Rain, Rain, Cool Day on Earth

It's been continuously raining at about the same rate (slightly heavier than a drizzle, but not quite cats and dogs... watcha call it?) most of the day. Enough to get you soaked if you stand outside for a couple of minutes. Weather's been obviously cool... According to my phone's weather app, it's 25ºC out there. The kind of temperature I set the air-conditioner to on a hot day.

Is it going to be a cool Chinese New Year? Is the Rabbit going to bring the cool to cover off years of fire? While we are enjoying a sleepy and cooling Sunday, I hope this rain is not causing any flooding elsewhere.

Angry Birds TV?

I'm actually reading up a Nikon D3100 review in our local Lowyat.NET forum but got sidetrack a little when I came across a tweet from @CNNshowbiz reporting that Angry Birds are not only stopping at being a PC game (its latest platform after iPhone, Maemo, Android, iPad and whatever other mobile platforms). It is going to be a very angry animated series, too! As much as I like the game (I'm stuck at Level 3-5, by the way), I couldn't imagine it being a full 30-minute cartoon (including plenty of angry commercials), though. Maybe as shorts like those Pixar ones before their feature film but 30 minutes every week? Hmmm...

On a side note, I'm surprised that the Angry Birds plush toys appear to be more popular than the very cute Android plush toy that I love but could not find. Hmph!

Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides Trailer

It is difficult not to love Captain Jack Sparrow and I'm just glad that he's coming to the big screen again in May. However, the trailer below doesn't look too interesting, though... but looks can be deceiving. :D

The Ingenious Fuzzy Wuzzy Camera Case

Who would have thought that Fuzzy Wuzzy was a camera case!

Fuzzy Wuzzy (wow, what a name) holds certain compact cameras:

And Fuzzy Wuzzy may be tasked with holding other stuff such as crayons (but so does any other camera pouches, I guess :P)!

This is all beginning to be something like an advertisement for Photojojo. Nope, this isn't. I'm just somehow fascinated by Fuzzy Wuzzy. ;)

Is life anything like a box of Famous Amos cookies?

Had a very scary encounter with my newly purchased box of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies today. Upon opening it and transferring the contents into an air-tight container for storage and occasional invasion, the bottom part of the contents were in smithereens! Ended up eating all of 'em with a spoon.

The HTC Android Phone Battery That Saved The Day

There are many movies where miracles happen in such a way that the hero gets shot but didn't die because the bullet hit a coin or a medallion or something in his pocket. Not in real life we don't hear much of those but today's different.

Two men were kicked out of a nightclub in Atlanta so they opened fire at the club but one of it strayed and hit a valet. The bullet went through the valet's jacket and through the HTC phone (nope, no details of what model it is), then stopped at the battery, a very red battery:

via Android Community.

The Idiot with a Tripod and Simon's Cat

I'm never a person that shoots video because I totally lack composition skills. The only video I had shot so far and posted to YouTube was this one - I was amused with the amount of birds flying around. This was taken with my ancient Canon A400 digital camera. So I never had much of a thing about digital cameras' ability to take videos nor digital video cameras. Needless to say, the recent crop of DSLRs that could video, 1080p or not, do not impress me.

However, after watching this video taken with a Canon 7D professional DSLR, I became quite impressed with the video capabilities of these single lens reflex digital cameras. Here's the video:

And here are comments from the guy that did it.

After the video, I noticed a totally unrelated featured video on YouTube that had over 20 million views. Without hesitating, I clicked on it:

Hmmm... interesting. I have subscribed to the channel. For those lucky iPhone or iPod or iPad owners, Simon's Cat has its own app for you.

The First Blog Post of a New Decade: The Red Slippers, The Zombie and The Android Bug

First off, let me wish everyone a Happy New Year and an all new decade. Lets all start fresh, be good and most importantly, be HAPPY! Here's a photo with plenty of red tint which normally represents prosperity and everything good:

Up next, let me introduce this very cool zombie to you:

Designed using the Plants vs. Zombies in-game avatar designer. The official name for a zombie avatar is Zombatar. Cool. As cool as the game. Highly addictive of the tower defense kind of thing. Not quite TD but that's what it reminds me of.

And to end this post, I would like to warn fellow Android users of a bug that Engadget brought up in their post. Incidentally, I wouldn't have read about this had it not for the Engadget Android app that I just installed a few hours ago. There exists this Android messaging bug where SMSes might be mistakenly sent to someone else other than the intended one.

