All My Reviews

Yep, it’s Chinese New Year eve yesterday and I jailbroke my iPad2, finally. My iPad2 is now happily on iOS5.01 and I am a happy man, maybe but we will see. Jailbreaking has its certain risks but I am still glad that I have done it. To be honest, I install cracked apps once a while but I still end up buying them later. I guess jailbreaking my iPad2 is just like giving freedom to it.

On this occasion, I used the GreenPoison’s Absinthe jailbreak software. It’s not extremely difficult as I just need to update my iPad2 to iOS 5.0.1 and then run the Absinthe on my Mac, and click the Jailbreak button. It only took like 5 minutes to finish jailbreaking and installing Cydia. My first mistake was to have the Passcode turned on. The first two rules are to turn off the Passcode and VPN. I didn’t know it until the Cydia installing process as the jailbreaking process was a success. As usual, I googled for the failure and it was then only I knew that I broke one of the two rules. Anyway, I just re-jailbroke it and it worked.

One frustrating thing that happened on my iPad2 while on jailbreak iOS 4.3.3 was the the iTunes sync failed to work after sometime. That meant that I had to copy out all my IPAs before jailbreaking to iOS 5.0.1. I should have tried to re-jailbreak it at iOS 4.3.3 and test the sync. However, what’s done was done and after jailbreaking to iOS 5.0.1, I downloaded a random app and tried the sync almost immediately. It worked and I guess I will be syncing quite often from now on just to be sure that the sync work and save me the trouble of backing up the IPAs next time.

So far, I have only tested the multi gesture and it is not what I have expected. I thought I could use multi gesture in Safari. However, I would be interested to see how the notifications work, which I haven’t tried yet.

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iPod Nano Clock Faces

I have been using a graphite iPod Nano on a Minimal Tik Tok watchband for almost a week now. As with all the reviews, Minimal Tik Tok is a high quality watchband and as expected, iPod Nano can be clipped to it without much hassle. Well, you might be thinking that of course it will fit as it’s designed for iPod Nano. I beg to differ as in the past, I have found that even some specifically made products have their flaws.

While using iPod Nano as a watch is fun, forgetting about having to press the sleep/wake button in order to see the time, I found out that the Time On Wake doesn’t actually work like how it should be. Let’s start from the beginning. I use iPod Nano first as a watch and then as a music player a few days later. So, for the first couple of days, Time On Wake worked every single time. I could go into each menu and press sleep/wake button twice and it would show me the clock. While looking at the time, I could also change the clock face and also swipe to use the timer functions.

I then copied some songs into iPod Nano via iTunes. That worked as well. However, I soon found out that when I woke up my iPod Nano, it showed clock but a single touch would bring it to Now Playing. I couldn’t change the clock face or use the timer functions. Instead, I had to scroll through the menu and enter through the clock menu. While accessing the clock through the clock menu, the Time On Wake didn’t work anymore and when iPod Nano woke up, it showed Now Playing instead. Hence, in order for iPod Nano to show the Time On Wake, I needed to go to the main menu before putting it to sleep.

It clearly is a bug. The easiest solution is to just connect it to iTunes and it becomes normal again. The problem will come back as soon as you start to play a song.

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Infinity Blade II

Infinity Blade has made users on other platform than iOS envious. It has been claimed to have the best graphics of all mobile gaming platform. I agree but the gameplay is short and lack of full real time combat style. In essence, it’s real time combat but the characters just stay in one position. After an hour of game time, I believe that some of us would be bored as we would have fought all types of enemies in the game. I made myself a mission which is to use and master all weapons available. It took me a couple of days to do so but after than, Infinity Blade sits inside a folder called “Finished Game”.

Infinity Blade II starts where Infinity Blade ends. The graphic doesn’t look any better than Infinity Blade and it’s already outstanding. The battle style is still the same except that there are more weapons to choose from. Certain types of weapons do not work with shield. In other words, you can’t block but dodge and attack. Each of the weapons can also be paired with gems found in the game. Gems when paired with weapons enhance certain ability.

There are now more chests and gold bags in Infinity Blade II. However, most chests requires Small, Medium or Large keys. So far, I find that small keys can be easily obtain. I managed to get a Medium key by beating one of the enemies. Not to worry though, gems and keys can be bought in the store using money earn from winning against the enemies or collecting gold bags.

