honest reflections of a blunt

I got myself a new blog

2009-08-20T00:40:00.003+08:00

Yes, finally or not. It's at WordPress - ykykyk.wordpress.com. Reason after the jump.

My most meaningful portable music player.

2009-07-06T19:36:00.004+08:00

Listening to music on the train today, I suddenly thought about an article by Woz on Gizmodo which he talked about the most meaningful gadgets in his life, one of which was the transistor radio, which gave him portable music that he could listen to all night long when he slept.

Even though it was superseded by the Walkman and iPod, the transistor radio was the one that gave him the real change in his life.

Then I thought to myself, which was mine?

I started listening to CDs when I was young, on my parents' huge roundish boom box. I've never bothered with transistor radios as a child, the reception was too bad. That's why I've always wanted a Discman, but my parents would never buy me one.

One day my dad gave in and got me a.. Walkman. Yes, when CDs were prolific in the market, he got me a walkman. Pathetic as hell, I would bug my mom to buy me empty tapes from the supermarket just so I could record my CDs on them to listen on the go, and even so she wouldn't always buy them for me. I had like 3 or 4 tapes my whole life and I had to reuse them over and over again. Not only that, it was tedious as hell to dub, nearly impossible to change tracks and I could only listen to the same few songs over and over. I grew to hate the music I had.

I finally got a Discman, but that was not what I wanted. I only could buy 1 CD a year. CD-R drives were expensive. I got a portable FM tuner too. Trashy pop on 987. Then an MD player. Glorified Walkman. I was never satisfied with my portable music.

Then, just after I finished secondary school, Apple dropped the big A-bomb. The first fucking iPod. 4GB of space in the size of a deck of cards. And not to mention it was beautiful. I wanted it so fucking badly the only thing that stopped me was the price. It sold for about $950 when it first launched. That was 1 month of my salary when I was working part time. And, it needed a Mac, or the gay Musicmatch Jukebox for windows. I was so sad. I passed.

A while later, I went to poly. I was elated. Having a laptop was compulsory. Finally, a fully portable music player with a shit load of space! I could even choose what software to use! Who the heck needs an iPod? Then reality hit. My so-called 'MP3 Player' only had 1 hour of battery life. Realistically it would only run for about 30 minutes. Not to mention in year 1, power points were as scarce as bikini babes in a desert. So I took 30 minutes to haul my ass to school, and then I couldn't use my laptop anymore until I found a power point. Not to mention it felt like I was carrying a volcano on my back. That did not last long.

About a year and 2 generations of iPods later, an old friend of mine struck me a deal. The first gen iPod. The one I fell in love with but had no damn money to buy. For $160. OMFG BUY. It was scratched as hell, and the battery lasted for no more than 2 minutes. I bought it anyway. My friend told me, "there is still warranty, I think you can still send it in." I was so fucking glad I listened to him. I sent it in to Apple, and 2 weeks later, I got a brand, spanking new 1st gen iPod. BRAND NEW. That's when it all started. Albums, songs, playlists, genres, swapped in and out at any time I wanted, in no time at all, over Firewire. It changed my life. It was exactly the way I wanted to listen to music. The battery lasted forever. And on top of that, it fit nicely in my pocket. For me, this was the most meaningful gadget in my life, EVER.

Needless to say, 7 years and 2 iPods later, I was on the train, today, still listening to an iPod, even though it's just a program, while on MSN with my girlfriend. Much has advanced over the years - colour, video playback, internet capability.. But I'm still listening to music the same way I was 7 years ago on my 1st iPod, while being able to do so much more. If not for the very first iPod, all these would have not been.

Looks like I might just skip the GS..

2009-06-22T22:23:00.002+08:00

Why? Cos it's pointless, once I can afford one, half a year later a better one is going to come out. I might as well wait till then. By then my contract should be 7-7-8-8 already, so I should be able to upgrade my phone without worries.

What can happen next WWDC? I don't know, front facing camera, and a xenon flash? iChat? Who knows?

And seriously, besides the speed bump, I really don't find the other features worth the trouble (and the money). I am really paying the extra god knows how much to load peggle that 5-10s faster. Although I seriously wish that my phone was a little (much) faster, I bet iPhone firmware 4.0 will make the 3GS crawl as well, and by then it will be iPhone 4G or 3GSS or some fuckshit, claiming that everything loads in no time at all, boasting PS3 quality graphics at 60FPS. I wish. LOL.

Why the new product line up is trash

2009-06-11T21:01:00.004+08:00

I think only 2 of you who read my blog is gonna know what I'm gonna talk about next. Lol.

Anyway, it's about WWDC. Yes the camping on the live blog was exciting for that night, but when day broke and I woke up, I can't help to think, that god damnit, the product line this WWDC is so damn stopgap.

It's like they have something really great in the labs but they couldn't push it out in time and so they just shove 'new' products in our face just because we were expecting something.

I mean, look at it. The product lines are completely messed up now. The only MacBook left is the white one, which they were supposed to phase out early this year. So when it's finally time for it to go, then what? Their notebook line will only consist of MacBook Pros? That does not make sense. They obviously have a product line that had to go somewhere but they flatly missed the mark and just had to make do.

And then the 3GS. What the hell. Again, what is the damn difference between the 3G and the S besides the point that it's faster and has all the extra whatever under the hood? It's really as though they couldn't make the iPhone 2 in time and figured what the heck, let's just take 1/2 of the iPhone 2 and shove it into a 3G case and make do for now.

The only thing I liked about Monday was the new 7 hour batteries for the 'Pros'. That's it. 2 hours of keynote and the only takeaway point was the battery. Nice.

And the 15" MBP without discrete graphics? WTF? MBP gay edition? No longer can you tote a 15" MBP around feeling smug about yourself at StarBucks when you know that there is a shitty version out there that looks exactly like yours. Like a fake LV bag. I really pity the suckers who bought the 1st gen 15" unibodies cos there is no product differentiation anymore.

You see, the 13" was fine you know, small, chic and cute. Didn't matter if it didn't have a lot of horsepower, it was still better than Intel Integrated anyway. But what the hell is a crippled 15" MBP doing there? Bastard child of Apple? It's big, looks fierce, and it has no balls. A Ferarri with a Honda engine. It should have been a 15" MacBook joining the 13" MacBook family and not the other way around. Seriously, the only unique difference between the 2 lines now is the fucking battery. And the aluminium.

And, all the removable HDD and battery nonsense for nothing. All gone in 1 generation. Not that it was a good design, I've always found it clunky. But still, with all the hype back then, wth man.

Jobs, please come back soon. We miss you.

StoneJamz

2009-05-21T20:49:00.002+08:00

I think they are going bust. I just received a SMS from them in the afternoon, asking people to sign up for a 'membership', $100 for 10 hours of jamming a month, to be used in 30 days. Just 5 minutes ago, another SMS saying $55 for 5 hours. I think they got not enough to cover for rent and need cash up front. I kinda pity them, they don't seem to have much business, but then again their equipment is so bad.. It's an endless cycle. Nobody goes there because the equipment is bad, and because they have no business they cannot fix their equipment.

なに？！？！

2009-04-26T20:18:00.003+08:00

Wtf, BSS just received a C&D for FMA:B. And supposedly everyone else subbing it too. How the fuck am I going to watch it now? Not like the fail remake was a bad enough disappointment already.

massive thoughts

2009-04-20T14:51:00.002+08:00

I've been thinking, or maybe have been troubled, for some time now. Some of you might know what predicament I'm in, maybe most. If you don't, it's about this:

I've got myself into this shit by wanting to do too many things at one time. But I can't help it when none of them are moving, I can't just sit and wait. I've been looking for a job, applying for school, looking for a serious band, and starting a business with my friends.

So the thing now is, none of them are moving along. And I'm becoming irritated. Maybe because I haven't been giving my fullest attention on any one of the above, choosing to spread my focus among all 4 and hoping that at least one will be successful. Maybe because I'm greedy. Maybe because I'm undecided. I don't know.

Out of the four, 2 of them are putting up a tough fight now, getting a job, and the business. I can't put my fullest attention into looking for a job because of the business, and I can't put my fullest attention on the business because I'm looking for a job. It's shitty. It's a fucking shitty cycle. And I can't make up my mind to focus on one.

One thing, I've always wanted to do what I'm going to do for my business. It's a good potential source of income, but I definitely won't be making much, or any, till much later. I need to eat, I need to buy things, I need money. That's why I want to get a job. So I can get instant monthly income. It's not what I like, but I do get paid. But if I do this, I will barely have time for the business, not to mention the other 2 things in my life as well, band and music studies.

