A very busy weekend with extreme late nights and also thanks to Blizzard for release Starcraft II after more than 10 years mean that I have very little time left to blog :)

• Did you know that lasers from laser shows can damage your DSLR's sensor? Check it out here.


• Do you know who Jonas Peterson is? Well, I just absolutely love his work.


• Can you imagine if Tokyo would have been left untouched and there was no people left in the city, what would it turn out to be? Well you can stop imagining and see some of the amazing images here.


• Here is how you can make your own iPhone 4 steadicam. Totally cool!


• Apple released a bundle of new upgrades and products yesterday. This include new iMacs, Mac Pros, a magic trackpad, rechargeable batteries and a 27" monitor. Head over here to find out more.


• Someone found Ansel Adam's negatives which is now valued at a whopping USD$200million. Now I wished that someone was me instead.

Have a great week ahead. For those of you playing Starcraft II, do make sure you keep yourself hydrated and get enough sleep!

Click on the image to find out more!

I really can't believe the weekend just flew by and I won a wooden spoon! Will talk about the wooden spoon another time but it is time for a Wednesday Clicks!

• Still feeling the World Cup Blues? Or is your body clock waking you up at 1.45am in the morning? If that still happens to you, perhaps this gallery of the best photos from the Fifa 2010 world cup can help you sleep.


• If you are a Mac laptop user, check out this nifty free tool called Airport Location. Airport Location is a small menubar app for Snow Leopard laptops and desktops. When you ask it to it records dozens of settings by taking a Snapshot of your computer just the way it is setup at that time. You can have as many Snapshots as you want – one for Travel, one for Office, one for Home, one for watching Movies etc.


• Singapore will be receiving their iPad's this Friday. I wonder when Malaysia will get ours.


• iTunes 9.2.1 is now available, go download it now from Apple


• Where do you stand with this sort of photo manipulation? What is your take on that?


• The Inspire+ Seminar in Kuala Lumpur will be happening this Saturday! Sign up now here. If you do, look out for me as I will be attending it as well :)

Have a great week ahead everyone!

I am currently using a Macbook Pro which I bought a little over 2 years ago. It runs on a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz Intel Processor and has 200Gb of storage space and 2Gb of RAM. Sounds geeky right? Well, this post is meant to be a little bit on the geekier side of things.

Anyway, 2 years a long time and is almost a lifetime for more electronic products but of course I am trying to maintain using my Mac longer and abstain from upgrading to the newer unibody Macs sporting those spanking new Core i5/i7 processors.

I mainly use my laptop to process photo images, that means I would have Photo Mechanic, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop running at the same time with Google Chrome, iTunes and Tweetdeck running in the background. This used to work out fine until I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, Lightroom 1 to 2 and now 3 and from Adobe Photoshop CS3 to Adobe Photoshop CS4. Same goes for the size of my images. It started off with a 10mp camera to a now 21mp camera.

This definitely put a strain on my laptop and I can definitely feel it moving extremely slowly nowadays. Of course the easy route is to just get a new laptop but throwing that kind of money about isn't in any of my current plans. So I went off about to figure out what can I do to improve the speed of my Mac and keep it running longer.

There are two ways of speeding it up of course, the hardware route as well as the software route.

Let's begin with the hardware route.

Upgrading the memory

I upgraded the memory capacity of my laptop from 2Gb of RAM to its maximum which is 4Gb of RAM. This definitely allows me to open more applications simultaneously and Lightroom runs a little bit smoother.

Upgrading the hard disk

This will be my next upgrade, you can choose to upgrade from the stock standard 5400rpm hard disk to a much speedier 7200rpm hard disk or if you have the cash and storage space is not an issue, you can opt for a SSD (Solid State Drive). Personally, I am very much looking forward to this, the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid hard disk. I really can't wait to get ahold of this baby once it reaches Malaysian shores. It is a hybrid hard disk which sports a 4Gb NAND flash on it and still be able to store 500Gb of data. Proven via benchmarks to be much faster than conventional 7200rpm drives, this drive would definitely speed up my laptop. I just hope that by the time it arrives, my laptop can support it. From my sources, Cycom at Lowyat plaza is selling the 500Gb version for RM700 which is quite a lot as the US pricing is only priced at USD$89.00.

Other than these hardware upgrades, I can't really think of other ways to improve my Mac anymore. So the next thing I need to look at is on the software side.

Onyx

Get this application directly from Apple and for free! It is a multifunction utility for Mac OS X Intel. It allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure the hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock and of some of Apple’s own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more.

Mac Keeper

Not just an ordinary app. It is an all-in-one solution for your Mac that combines a set of drive clean-up utilities, standalone tools, and online services. Simple and powerful, this app will make work easier for beginners and give more flexibility to experts.

Why MacKeeper? You will never have to complain about lack of disk space, slow system performance, accidental file loss, privacy breaches, or be confused with any Mac-related questions.

I managed to recover about 20Gb of hard disk space using Mac Keeper. To some of you, 20Gb is not much but to me where I usually have around 5Gb of  free hard disk space, 20Gb represents 10% of my entire storage space.