Infinity Blade II seems to offer a few more alternative paths compared to two in the first Infinity Blade. I have yet to explore all available routes as most paths will only be unlocked after a few rounds.

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Walkie Talkies

I always have this idea of saving phone cost. Wouldn’t it be better to buy a set of walkie-talkie which has a range of a few miles and then we don’t have to regularly rely on mobile phone if we are close enough? True enough, my wife’s sister actually use a set of walkie-talkie to communicate while shopping inside a shopping complex. I think it’s great especially we normally don’t get strong enough mobile phone signal inside a shopping complex. However, never did I know that walkie-talkies can go up to a range of 36 miles.That’s pretty impressive!

By the way, walkie-talkie might just be my kind of language. In some countries, they are called radios. With the use of radios, there are also range of scanners like the uniden bcd396xt which scans for radio frequencies. It works like our in car entertainment unit except that the range of radio frequencies that these scanners scans are not available to our cars’ radios. Different countries have different set of rules about which types of scanners can be used as it might interfere with police activities. For example, criminals might use scanners to escape from the police. Anyway, these scanners are by far more powerful than our home radios. They can store hundreds of channels while as far as I can remember, my car’s radio only stores six channels and has trouble scanning even the most popular radio station.

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I have been searching for a NAS for quite sometime now. NAS is the short form for Network Access Storage. It’s the same as normal external hard drives except you can connect it to the network rather than using USB. The best of it is that literally all devices on the same network can utilise the same drive without the need to unplug and plug. I am a little bit fed up with using my current external drive as I can only use it through USB connection. In my ideal world, I like to connect things wirelessly and not directly to my PC or laptop. True enough, there are already WiFi Storage devices available in the market now. Well, the price of NAS has already put me off and the WiFi storage device is even more expensive than NAS. The other concern that I have is the speed which is without doubt, incomparable to direct USB connection.

Buffalo LinkStation Duo

Buffalo Linkstation Duo

At the moment, I am just trying to weigh between the pros and the cons. I am not in a rush to get myself a NAS until yesterday when I saw a reduce price of Buffalo LinkStation Duo 1TB selling at £64.97. It’s refurbished and re-certified but that price is unbeatable. A normal unit of Buffalo LinkStation Duo will cost twice the price. It’s a bargain but I am still hoping that the price would drop further. As it doesn’t matter to me if I didn’t get one, I think it’s worth the wait.

The Buffalo LinkStation Duo looks really huge on the picture but in reality, it’s tiny. I have read reviews about it being quiet which really increases my desire to own one especially at £64.97. It does Raid 0 and Raid 1 as capacity of the said hard drive is divided into two separate hard drives. In other words, it has two hard drives in it. Apart from using it as a Raid, user can also choose to fully utilise both hard drives.

Finally …

Some Amazon users commented that when they received their Buffalo LinkStation Duo, there were some loose parts in the drive itself. That was the common problem of this drives and it had caused some users to lost their data as well as making the drive unusable. The issues have been rectified and it should not happen again. This bargain Buffalo LinkStation Duo might have been refurbished from the return units but the current price is incredibly attractive. It’s a huge dilemma for me. I would love to have one and I wish I have ordered a unit of Buffalo LinkStation Duo by now but somewhere at the back of my mind is telling me to wait.

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Portable phpMyAdmin

Error message: #2005 – Unknown MySQL server host ‘WP_HOST’ (1)

Flatpress to WordPress

Moving from Flatpress to WordPress can be regarded as quite an easy task. The problem is that there is not much you can do about except exporting all the posts into a SQL format using a tool supplied; FlatPress Wiki. In order to run the SQL file for inserting all my Flatpress posts into my WordPress account, I need a SQL tool. I installed Portable phpMyAdmin initially since it’s one of the recommended SQL tools. However, I got the error message as attached above. I didn’t pursue further and so, I installed Adminer. It worked great until I tried to import my Flatpress posts using its SQL importer. My job involves creating SQL statements, procedures, views and database management. However, the errors that Adminer threw out were totally unknown to me.