But I need the money. Or want? I don't know. There's a saying that there must be sacrifice to get what you want. And I believe sacrifice will definitely come with suffering. But you see, I don't mind the suffering, but I just don't want the people around me to suffer with me as well. Leila, for having to pay for my meals all the time. My parents, for having to pay for my living expenditures and having to tell their friends and colleagues that their son is useless and jobless.

And on top of that, to put it in an even more twisted way, I've got to sacrifice getting a job for the business, or sacrifice the business and musical passion, to get a job.

MONEY OR PASSION

That's the question. In life, you can't have both.

Think different

2009-04-09T17:54:00.002+08:00

Hell yeah. I'm being offered a job at Dell selling computers. Every Winshit I sell, one less Mac buyer. :D

My White iPhone is spawning cracks

2009-04-04T17:51:00.001+08:00

Fuck. Just barely a month from my last replacement my new iPhone is spawning hairline cracks all over. Should I replace it again?

EDIT: SingTel gave me a new one again. But for something else, because my screen wasn't flushed to the bezel. I think I'm not going to care anymore, till the new iPhone comes out then I shall bug AppleCare to give me the new model..

MobileMe replacement

2009-03-19T16:05:00.006+08:00

I'm sick and tired of MobileMe. I seriously am. $140 a year just to sync my calendars, contacts and bookmarks across my 2 Macs, and to my iPhone OTA. $140 upfront. For a service whose iDisk doesn't even work properly, and does not sync my subscribed cals OTA without some hacking (running a shitty buggy program that I have to PAY for, again)

So, I've found myself some replacements.

Having 2 Macs, I needed my cals and contacts to be consistent across the 2. I absolutely must have calendars and contacts syncing. So how do I do this? Simple. Enter Google, and Spanning Sync. Spanning Sync syncs your cals and contacts to and fro Google. And you still get web access to them, from Google's own web apps.

The only thing you lose is OTA syncing with the iPhone, but I realised that the additional convenience does not justify the battery life I lose at the end. You can actually use Google's new Exchange service for OTA syncing, but it will screw up your contacts as Google stores contacts in a slightly different format than Apple. Spanning Sync sorts it all out for you so your contacts look a-ok on the Mac.

Spanning Sync costs US$25 for the 1st year, US$15 for subsequent years, and US$65 for forever. Google, is of course, free.

Next, bookmarks syncing. This one is easy, Foxmarks. Bookmarks syncing across Safari, Firefox and ShitIE. You also get web access, something ME screwed you over and removed. It also has sync profiles so you can choose what bookmarks go on what machine, if you don't want the porn you bookmarked last night appearing at work. And once again, 3 browsers. Winblows too (fox and shitie only)

Foxmarks is free.

Lastly, data syncing. This is my favourite, Dropbox. I've been using this for nearly 2 months now and I absolutely love it. Although the measly 2GB isn't much, you can pay US$99 to get 50GB, and for the same price from MobileMe, you only get 20. And why the hell would you want to store so much data in the cloud anyway?

And the best part is, it works. Dropbox exists as a folder in my home folder, and the whole Dropbox folder is synced in real-time. It doesn't matter what the directory structure is, it acts just like a drive.

And syncing data barely takes any time, I just put the file into the folder and Dropbox will tell me when it's fully synced and ready to go. I remember back with iDisk I've always had to wait for the f**cking bar that never completes, and most of the time it will just crash Finder because it's just too damn slow.

And guess what? Winbitches can use Dropbox too! And you can do collaboration with this, e.g. creating a folder inside your Dropbox that you can choose whoever to access. This is something iDisk can't do. And it has a public folder too, for you to share your porn or whatever with the world.

Dropbox is free for 2GB, US$99 for 50GB. Just use the free one.

If you ask about push mail, I will slap you. Push anything drinks battery like water. I've set my phone to check my gmail every hour, and it is more than enough. Use Google. Google is free. FREE.

In total, if you go for the cheapest route above, it only costs US$25 for the first year, and US$15 for subsequent years. This, compared to US$99 a year for MobileMe, is quite a huge saving. US$65 for forever still beats US$99 every year. If you absolutely need 20GB of space in the cloud, though, you can still choose to use MobileMe, but if you manage to sync the whopping 20GB into iDisk, let me know, I will treat you to dinner. I was already having problems syncing 50MB.

There you go, if you are contemplating MobileMe but squinting because of the cost, think about these free (or significantly cheaper) alternatives I've listed above. Thank me later if you want.

Fixed? Not really..

2009-03-08T12:55:00.002+08:00

After v24-TNG my internet was becoming progressively slower for no reason (1.5KB/s anyone?) so I gave up and used tomato instead. Much better. Awesome control of QoS. Everything else is fuss free.

UPnP FIXED!!

2009-03-03T15:30:00.003+08:00

If you are using a linksys router and DD-WRT v24-sp1, you might have realised that UPnP does not work. It never populates the UPnP table and iChat's video chat is always laggy, or it wouldn't even connect.

Here's the fix. Go get v24-TNG svn10431 over at DD-WRT's site. It's under downloads/others/eko/V24_TNG/svn10431

Remember to reset to router defaults before and after you flash, from the main menu, not from the flashing menu. After I flashed my router it was still the old version (confusing, yes). I reset to router defaults from the main menu and then it showed the new version. Weird. But yes, UPnP is working now!

oh shi-

2009-02-24T22:35:00.002+08:00

Safari 4 beta is out. And it looks pretty fantastic.

OMFG THIS IS FUCKING HILARIOUS!!!

2009-02-03T19:05:00.006+08:00

The colour of apple

2009-01-30T01:11:00.007+08:00

.. is not black, nor is it silver, nor is it bondi blue....

It is White.

I just realised I have not post pics of my new pedalboard yet..

2009-01-28T11:19:00.003+08:00

Tadahh...

It didn't come in such a nice condition tho, so I had to reupholster it.. with this!

INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH! It looks very nice tho, like carpet..

The other side of the pedals are stuck with this..

So yeah, they stick like glue. I can flip the thing around and the pedals won't drop off. If you're lucky you will get to see it next jamming!

(it's bloody fucking heavy tho)

Best Vuze replacement so far

2009-01-26T00:19:00.002+08:00

It's been nagging me, Vuze taking up 300MBs of memory and sometimes more, on my old iMac with only 2GB of ram. 2GB is little nowadays, how fast time flies. Anyway, Vuze absolutely kills my iMac. It beachballs my Mac to no end. So today, during spring cleaning, I decided to take up a solution suggested by Jem: uTorrent.

Well if you are an avid pirate, you should know that uTorrent was bought over by BitTorrent, a completely legal, legit company, sometime back. That doesn't make it very safe, but it is the fastest and most lightweight client on windows. So recently, after the cows finally came home (hey, Lunar New Year, happy year of the cow guys) they released a supposedly kick ass Mac version. I remember Jem hyping about it "it has RSS downloading and it's really fast!" so I decided to give it a try.

Then I realised, the hard way why people always say not to follow hype.

First of all, there is no RSS downloading in sight. RSS downloading only existed for a little while on a leaked pre-release alpha build. It's beta now, and it's not there. But what was true, was that uTorrent is pretty damn snappy, and barely took up 30MBs of memory.

So fine, no RSS downloading, I can live with workarounds. Stumbled upon a program called TV Shows, where you just choose what show you want and from which episode you want to watch it from and it will download the torrent files for you, once they are available. The version on that link doesn't work but this dude fixed it. Pretty damn cool, works better than Vuze. +1!

Now I don't only watch TV shows, I watch anime too. So I need something that can handle generic RSS downloading for me, and I found Automatic. Automatic works roughly the same way as how Vuze's RSS downloading works, so that's good enough for me. Oh, both TV Shows and Automatic has options to open your torrent files for you, so they start automatically.

All's well, well almost, till I realised, uTorrent does not have web administration. I mean, what if I need to download something and I'm not at home? I've always loved Vuze's web administration, and I can't live without it.

Then I remembered an old gem: Transmission. It is a BT client that I believe, originated on the Mac. Popped by the site to take a look after this long while, from all the google results of people comparing Transmission to uTorrent.

I must say, I did not use Transmission back then as I couldn't select files within a torrent to download. It's such a simple feature and they didn't have it. But they have it now. And because it originated from the Mac (I believe so) it is the only BT client that fits the UI of the Mac. Simple, sleek and informative. It is also extremely lightweight, much like uTorrent. So I gave it a shot, and WOW. It does everything uTorrent can do, and looks much better. AND, it has a web interface that looks EXACTLY like the Mac interface. Not even Vuze can match that. Also, it has built in peer filtering, with a list that is consistently updated from the intarwebs, just like Vuze can. That's 2 to nil for Transmission against uTorrent. Together with TV Shows and Automatic, Transmission just supplants uTorrent. This solution is better than Vuze too, if any portion of Vuze fails you can't just replace it, you got to live with it.

