Category: General

Am back in Kuching for a holiday this week. First thing I did was to transfer some of my favourite records into MP3 so that I can listen back where I am most of the time. Talk about nostalgia! Just digitized Ce Ce Peniston’s Finally, Janet Jackson’s Go Deep in the Thunder Mix, and now I have Cassa De X in Dubfire’s Deep Vocal Mix. FUnny to see BT and Deep Dish in a record, didn’t know that it was them since I never read the record labels! Got another 30 more records to go before I finish, I’m sure there’s not enough time to do them all.
How is it done? From the record it goes via an Ortofon cartridge (the standard for scratching records in the mid 90s) into a Technics SL1200 turntable (the old grandpa of scratch turntables), into a Gemini PMX15A mixer (apparently Portishead’s DJ uses it), into a Griffin Technologies iMic, into a Powerbook G4 and using Final Vinyl to digitize into WAVE file. Will do the conversion into MP3 back in Kuala Lumpur on the PC since its faster.

Was out of the country for 3 days and when I came back the iPod battery was already flat. Seems that after a few years, the battery fails to retain charge. If its not used for a few weeks the battery will be flat. Not sure where the charges leaks to, but it just disappears.
Luckily my replacement battery arrived from the US last weekend and so its time to upgrade it. I’ll detail the upgrade later but it was almost painless, but while prying the case open I think I must have dislodged one of the button. Now the play button is integrated in the case. Meaning that all I have to do is to squeeze the bottom of the case to get the play/pause button to work! Will have to operate the case again soon when I have more time to repair this… but I thought its quite cool “feature” to have…

Today marks my first time on eBay… I’ve been watching items for a long time already but its the first bid today. Feels good. But you wont know that you have won till the end of the auction.
I was planning to get a new tripod head from Kirk Photo in the US but there’s this guy in Perth that sells a mint condition head (ok, older model, but I dont really care, the only change is the QR platform) and I more or less have the price I’m willing to pay for it. Lets see how it works out. I have the high bid today, but still with 48 hrs more to go.

Downloaded google talk in the office today but the proxy server blocks the port. Back at home, I only have my powerbook with me and for now google talk only works on Windows machines.
However, its suppose to be compatible with Apple’s iChat that comes in all modern OS X. That’s because it uses the open-sourced Jabber protocol for communications. But its bad luck as I find out that only iChat v3.0 that comes with OSX Tiger works with Jabber. All older pre v3 iChats only work with AIM’s protocol.

If you’re on the Mac, you could use a third party IM client such as Proteus though. I already have proteus running with MSN and Yahoo accounts, and I’ll check later today when I’m home to see if it works with my google account on jabber. The server should be set to talk.google.com and on port 5223. Strange, earlier on the internet there was a site that mentions that port 5222 works, but on google’s site its 5223. Maybe they have more than 1 port opened for Talk.

Spent some time tonight looking at the templates on my Movable Type (MT) files. Its messy as hell! First I was getting parsing errors on the new posting, but that’s becuase I’ve modified the templates so much on the Gadgets site that I need to put only the name of the JPG where the text body goes in… and the rest of the text into the “extended body” area. So there’s nothing wrong with the code, just that I forgot the procedures to put in the texts.
I’ve also cleaned up some codes and some orphaned files in the Gadgets page. I’ve got a few ideas on how to evolve it and everyone of them requires a whole afternoon of MT coding… might need to spend some more time to get it to whatever I wanted the end product to be.

At the same time, I’m planning to work on the GPS site. Plan to base it on MT again, but might have to modify the template again. Here’s comes more mess!

@#%@#$ Just realised today that new postings on nangka.org/gadgets are showing “Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING in xxx/index.php on line 60” when you try to access the site. The problem has been documented on this site…
http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=9&t=47759

… but for me, I’ve stored my MT templates on the server and did links to them, so I can’t check what went wrong. I can’t access the FTP server from the office. So till this evening (wife will be watching Desperate Housewives, so I’ll have some time to work on the problem) 50% of the gadgets pages will not be available… I dont believe I didn’t see this earlier! Made a new posting today documenting the accuracy of the Polar S1 pod which I did last weekend.

Usually I dont go for fast food, but a Whopper every 2 months is about the limit I can handle. I don’t usually have a craving for McDonalds, but Burger King is different. For the record its behind the Jin-An Temple. I dont remember the name of the road but its the one parallel to Nanjing Lu. The beef patty here seems to be thinner than usual, but otherwise the taste is more or less the same. 10RMB for a lone Whopper. Roughly double for the meal.

Been waiting for 4 months at least for my new Nikon LS50 (aka Coolscan V) film scanner to arrive at my dealer’s place and just this week the latest news is that its not find it. At least not in this part of the world. So after waiting that long, I’m wondering, should I look in another country?
Just as I was about to do that, I realised there’s a Konica-Minolta Scan Elite 5400 II that’s about the same price in the US compared to the LS50. Unfortunately a check of prices in Singapore, Malaysia and China showed the price in asia to be double what it costs in the US.

Will be doing some hard thinking. I think I might finally forget about the Nikon and start to order the scanner all the way from Adorama or B&H and foot the shipping. Then I’ll just hack the power supply so that it runs on 240V and not that lame 110V they use in US.

Doh! All of a sudden, my 2G iPod batteries only last 2 hours per charge. Just a few weeks ago I swear it runs up to 4 hours (out of the box it runs up to 8 hours per charge).
While searching on the internet for a replacement battery, I came across Newer Tech, that sells user replaceable batteries (at least user replaceable for the 1G & 2G iPods, I think the newer iPods enclosures are more delicate) that runs up to 2x the duration of the original batteries!

I’ll be deciding which capacity to get soon. Maybe even a new iPod but I doubt it. I still like the design of the 1G & 2G iPods better than the new ones.

Shanghai got hit by little Matsa this weekend. Nah, small little typhoon, actually I didn’t look at the satellite map but I bet its just being grazed by the tail of the vortex. Nothing special, nothing like the cat 5 I got to see in Hong Kong last year. (or was that 2 years back?).
The rain would come down hard for an hour or two and then calm, and before you could get out of the building, another round of heavy rain comes again. If you think that its like in Perfect Storm where you’re in the eye of the storm and then the wind change direction and get the same mess again, not here. The clouds seem to be moving in the same direction.

What’s fun to watch are all those stoopid pedestrians that use their umbrellas in a typhoon, or at least in a storm.