Portable phpMyAdmin

I went back to Portable phpMyAdmin and tackled the login screen problem. On the plugin official website, it states the following.

If the user doesn’t know the MySQL credentials, the plugin extracts them straight from wp-config.php. This plugin requires PHP 5+

Obviously, it didn’t work on this occasion and there’s a problem with the WP_Host somewhere in the settings. In order to set things right, I have to FTP to my site and edit the Portable phpMyAdmin config file. I always use Net2FTP for any FTP tasks. From the root, I navigate to wp-content/plugins/portable-phpmyadmin/wp-pma-mod and edit config.inc.php file. Within those lines, there’s online one WP_Host. I renamed it to localhost and voila!

Through Portable phpMyAdmin, the error messages were clearer. I was able to clear all the errors and eventually, import all my Flatpress posts to my new WordPress blog.

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Paradise Island

When I first bought my Android HTC Desire, I was very excited. That was the first time that I bought a newly launched smartphone. I owned quite a few mobile phones before this but they were already in the market for sometime. The build quality is great. In fact, everything about it is great only to be let down by the limited internal memory space and the problem with multi-touch when playing games. Due to these two problems, I am only using my HTC Desire for stuffs like e-mail, social network, document transfer and web browsing and some light gaming which don’t require multi-touch. Paradise Island is one of those games which could keep me playing for quite a while. I call it semi-addictive.

It’s free

Paradise Island is available and free on both Android and iOS. It is like one of those tycoon games where you build a city and collect taxes from the buildings that you have built. Different types of buildings have different taxes collection duration and caps. Some buildings can take up to 20 hours or so before you can collect money from it. It’s hardly challenging but I like to see how it looks once I have access to all the buildings. I like the simplicity.

Collecting money and piastres

On a smaller screen like my HTC Desire’s 3.7″, Paradise Island actually looks quite good. I have it installed on my iPad2 but Paradise Island’s resolution doesn’t look good on it. Furthermore, I have already been playing Paradise Island for months on my HTC Desire before I bought my iPad2. Hence, I decided to stick to my HTC Desire rather than having to rebuild Paradise Island on my iPad2. Paradise Island only takes a few minutes of my time a day as I only enter the game to collect the money. The game itself actually runs in the background so you don’t have to be in the game all the time to collect the money.

Piastres is special money in Paradise Island where you will need to purchase some special buildings. Collecting Piastres is difficult and it’s the way where the developer hopes to earn some money. There are currently three ways to increase Piastres, build a building that will earn you a piastre in about 20 hours, complete some designated tasks or purchase from the developer.

Battery consuming

Sooner or later, I will have to reorganize all my buildings either to make way for new buildings or to make it look better. When Paradise Island is running in the background, it consumes little or not noticeable amount of resources. However, when you are actually in the game, it will use up the resources very quickly.

Finally…

There are practically no cheats in Paradise Island. Several gamers have tried moving forward the time. It did help by collecting the money faster. However, the they switched back to the current time, Paradise Island branded them as cheaters automatically and it will take them 24 hours before they can collect money from each of the buildings that they built. I think I will still keep playing it unless I change my HTC Desire which I probably will resort to playing Paradise Island on my iPad2 instead.

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HP Touchpad

On 18th August 2011, HP announced that it will discontinue it’s mobile devices line. It includes the new HP Touchpad and Palm phones. You would probably know about it already since it was quite a big news in the tech world. But what has captured the interest of gadget lovers is not the decision to discontinue those products and they are probably even less interested in the future of HP tablets and mobile phones. The fire sale is the headline. Everyone is waiting for their local retailers to slash the prices; from £479 to £115 for the 32GB model and from £399 to £89 for the 16GB model. For that price, anyone is interested and that includes me. At first, I doubt that UK would follow the trend when US first announced that there will be some sort of fire sale. But it is true now and as soon as HP Touchpad is selling in fire sale mode, it’s sold out.

Right now, I wish that I should have bought it at full price and then wait for HP to announce a refund of the differences. That’s quite a huge risk to take though. Anyway, the time has passed and I should move on. I have indeed moved on and I found myself checking Argos stock on HP Touchpad every now and then. I am not obsessed with HP Touchpad since I already have an iPad2. The deal is just too good to pass.