Download it here.

Remove fonts you never use

If you don't work with plenty of languages, you can always remove languages that you wouldn't use. Trust me, there are a lot of them! You can either move them out of the fonts folder or you can use Mac Keeper or Monolingual to do that job for you.

Stop unused extensions

What is the use of turning on Wifi, Bluetooth, filesharing and internet sharing when you aren't using them? Then open the Extensions Manager control panel via Systems Preferences and turn off the various system extensions that you don't need.

Disable the Widgets Dashboard

I used to think that Widgets are cool but after a while, I totally forgot about it's existence and hardly even check it. Hence why I decided to just kill it off completely. Those little buggers can be a system resource hogger.

• Open up terminal.app located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal


• Copy this, paste it in the terminal and hit enter: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES


• Then enter this: killall Dock


• That’s it! Dashboard widgets are now disabled

Other wise, you can also follow this guide here on how to disable the widgets using your mouse.

Here are some of the ways that I managed to find and source out in order to speed up my old Mac. If you have any tips and tricks, I would definitely want to hear what your solutions were and I would definitely love to try them out as well. Any method especially if it doesn't involve buy a whole new laptop.

There are Wednesdays and there are some Wednesdays. Monday was a zombie day for me as I was up all night watching the world cup. I think everyone in the office did the same as well. Anyway, it is Wednesday today which means that there is time for a Wednesday Clicks.

• Ever tired of the Mac vs PC war going on out there amongst your friends? Well here are some bit of news to add more salt to those war wounds. Three Mac features I want on my next PC and Three PC features I want on my next Mac


• Tokina announced the 16-28mm f/2.8 lens for both Nikon and Canon


• If you think sending smses to oneself was dumb, try sending threatening smses to oneself and get sent to jail.


• Spain won the world cup, boohoo! I hate divers


• A new Star Wars Tower Defense is coming for the iPhone, woohoo!


• Gordon Ramsay, the tough guy from Hell's Kitchen actually cries. Check out this photographer who captured that image!


• Photo Mechanic 4.6.5 is now available. Check out what is new with this version here. Download the file over here.


• Fashion shoot using an iPhone 3Gs? Yup, someone has gone ahead and done just that.

Its so going to be a very very long week ahead!

One of the many questions people ask me is what do I use my iPad for? Well I would love to say I use it to wow my clients and also showcase not just my presentation skills but also some of my photography work as well. And I managed to do just that using a very nifty software called Dropbox.

You see, I have a number of laptops and PCs and a Mac about, each of them having a specific purpose individually. So when I want to share files and work with some files, it is rather cumbersome to keep on using a thumbdrive to transfer the files and after a while I ended up overwriting the wrong versions of documents and this caused a huge nightmare for me.

So when I started looking around for a cloud storage software, I found out about Dropbox. First of all, why I chose Dropbox was because it was free! Yes, absolutely free for 2Gb worth of space. Now if you are thinking of using it for large files then I would suggest another alternative but if it is to sync some of your important documents, 2Gb is more than enough. Of course, if you want more than 2Gb of files then you have to pay for the service.

So how does it work?

Dropbox functions as a specific folder that resides on your PC/Mac which syncs directly with the cloud. It looks exactly like a folder in your PC and you need to do is just treat it as your folder! So you can copy and paste files into it, create sub-folders according to your own liking and drop files into that folder.



Another cool feature about it which I learned about it recently is that Dropbox allows users to share their folders with other people! How cool is that? When I was submitting my photos to be included into The Nut Graph's article (I blogged about it here and view the article here), I worked with Jo-Ann by sharing my photos via Dropbox. This also included me making some changes to the photos as well as include in captions explaining what the photos meant. Now this was extremely helpful for us both as I am sitting here in Cyberjaya while she is all the way in KL.

Now earlier I mentioned that I had a more elaborate setup, well it isn't too complicated as Dropbox makes it so much easier now. So I decided to create this diagram to show you all what I really mean when I use it extensively.



In my work environment, I would also assume that most of our work laptops have certain limitations as to what we can install on our laptops and one of them is iTunes. So thanks to that, I can't really sync my iPad with it and hence I can't really sync files with it. Thanks to Dropbox, that is all in the past. Note that with the iPad, I can't edit files in my Dropbox folder but I can view them. Tip, for best viewing pleasure such as presentations, I would save my presentations as PDF files so that the formatting doesn't run.

Anyway, if you are really interested with Dropbox, you can head over here and sign up for a free 2Gb account now!

After a long day shooting a pre-wedding session at Putrajaya, I headed over to Souled Out at Sri Hartamas to join my mates to watch the 2010 World Cup Finals in South Africa. It was a little more special as there was a Street Party going on at that time and the place was completely packed. Parking was scarce and so were the vuvuzelas.

Frankly the crowd was going wild and everyone seemed to have brought their own vuvuzelas which they happily blew throughout the night which made me sort of deaf. The place was completely packed to the point where there were a bunch of people standing up throughout the night (not counting those on the street of course) that they were blocking the big screens for those who were sitting down. Thank goodness that Souled Out had a number of large LCD TVs broadcasting the match as well.

