Back to Nokia!
Just put down my name to reserve the 2009 Nokia flagship phone (yes they have one every year apparently!) I hope it’s not something I regret!!
geekt things 2nd quarter 2009
hmmm, not so bad, 3 months since the last post.
why haven’t I been posting? it’s a bit of a sob story, and me just feeling sorry for myself, since my colleague, an avid food blogger with close to a hundred blog visits a day, laughed at nicthegeek.wordpress.com and called it pathetic. just because he serves google and nuffnang ads, and gets a following, and gets a miserly income from those ads.
but geeky things have not been happening much recently, as I’ve been too caught up with work, tv, the net, travels and just plain lazing.
But I did make an attempt, which failed, to visit the PC Show last weekend. With 4 IT shows each quarter, it doesn’t make any sense that crowds get larger at every show. After I reached Suntec on Friday evening with friends, I almost immediately decided to give up, bought an iced caffe mocha (forgot about the extra shot!) and left to go eat steamboat. yes, steamboat, in this freakishly 30+ degree temperature, and al fresco, I’m proud to say.
On the gadget side of things, I’ve been lusting over (what’s new?) a couple of new phones. Now I’m just torn between buying the LG KC910 Renoir, staying loyal to Sony Ericsson, or getting the Nokia N97 which has been getting rave reviews recently. but then I haven’t been a Nokia fan for ages, and it’s probably a knee-jerk reaction to all the reviews going around.
Pretty phones, all in a row: LG Renoir, Nokia N97, Sony Ericsson Satio (formerly known as Idou), all courtesy of GSMarena.
The SE collection has been rather pathetic lately, just coming out with many clones of their K and W series. Although! I’m waiting quite eagerly for the Satio (fomerly known as Idou) to be released in the last quarter of the year. Hope they’ll have the microsite for it!
Other than that, it’s the LG Renoir, which I’ve had my eye on for quite a while. Had to give up on the Arena, coz of it’s capacitive screen. I bought the LG Viewty, second hand, just to try out touch screens again, and I’m quite loving it right now.
Basically I’m just lusting over a phone that has touch screen, and wifi. So that, I can be pretentious at a starbucks or during transit at an airport, and go online to much around. Although I don’t really do much when i manage to snag a free terminal at the airport. does messing around on Facebook and deleting junk messages from Gmail count?
I’ve decided to try and go back to using Flock again, and it seems that Flock 2.5 is still as cool and much faster at starting up. Will have to try it out on the iBook soon, just to see.
Singnet broadband is really slow this week!
geek heaven 1stQ
Am tempted by the Dlink NAS offering at IT show 09 to support my bt ongoings.
Other price lists here: http://is.gd/mF0l
Inspired to blog
I’ve left both nicthegeek and lucidmyth alone for the longest time by finding lots of excuses. But after attending Blogout09 last saturday, I was very inspired to restart my blogging. Especially from the talks by yongfook (no, it’s not because he’s very hot!), lester and claudia.
But, as sharkie said when I told her about it, “WE SHALL SEE…”
And so, there it is.
Old customers not worth keeping?
TELCO giant SingTel has moved in to ease the burden of customers who may be financially strapped.
It is offering all customers who sign up for its SingNet broadband 3Mbps to 10Mbps plans a $10 rebate off their
bills every month for two years.
From mypaper.sg 11 Mar
i wonder what happens to the rest of us goons who already are with Singnet.
Byebye, Tang Dynasty City
It seems that the demolishing of Tang Dyansty City in the western corner of Singapore is taking place. Newspaper reports last year said that demolishing would start in January this year and be completed by March 09, although nothing was really noticeable this past 10 months. Passing by it last week, even unobservant me noticed that the 10m high stone ‘castle walls’ have fallen, and the pagoda has lost quite a few of its storeys.
It’s always been a myth to me what Tang Dynasty City really represented and sought to prove. The ancient Chinese ‘city’, a recreation of ancient Chang’an, is not part of our culture (maybe our great great great grandfathers’). The admission ticket, seeking to emulate the success of Haw Par Villa, was over-priced. Activities were mostly passive and blah, consisting of craft demonstrations, a wax museum and Chinese acrobatic acts (which one can catch on Channel 8 every public holiday). Food and other products for sale were ridiculously expensive. Only some of the exhibits from the park came to a good end, after being auctioned off by the owners. Some of the terracotta warriors, fake of course, now see the throbbing nightlife of the city. One of them might even stand in my boss’ house.