I had a first hand experience a few weeks ago. Oh no! Looking back into the past are we? Anyways, earlier on that day I sent out a group SMS to inform of a meeting schedule. After that, I declined a friend's invitation to go to Pulau Ketam for a photography session. I had set my phone to inform me when a SMS is delivered. To my amusement, I received multiple replies telling me that my SMS to my friend was delivered. Some time passed when one of the people whom I had sent an SMS about the meeting schedule called and asked me what's this meeting at Pulau Ketam!

Gosh! Only then I realised that I might have made a mistake! Panic stricken, I went to check but in the default message app indicated that the recipient was my friend! At that time, I thought it might be a bug with the HTC Desire but only now, after reading Engadget's post did I realise it was actually an Android bug. Gasp! You have been warned!

Happy New Year 2011!

Just as 2010 comes to an end in a few more minutes, I would like to share with you my favourite photo of the whole year, taken at Hong Kong Disneyland during a company trip. I'm not good with photographing people during their candid moments but somehow, while waiting for the parade to start and swinging my camera around I caught this interesting moment.

Hands down my favourite photo of 2010!

The Bali Ice Incident

The drink bali ice (or bali ping in Cantonese), folks, not the Bali in Indonesia with snow due to global climate change... yet. Had lunch just now and iced bali was my drink. The price - RM1.50. It surprised me a little considering a drink of iced bali was only RM1 in the southern region of Malaysia while here in the central region, outskirts of the heart of the capital the price is an extra 50%!

Factoring in rental, inflation and slightly higher standard of living, is the 50% higher price tag justifiable? This wouldn't have crossed my mind had I not been traveling to the south so often lately. Hmmm... wonder how much will iced bali be as we approach Chinese New Year. RM1.60? RM1.70? RM2? :O

All in the day of Boxing

Watched a rather effects laden Tron Legacy in 3D with my buds earlier today, discovered good and evil Gingerbread Men at Coffee Bean Mid Valley and then somehow, went on to be busy bodies at a what-appeared-to-be-partially-opened-SStwo Mall. All these on Boxing Day.

SStwo Mall Front Facade

Book fair at SStwo Mall

Setting Custom Ringtones for Android Phones

Recently, I was playing a lot of Angry Birds and found that the theme is rather catchy and so I was looking for the theme to download and set as my HTC Desire's ringtone. The search was easy enough with Google. The first search result was perfect - AngryBirdsNest.com. iPhone users can find their .m4r version there, too. Downloading was also easy.

Setting the .mp3 as ringtone was not as simple. My initial thought was to just browse to the file, press and hold and there should be a pop-up with the option to set the .mp3 as default ringtone but nope, not as easy as that. Another search and the solution came up. The site I found out from is here though the version of Android it used as illustration was probably an older version that I've never used before (I've only used 2.1 and 2.2 before).

All that needs to be done is to create a Ringtones folder in the SD card's root directory and move the .mp3 file to it followed by going to Settings > Sound > Phone Ringtone and the ringtone should appear there. To create a folder, a third party file browser app is required but these are easily available for free from Android Market. The one I am using is called ES File Explorer. Similarly, do the same for customised Notifications and Alarms sounds.

Attempted Simulated HDR II

Folks, here is another attempt at simulated HDR taken with my HTD Desire with the Camera360 app. Kinda scary me thinks. Further enhanced the colour by increasing contrast with the Adope Photoshop Express app.

Previously less scary, less exaggerated simulated HRD here.

Dual Core Goes to Smartphones in 2011

Just as desktops and laptops go quad core, it is time for smartphones to inherit dual core processors. LG was the first to announce dual core Tegra 2 chips for their Optimus something line. Being Korean, Samsung followed suit with announcements for dual core Cortex powered smartphones called Orion. Both are clocked at 1GHz.

Nokia seems to also have plans for dual core phones targetted in the last quarter of 2011 and more interestingly, to offer cameras that will have optical zoom! Finally!

I guess with my HTC Desire, I could wait till quad core smartphones with interchangeable lens come out in a few years...

via CNET Asia Mobile Tech newsletter.

Gingerbread, the Android 2.3

The next version of the Android OS is called Gingerbread and here's the official introductory video:

In a nutshell, 2.3 focuses on improvements in games development, multimedia, speed and power management. Besides that, there is support for this thing called near field communication where one can get more information of something that the device is near to. Hmmm... all these should appear first in the Google-Samsung phone Nexus S.

via Android Tapp.