Black Orange – Peter Du’s Blog

I was browsing Facebook today and stumble upon a fairly interesting website: MagMyPic. It does one very simple thing for you: using your stylish photo on your computer, it creates a magazine cover for you to show off to your friends. So here is my take:

Well, I love the effect I create from the photo uploaded, but the function of zooming and panning is missing. Moving your photo around until you are satisfied is not that easy to do with the web interface yet. Not talking about customizing the fonts, the wordings as well the removing the watermark at the bottom of the photo.

Yet, I bet you could have loads fun with this as well.

My MacBook Pro + Nokia E61i phone for a while, and some of them I find particularly useful:

1. Home Zone : If you have used “Proximity” before, this is an advanced, more polished version. It creates different zones using wireless base stations, bluetooth device as well as ethernet addresses. Any changes to these three components will cause the application to perform some actions, like running an AppleScript, a shell script, or even a C program. I use this piece of software to lock&unlock my computer in conjunction with BluePhoneElite.
   
2. BluePhoneElite : First of all, this is still a piece of buggy software. Sometimes it crashes internally and quit running, sometimes it could not recover when the bluetooth connection to my phone is disrupted, and sometimes the single one of the important features of the software: the talk-through function is not functioning. That feature allows me to the handsfree profile from the phone and let it connect to my computer as the transceiver in the car. I was only able to manage to get it running now by first disabling all the services in the phone and then enabling them. But still, when my phone reboots, it is frustrating, I have to run through all the sequences again. Nevertheless, I love to use it more and more everyday to process my SMS and calls in the office without even pulling my phone out from my pocket.
   
3. OmniFocus & OmniOutliner: These are the two essential tools for me to manage my projects. They help me clear my thinking and arrange my work in order. OmniFocus has implemented the GTD concept, where I can file different actions I have thought of into an inbox and categorize them accordingly to different projects I have in hand. And I use OmniOutliner to sort out my thinking related to one problem in the project, listing all the aspects and the corresponding actions to those aspects, with all kinds of sub-points to support main argument
4. Afloat : I totally love this application, it is a very concise application that manages most of the window effects in my MacOSX. I do a lot of programming job, and I would love to see my console floating on top of the all the things I run at the background, perhaps with a little transparency to see what is going on at the background.
   

HP Mini Launched in Singapore yesterday. After listening to so much online buzz, I finally got a chance to get my hands on the product. Previously, I played a little bit of Sabrina’s ASUS EEE PC, I thought Mini would weigh equally light, but I was wrong. The machine felt rather sturdy, with the metal casing and acrylic protector, but that was at the cost of the weight. In my hand, it felt almost as heavy as my MacBook Pro. I was contemplating on the idea that putting Mini into my bag and forget about it, and take it out to use whenever I want to, now, my dream was shattered by the sheer weight of this device.

The price for the Mini was out of my expectation as well. $999 for the usual version with Vista Home Basic version, and $1399 maximum for the high-end version with Vista Business, 2G RAM and Bluetooth. And to make things worse, the battery only lasts about 3 hours on a 3 cells and 5.5 hours on a 6 cells, and the keyboard is still plastic. If I have to purchase the device at that price, I would already start thinking of the alternative products like Sony VAIO: 4 times the price, 4 times the battery length with internal DVD burner and a fairly fast CPU.

So much for the dark size of the story, there were quite some bright spots I saw from this laptop.

Designing started last August, initially for kids in the classroom, this laptop is simply kids-resilient: you can pour water on the keyboard (I tried with Soda water), you can try dropping the PC a few times, and you can pretty much sit on it, I guess, if you are not that overweight. HP put another piece of acrylic board in front of the LCD so that you can make sure that the screen is not that easy damaged when you use your ball-pen writing over it.

And it has skins, no longer naked! I saw a lot of skins yesterday. According to HP, these skins are provided by a Singapore vendor. I think these skins will really help in kids’ showing off game. “I’ve gota cooler skins than you, dude! Oh man, this dude has no skin!”

And this Mini has an interesting design for the power connector, a modified Apple connector in my eyes, where the connector could provide you (or rather the computer) with some useful information about the current power adaptor, therefore showing your charging time more accurately. And it has an accelerometer built in to provide damages to the hard disk from moving around.

So in conclusion: I love the form factor of Mini, but the relatively slow speed of the CPU and expensive price tag are killing me. Since HP chose VIA to avoid rapid update from Intel, I have no intention of buying it so soon. And the UMPC war has just started. With Dell, ASUS and HP (and perhaps more) participating, I am just looking forward to the day when I could enjoy a 12 hour long UMPC at below 1000$

There are some images and stored at HPMini.wordpress.com

It has been really a long while since we have seen the first rumors of the upcoming HP UMPC 2133 (now HP Mini) first in February. The product has finally come to the light. Since the invention of OLPC and followed by that EEE PC vs. OLPC case, I was getting more and more interested in the UMPC world.

Deep in my heart, a ultra-portable tablet PC with extraordinary performance, like gaming, CAD design and long battery would be definitely a killer to me. However, due to the difficult of engineering such piece, I think, the dream of mine is still hanging there.

I have seen a few reviews from online, like jkOnTheRun, which contains a video review of a closer look at the device, as well as side by side comparison of two UMPCs, he has high praises for the device, declaring it the best UMPC he has seen so far, but I that’s just because he got the top-end version to review for free. The price tag on this device isn’t cheap at all. The current available model is priced at $600 USD ($888 SGD with GST) and the top version is $750 USD ($1111 SGD with GST). I hope they are not charging more for shipping and marketing in Singapore. Notebook Review has posted a balanced look on the device with more benchmarks. The major hurdle in the machine is the lack of a powerful processor, the VIA C7-M just doesn’t cut it in term of the raw processing speed.

Yet. I think the device has some really nice quality I am looking forward to, I am afraid that the keyboard is not going to be as nice as my MacBook Pro, but recalling my experience using all the tiny keyboards provided by Packard Bell as well as the EEE PC, I am just looking forward to try it out really soon and do a comparison.

I was once dreaming of carrying a laptop like carrying a book in my bag, and I think the dream is near.

PS: I might get hands on experience really soon. So watch out!

Update:

The device is only given to JK as a review item, not free gift, but again, since the price factor comparison is with high-end UMPC, there is nothing we could talk about here. I am going for the launch event tomorrow in Singapore for HP Mini. We’ll see then.