World shortage of the letter 'S'

Singapore appears to be suffering a chronic shortage of the Letter 'S'. This is the likely explanation for the complete lack of plurals in this technically english country.

Cafe Blogging

Have been forced to move to the cafe to work as our neighbors directly above our flat are renovating. According to the notice posted in the lift; "there will be hacking". If you want to simulate the experience of hacking, I suggest the following. Get one large concrete block, a powerful hammer drill and a sledgehammer, with your ear pressed close to the block intermittently drill into it at full power and smack it with the hammer. If you are still sane after 3 hours take a break for lunch and then continue.

Unlimited wireless broadband is just $10.50 SGD per month about 3.50 of your U.K money, of course with all the coffee and muffins it starts to get expensive, jittery and full of fat

Upgrade!

Having been paid for the first time in a while, I had to go treat myself at least a little bit. So having noticed that CS2 is very memory hungry, I bought a 1 Gig stick of ram for my powerbook to take it to 1.5 Gig of Ram. Overall it has made the system more responsive especially when switching between photoshop and other apps. Anyone need a stick of 512Mb ram for their laptop? I have one going cheap.

Progressiverx.com redesign

Almost completed my first major freelance project. I redesigned the progressiverx.com website. It sells high quality drugs direct to consumers, and shows up the absurd mark ups that there are on brand name prescription drugs in the United States. It was recently featured in business week magazine, unfortunately before my redesign.

This was an interesting project and taught me the benefit of fully designing the site in photoshop before moving on to coding it in html. This ensured that the client could see and make changes to the design early on and kept me disciplined about finding a way of executing the design in HTML rather than compromising on the design.

Feel free to check it out and if you are in the US buy some drugs.

progressiverx.com/

Happy Birthday Bro

Ben and I
Originally uploaded by jkprime.

Couple of pictures of us back in the day. Seem to be having a pretty good time by the looks of things! Hope you have an awesome birthday, wish I could be around to share it.

See you soon, and have an amazing year.

Railay Bay

DSC 0028
Originally uploaded by jkprime.

Just back from a great trip to Thailand. Stayed in a small place called Raialy Bay, only reachable by boat. Great laid back place with a super cool reggae scene. More photos at my flickr account.

3.2 Km Run with Chris

Type:	Run
Distance:	3.2km
Time:	22.12
Location:	Cavendish Park
AVG HR:	NA

Comments

Easy run wih Chris, still feeling tight calves.

Songkran Festival

DSC 0033
Originally uploaded by jkprime.

The Thai new year, absolutely the biggest most insane water fight I have ever witnessed. Remember its all good fun until someone pours a bucket of ice water on your head whilst doing 60, 2 up on a scooter!

Seeing Around Corners With Dual Photography

One of the most impressive bits of science I have seen in a while, really very cool, though I am a little unsure of the applications. The video is a must watch. Which by the way is distributed as bittorrent file, one of those evil P2P technologies that various industry groups want to kill.

We present a novel photographic technique called dual photography, which exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene. With a video projector providing structured illumination, reciprocity permits us to generate pictures from the viewpoint of the projector, even though no camera was present at that location. The technique is completely image-based, requiring no knowledge of scene geometry or surface properties, and by its nature automatically includes all transport paths, including shadows, interreflections and caustics.

Link

(Via MAKE: Blog.)

4 Km Run

Type:	Run
Distance:	4km
Time:	19:30
Location:	Cavendish Park
AVG HR:	166

Comments

Probably started out too fast, struggled towards the end with heavy legs. Below is the route click for a larger image.

This is really quite cool, if you geek like me

I was reading on the BBC how the Mars Rover opportunity has managed to get stuck in a sand dune. Unfortunately the pictures on the BBC site are always very small even when enlarged and didn't really tell you a great deal about how the rover is actually stuck. So off to NASA JPL site where you can look at the raw images from the rovers camera's seeing what the engineers see. So here is a picture from the Left Front Hazard camera, all the way from a small rover stuck in the sand on mars to your desktop.

and the good news, by simulating the conditions in the lab with a spare rover the team at NASA reckon they can get it unstuck. Now thats a cool job playing with $400 million dollar robots in a sand pit!