Anyhow, back to the match.

Paul the Octopus predicted that Spain will win the world cup so I ended up supporting Netherlands as my client is from Netherlands and most of the colleagues were Dutch but most of all, they were the underdogs of the match.

Apparently, everyone else at Souled Out, including my friends, supported Spain.



The match started off quite nicely with Spain dominating most of the possession until the man of the match decided to show his true colours.



And that man was no other than, Howard Webb. The referee of the match and his favourite colour was yellow. By the 28th minute, 5 yellow cards were shown to both sides. At the end of the match, 14 yellow cards were awarded which also resulted in John Heitinga being sent off.

I think that really killed the game, players were a little more cautious and what made me furious were the number of dives from the players of both sides. But nearing the end you can see a little sort of biasness when the dutch side seemed to be on the shorter end.



The players tried to show their frustration and yet, nothing was done or given. But you can't also blame the referees, both teams had incredible chances only to waste it away. The game was then forced to go into extra time where Iniesta managed to score the goal which led Spain to their very first World Cup.



Frankly, I was kinda sad that Holland had to lose this way when Iniesta dove deliberately. This allowed them a free kick which eventually led to the goal. And to rub salt into the wounds, Iniesta scored the winning goal. The match overall was very uneventful mainly due to the lack of goals from both sides.



Technically, Spain deserves the win. I felt they dominated the game a lot more and their passing was very entertaining and executed brilliantly. Their set pieces were just amazing short of Puyol missing a couple of open headers in front of the goal but tactically, it was executed brilliantly!

In the end, as I would always tell my friends who says that football should start copying the Americans and start using instant replays to make decisions, referee error is always part of the match. But now, if instant replays would help reduce the number of dives a player take, I would gladly opt for the use of instant camera replays for the referees. This would at least make the game a lot "cleaner".

When I got back home at 5ish am, I caught my mum dancing away to victory because she had supported Spain all this time. Heh, I wonder if she liked the players more or not.

Yes, Wednesday Clicks has finally made a come-back after absolutely no requests for it over the past 6 months. Nevertheless, I would like to stick to it again and bring up some new links and news from about as well.

Here are some of the latest happenings about!

• If you aren't following me on Twitter, do follow me :)


• There is an upcoming photography conference coming up called Creative Asia. Check it out here. The conference feature big names such as Dane Sanders, Joe McNally, and Manny Librodo so don't miss out on it!


• Wedding and Portrait Photographers Malaysia is up and running with their conference coming in August! Check them out here.


• Images of daily life in Pakistan is featured here. The images are just mind blowing!


• Check out the Nutgraph's latest article on Refugees in Malaysia here.


• In case you want to get your hand on the latest iPhone 4, you can get them here locally! (warning not cheap!)


• If you are a fan of Futurama (check out the new release of Season 6!!), check this out. This guy built the entire city from Futurama using Lego bricks in his free time. Talk about being passionate!

When Grace posted an event "Photographer's Gathering" a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, I was totally not expecting the crowd last night. There was a huge group of photographers, mainly wedding but nonetheless new faces as well as old friends. The mood and the event was totally awesome, we packed out the The Olive Branch to the max, running out of seats.

Here are some of the photos I captured with my iPhone, I had no choice as I had just sent in my gears to the service center for focus calibration. Surprisingly, for a photographer's event, there were only a couple of cameras there and whole load of iPhones in the midst.


The event started with Grace introducing herself and thanking everyone for joining in on the event. It was mainly a way for photographers to meet each other, catch up, mingle around, meet new faces as well as listen to some of Grace's, Patrick's and Zung's experience with WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers International) when they were there last March in Las Vegas.



Grace also brought quite a number of brochures and magazines she collected from the WPPI tradeshows.



Patrick and Zung also joined Grace at the front to share their WPPI experiences with everyone, ranging from the total cost of the trip, the cost of the conference, travel methods, 25 cents chicken wings, Hooters, airlines and definitely lots of funny jokes as well. They were really frank about the trip, what they have learned about the trip and what they brought back from WPPI.

After that, Peter who was the current president of WPPM (Wedding and Portrait Photographers Malaysia) came up to talk about WPPM and explain what WPPM is all about. If you don't know what it is, check out their website and watch out for the upcoming WPPM conference in August.

Patrick later on shared with the group on his experiences with the print competition as well as what he had learned when participating in the competition.



Whilst Patrick was speaking away, me and Jon quietly slipped away to the kitchen to bring out a birthday cake to celebrate both Patrick's and Alex's birthday. Alex at that time hadn't arrived yet but we managed to sing happy birthday and eat some good old cake which surprisingly again, for a room full of photographers, there was plenty of cake left. I think everyone must have been on a diet.

There were plenty of new faces and new people I met and the mamak session after the event was also funny as we heard proposal stories and weird photography poses which gave us all a huge laugh about.

Definitely can't wait for the next one!