I was rummaging around in my drawer, looking my VGA converter and I happened to notice the big collage lying flat and shinny on the side of my desk. Funny thing is, It's already been half a month since my graduation day, yet I still have the habit of sitting down in my room admiring this piece of artwork every weekend. No kidding, it is gorgeous! Those unforgettable memories we have together...damn, I miss it a lot.
It seems to rain too much these days, my evening brisk walk routine is ruined, and the depressing damp air worsen the feeling. Yet, life goes on. Here's two beautiful wallpapers that can cheer you up. Put one of them on your home screen and let the bright smiles of Rain Man and Rain Woman warm your heart in this lovely Sunday morning :)
Cloud is good, especially if you want to access your personal documents on the go through your tablets and smartphones . However, all cloud services, including the famous iCloud, have something in common, they charge you a lot when you exceed the free limit of storage that the company offered, such as Dropbox, which offers 2GB free storage, and iCloud which offers 5GB storage for free. The more storage you expand, the more you need to pay. Besides that, there's another problem, most of us prefer to store our documents in our PC at home, which has a massive physical storage, rather than choosing to store them online. So is there any other alternative to obtain your documents from your home PC when you are elsewhere, far away from your home? Some of you might tried using IM clients such as Windows Messenger, Skype, and Yahoo Messenger. Some even come out with the idea of using TeamViewer to obtain documents from their folders at home. But, those methods are SLOW! And without someone at home, those ways are hardly accessible. Things got even worse when you try to retrieve your video files.
Now we have another great solution, called Polkast. The most significant advantage that we found on Polkast is, it's totally free! It's a different concept from Cloud based storage. It doesn't store anything on the network, so there's no data storage limit. The procedures of setting up the account is extremely simple. On your iOS or Android devices, you just have to download the Polkast App (free). At the same time, connect your laptop or PC to the internet and download for PC. If you are using a Mac, there's also a Mac version for you. After the installation of Polkast on your PC has completed, you can sign up an account through the Polkast software on your PC, by using your email address. The sign up process is very fast, and when it is done, you can now turn on your Polkast app on your tablet or smartphone. Now, key-in the email address and password that you used to register your Polkast account just now. When you have successfully sign in, Polkast will connect automatically connect to your HomeBase (your PC storage). At the meantime, please make sure that you keep your internet connection, PC and the Polkast software on. Through the Polkast app in your iPad, you can instantly access your files stored at your Documents, Music, Picture, and Videos folders of your PC (both personal and public folders). If you want to retrieve any of your documents, just tap on the file and a "Download" and "Share" buttons will appear. You can select "Download" to download the file to your Polkast profile or you can "share" your file through your iMessage for those who use iOS. So far, I still haven't find any way to move the downloaded video files to my Video App in iPad. That's the only flaw I can find till now. The download speed is fast if your device connected to your HomeBase through the same wifi network, but if you are distance away from your home network, using wifi hotspot or other networks, it might be slower, depending on the local connection speed.
We've just came back from Lotus Five Star Cineplex, One Plaza, Kuala Selangor, after watching this gross, bloody and mentally disturbing shark film named "Shark Night." Well, to be honest, it's not as great as we expected, and I'll tell you why I make that claim.
First of all, the movie is successful because it uses a cannibal, shark, as the theme of the movie. Though there are other more gruesome movies out there that managed to scare people's pants off, such as Bikini Girls on Ice, Friday the 13th, The Human Centipede, Paranormal Activity, etc. None is close enough to beat the horror of nature. Movies like "Shark Night", "Piranha", "Sanctum", "Rogue", "Anacondas", they are the one that really freak me out. Those animals that seem to be completely harmless when we see them in the aquariums and zoo, or some of those predators that we only get to see in National Geographic Channel, those are the stuff that are capable of evoke our deepest fear, and plant it right into our mind. Those are unforgettable. Besides the terrifying beasts of nature, something that is even worse is the sickening, psychotic human nature that makes the movie even more atmospheric, giving the tingling sensation to the viewers. Characters in the movie are flawed with selfishness, cowardice, cruelty, greediness, and worst of all, self-centred. They reflected the mean and terrifying world of reality. The movie showed us that after all, the scariest creature in the world is not man eating crocodiles or sharks, but human themselves.
