Movie star

At Soho Square in the beautiful sun.  The downside of fixing a 50mm on a non-full-frame is obvious here: you really need to step back. But for the price, no complaints.

We also bumped into two photographers who asked us to be their portrait subjects. One was the flash man, holding a stand-alone flash which was fired via radio frequency (i.e. no cords required). Very interesting, I hadn't seen these gadgets before.

f2.0

Testing my new 50mm f1.8 II on not very healthy leaves at Changi Airport.  I wanted the cheapest possible lens for days I don't feel geeky enough to lug a big bag.  What a world of difference from the 17-55! (130g vs 645g)

Elegance

Elegance is when Skype knows how to pause iTunes when you start making a call.

And when it is done, fades the music back in.



P.S. The radio station »Deezer does this too.
(And is one up Skype for its spotless streaming, even in erratic Chinese broadband connections).

Bad tech luck

October is the month of bad tech luck.
(It is also the reason why I haven't had much of an online existence recently...)

First, poor Macbook (4 month old) started having the sudden infant death syndrome - it would suddenly flick itself off and would do it repeatedly. To prevent permanent death, I sent it in for maintenance just before I left for Singapore. It is quite timely too since I had been wanting to send it in to change the polycarbonate surface of the Macbook (the earlier batches used a material which discoloured too easily - perils of being an early adopter).

Now, if there is any silver lining to be seen about having to send your laptop in for maintenance, it is that the Mac customer support folks - both in Singapore and in China - are so polite and undefensive. They recognize a problem when it happens and don't just try to talk around the issue or shift blame. I would be hardpressed to name another manufacturer who would be willing to change the plastic surface of a product due to cosmetics reasons.

In any case, the sudden infant death syndrome has since been diagnosed as an immune over-reaction to the heat, so hopefully Macbook will get to come home soon once the replacement component is in stock.

In the meantime, I have been relying on the Dell laptop at work, which is such a clunky industrial piece of machine, but which works. I call it The Farmer (a la The Farmer in the Dell). I like Macbook very much, but have to concede that there are still those few things (China internet banking software and the wonderful Picasa and Mindful Clock programs) which depends on Windows and hence, The Farmer.

To Dell's credit, their newer lines of laptops are less farmerish now, due in part to their Mac-like glossy, elongated screens. The other parts of the hardware, I am not sure. The touchpad buttons were too soft for my liking when I tried Ms Q's, and I sure hope they updated their bluetooth connectivity. I spent an entire Saturday night trying to configure the bluetooth on The Farmer to work with my headset, only to find out after intensive googling that Windows SP2 does not support bluetooth headsets and manufacturers have to provide their own stack update. Dell duly did this by copying from the Toshiba stack, but which specifically didn't provide for the Latitude D610 - the exact model of The Farmer.

In short, I can't skype with a bluetooth headset on The Farmer, which made me miss Macbook even more.

But I thought, never mind, maybe I can still blog with The Farmer. I did manage to set up my wireless again after it was knocked out. But voila, exactly on this Sunday that I brought The Farmer home, the Chinese govt put out their censorship tentacles - the Blogger site was blocked.

Grr grr grr.

Someone tell me where I can buy a good-luck tech charm, will ya?

1st post from my new Macbook

This is going to be short since it is way past the bedtime of a flu victim, but talljoanne is now the proud owner of a Macbook!

This being my 1st post from a Macbook, of course I took advantage of a Dashboard widget which allows me to blog straight from an F12 key - with no browser required. This could turn out to be a very important function when I do get to Shanghai (fingers crossed very hard - by next month) because I have just found out that China bans blogspot websites. Although I read that they do not ban blogger.com per se, it still means I can't preview my site to iron out template problems. I guess if Beethoven can compose without hearing, then I'll just have to blog without previewing.

Coming back to my Macbook, so far so good - I am still feeling my way around, esp. the keyboard and its shortcuts. But I love the aesthetics and the clean architecture of the OS. Can you imagine - there is no such thing as uninstall of programs in Mac? Just drag it to trash or a simple command-delete! But I must admit that I am also sorely feeling the loss of Picasa and an office suite (OpenOffice which I just installed had a glitch but it's too late to troubleshoot). Maybe Mac lover Mr T will come to my rescue when he comes back from his work trip.

Incidentally, I must commend the Safari browser for rendering Chinese fonts so beautifully. And the idea of a progress meter in the address bar is very neat indeed. Unfortunately, Firefox's tabs is the single largest killer app for me, so until Safari has tabs, I will be sticking to Firefox...

Time for both woman and the machine to rest. Zzz.

Have you discovered Mozilla extensions?

Okay, I guess the first question should be: Have you discovered Mozilla Firefox? If the people around me or my site counter stats are anything to go by, I guess not :( Which is unfortunate, because I seriously have not looked back since switching to Firefox. (It first came installed on my work laptop.)

If you haven't experienced the joys of »tabbed browsing yet, please do. It is the single biggest reason to switch. And here is the deal - you can customize Firefox with »Firefox extensions to make surfing exactly the way you want it. Want a translate function in your right-click? A really compact menu bar so that you can put your bookmark toolbar in the same row as your menu bar? A nifty search bar that combines Google, Google Images, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, WebMd, IMDB, Lonely Planet etc.. all in a single dropdown menu? (This is the excellent Firefox search bar in the latest version. I used to use the google toolbar but discovered there was no more need for it especially since I discovered the Search WP extension which meant I didn't to have to lose the highlighting function in the google toolbar.)

I accidentally came across »Download.com's favourite extensions yesterday, hence the motivation to post my favourite extensions too...

Have I won you over from IE yet? :)

MacWannabe

As some of you may have heard or seen, I was busy the past week being a tech geek. Part of it was fixing my niece's wormed laptop, but mainly, it was an obsession with Mac-ing my computer to give it that impressive clean look. Voila!

If you crave more aesthetics in a workspace that you face most of your waking hours, here are the programs that can make it happen:

• Objectdock - Freeware. Let the kiddy Windows taskbar rest forever in peace.
• StyleXP | UXtheme.dll hack - Freeware | Shareware. Choose the Panther theme for the menu style in StyleXP. However, note that StyleXP is a shareware and expires after 30 days, leaving you with the original, excruciating, Windows menus. But don't worry and don't feel like rushing out to buy a Mac when that happen :) You can use the Uxtheme.dll hack freeware from Neowin available here. If that doesn't work, the manual hack (which is actually not difficult) is succintly detailed here at Neowin.net. This is a long-term solution. (You can also skip installing the StyleXP step altogether and depend on the Uxtheme.dll hack, in which case you just have to google for your own Panther theme and install.)
  
• Yahoo Widget Engine - Freeware. For those beautiful widgets on the desktop. Previously known as Konfabulator, it has been bought over by Yahoo. Nothing has changed much from the user point of view.
  
• Lucida Grande font - do away with the boring Windows default San Serif!
• Icon Tweaker - Freeware. I used to use IconPackager, but again, that expires, so IconTweaker is definitely a more long-term solution.
  
• ObjectBar - The main reason to have this bar found at the top of a Mac screen is really for the system tray. But if you are like me and prefer not to overload your RAM, it is actually possible to make do without it.

For a step-by-step guide and more hardcore emulating, try:

http://features.engadget.com/entry/8828351836181248/ http://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?c=1&AID=66871