If you use a Mac, give Transmission a shot. It's pretty damn good.

Please guys, use GTalk

2009-01-25T02:15:00.003+08:00

Guys, replace MSN with GTalk. MSN is passe. And you don't even need to create an account if you are cool and already have a gmail account. On Macs, you can use Adium. On windows, I bet there is a windows client. Dump MSN man.

This is amusing and informative at the same time

2009-01-21T19:14:00.004+08:00

I never knew there was such a detailed categorization of shit.

"The Bristol Stool Scale or Bristol Stool Chart is a medical aid designed to classify the form of human feces into seven categories." -Wikipedia

Finally a decent contender to the iPhone..

2009-01-16T21:17:00.004+08:00

Fuck man the Palm Pre is really sweet.. It aggregates all your contacts from everywhere into a single, simple interface, from Facebook to Gmail to Exchange. It also aggregates all your conversations into a single interface, be it IM or SMS, so you can SMS or MSN someone from the same window and it looks like 1 flowing conversation. Yes it also aggregates your calendars from everywhere. UI wise, it can do everything the iPhone can do- swipes, pinching, etc. And it's actually smoother. And guess what, it can multitask. The only thing that will be lacking will be powerful third party apps because the API is HTML CSS and JS, but that might just change, who knows.

So what is it going to be, to be stuck on Apple as a stuck-up fanboy or go on to something better? Palm was the 1st ever PIM I've ever used and it made my life so much better (before it died on me, and then the company died as well). Now they finally come up with something that is as wonderful and exciting as my Palm V. Funny thing is that it doesn't have the same charm the iPhone gave when it 1st came out.. Maybe it was the Reality Distortion Field..

My newly refurbished room!

2009-01-05T01:23:00.004+08:00

Tadahhhh...

It's not as pathetic as before now. Still pathetically small, but at least it's finally pleasant.

A pity I don't have any before pictures to show you how pathetic it used to be, it was so hideous I couldn't even bear to take any photos of it lest the camera breaks. Anyway, try to imagine it without the blinds, without the rug, and with an ugly toilet-like florescent circle-light on the ceiling. Took me quite a bit to get the blinds on, I used cable tie, but the end result is great. Yes, it works flawlessly. :D Blinds, rug, ceiling lamp and lamp shade courtesy of IKEA.

The most beautiful video I've ever watched

2008-12-15T20:21:00.005+08:00

Our world is indeed a beautiful place..

I still consider you my friend

2008-11-27T00:11:00.008+08:00

Just that I won't trust you anymore. And I hope that after reading and realising what I've said, everyone else will stop trusting you too. Which is fair, since you don't trust anybody anyway.

Do not onto others what you do not want others to do unto yourself.

PS: To all you other readers out there, if you don't understand what's going on, don't worry. You will understand once it happens to you.

PSS: To all those who asked.. what about the friendship? Let me put it this way.. I gave him my absolute trust and friendship, and yet all he did was to wear a mask, pretended to be my best friend, while instigating things to go against me behind my back. So what makes of this friendship? This friendship didn't exist at all, it only existed in my head. It was what he wanted me to believe. He doesn't even consider me his best friend.

But I still consider him my friend, because this friendship did exist once, before everything happened. Maybe about 3 years back. But I guess it's long gone.

D:

2008-11-26T22:51:00.002+08:00

I used to think the iPhone was an elitist piece of Apple fanboy-ism. Now it's as common as Nokia 3210s during its heyday. What the heck happened. D:

Betrayal..?

2008-11-25T11:35:00.007+08:00

I really wonder how I can be the one that betrayed you, when you were the one who took her away from me. And not only that, you failed to take care of her, failed to keep her in control, blaming the reasons on everyone else but yourself. I was trying to get back with her, to correct the wrongs, but it was too late for me to do anything. And this, to you is betrayal? So when you took her away, when you fail to give her happiness, you didn't betray me? And I didn't even bring it up. I took it like a good friend, that maybe things just weren't meant to be. I didn't blame you. I never did. Now you turn around and blame me instead, on the pretext that I backstabbed you? When it was you who did so to me?

And what about the band. Every single band I have, you tell me it won't make it. Is it your so called intuition, or that you just don't want me to succeed? You destroyed TEG, what we have built up for so long. You planted hate and discord among us so we would fight and destroy ourselves slowly. Made us stop doing covers knowing that we like to do covers. Made us do originals that we can never do. Made us irritated with a sloppy drummer that actually isn't sloppy at all. There's also a reason why we stopped gigging. Cos you hate to gig.

And then when Jason left, you told the rest of the band that TEG is no more, without my consent or knowledge. True that I grew sick and tired of the band, but as we all can see, it was all your doing. And deep inside, no matter what you do, I've always wanted to give the band a chance. I never wanted the band to split.

And what about my new band? That won't make it too? Once again you are trying to plant hate and sow discord among us, telling me how bad gene is, how bad rico is. Trying to influence me to dislike or hate them. Leaving the band and then telling me the band won't make it.

Telling my girlfriend that I betrayed you, trying to paint an ugly picture of me. You try to destroy my bands, and that's not enough, and you have to try to destroy my relationship as well. As though destroying my previous relationship and previous band wasn't enough, you have to try to destroy every subsequent one.

And yet I'm the one who betrayed you.

Random musings..

2008-11-24T15:42:00.003+08:00

In order to be successful in what you do, you got to love what you do. If you do something for the sake of being successful or money, then you will never be, because there is no love. If you do what you do just because you love it, without giving a care about the world, life will reward you will success and money. Which is quite ironic.

But this is why crafty businessmen are the richest people in the world, cos their love in life is to fuck with people and earn their money. And as though that is not enough, life rewards them with success and even more money because they did what they love. Nice.

Laziest Mac user of the century

2008-11-05T23:58:00.006+08:00

And that's me. Look what I got for my iMac:

So. WTF is this? It is a media center program called XBMC, which originated from the Xbox, and now it's available for almost every single platform. Even the Apple TV. Basically what it does is it categorizes all your movies and TV shows, automatically. Even Anime. Yes, it's AUTOMATIC. So I just put the files at the right places, and it will detect them, and download the cover art, plot synopsis, and episode summaries, and put them sort them nicely, as above. So all I need to do is fire it up, arm myself with the remote, and pig out. Wonderful.

And to top it all up, I installed Quicksilver on my iMac again. Spotlight is just too friggin slow. Yes, I'm the laziest fucking Mac user ever.

Something very funny happened recently..

2008-10-28T19:47:00.005+08:00

One day, somebody said..

I'm sorry, I can't be perfect..

.. and all he could do was..

Runaway, runaway..

.. and all I have to say, is this.

See who gives a fuck.

WTFU

2008-10-18T17:50:00.004+08:00

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/~san/wtfu.mp3

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/~san/wtfu-vanilla.mp3

Betty, finish the damn song, and Fi, you know what to do ;)

Oh ya Betty, I think I made your warwick into a warmonster. LOL. Hope you like the effect.

Shit.

2008-10-15T03:07:00.002+08:00

The new Macbook Pros actually look kinda nice D:

And the screens are super thin!

Aww aren't they sweet..

2008-10-15T01:46:00.003+08:00

The new MacBook on the left, and the new MacBook Pro on the right. I actually don't mind the new MB design, but I detest the new MBP design, even when they are similar. Maybe because I'm more tolerant to change and fresh designs on the hip and trendy low end model, but not on the more professional, expensive model. I'm keeping my old MBP. Forever.

The new Macbook Pro

2008-10-14T13:34:00.002+08:00

Look here for more details.

I can't say I like the new design, but it looks like it will grow on me, like the aluminum iMacs. Carrying glass around is kinda shady though, won't that be heavy? Hmm.

Terminal elbow grease, again!

2008-10-13T15:11:00.002+08:00

Yes, something on my system screwed up, again! I couldn't move my ~/Pictures folder over to my newly created partition for backing up. Finder kept complaining that there was a problem with the file, but question was: which file? Finder's really smart for not telling me, so after some digging around, I realised some duplicate files iPhoto created were somehow corrupted. Those I rotated, cropped, resized, whatever. So I went looking for them, with this.

cd ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/

find . -name *_2.JPG

A few idiots showed up, but the modified files are fine, just those that are lingering in the originals folder, where they shouldn't be anyway. So,

find ./Originals/ -name *_2.JPG

Lesser idiots showed up, and there were everywhere, and I didn't want to delete them by hand. So,

find ./Originals/ -name *_2.JPG -exec mv {} ~/Desktop/ \;

Just in case I needed them later. Now, everything goes over. Finally. Apple needs to get their act together.