However, returning to my claim just now, this movie is kind of tedious in some point. If you guys have experience watching other horror movies related to animals, maybe you will notice how cliche this movie is. Let's take Piranha for instance, it all started with a nice sunny day, when people are drinking and having fun at the lake, with no sense of danger, and suddenly the creature appeared expectedly, tearing the victim apart and that's it, end of the intro. Same goes to Rogue, where a travel journalist joined a group of tourists on a crocodile watching river tour at the beginning of the story, and when they were about to return to the base, someone spotted a flare coming out of no where, which leaded them to the gigantic man eating ancient crocodile. Yeah, we know about the beast from the poster itself, even before the show, but why use the same old tactic? While we watched the movie, it's noticed that this movie only serves to scare people in the surface level. It's won't create a deep, hard to remove kind of effect on you, not like those great, meaningful nature related horror movies like "Sanctum" and "2012". Those movies are rare, as play with both your fear and your emotion, crashing you both physically and mentally. It created a lasting effect on you, and even if you watch the movie for the second and third time, those feelings will still emerge.
Well, to conclude, this movie is not as deep and powerful as "Sanctum", and not as disgusting and sickening as "Piranha" and "Saw", but still, it's really entertaining if you're just planning to exercise your heart a little bit more and enjoy realistic 3D effect.
Finally, the day has come, the "insanely fun" virtual music instruments app, Apple's GarageBand is now available for iPod Touch and iPhone users! Previously only for iPad users, this creative app takes full advantage of iPad's 9.7" large touch screen and its multi-touch interface to allow users to compose and record their own songs, and they proudly guaranteed that even customers with no music talent and background would be able to enjoy using it. GarageBand's Smart Instruments are specifically designed for that purpose. The preset autoplay feature available in every smart instrument allows you to play like an expert without the need of background knowledge of chords. Instruments included in this app are keyboard, drum, smart keyboard, smart drum, smart bass and smart guitar. There's also handy features like guitar amp, audio recorder and sampler. Now that it is available for the smaller screen iPod Touch and iPhone, it's worth to check out how the Apple engineers make use of the tiny 3.5" touch screen to create wonders.
Amazon, the company which holds one of the largest online bookstore in the world, has again, initiate a big move by offering its customers an e-library service named "Amazon Kindle Owner's Lending Library", granting its Amazon Prime's subscribing Kindle users the opportunity to borrow some of their favourite books from its newly formed online library system. An even greater news is that Amazon's library currently holds around 5,000 titles from a wide variety of genres and publishers, which provide subscribers with more choices to choose from. Amazon is still in the process of pursuing more publishers to join the game, as many are still not convinced by the profitability of this service.
So, what's the catch? Will there be any restriction for this service? Any due date? For now, each user is allowed to download only one book at a time, and there's actually no time limit for the book that you borrow. Not only that it offers unlimited borrowing period, it also allows you to place bookmarks, highlights and even annotations on the book (it wouldn't hurt the book anyway). It's indeed a very thoughtful feature, with one more interesting related feature included, where you will have all your bookmarks, highlights and annotations remained at the exact places, if you ever borrow or purchase the same title again. Isn't that amazing?
When will this service be available internationally? Or perhaps we should say, "will it?" This service is now available only for U.S Amazon Prime members who own Kindle devices, according to Amazon.com, and I guess the rest of us will have to wait and see.
For U.S readers, you can click on this link for more detailed information about "Kindle Owners' Lending Library."
"Great photo editing app by a reputable developer in an unbelievable price," that's exactly the words that should be used to promote this handy application for iOS devices. It's great as it offers essential feature like cropping, and many amazing features like brightness editing, which enables you to adjust your exposure, saturation, tint, contrast, and even black & white. Besides, it also offers sharpness editing options like sketch, soft focus, sharpen and best of all, the noise reduction feature (only available in paid version). Another extra features that are included are special effects and borders, which ease us in beautify our photos with artistic frames and colouring effects. The editing process is simple, where you can adjust the saturation by sliding your finger left or right over the photo (I prefer using thumb). After you've done editing your photo, PS Express offers you the convenience of directly sharing your edited photo to Facebook, TwitPic, and Photoshop.com. Currently, tests have been done on my iPad2 32GB and my partners' iPod Touch 8GB, and PS Express app responds very well on both of them, in both large and small screens. There's no crashes so far, and we hope that this app will continue to be refined and improved for better user experience, and most importantly continue offering this for free.