I am thinking, if I had a HP Touchpad right now, what will I do with it.

Digital Photo Frame and Clock

This is a nice though. A 9.7-inch digital photo frame plus clock would be great. I have been dying to get myself one but most of the digital photo frame plus clocks in the market rely on main power supply. HP Touchpad could easily hold its charge at least 7 hours. Well, there will be a few with its own battery but they certainly can’t do more than HP Touchpad.

Android

Everything is possible nowadays. Getting HP Touchpad to run on Android is not rocket science. Imagine the possibilities that will be opened up by having Android on board on a HP Touchpad? Endless! A good quality 9.7-inch 16GB Android tablet priced at £89 is almost impossible to get.

Use it as it is

I am a gadget lover but I am not an extensive user of gadgets. Take iPad2 for example, I only use it for games, e-mails and internet. I did try to use it as a secondary screen using Air Display but it still needs some improvements in terms of speed and usability. Accessing Twitter, Facebook and e-mails is quick and easy. I believe HP Touchpad could do the same too.

Finally…

Until I get my hands on one, it is still quite a mystery device to me. To be honest, I am most likely to retain WebOS rather than install Android or any other possible tablet OS that will be compatible or made compatible with HP Touchpad. WebOS will be obsolete if no one take up the challenge to revive it from HP. I kind of like the idea of owning it since HP Touchpad is probably the first and the last tablet to run WebOS.

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110mb Web Hosting Service

I finally had enough! In the last couple of days, I have theoretically left 110mb web hosting service. One of my blogs, My Ideas 4 You is still on 110mb but I have backup all the data and I can have it running on my new web hosting in just a few clicks away. Yes, it feels great though I am moving away from free web hosting to paid web hosting. However, I don’t think I will regret it.

In the beginning

Web space is getting cheap. 110mb got its name because it was offering 110mb free to anyone who sign up. By the time I became 110mb customer, it was already offering 5GB free web space. Great deal, I thought to myself! I never use it all, not even near 110mb. Besides that, it offered 100GB bandwidth and many 1-click application. However, mySQL doesn’t come free, so, I have to choose a blogging platform other than the popular WordPress. Flatpress was what I found. Everything was great about Flatpress. It’s lightweight, easy to manage and tons of plugins. Everything was great with 110mb too. Practically no downtime and it was quick when transferring data.

Charges

My Ideas 4 You started to grow and I realised that email is important. Comments were pouring in as well, hence, I needed to know whenever someone left a comment. But in order to get email to work, I have to pay for the service. It’s only an one-off payment, so I didn’t really mind. Payment was quick and within 12 hours, I received a confirmation saying that the email was good to go.

Later on

Soon enough, I decided to start up another blog, All My Reviews, which is this blog. Well, same but different. This blog is currently hosted under my new web hosting service. All the previous posts are still on 110mb but I am not sure whether I will be able to see them again. I will explain that later on. On 110mb term, My Ideas 4 You and All My Reviews are on different servers. That didn’t bother me as the servers are still managed by 110mb and at that time, I still thought they offered the best free web hosting service. I planned on a third blog but I hardly did anything to it.

Troubles

Older servers tend to be more stable from what I have gather from the support forum. A year or two after I became 110mb customer, my blogs started experiencing downtime. At first, things were solved easily. Then, the downtime became quite regular especially weekends. As I said, older servers tend to be more stable and thus, All My Reviews is the less stable one. In my opinion, a not-so-regular-downtime-period is still acceptable for me since 110mb is offering free web hosting service. Soon, my paid email service is unstable. I don’t get notifications on comments that have been posted on my blogs. I logged several support calls but I receive no replies. Once in a blue moon, I do get a few notifications but that’s not good enough.

At the moment, my old All My Reviews site is down. And it has been down for about three months now. Seems like everyone has forgot about that server. Everything about 110mb is just so wrong at the moment. The forum is not accessible now and I can’t even login to my blogs control panel other than FTP.

Finally…

I can’t imagine what will happen if I paid for 110mb premium hosting package. Anyway, I am glad that I am out of 110mb. As much as I liked them in the past, they just can’t keep up. I have to start all over again for All My Reviews blog but that doesn’t matter. I can only hope that my new web hosting service lives up to its reputation.

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