingo! My phone rang, showing a local Celcom number as the caller.
I can now call any phone number, either mobile or fixed line, anywhere in the world from my Gmail. Of course, I need to have a microphone hooked on my computer to be able to actually talk with the person at the end of the line.
You can try it out now, using the US$0.10 credit available when you activate the service. If you want to make more calls, you can top it up using using your credit card.
Google’s latest move, with cheap rate to boot, brings the search engine giant in head-to-head competition with VoIP players like Skype and telco operators. The rate is cheap, for instance, someone calling from the United States to Malaysia need only to pay US$0.04 for mobile phone number and US$0.02 for a fixed line number. Here is a complete list of Gmail phone call rates (for calls from the US to the rest of the world).
You can also video chat right from Gmail. See instruction below:
I find it ironic that most people who jog at sunrise are those already in their sunset — people in their golden age, panting and sweating in the dying dawn.
Then it occurs to me that the central piece of the whole irony is none other than myself… because I too am thinking of waking up early and kick-start my morning jog routine.
This old man (picture, below) is not jogging. He is just walking; in a slow, excruciating stride. Age has really caught up on him.
I’ll be joining them soon, doing the morning jog, I mean; and try to salvage whatever is left of my former self.
In any case, you can’t outrun age. It’s an unstoppable foe and no matter what you do or where you go, it will eventually catch up on you.
UK-based photographer Philip Bloom set six cameras, five of them Canon cameras and one a Nikon to take this stunning timelapse photograph and video of Monument Valley in Utah.
He used two Canon EOS 5D Mark II, two Canon EOS 7D, a Canon EOS 1D Mark IV and a Nikon D3s. The set up is definitely not for the faint-hearted. Here’s how he shot the film.
I spent a good 30 minutes of my time prior to writing this entry, watching and playing with a movie trailer about a group of people who mysteriously vanished from the city of Val Sinestra. The eerie part is that all of those who went missing are my Facebook friends.
Where have they gone to? Create your own suspense-filled trailer, featuring your own Facebook friends at Lost In Val Sinestra website. Go there now, I promise you it’s going to be fun.
The latest issue of PhotographyBB Online Magazine is now available for free download in PDF format. The magazine, as some of you might know, is a free publication with the goal of educating beginner to intermediate level photographers.
This is one of two photography magazines which I make it a point to spend time to read, from front to back. The other is Underwater Photography, published once in two months, also available for free download.
PhotographyBB magazine, issue No 30
Issue No 30 of PhotographyBB magazine, discusses social media for photographers, digital art, portrait photography, wildlife photography as well as an article on stock photos.
You can download the magazine, here. If you are new to PhotographyBB, however, you will have to register to subscribe to it, which you can do by entering your first name and a valid e-mail address.
The Underwater Photography magazine can be downloaded here. The same subscription principle applies.
The Twist & Shape stepper lies idle at a corner, not twisting, let alone shaping. For many months now since I last unpacked it, the fitness machine just sits there, collecting dusts; its sedentary owner barely aware of its existence.
His ever bulging belly, however, jolts him to his senses and now the owner — that’s me — is becoming more aware of the machine. Everyday since the past week, he gravitates more and more into the orbit of the fat burner, wondering if at forty-something there is still a way to recover the six-pack abs of his younger days.
The truth is, there is more to flat tummy than meets the eye — or, if you will, meets the belly button. Unlike a car, one doesn’t need a spare tyre and an additional circumference at the belly is costly. Think of all the new pants you have to buy because the existing ones no longer fit. And think of all the fuel you burned while going to the shop nearby because you insisted on using the car because you were just too lazy to jog-walk — because the body has become heavy.
For me, I am done with all these. From next month onward, I am going to pump away all the weight at the middle and be as skinny as an old mantis. Wish me luck. And if you ever feel like trying, here’s a video on how to lose fat at the abdomen and get a flat tummy.
Facebook, the social networking site, is the most visited website in Malaysia, according to the latest figure shown on Alexa.
This not surprising considering that over 7.666 million of 500 million Facebook users worldwide are Malaysians, according to CheckFacebook.com, a website which tracks the membership figures of the billion-dollar worth social media website.
The omnipresent Facebook... half a billion users as of July 2010
The 15 most visited websites in Malaysia this week are: Facebook, Google Malaysia, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Blogger.com, Windows Live, Wikipedia, Maybank2u.com, MSN, WordPress.com, Mudah.my, Twitter, The Star Online and Malaysiakini.com.
By the way, how much is Facebook worth? According to some estimates, if Facebook is to go public now, it could top US$30 billion.
Please bear with me for the blog entries here might seem nonsensical to you but that is how I keep writer’s block at bay — by writing whatever it is that tickles my fancies. Hopefully, in the near future, there will some coherence in the way this blog is run.
There are dozens of tools out there dedicated to creating High Dynamic Range (HDR) photographs and among the most powerful, yet easy to use, must be the new Oloneo PhotoEngine, of which beta version is now available for a free download.
Dynamic range, simply put, is the difference between the darkest and lightest area in a photograph.
HDR, therefore, is the ability to show a greater balance between the two extremes in a picture, in a sense that there will be no areas in the photos which are too overexposed or underexposed (see the clip below).
However, HDR is not the only thing PhotoEngine is capable of creating. The tool can also be used to create a certain mood in a picture, as can be seen below. The first photo is the original.
[UPDATE: The LX5 is officially announced today, July 21. Those who have tested the pre-production model came away impressed]
By now camera trend watchers would have heard of the LX5, Panasonic’s premium compact camera and the successor to the much-respected LX3. Rumours of the LX5′s impending release have been making rounds since last month. Today, stopping short of officially announcing the camera, Panasonic posted a mouth-watering specification of the LX5 at its website.