One year

2008-10-13T01:33:00.002+08:00

It has been a year since the last gig. Can't help but to realise that nothing has been done since the last year, even with all the talks and resolutions, besides finally recording a 2 year old song properly. Oh well.

Just a random thought.

Leopard permission problems (what's new?)

2008-10-02T21:54:00.006+08:00

Ok, just found out about this while fiddling with a new.. er.. hdd of mine (yeah it was supposed to be secret but wtf). Anyway a little background: I was thinking of coming up with a way to organise my stuff inside, and I decided to follow *exactly* how macs lay out their stuff. Basically, there is a Users folder in root, and then my shortname folder in it, which is my home folder, and all the other jazz inside the home folder. I will then create symlinks from within my home folder to point into folders in that folder, just as though they were at the same place all along.

For example, ~/Music, which is essentially /Users/san/Music, or more accurately, /Volumes/san/Users/san/Music, will point to /Volumes/san\ Storage/Users/san/Music instead. All these can be done with ln -s

Very simple right? Yes, till I hit a problem after creating a symlink pointing to the home folder on my new drive; accessing this symlink stalled my whole mac. Finder stalled, Safari stalled, every fucking thing stalled, I even had an error that Finder.app did not exist while trying to open a folder from my Dock. Great. This symlink I created, whatever I tried to call it, when pointing to /Volumes/san\ Storage/Users/san, would just lock up. I cannot find a better explanation of this fuckup better than a stupid permission problem went bad.

I checked the Get Info of the 2 home folders and compared them and I found this slight discrepency: there's a group called (unknown). Not only on my new drive, even on my old one, and every damn fucking file and folder in my home folder.

So I checked it up. Lo and behold, yet-another-mac-permissions-fuckup. Everyone who upgrades from Tiger, or migrates a Tiger user account, will get this problem. That practically means all of my dear Mac friends reading this, except for the lucky **** who bought Macs that came with Leopard. Yes you Geoff, and you too bee.

Why did this happen? Basically, Tiger got it all wrong: when you create a user acount, say 'ass', you will be also assigned to a group, called 'ass'. This isn't the convention in the Unix and Linux and BSD worlds, it doesn't even make sense, so Leopard fixed it. Now, all (new) accounts are under the group 'staff'. But guess what, they forgot to convert the old Tiger users over. There is no such group called 'ass', or 'san' or whatever you decided to name your account. So it shows up as, you guessed it, (unknown). So they sorta fixed the problem, which wasn't really a problem, and created a new one. What new problems? Reportedly, Spotlight is semi borked with this permission problem, and you get a performance hit because of that. (Jem, I guess this was our problem all along) Also, your Finder might crash when you try to delete the (unknown) user group, or it might just crash for no particular reason, like me accessing the damn symlink I created. It's also plain UGLY. Macs are meant to be preetee.

So. Fix? Or no fix? A brilliant way would be to create a new account and manually copy all your shit over. That would be something I won't want to do, and I guess neither do you. Another way, is to do it by nipping the problem at the bud, and fixing the rest with some smart terminal fiddling. Which I did, and my Mac still runs, so I guess it's safe.

Instructions are detailed here but I'll summarise for you. First, go into your System Preferences, click on Account, and authorise yourself. Right click on your own account, and click the only option there, Advanced Options. Here you will find your poison: Group ID will be exactly the same as User ID, 501. Change Group ID to 20. Click Ok.

While you are at it, it is probably a good idea to temporarily disable Spotlight on your whole HDD, using the Spotlight preference and putting your drive in the ignore list.

Now, open terminal, and type this: ln -aln Documents It can be any folder for that matter I just used Documents as an example. You should see a bunch of drwx------ number 501 501 number date myFolder there. The 2nd 501 is what we are interested in, and if it's something else like 502, just take note of it. The 1st 501 is correct and we are not touching it.

Next, run the command

and then followed by

sudo find . -group 501 -exec chgrp 20 {} \;

Basically, cd jumps to your home directory, and the command will find everything within your home directory, and change all group 501s to group 20. If the number you got just now is some other number just replace 501 with it. Don't do anything and wait. Once it's done, restart your computer and run permissions checking just in case. If ACL turns up for Finder and some other passwd shit, it's a 10.5.5 problem, download the 10.5.5 combo updater and reupdate your Mac.

You can double check your folders now, the (unknown) should now be 'Staff'. Re-enable your spotlight and everything should work as per normal. My iMac seems zippier now, but I don't know if that's because my spotlight indexing was still ignoring my main drive.

With this I learnt how to set the Users folder on my new drive to Root access only, and my own folder to be my access only. So nobody can delete the Users folder by accident without inputting a password, and only I can access my own stuff. Heh. This also probably means I'm restricting access to only my Macbook Pro and my iMac, and Macs in general that allow me to input a password to let me in. Oh my god, :O so damn troublesome! I can't let any Tom, Dick or Harry hack into my computer and steal my files! Damn I want a windows computer so I can be hacked D:

Sigh, Macs are so troublesome and lousy, we don't have .dlls for anyone (like your neighbourhood friendly virus) to hack openly, as everything on windows is permission 777. We need to know stuff about permissions and owners and groups, so god damn troublesome. Windows is so much better, I can just delete NTDLR and get away with it. :( I want my Vista PC..

DIY mee pok tah

2008-09-24T15:14:00.003+08:00

Lol. I just made my own mee pok tah. So proud of myself.

Oil, black sauce, sambal chilli, instant meepok noodles (without using any ingredients inside), topped with fish balls and spring onion.

1st impressions, a bit too sweet, cos the black sauce I have at home is the red date one. But still shiok. Next time I will use the MSG and oil from the packet to boil the noodles in them, to simulate the MSG soup they use to cook the noodles in at the kopitiam. Heh. Maybe can serve as soup later too. And use more generic black sauce.

MY BLOG IS BORING

2008-09-18T22:08:00.001+08:00

And I'm bored. Goes together really well.

ay-dee-oom!

2008-09-11T19:48:00.004+08:00

One of the many reasons why I hate macs D: It's just too darned preetee.

Oh no!

2008-08-28T17:07:00.002+08:00

Seems like I haven't blogged about my 1 year with bee bee either! Yes we've been busy but yea, we've been together for a year already, and many many more to come! Pictures will come up when we are free, but we are always so busy with each other we don't have time to show you guys all the fun we have! :P We'll do it soon, don't worry. Happy 1 year bee!

Why the iPhone 3G sucks

2008-08-27T16:27:00.005+08:00

The iPhone 3G sucks. Really. The most hyped up phone you've always wanted is a pile of trash. And let me tell you why.

Glass screen. Like wtf. Where are my buttons. Where is my plastic screen. A plastic screen is so much better than glass. Plastic doesn't shatter. This is a step backwards in phone design!

3D games. Only now? Even my old Pentium 2 machine could play 3D games! And it can't even play CS. What the hell.

3G. What the heck is that shit. 3.6mbps. Which phone only has 3.6mbps? This is so 10 years ago! Even my StarHub cable runs at 6mbps! That's nearly TWICE the speed! 3.6mbps is so damn SLOW!

Push email. This is absolutely retarded. Who the hell needs this? I don't want my phone to be informing me of every email I receive. Use internet explorer to log in to hotmail check email man. That's the way email should be. Push email is so uncool.

Battery life. The battery on the iPhone only has 1 day of battery life with heavy usage! 1 day! And with heavy usage meaning surfing on Safari, and watching YouTube. I mean that's just miserable! Which phone only has 1 day of battery with Safari and YouTube usage?

SMS conversations. What the fuck is this shit? I can't mass delete SMS! I can't even delete individual SMS! This is so damn backward! Having separate inbox and sent folders is so much better! Not being able to consistently go back and forth between inbox and sent totally kills the SMS experience! SMSing feels just like instant messaging now, and if I wanted to IM I can just use Windows Live! Messenger right? Why do I want to SMS?

GPS. Google maps is free. What the hell! I prefer Nokia N95's GPS, you got to pay! Things you pay for are ALWAYS better than things for free. And it has a plastic screen, buttons, and all the fantastic things a phone should have. Don't get the iPhone man. Be cool, buy the N95.

There are a million other things that I can't think off now. But whatever it is, just don't get an iPhone. Or a mac. Apple sucks. Like totally. Microsoft and Nokia is the way to go.

EDIT: Apparently some people just can't get the sarcasm. But, some of the things I posted above are actually what some people say of the iPhone, especially of the SMS feature. The purpose of this post is twofold: to show how stupid windows users are, and to dissuade potential stupid windows users to buy the iPhone. The Apple brand is diluted enough by these stupid windows users, and I would like to maintain my elite status of a Mac user. I don't want Apple to be the next hp or acer, although they seem to be tending towards that path.