Go Here (NASA JPL) for the original hi res images and a whole lot more.

Bluetooth what is it good for,

Absolutely Nothing!

So far my experience of bluetooth has been incredibly disappointing. Bluetooth was probably one of the most hyped technologies of the last 5 years, intending to be a low cost low power cable replacement technology. It unfortunately seems to be out of date before it got going.

Lets start the catalogue of horrors with my headset a Jabra BT250. The best thing that can be said about this is that it sometimes allows you to have a conversation albeit with fairly poor audio quality without having to take your phone out of your pocket, providing that,

The phone is on the same side of your body as the headset

There is not the slightest breeze blowing across the mic

It actually manages to realise the phone is ringing and connect, when it does it has an annoying delay leaving you shouting HELLO to no one in particular

You have time to get it out of your pocket, pick it off the dash, fiddle it into your ear and then push the receive call button.

The planets are in perfect alignment

Next on the list of disasters, the MacMice MouseBT. Completely unusably laggy with my powerbook, overshoots, jumps takes a while to wake up. Went back to my old wired intellimouse. Now replaced by a Logitech mx1000, everything a wireless mouse should be funnily enough not using bluetooth but their own fastRF protocol!

Sony Ericsson K700i has probably one of the better bluetooth implementations and to a very limited extent it works, I can sync my contacts with my powerbook and control itunes provided I am not more than 2m from my laptop and there are no walls or air molecules between us. On the downside when bluetooth is connected the power drain is enormous, draining the battery in under a day rather than a week.

It will likely find its home in the automotive industry who from my experience are huge fans of doing everything in a pointlessly difficult way with technology that will date fast and provides a poor user experience.

So in summary,

Bluetooth
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Bluetooth
What is it good for
Sometimes syncing your phone with your laptop.

Best french toast in Singapore!

Well I haven't tried them all, but the french toast at Cafe Rosso in Holland Village was fantastic. Great breakfast location with outstanding light fluffy scrambled eggs, great coffee and surprisingly generous portions. Not too bad value for Holland V $13.90 for Scrambled eggs on toast with coffee and a juice. Plus you get to read obsessively detailed Japanese style mags from back to front.

Overly Friendly Romanian Food

From a Romanian menu via John's cameraphone, with the comment, "Do you really want to be on first name terms with your dinner"

The Hack Don't Stop

Don't stop playing hacky sack when night falls get battery powered glow in the dark strobbing hacky sacks and all your night time hacky sessions got a whole lot easier. Personally I just use the force.
Link Via TreeHuggger

remix superheroes

Haven't visited heavy.com for a long time, was over there today and came across this great remix of old justice league cartoons. Superman as Green Lanterns office bitch, excellent! This kind of creative re-use of old material is only going to increase as the amount of content published increases and enters the archives. Link

Now that's cool

I have always thought flickr was a fantastic web application, that's why i signed up for a pro account early on. Now this arrived in my inbox this morning!

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it's true! And since you're one of those lovely people, here's a little something to say YOU ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for!

Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Nov 1, 2006.

2. More capacity!

Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!

This won't be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you'll see a note on your home page telling you what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we're in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.

Kind regards,

The Flickreenies.

Now that seems like a really nice thing to do, and genuinely useful too, unlike so many freebies.

Thanks flickr

Webcam

Look right, thats it, the view from my window, or else its not!

Holiday

Off to Chiang Mai for 4 days, might even do some climbing out there! Is anyone else amazed at the number of discount hotel sites on the internet.

Amazing flash animation of hard disk

Fantastic flash from hitachi

(Via Gizmodo.)