Panasonic LX5
The headline features: F2.0 Leica DC Summicron Lens, a large 1/1.63″ High Sensitivity 10 megapixel CCD with evolved sensor technology, HD Movie Recording, up to 6fps continuous shooting, 3.8x optical zoom, conversion lens compatibility, Power OIS optical image stabiliser, multi-aspect ratio (4:3, 3:2, 16:9 and 1:1). Here is the full spec.
In 2002, a friend returning from a trip abroad asked me if I wanted anything from the country he was visiting — a magazine or something, he said.
I told him that that wouldn’t be necessary but if he insisted, a book would do, I said. At that time, I had just started to pick up reading as a hobby. He told me he knew nothing about books but he would grab one anyway.
I guess he was just returning a favour for having been bugging me with long distance calls asking about the political development back home whenever he was abroad.
My friend was not a politician but he loved to talk about politics. Sometimes he would call just to say he had read something about Malaysia in some newspapers he came across while criss-crossing the globe. As usual he would ask for my opinion about the things he had just read because “reporters know a lot of inside stories” he would say.
Coming back to that particular trip in 2002, he returned home a couple of days later, invited me for a coffee and handed me five books, one of them was Fatherland by Robert Harris. “These are bargain books,” he chuckled, “that’s why I can afford to buy five.”
I thanked him for his kindness. Of course, the books were soon forgotten as the conversation shifted to politics. Vintage him.
It took me several months to read all five. Fatherland was unusually compelling that it left a lasting impression on me until this day despite the fact that I could no longer recall what the book was all about except that it had something to do with Nazi and Germany.
Last week, I rummaged into the heap of paper boxes containing my personal library and found the book buried deep below. I am now re-reading it — to once again experience the stomach-churning tales that Harris had weaved into the pages of the book which counts Nelson Mandela as among its readers.
The book, by the way, has been adapted into film of the same title, with the tagline, “What if Hitler had won the war?”
Google has released a tool called App Inventor that allows Android phone users to create “just about any app you can imagine” — a move tech observers said could prove to be a game-changer in the increasingly competitive quest for market domination among iPhone, Android and Symbian systems, to name the major players.
Users wanting to try their hands at creating one could ask for access to the tool by registering at App Inventor’s website.
Am not convinced though. From what I can gather, creating an app using the App Inventor is not going to be a straight-forward affair especially if one is without any programming knowledge.
How much is 1,690 Swedish kronor in ringgit? What time is it in Anchorage, Alaska? And by the way, how much is 10 pints in litres, or 3,569.2675 acres in hectares, or 4,590.001 sq miles in sq km?
Here are five little Google tricks you can use to get the answer to these questions in under one minute.
1. Use Google search as currency converter:To convert the Swedish kronor to ringgit, just Google 1,690 Swedish kronor in ringgit and in just seconds, you’ll get the answer. You can key in any amount of kronor.
The same goes to other currencies. However, for certain currencies such as the pesos, you need to be specific whether you mean Mexican pesos or Philippine pesos. By the way, kronor is the plural of krona, the Swedish currency.
2. Use Google search to tell the time in major cities: For instance, you can search for the term time Anchorage or time Brussels and so on, and in no time at all, you’ll get the exact answer without having to crack your head trying to figure out how many hours these cities are behind or ahead of GMT.
3. Convert metric figures to imperial figures and vice-versa: Tell you the truth, I can only memorise one imperial-to-metric conversion, that is the acre to hectare. I can tell you in my sleep that one acre is 0.40469 hectare but that’s all about it. I still need a calculator to convert any area more than one acre
But Google makes it possible to convert metric-to-imperial-to-metric on the fly. For instance, I can just search for the keyword 3,569.2675 acres in hectares to get the answer 1,444.43131 hectares.
4. Use Google to search for information: This, is of course, the easiest part. Just key in any keyword and Google will try to find all the relevant information. If you want to search for a specific keyword however, you need to put quotes before and after they keywords.
For instance, try searching for the phrase I hate Simon Cowell. Now, try searching the same phrase but this time with the quotes “I hate Simon Cowell”. Amazing, isn’t it?
5. Last but not the least, you can also use Google to find the definition of certain words or phrases: For instance, if you want to know the meaning of a syndrome called Munchausen by proxy, just key in define:Munchausen by proxy.
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I HAD THE the feeling there was something wrong with the intermediate double-storey terrace house which the agent showed me a week after we — my family and I — arrived in KL from Singapore in November 2007.
For one thing, even in the guise of the fresh paint, the house had all the tell-tale signs of a prolonged disuse, like an old barn abandoned in the wood.
I reckoned it might have been more than a year — could have been more than a decade for all I know — since the last occupants walked out of the rusty gate, whose paint flecking in the sun like dead skin.
Yet, for another, I could feel that something had remained there, taking refuge in the darkened corners of the premises. I could feel the thing was not alone.
The fresh paint didn’t look inviting; but I could feel the house — the things in the house, whatever they were — I could feel them waving at us, urging us to go in and why not just have a look, because we might like it…
Come in, come in, we won’t hurt you, I could almost hear them whispering. Come in, for we haven’t had blood in more than a year — might have been more than a decade for all we know — and to tell you the truth, quite honestly our dear Jackson man, we have almost forgotten the taste. Come in!Read more…
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I reckoned it might have been more than a year — could have been more than a decade for all I know — since the last occupants walked out of the rusty gate, whose paint flecking in the sun like dead skin.