Although I didn't expect it, this post has also shown it's third purpose: to reveal the stupid windows users who claim to be Mac converts, diluting the Apple brand, like the really clever boy who posted in my tagboard. Dude, if you can't contain your raging hormones and use your brain to think, you don't deserve to be a Mac user. :)

Blogger, and the internet, is a piece of shit.

2008-08-07T16:56:00.004+08:00

Wow, blogger has a new RSS feed reader thingy! And guess what? IT DOESN'T WORK! Stupid shit. This is how it shows up in preview, making me all happy:

This is how it actually shows up on my blog:

That's a whole fucking world of difference can. Not to mention this feature fails half the time when I'm adding something, making me save after every entry, and even that doesn't work half the time too. Blogger, if you want to come up with something new, make sure it works first, please?

EDIT: Now it shows up properly, but if it doesn't please refer to my post to see how it should look like. Damn sad shit.

I must be dumb

2008-07-11T17:19:00.002+08:00

Minima (the blog theme I use) has a stretch version. Now we can have the best of all worlds. Yay.

Now in HD!

2008-06-27T16:39:00.018+08:00

My blog is now in HD! What for? Well.. Since SD (standard definition) is going to be phased out real soon I might as well update my blog for HD. And I've always found my blog too cramped.. Anyway. Now to make good use of the screen estate I have! Time to flex some muscles..

Before..

720x480 (480p)

After!

Spanking new widescreen 1280x720 (720p)!

I tried running my blog in 1080p (1920x1080) but I had to run safari in full screen to enjoy it. And I guessed that not many people will have a full HD 24" monitor to view it so.. Yea. 720p is good enough. Lol.

For those that can't see my blog properly, too bad! Time to upgrade already! Even my 15" laptop screen can display it! You should be ashamed of yourself!

I'll be updating my previous posts to have HD pictures, so they will be BIG AND NICE! :D Stay tuned!

Here's how everything's looking now:

Oh you probably missed this other post I had sometime back, with me playing J-Rock at Suntec. Here's a little something:

HD vs SD

HD

SD

shit, shower, sleep.

2008-06-20T02:37:00.011+08:00

I'm finally done with EE2001. The final presentation is later, and we are the last group. Means more sleep for me.. sorta. We are intending to head down to lab at about 1 to stress the other teams.. and to kpo a bit. I got a feeling they put the better teams at the end for some kind of closing ceremony for the lecturers, but the guys think otherwise. Oh what do I know. Anyway, the presentation and video is *awesome* Jem is uploading the vid to utoob so you guys can see it soon, I hope. Take it as some sorta explanation for my disappearance for the last 2-3 weeks, and I hope you will be impressed. I really really hope. I've not been having any proper sleep nor proper social life the past 2 weeks and if you guys aren't impressed with what I've came up with I'll be.. well, very very very sad. :( If I get an A for this module I guess I'll stay on, if not I'll need to report back to camp to catch mas selamat for 1 month. Damn sian.

Anyway, this is a formal apology for all whom I've neglected for the past 2-3 weeks, Eugene, Fi, Wan, Jason, Sebas, and of course my dear bee bee.. So so sorry for not being around and not knowing what's going on, I'll talk to you guys soon k? Once I get my brain back.

Anyway a little tid bit of what I was doing, here's my baby for the last 3 weeks:

It's an electronic boarding pass, to replace the normal paper one. Wirelessly updatable, built in alarm to remind you to board the plane, able to alert you of changes in flight timing, and is also able to warn you of emergencies like fire and terrorist attacks. An uber boarding pass if you'd like. Can't cook or clean your house yet tho. Oh it can display advertisements too. Haha. Once I post the video you can see it at work.

EDIT: Video is out! (Now in HD)

Buttttttttttttt. I was not really busy working on this bugger, it was already done since a long time ago. It's because of one particular team member of ours, who can't get anything done right. I, along with Jem and Josh had to complete her part for her, which is actually very simple, but also very integral to the project, and is also very tedious to do. Not that I want to bitch about her, but if only she was just a tad bit more competent, we would have been able to have a lot more sleep. A lot lot lot more sleep. The 3 of us, sacrificing our sleep to finish her part when we could have had rested like a long time ago, while she she can 'trip' and almost fall while sitting on a sofa. Like how right. She was nodding off la. If only she could do things in tandem with us, we could've have finished everything together much earlier. But it's not that she didn't do anything for us tho. She helped us settle nearly all of our admin work, like filing. So it's not all that bad. But I would have loved to be able to sleep more. >:(

I shant crap anymore, I miss my bed. Will talk to you guys soon, I'm back. Haw. Sunday jam? :D

HAPPY 10 MONTHS BEEE!!!

2008-06-16T04:23:00.009+08:00

:D:D I brought Leila to a trip up to the sky on our 10 month anniversary.. My friend Josh's a pilot so he offered to bring us up.. Here's the plane, on a lazy saturday morning at seletar runway:

It's a cessna, bravo oscar quebec.

We were waiting around the runway while Josh was running checks on the plane before flight..

Bee bee was being generally very happy.. :P

Josh checking his plane..

Bee was NOT checking the plane :P

After awhile, we were ready to fly! Everyone had headsets so we could hear each other talk in the sky as it would be really noisy..

Josh doing some final checks..

Ready to go!

Take off!!

The view was damn nice up there la! That was seletar resort or something..

Everything looks so tiny up here!

Silly bee was grinning most of the way :P

So was I..

Oo I made Josh find bee's house.. Heh and we found it! I think I might have a shot of woodlands interchange too, it's super tiny la. We were just there just the day before..

EDIT: here it is! Causeway point, all the way at the bottom:

With the bus interchange and mrt station and all.. So small!

This is Malaysia..

After landing we went to Jalan Kayu for prata, then we went to Yishun to look for guinea pigs. On the way we tried to look like one.. Leila started it, she insists I look like a guinea pig -.-

After reaching there we didn't want to go back there again as it's too out of the way so we bought one. Meet beh tay/piggy/pigpig/porky/pokpok:

Look like meh. -.-

Piggy's a brat la. He loves running around my room and finding spots where I can't reach him. Can't wait for him to grow big and fat and lazy. :P Bee bee and I love him, and mommy loves him too! He fell asleep in my mom's hands just now. So cute :P He's not in the red pail anymore cos he found a way to climb out of it. He's damn naughty la. So he's temporarily in my mesh dustbin now. It looks nice but it's a little too small for him. Got Leila's old cage, will clean it up tomorrow and put him in his new and bigger home. And I think we've spoilt him already, he keeps wheeking for my attention now, even as I type this, and when I go over to pet him he will purr and be a happy little brat. Haha he's such a cute critter.

Hope you enjoyed our 10 months bee! I enjoyed it a lot! :D May we go a long long long long way together! *hugsss* Love you bee bee! *muackssss*

Absinthe's 1st gig vids

2008-06-13T16:37:00.002+08:00

Heh.

Oh fuck the vids are out

2008-06-09T03:41:00.005+08:00

I wanna post all but that will flood the page.. I'll post this one cos it has a decent solo by me :D But I was not in the camera's focus. Oh well.

And the same song by another band, on the same day.

Enjoy!

HAI SHAI!

2008-06-08T05:45:00.004+08:00

Hey aaron, I was quite surprised + touched that you actually read my blog! Haha I didn't think you would read it's quite boring usually.. Anyway to whoever who reads my blog secretly, SHOW YOURSELVES! Tag or smth la lemme know you're around. For that I'll move my tagboard all the way to the top so everyone can spam it :D And I'll remove the old about me portion, cos who I am, are in my friends, and you guys will take the limelight in my blog. :D

Siala

2008-06-06T04:35:00.002+08:00

1 week of chionging project and rushing around for the (horrible) youth park gig I didn't notice I had 11 unread blog posts! So sorry I can't comment or reply anyone of you IRL (whatever you guys posted is almost what you smsed/msned me) Sorry bee, sorry fi, sorry wan, sorry jason, sorry everybody! I am super busy with school, was super busy with band and there is just a lot of things on my mind right now, about my future. A bit tired to explain now but it's somewhere along the lines of quit school, find job and take guitar lessons. I want to be a musician. Guitarist or bassist or teacher or whatever the fuck. It's my dream and I will chase it no matter what.

Dear Jason (again)

2008-05-19T02:59:00.002+08:00

I've been holding this back, but I think you need to hear this now.

Me and my friends have been discussing this, about your plight in life, and we've all came to a common conclusion. You are gifted in drums, and music in general. Make use of it. You should know that there's nothing else you could do better but to drum. You have been searching for the answer all along but the answer has been in front of you all these while. You have been asking from God to give you a sign, help you out, this and that, but He has already given you the answer, and all you need to succeed; your 2 legs and 2 arms. You have an incredible skill for drums, make good use of it.

