Thursday, July 21, 2011

Unleash the Lion

Mac OS X Lion

Last night as I was trying to fight the after effects of jet lag (thanks to my 28-hour door to door journey from Chicago to KL), I saw that Steve Jobs has indeed released Lion and it was available in it's new form which was a downloadable update via the App Store. I am for one, am glad that the update came in the form of the App Store and it was easily downloadable. All I needed to do was fire up my Unifi connection and then download the package.

Now this was a huge difference from my experience about two weeks back when my home PC decided to die on me after a good 6 years (yes, the motherboard failed on me) and I decided to rebuild a whole new PC. Together with that set up, I bought a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and the whole process of installing everything again took a good long day. What I didn't mention was that the guy at Compu-Zone was trying to figure out why the DVD writer driver couldn't be detected. After troubleshooting almost every component in the PC, the fault laid with the power supply.

What I am trying to point out is that, even with my old Macbook Pro 2008 model, the whole installation was fast and easy. It took me around 20-30 minutes to download Lion, and another 20 minutes to install it over my existing Snow Leopard installation. At the end of the day, I was very impressed and more so impressed by the price tag. USD$29,90 for the entire Operating System. I just paid like RM400 for my copy of Windows 7 and yet Apple has done it again with it's low price.

By the time the installation was completed, I managed to fiddle around with the new OS and the two most impressive thing that I enjoyed was Launchpad and Mission Control. Definitely a good way or sorting out my Apps, previously I would always curse trying to find out apps which I installed but totally forgotten about. Unfortunately for me as well, I can't utilize multi gestures due to the fact that my Macbook Pro was made in the dinosaur ages hence that is one thing I have yet to experience.

Perhaps a new Macbook Air might do the trick but as much as I would love one of those, I really can't justify the need for one.

 

 

 

 
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Thursday, July 7, 2011

Get The Fruit Outta Here!

About 10 years ago, I graduated from college and I was completely blessed that I managed to get into a twinning program which brought me to the University of Sheffield for 3 wonderful years. During one of those 4 years which I spent trying to figure out electronics engineering, I took a summer vacation to visit BK in Melbourne and Sydney. It was during that trip that I actually discovered this store called Boost. After forking out a huge AUS$5 or maybe it costs more, I was wondering why in the world would someone pay so much for a cup of juice.

Fast forward it 8 years and here I am together with a bunch of food bloggers at a small 400 sq feet, just at the edge of Food Republic in Pavillion. Yes, I was at a small gathering together with the owners of Boost Juice Malaysia, Nick and Soraya. Now, you would be wondering how in the world did I end up there. It definitely does sound a little random especially for a guy who has been blogging about photography and more recently a little bit more about Volkswagen and cars.

I shall leave that answer till the end of this post.



So what has this got to do about the title of this post as well as what in the world do I do with fruits? I will come back to that in a bit.



So here we are, about 10 of us, squeezed into an already packed location called Pavillion at the Boost stall located at the lower ground section. There were plenty of food bloggers who knew each other from the food blogging community I guess, of course I recognized a couple of them such as Horng and Suanie. If I am not mistaken, I met them the last time I attended a ShutterAsia gathering.



At this time we were given the history of how Boost started up here especially with Nick and Soraya both being ex-Accenturians (a name I guess to coin Accenture alumni). At the same time, we were of course offered plenty of samples while we were having a chat.



Samples such as their wonderful muesli bars, gym junkie, mango magic, blueberry blast and the watermelon lychee crush, were served to us. There are two distinct differences between some of the juices available, one of them which had a heavier taste was those that has yoghurt blended in them (yoghurt imported from Australia!) and a very nice revitalizing drink would be the crushes.



Best of all, I really do enjoy drinking Boost juices whenever I have the change because I know that they have absolutely zero added sugar and I can have them as a meal replacement. I guess this is my healthy side trying to lose a bit of weight here and there. I am definitely contemplating seeing if I can go on a Boost diet and see how much weight I can lose.



So, what is "Get The Fruit Outta Here"?



It is their current competition after "Whats your name game" and it is very simple. Just buy a Boost juice from any of their stalls and you will receive a Boost Boarding pass. This Boarding pass will provide you with an instant win prize (you need to scratch a part off to redeem it) and it also puts you in the running to win more prizes such as flights to Australia, London and Paris!

You can check out more about the competition here as well as submit your boarding pass entries. Hope you all get a chance to win some amazing prizes :)

Remember to do it quick as the competition will end soon!

At the end of the session, I managed to capture a group photo of everyone who attended the session.



And no, we didn't eat yong tau foo for dinner.

p.s. See if you can catch anyone familiar in that photo :)
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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Ron95 versus Ron97

Now ever since our wonderful government has decided to remove any sort of subsidies for our petrol, I have resorted to using Ron95 but as most other people, I get the question (sometimes) on what is the difference between the two fuels.

Personally on my car, I can definitely feel the difference in terms of power after swapping from Ron97 to Ron95. This is for the VW Golf but when I was driving my old FD1 Civic, I really couldn't tell any difference.

Perhaps this video could help us all understand the difference a little bit more.







Even with the lack of power, I still choose Ron95 mainly because of the cost of fuel now. Heck, the 10sen reduction still proves that Ron97 is rather expensive especially for people who drive far distances on a daily basis.

But heck, I am definitely tempted to try out a couple of tanks of Ron97 and bring the car for a dyno test to see the difference.

Since we are also checking out some YouTube videos, check this out. Happened during the Sepang GT last weekend :)





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Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Saving Cash with iMessage

Saw this bit of news on MacRumors, ever since the WWDC keynote event where Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5 and others were announced by good old Steve Jobs, one of the new features of iOS 5 did manage to catch my eye.

Image source - MacRumours

One of these new features within iOS is iMessage which is Apple's own messaging service for it's own devices. Built in to messages itself, what iOS 5 now will do is to check if the recipient of your message is using an iOS device and then sends it via iMessage instead of the usual SMS channel.

I guess this is Apple's official answer to RIM's Blackberry messenger, WhatsApp and other messaging service. I do hope that there are other features such as group chats and all but as much as I like this to work, we all still have friends who don't use iOS and rely on Blackberries and Android.

What it does allow us to do is to save a bit of cash instead of sending SMS out, and I really do like it's transparency feature where you only need to access messages instead of launching a separate app such as WhatsApp.

Can't wait for these new goodies to be available especially since I promised munz that I would get her an iPhone 5 and I definitely do need to upgrade my current MacbookPro. So far rumours have it is that the next model will sport a whole new casing design. Will probably wait for that. Also another feature which I am really looking forward to, is syncing iOS devices via Wi-fi.

Credit - MacRumors
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