For the past 10 years since it closed, the park has just been an eerie 12-ha plot of land, whose carpark served as a large vehicle park, a temporary stop for busy contractors eating at the food court across the road, and who knows, as an illicit rendezvous point at night. It certainly was dark enough.
Discussions for the after-life of the $100-million theme park included a Shaolin-style helath retreat (which has apparently been shelved or fallen through), or perhaps even an integrated resort (IR) minus the casino, in the theme of Downtown East (Downtown West, anyone?). Sources from the industry have mixed concerns about the future of the 12-ha site. Will it succeed as an IR minus the casino? Or will it emulate another Downtown East family theme park? Will encroaching into Jurong Lake and neighbouring Chinese and Japanese Gardens, adding onto the massiveness of the site be of any use?
Given the recent economic downturn, we really need to ask whether there is enough critical mass in Singapore and the surrounding countries to support yet another massive leisure/entertainment/shopping/hotel project.
Flock-ing again
nicthegeek is back to trying out Flock. I first started trying out Flock in 2006, attracted by yet another browser with Mozilla/Firefox capabilities. What was better, was that Flock was partnered with Photobucket, at that time my favourite online photo album. It made uploading photos, well…brainless. It was all drag and drop. Blogging with lots of photos was made that much easier, consisting of typing, dragging and dropping.
But then, it all became a drag when Flock became more and more bloated, and took forever to open, both on the PC and on my iBook G4. I then turned back to Firefox, which was then in its 2.x incarnation. But then, I’ve kept an eye on Flock and the comings and goings.
Given that Flock 2.0 went official a month ago, I couldn’t pass up the chance of using it again, especially when it’s based on Firefox 3.0. I don’t give myself much choice in terms of browsers, having stuck with Firefox for the past few years, only grudgingly going back to IE when certain sites don’t work or need testing.
What has always attracted me to Flock has been the support for various social networking and Web 2.0 sites: Photobucket, Flickr, Facebook, WordPress, Digg…open up the Accounts and Services sidebar (pictured) to find more. It lets you do so many things without having to go to the site, login, and do
whatever you want to
do. Update your Facebook status, check your friends’ status, upload photos, check emails, chec your RSS feeds, so on, so forth. Saw some text or graphics you’d like to blog about? Just drag and drop it into Flock’s web clipboard, and drag and drop it into your blog post. Upload your photos to Facebook, Flickr or
Photobucket? Open up the photo uploader. All that and more is just so much easier, without having to flick through several open windows.
Flock is also the first browser to have Media RSS, meaning you can subscribe to media feeds (photos, videos, etc) via your Flock browser. The media bar can also be opened and closed as you fancy. Appearing just above your tabs, you can view your own media streams from Flickr
or Facebook, or search for streams or whatever happens to be on your mind at the time.
- easy access to any of your accounts or Flock’s partnered services via the handy little bar on the left-hand side.
- view uploaded photos or videos, or search for other media streams via the Media Bar just above your browsing space.
Of course, I could also say that all this and more can also be done with Firefox 3.0, with just a few additions of well-made extensions. But isn’t it so much better, if you didn’t have to worry about trawling for the extensions, loading them, testing them and sorting through the good, the bad and the ugly. AND, most Firefox extensions can also be used by Flock…HA!
Having said all that, Flock is not the browser to use, if you’re looking for a lean and mean browsing machine. Google Chrome, another nicthegeek favourite, would be more for you.
Flock is also not without any faults. Most Firefox users would find it easy enough to use, although the gamut of partnered services means having to dig deeper into the various menus and toolbars. It will take a little bit of time before you’re used to the various buttons and sidebars that appear out of nowhere, and are everywhere.
But, trust me, if you’re into social networking and are signed up to too many sites to keep track of, Flock might be one of your trusty solutions.
Wild Day Out again?
this San Miguel Wild Day Out series of concerts is getting very irritating. Why doesn’t it happen in Singapore?
On another note, 老大’s hairstyle not very flattering. What happened?