How you might ask? Take lessons. Go learn the theory. I know it's spending more money now, but in the long run it would well be worth it. Brandon teaches. Go learn from him. What can you do with this extra knowledge? You will be certified to teach. This is 1 source of income. You can be a sessionist. Play for bands, play for artistes. You have the skill, coupled with the paper no one can deny you. Bong, is Singapore's most renowned bass player. He toured with Sun Yan Zi for 3 years. He teaches at Yamaha in the day. He plays for different bands at various locations every night. He earns $10k a month. Not saying you NEED to earn that kind of money, but hey, half of that amount isn't too bad. A quarter of that isn't too shabby either. In the band, you are the most talented musician. You can drum, you can sing, you can play the guitar. And yet I'm the only one that seems to be pursuing this future. The answer is right in front of you. Just forget about all your reasons and excuses and go for it.

gah

2008-05-07T14:20:00.002+08:00

Haven't put anything here for some time. I usually only post when I wanna bitch about something.. Oh yea I AM going to bitch about something! My fucking physics paper is today, and guess what, I still dunno what the fuck is going on! Hoho.. I'm so screwed.. But oh well, it's my last paper, I just hope I get a D for this shit. I don't wanna take it again. At least I know more than last sem, if that makes things any better..

Dear Jason

2008-04-21T03:19:00.005+08:00

I don't see why you should be pissed, sad, or disappointed. Firstly, no one planned anything for sunday. Yes, I know sunday is band day, but nobody planned anything, and nothing was on. So we went on our merry ways. Fi was hanging out with me not as a band but as my best friend, together with me and Leila. I don't see any wrong with that. Pardon me for being harsh, but I don't see why you should demand to be invited.

A fool who's contacted only when needed you say? What can we do when always, on the day itself, you ask, "Hey what are you guys doing today? Don't mind I tag along?" How about suggesting, or planning, an outing or a meet up? At least the day before? I'm sure you have in the past, and they all worked out well didn't they? I think it's very fair to say that we thought you were busy because you didn't contact us regarding meeting up on sunday for the whole WEEK. I thought Wan was busy too. I thought Is was busy too. Cos neither of them contacted me. Fi contacted me on friday. If you're gonna ask why didn't I ask the rest of you guys along, what's wrong with me spending precious time with my best friend? I don't get to talk to him much when we're out as a band anyway, and we are always out as a band. That being said, I actually don't get to talk to him much AT ALL. We've always been putting the band as priority. So why can't we have just 1 sunday to ourselves, when we assumed everyone wasn't free?

Seriously, I didn't even pick on the fact that you completely forgot about my new year party and went to Aaron's instead, when I asked you first. So I don't see why you should be so upset about today's incident.

Playing loudly without playing loudly

2008-04-17T22:03:00.006+08:00

Today I decided to prototype my silent jamming model. I brought the mixer up to my room, and straightaway hooked my amp to it, via line out. It sounded, like ASS. Lots of superhigh frequencies I don't want. Ok, I thought my amp was screwing with me, so I hooked my pedalboard straight to the mixer. Still, like ASS. The kind that will make fi get a migraine.

I knew that every channel on the mixer has gain, up to like 54 dB gain on this one, so I thought, why not just play my amp at a really low volume, and mic it up with super gain? So I tried that, I miced up my amp from inside the cabinet, and it sounded real good. It was my sound, at long bloody last. But damn it, it was picking up the sound of my electric guitar as well. The gain of the mic was too high. I tried cutting frequencies but it will cut the tone of my sound too. That didn't work as well, so I thought, why not I just stuff the back of the cabinet with a pillow? That would definately cut the sound of everything outside the cab.

Then, IT HIT ME. Why not I just stuff EVERY DAMN THING with pillows. I can bring up the volume of the amp, and cut the mic gain, in case of any other external noise I will pick up, and to have a little more headroom. And I did. Walla:

That weird piece of furniture under my amp head is yes, my speaker cabinet. And shit, at volumes where my neighbours used to be able hear, is now just confined to a radius of 1m around the amp. It's THAT SILENT. And it sounds bloody good.

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/silent.mp3 Hear for yourself.

Bear in mind that whatever I was playing could not be heard outside of my room.

EDIT: Fiddled around with the EQ, http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/anyhow.mp3

Everytime I cut something, I rid of something I don't want, but something I want gets cut away as well. Irritating. Fi you gotta teach me how to use a mixer -.-

iPod tools for the mac!

2008-04-15T14:06:00.003+08:00

Thought I would share some apps here. If you need to transfer songs to and from your iPod WITHOUT iTunes, there's a handy program called YamiPod. Only problem is that it doesn't work with an iPhone, so there is PodWorks. Problem is that you can't transfer music TO your iPod/iPhone with this one, only from. It does download songs straight into iTunes nicely with all the metadata though. There's an app called Senuti that does the same thing as PodWorks but without iPhone support. So it's PodWorks for me.

2008-04-12T21:42:00.000+08:00

W-T-F

2008-04-09T20:34:00.004+08:00

This is my favourite song from Muse. Check out the second solo. It's mad.

Guess what came in the mail today?

2008-04-01T00:52:00.004+08:00

Hehe.

Nice and fresh!

In case you're wondering, this is why I'm getting a new laptop. Sent it in to iShop, iShop took a long time cos there was no stock for the LCD, called and screwed Apple directly. Being Apple, they offered to replace my MBP for a new one (the latest one!!) FOC. HEH.

Transferring all my data and programs with the built in user migration tool. Macs own.

No, it didn't take 11 hours. Lol. About 2 hours later..

Tadah! Haha. Nearly 1:1! Fresh out of the box! Didn't even have to do anything, no reinstalling of programs or any nonsense. Everything there. Down side is that I only have 50GB free out of 200 now.. Oh well. It will end up like that sooner or later anyway.

Looks like even I too, fall prey to guilty material pleasures sometimes..

2008-03-24T23:56:00.003+08:00

Heh.

And the best part about these guilty material pleasures, is that you don't even feel guilty at all. >=D

Testing RSS

2008-03-18T19:19:00.001+08:00

Damn shit my safari's RSS counters are dead.

KEN LEE!

2008-03-13T10:17:00.000+08:00

fucked

2008-03-11T19:07:00.004+08:00

Sometimes, I wonder, what I am doing in NUS, why am I studying this stupid course. Then I wonder, what else can I do? Nothing. If I quit school and find a job now, the employer will ask me why I dropped out of school. If I stay in school, I risk doing bad enough to be kicked out. If I study something else, what the hell else can I study? I don't want to come up with excuses, or to blame anyone. Cos everything has already happened and now is the present. I just feel very very fucked about school right now.

The Angel and The Devil

2008-03-06T21:06:00.006+08:00

O >:D

p.s. Many thanks to Fi. If not for you, I would have never been able to get this. I am so grateful.

omfg. a song made from just win98 and winxp sounds. shit.

2008-02-24T12:35:00.000+08:00

WTF

2008-02-23T21:14:00.003+08:00

A band that uses a DS and 2 iPhones as instruments. WTF WTF WTF. It's so damn freaking cool!!!

They are called iBand btw.

Old school or what??

2008-02-21T20:13:00.004+08:00

Hehe

2008-02-20T09:53:00.005+08:00

Argh I just realised I haven't blogged about vday!! I'm so owned :( Anyway. Vday was damn fun! :D I got her flowers, and showed her the movie I made with pics from the day we met.. She was so happy she almost cried :P Luckily I included funny stuff here and there so she wouldn't start bawling :P And guess what she got me?? ORANGE BOX!! Hahaha! Damn funny la. You would expect like maybe a bear, or chocs, but no she got me a game. HOHO. She sure knows me well :D Anyway the xbox is fully functional with many games, we had fun over the weekend playing like almost everything under the sun. Now all I need is more controllers and people to play!

In other news, I was zhnging my adium yesterday.

Sleek or what? :D

:D

2008-02-14T10:09:00.002+08:00

Happy 6 months cum (no pun intended) valentine's day bee!! Got surprise for you later hur hur..

Party Machine Up and Running!

2008-02-12T01:27:00.000+08:00

Haven't thoroughly tested everything yet, but so far all the multiplayer games work. Ninja Gaiden refuses to work, and so does GTA: San Andreas (downloading a fix, hope it solves it, couldn't try)

Fun fun fun!

2008-01-27T22:56:00.001+08:00

Never take a blind date to a silent film.

2008-01-16T23:26:00.000+08:00

Thanks bee bee for the xmas and birthday prezzies :)

2008-01-10T00:35:00.000+08:00

Thank you so much.. Love you bee bee *muacks*

My guitar has not looked so clean for a long time..

2008-01-07T16:40:00.000+08:00

Removed all the strings, cleaned the body, the fretboard (LOTS OF SHIT!) the neck, headstock, changed the strings... Looks great, feels great and sounds great now! :D

2008-01-07T05:23:00.000+08:00

Back by popular demand, the parody of Dragonfarce!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwPAewBFVQs

Vids of mad guitarists

2008-01-04T19:56:00.000+08:00

John 5 who used to play for marilyn manson. Surprisingly good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc9O4yk7SKc

Chris Broderick. Another madman. Here he plays mozart by tapping

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xohcxxt6oHo

Then he does some slap jazz slapping

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsYfLjsHBDE

He can shred too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4bLerJddlM

This is proof that how some people CAN play the guitar too fast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adY-zuus5YQ

And how pinkies can be too long

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34ttVVeGb3w

And finally why I think Dragonforce plain sucks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1uT8MUr7_4

Been playing around with garageband..

2007-12-21T03:40:00.000+08:00

All fi's fault. Now I'm addicted too. The amp sim is amazing, you can choose the sequence of the amp, eq, how many amps you want.. bla bla.. I went to research online on Eddie Van Halen's tone, stumbled on this site http://www.amptone.com/eddievanhalenrig.htm and I followed it. Since I could insert as many EQs as I wanted I could somehow follow it to a certain degree. Guess how it turned out. I won't say, hear for yourself!

Panama

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/panama-garage.mp3

When I Look Into Your Eyes' solo

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/looksolo-garage.mp3

A faster solo (anyhow)

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/solotest-garage.mp3

A project I've been dreaming of for some time..

2007-12-18T18:31:00.000+08:00

Has finally been fulfilled. :D Smarvo with a return jack. Now I can jack in my pedals the way I do during jamming, bypassing the EQ on the amp. And the best part is, I did it myself. :D Took the useless footswitch jack and re-wired it to the volume knob (I'm sparing a LOT of details) and it works! I also wired it so that it will always be in clean mode, the way I use it. The boost mode sounds horrible anyway..

Pics!

Sound clip here: http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/panama-smarvo.mp3

Linux on mac? Unpossible!

2007-12-15T20:26:00.001+08:00

I got it done with Parallels and Ubuntu. :D And it's pretty damn fast. Faster than windows running on Parallels.

Oh by the way I loaded Ubuntu with mac fonts so it will look more mac-like. The original fonts looked like ass. Lol.

Tipard/Leoger

2007-12-15T16:30:00.000+08:00

Er yea. One more of my antics of trying to make Leopard look more like tiger. And ending up making my Leopard look like some frankenfreak thingy. Oh well it's cute ^^

Tag if you wanna know how!

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

2007-12-12T02:21:00.000+08:00

A friend who helps in times of trouble is a true friend. How true this is. I am thankful for having not one, but two. My baby and fi, the only two who helped me out for my up and coming court case. Baby offered her PSP up for sale to help out, and is also taking out a significant portion out of her paycheck for me. Fi offered the same, and he cabbed all the way down to meet me even though he was in the middle of his work. Both of you are the truest, and bestest of friends anyone could ever wish for, and for that I am eternally grateful.

I shall not mention the particular individual who immediately turned me down even before I asked him for help. I was not even intending to ask him, afraid of the repercussions. Such people I need little of in my life.

It's times of trouble that one finds his true friends. Not that I doubted any of them, but it was through this that strengthened my belief on who my true friends are. I learnt a lot too from this experience, through all the thinking I've done collectively for the past 2 months. I realised all the wrong doings I have been doing, and why. It's time to get back on the ground and live a humble life.

I hope the verdict tomorrow will be alright.

Leopard Tricks!

2007-12-06T23:37:00.001+08:00

New additions to my ever changing mac! Notice anything different? The menu bar on top is not translucent anymore! Yay! Old tigger goooodnesssss... Did it with 2 programs. And I'll guide you through how.

First, I made it white. It used to be difficult, having to go into terminal and edit system files yourself.. But the great guys at eternal storms software made a really nice software that does everything for you, free of charge! Here it is: http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/opaquemenubar/index.html

Run it, change opacity to 1, restart. You're done.

After this, you're done, with a really really white bar. Like.. bleached. That's kinda ew and bright, not like the Tiger one with a gradient, so we have another app to help you out. You can adjust the gradient, the colour, mouse over opacity, yadda.. but I adjusted a global setting to look as tiger as I could, as seen above. Nice and yummy. I like. Here is the second app you need: http://www.manytricks.com/menubartint/

Run this one, fiddle around, and you're done. For reference, I used black for all the base colours, and set 0% opacity for top, 5% opacity for middle, and 15% opacity for bottom. Both opacity sliders for mouse over and away are all the way to the left. Once you're done, you can hide/close the settings window, and it will be tucked away nicely without knowing it's there. Oh and you need to add it in your login items for it to take effect, just tick the hide button after adding it so you won't see it or even know that it's there.

UPDATE: You can just use opaque menu bar to set the opacity to 0.62 to get the bar on older macs running leopard. It doesn't look exactly like tiger but at least it looks official, and it's less troublesome. Also with menu bar tint the white words when you click any menu item turns out grayish. And the blue doesn't quite match the rest of the menus. So well, you decide.

So there. Hope it helped. If you wanna know how I got the song title up there, I use a program called QuickTunes, and I have a software called GimmeSomeTune (also from eternal storms software) that grabs and updates the lyrics for all the song that is playing, and you can set a shortcut key to display the lyrics anywhere. No more breaking your flow to find lyrics, just control-command-L (that's how I set mine) to show the lyrics in a nice, translucent black, resizable window. Lookee here:

It comes with a menu icon, but you can hide it, but remember to set a global shortcut to call the settings page up before you do! If not you can't see it again unless you delete the preference file, which is.. really tedious. I set mine to control-command-comma, as command-comma is the normal preference shortcut key for the mac. Easy to remember.

I also have a QuickLook plugin that displays the contents of a folder, rather than a boring icon. Check this out:

You can get this from http://homepage.mac.com/xdd/software/folder/. Also, I have one that QuickLooks zip files, rar files, any archive file as well! You can get that one here http://macitbetter.com/BetterZipQL-1.0

Also, have you ever surfed the net, or talked to your friend, and not know what a word meant? Did you have to go to dictionary.com or worse, flip a real one? Well in leopard it's built right in, you just select the word and press control-command-d. Yes it's that simple. Look here:

Works anywhere with selectable text. For any other word, just call spotlight (command-space) and type it in! Spotlight is just too flexible to document here.. Basically you can run programs, choose songs, search the dictionary, do simple math, all in spotlight!

"But what about my spanking new PC with Vista?" you might ask. Well, too bad. Get a mac. :)

10 reasons why you should get a DS instead of a PSP

2007-12-06T12:47:00.000+08:00

If you are considering between a DS and a PSP, think no more. Get a DS, and below are the 10 reasons why. I've owned a PSP prior to the DS, so I can safely say that my comments are unbiased and the true reflection of what I feel about the two different consoles.

The games are smaller so you can put more on a piece of memory than a PSP, a PSP with a 4GB memory stick can hold the most 5-6 games, each weighing in at 200MB to 1.5GB, while a DS more than 30 games with a 2GB SD card, where the smallest game is 8MB and the largest at 128MB. How many times on the bus were you bored with your PSP game, and you wanna play some other game, only to realise you didn't bring it along? With a large selection, you'll never get bored. Also, with the amount you can put on the DS, you don't have to choose what game to bring along with you, you just bring all of them along!
With smaller games, a good side effect is that the games will load faster. MUCH faster. You spend less time waiting and more time playing.
The games are simpler, making it much easier to play on the go than with the PSP. I found myself playing my PSP only at home, making it practically useless as a portable console.
The games are easier to save, same as point 4. You don't want to be waiting for the bloody game to load to the main menu, then load the save menu, just to save when you've already reached your destination!
The games are so easy to play even your girlfriend or her baby cousin would want to play! Fun for everyone, isn't that what games should be like?
There are many interesting and unique games on the DS that you can never find on the PSP. How many games on the PSP are horribly stripped down versions of their bigger console brothers on the PS2 and PS3?
A DS bundle is cheaper than a PSP bundle.
The DS is much smaller and lighter, and thus less strenuous to play on the go. I've played the PSP on the bus till my wrists and neck were sore. I can play my DS from home to Woodlands and still not want to put it down. Also, while being smaller, it's easier to bring around! The PSP was just too troublesome.. Not to mention being afraid of dropping it..
The DS is more hardy than the PSP, with a suitable hard case. The hard case does not impede the usage of my DS, unlike the unwieldy Logitech PlayGear for the PSP. This means you can take it out to play anytime you like while on the go without fear of dropping, scratching or nicking your DS. I was so afraid to drop my PSP, with a few near misses.
It's easier to 'mod' the DS than the PSP. The amount of knowledge needed to mod the PSP just to play games off the memory stick is atrocious! You just buy an R4 for the DS. It's only like, $50? A brand new DS + R4 is still cheaper than a brand new PSP. And you can slap in a memory card into a DS and begin playing, but you still need to mod the PSP!

Yeah, you can say the PSP has better graphics, looks cooler, and can play PlayStation games, but the games just suck for playing on the go. Most games feel as though they were supposed to be enjoyed at home and not outside, especially with the snazzy graphics. Even with the snazzy graphics, they are nowhere near the quality of a PS3 or even the PS2, so there's no point in playing them at home anyway! You might as well get a proper console. That being said, I'd rather get a Wii. So I can play games together with my friends, rather than them watching me play Final Fantasy Whatever.

Get a DS. You won't regret it.

Hmm

2007-12-05T03:01:00.000+08:00

In the light of the recent trend of posting song lyrics, I shall do so as well.. (actually not really, it's just fi lol)

Here's Third Eye Blind's Jumper, from the era of secondary school. Singing about stepping back from the edge and putting the past away. Meaningful stuff.

I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend

You could cut ties with all the lies

That you've been living in

And if you do not want to see me again

I would understand

The angry boy, a bit too insane

Icing over a secret pain

You know you don't belong

You're the first to fight

You're way too loud

You're the flash of light

On a burial shroud

I know something's wrong

Well everyone I know has got a reason

To say

Put the past away

I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend

You could cut ties with all the lies

That you've been living in

And if you do not want to see me again

I would understand

Well, he's on the table

And he's gone to code

And I do not think anyone knows

What they are doing here

And your friends have left

You've been dismissed

I never thought it would come to this

And I

I want you to know

Everyone's got to face down the demons

Maybe today

We can put the past away

I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend

You could cut ties with all the lies

That you've been living in

And if you do not want to see me again

I would understand

Can you put the past away

I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend

I would understand...

Anyway life hasn't been really swell for me recently, credit card debt, court case for speeding coming next week, just finished my exams and probably going to fail 2 modules.. Thankfully baby's always been there for me.. Gonna clear all the shit and start 2008 afresh. I will be a better, more responsible person. I guess that's the true meaning of maturing and growing up, and not speeding like a mad dog, spending money like water and fooling around with girls, like a certain individual might like to believe. I'm going to wake up and accept the fact that I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth and live a normal, honest and happy life. One does not need to endanger lives and waste petrol with speeding or spend lavishly to enjoy life. I have my baby, my awesome group of friends, my band and my music. All these too important to me to lose with recklessness.

Thru the shitty 2007, I hope I've become a better person. May 2008 be a better year.

2007-11-23T02:36:00.000+08:00

All I've ever wanted for a girl, was someone to talk to, someone to laugh with (or at), someone to cuddle up to, someone I can take care of, someone that can take care of me, someone I can take responsibility for, someone to live with, someone to be with, someone to hang out with for the whole day, someone to love..

And I've found her. And I'm glad. I love you bee :)

Leetifying Leopard

2007-11-12T17:40:00.001+08:00

If you've been reading my blog, you would probably know I have 2 macs, and both running OS X Leopard. If you don't, now you do.

What's new in Leopard is something called Screen Sharing. Basically what that means is that you can control a mac, from any mac, over the network. Cool huh. You might have seen many repetitive desktop pictures on my blog over this period (rest assured they were of different macs on different versions of OS X) but you haven't seen anything as confusing as this yet:

Wha? 2 docks? No, the mac in the window is my iMac, while the actual one is my MacBook. I'm downstairs and I would like to make my iMac do stuff while I'm working. I won't have to run up and down to check on what's going on, I can do everything from here. Is that cool or what?

Anyway. Maybe that was not so confusing considering you probably are on micro$haft winblows, cos when I look at that pic I see 3 docks (including the one here). So. To add on to the confusion I decided to be retarded:

snowy the new kitty..

2007-11-08T23:38:00.001+08:00

DSC01169.JPG, originally uploaded by sanXp.

She's sleeping soundly.. Has been a long day.

Mac OS X

2007-11-02T09:26:00.000+08:00

Before (Tiger)

After (Leopard)

Aw yeah. Leopard is now on the big one.

2007-11-01T16:28:00.000+08:00

24" Leopard goodness. I couldn't help myself. Sorry tigger..

click

2007-11-01T11:52:00.001+08:00

LOL@APPLE

2007-10-27T20:05:00.000+08:00

Windows servers are represented on Leopard as crappy 15" CRTs with a BSOD. LOL!!

hehehe

2007-10-27T19:47:00.001+08:00

Leopard is up!

2007-10-27T19:02:00.000+08:00

Screw the non-believers, I got leopard running on my MacBook Pro. Heh. Check it out:

Is Leopard really worth it over Tiger?

2007-10-27T13:05:00.000+08:00

Been reading up on it prior to making the leap to Leopard, and there were many whose computer crashed and burned after installing it. Apparently it had something to do with certain incompatible apps loading on startup, and they had their machines stuck on the blue startup screen with the mouse pointer for.. a good few hours. Nothing they do can get the machine out of that state and even better, when running the installation DVD again, the drive could not be installed to! They apparently had to format and do a clean install of leopard, losing all their files. I'm not too keen on that, especially on my iMac where I have a lot of very precious data. With no 500gb hard drive to backup to, I can only risk my MacBook Pro, which doesn't have a lot of data, but which I can throw into my iMac for safe keeping.

Another thing is the look of leopard, I don't really fancy the way it looks. Yeah, stacks is cool, spaces will be useful, cover flow everywhere, but the overall look of Leopard is.. ew. The translucent menu bar, no more rounded corners, super FUGLY folder icons, ugly shade of blue on the selected menu items.. oh and yes.. FRONT ROW LOOKS LIKE ASS. I believe it's the exact carbon copy of the Apple TV interface, which honestly isn't very nice. The 3D effect of zooming in and out of front row is GONE, and it just fades in and out. Really sad.

So I've decided to go with Leopard only on my MBP, as I believe spaces will be productive for me, but will stick with Tiger with my iMac. Tiger just looks better, and I don't need spaces here with a 24" screen. I don't code on my iMac anyway. I would wanna come home to a pretty interface after a hard day of school or what not.

Cool app of the week!

2007-10-23T15:18:00.001+08:00

Introducing an app I've been looking for the past few days: an app that can display the song my iTunes is playing on my menu bar, the nifty nice neatish area on the top right of all macs. It's really simple, but it's not easy to find a free one that looks good (the other I tried needed me to pay and had really crappy anti-aliasing; the words were jagged!) and I stumbled upon this today: QuickTunes. It's completely free under GPL and it does a little more than just display the song title on the menu. Check the shots out:

Pretty much explains what it can do. Not like I really need them, but it's cool to have. It has a floating window which I won't show here because I already have sizzling keys to do that for me.

More info here: http://dbachrach.com/opensoft/index.php?page=QuickTunes

for fi

2007-10-19T14:44:00.000+08:00

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/firiff-triac.mp3 this is your riff with my triac
http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/firiff-mix2.mp3 this is your riff mixed in with the triac
http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/firiff-mix.mp3 this is the same as mix2 but it has my normal setup mixed in as well, sounds like shit tho, dunno why

Hmm I removed the 'What My Friends are Saying' section..

2007-10-19T12:20:00.000+08:00

Kinda takes up too much space and I don't think anyone is interested in reading them.. If you want it back just holler on my cbox and I will add it back!

I HATE CHINANESE!!!!

2007-10-17T18:17:00.001+08:00

The feeling of being a guitar geek is coming back..

2007-10-15T23:14:00.000+08:00

Finally the feel is back.. I wanna do stuff to my guitar setup once again. I'm planning on having my solo boost switch on my guitar, followed by a looper that switches 2 of my 3 overdrive pedals in and out so I can switch between clean and distortion easily, and cutting the body to have more pull up on my floyd. All these hopefully done by next june, wish me luck..

Thanks to all that came!!

2007-10-01T03:15:00.001+08:00

IMG_4672.JPG, originally uploaded by sanXp.

See all the photos here:
Day 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanxp/tags/day2/
Day 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanxp/tags/day1/

Heh

2007-10-01T03:14:00.001+08:00

IMG_4667.JPG, originally uploaded by sanXp.

Check the rest out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanxp/tags/day2/ !

DAY 2!

2007-10-01T03:10:00.001+08:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanxp/tags/day2/