Free up space on Mac OS X

If like me, you like to trim unnecessary stuff of your Mac, this is a useful and educational site on how you can free up precious space on your system. Just be careful when you start your process and not remove important files.

Travel with only one bag

Packing a travel is actually an art, or is it science? Regardless, it's much more convenient to travel with one bag than be weighed down by tons of your luggage. Onebag.com is a wonderful to explore if you want to check out how you can travel light, telling what you need to take on your trip, what to take them in, and how to pack your stuff. Great for smart travellers.

SXSW 2006 Music torrent downloads

If you're looking for free, legal music to fill up your iPod, check out the collection of MP3s for this year's South By South West conference in the link below. Featuring music from the Showcasing bands playing at the event, there are two separate torrent files that you can grab. In total, there should be about 900++ MP3s in these torrent files which will probably add up to more than 2.5GB of music. Enough to fill up your iPod, or at least if your's is a 4GB nano.

In case you think that the MP3 files are fillers or throwaway music, think again. You'll be able to find gems and some interesting bands in this collection. A great way to discover new music.

Birthday Lunch

Lunch with my wife @ the Soup Resturant during her birthday recently.

Mother of all Lists

Lists. They're a great way to put down useful information. You can have a list of useful stuff, or you can have a list of not so useful stuff. Whatever the case, we have made one or more list during our lifetime. Now, how about sharing those lists that are useful to other folks? Well, Listible is a web resource that puts together various useful lists. On the site, there're things like a list of "Top Free Anti-Virus Software", "Creative Commons Music", and even "Sites to download free and legal MP3s". Really quite a nifty little resource.
Link

The System of the World @ The Tower of London

Neal Stephenson is one of my fave writers and his trilogy called the Baroque Cycle is certainly a most interesting romp through the age of enlightenment. To provide readers with visuals of some of the locations found in the volume called "The System of the World, notlikecalvin has posted a Flickr photoset of locations in the Tower of London where some of the action takes place. So if you want to see the real life locations where the actions in the book take place, go take a look.

Custom LEGO creations

Saber-Scorpion's Lair has some really great looking custom made LEGO creations. There's a series for HALO, Metal Gear Solid, and even Lord of The Rings. I don't think that we will be seeing offical Master Chief Minifigs from LEGO any time soon, but it is certainly great to see fans taking the initiative to create sets of their own. Nice.

Classic Apple

Classic Apple
Originally uploaded by Gremlink.

It is strange how some things that you kept for years become items with historical significance. My wife found this classic Apple logo in her box of memories. To have a classic logo in one's hand is like holding on to a piece of computing history. Seeing where Apple is now and also the fact that the Mac has replaced the original Apple line, I can only say "wow" to how far tech has brought us.

LEGOd Video Games

Skinny Coder has posted a series of video games scenes recreated using LEGO bricks on Flickr as a series of photos. Some of the games that were "LEGOed" include NES classics like Metal Gear, Duck Hunt and Bionic Commando. For those who are more attuned to current games, there's a version of Katamari Damacy, or is it Blockacy... Impressive.
Link

Apple and Nintendo - long lost connection?

Okay, take this link with a pinch of humour. The Go Nintendo site has a series of images that shows the curious and coincidental connection between Apple and Nintendo products. Who knows? Will there one day be a product that brings the two cult brands together?

read more | digg story

A moment of light & shadow

A moment of light & shadow
Originally uploaded by Gremlink.

Caught this interesting image this morning. The sun was shining into the dinning room and cast an interesting image onto one of the chairs.

Instantly upload screenshots to Flickr

This is a useful tool with a clumsy name. Flickr and WEBIMAGER is a freeware that lets you capture screenies and quickly send them to your Flickr account for the world to see. Great if you don't want to manually go through the process of logging into Flickr, touch up the image, upload the image... by which time you may have fallen asleep.

Exhaustive list of Freeware Alternatives from Neowin.net

I've mentioned one too many times that freeware is great. There have been a number of freeware lists that I've featured on this blog, but this is suppose to one exhaustive list. It's actually pretty good until you find out that it's more Windows-centric. Mac folks will have to dig further in other places for a similar list.

read more | digg story

Soft-mod your Xbox

Here is a step-by-step guide (complete with pictures) on how you can turn your gaming machine into a media streamer. Well, if you didn't know that pimping out your Xbox can be that easy, now you do. All you need are just some free software, a Mech Assault game, a Datel Xbox Action Replay, and some patience.

read more | digg story

RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use

Oh my goodness... has the RIAA gone bonkers? Actually, they've been that way for some time. Anyway, it seems that now the RIAA is arguing in a DMCA rule-making filing that copying for personal use ( such as copying to an iPod) is not fair-use. Read this link on Electronic Frontier Foundation to find out what RIAA is doing to you and your music.

read more | digg story

Search Amazon and NLB at once

This fellow has come up with a really, really useful Web 2.0-type service called Book Jetty for book lovers in Singapore. What it does is that you can search for a book on Amazon, and it'll also simultanously look for it in the National Library catalogue. Essentially, you can look for a book that you want and then see if it's available in the library. Or if you want a book from the library, you can at the same time find more info on the book in Amazon.

Useful eh? Absolute time-saver, I'd say. It's still in BETA so there may be some bugs and it may not be optimised in terms of speed. Still, it's a terribly useful application. Two thumbs up! Just hope that Amazon or NLB won't shut it down with silly reasons like "copyright".

Playing with Sand is fun

There's this thing on the web called the Falling Sand game and it's really a dirt-free way to play with falling sand. Running on Java code, some have called this game really "zen"-like. It's so popular that there's a "Hell of Sand" version with not only falling sand, but stick figures.

Now, Owen Piette has taken this whole sand box fun to a new level by coding a version with C/C++ so that you don't need a web browser to enjoy the calming effects of falling sand. It's amazing and certainly a therapeutic way to waste your time and experience Zen too.

IPTV box?

Is this the IPTV box that will be in our homes soon? It'll be great to have a media center box where you can have access to thousands of movies on demand.

LEGO Star Wars The Original Trilogy

Following the success of the prequel Star Wars LEGO game, LucasArts is going to bring those cute brickhead minifigs to the original trilogy. It's cure great news for LEGO Star Wars fans. But we will have to wait till 2007 to play these games if the release date is any indication. Also, it'll be available on seven platforms. Won't GBA and Xbox be really at the tailend of their product life cycle in 2007? Still, it's good news that new games will still be available for these "aging" platforms.

Old times

Spotted these old school records at the food court in Wisma. Totally retro. Since they are displayed out in the open, hope no one will nick them. Hmmm... I wonder what the record sounds like.

DivX on XBox360

Using the Xbox360, you can watch the videos on your Media Center PC, but only if they are in Windows Media format. Of course, clever hackers are changing that and providing a solution that will allow you to watch DivX and XviD files. There's also another solution in the works called Transcode 360. Hackers are certainly stepping in to fill the voids...

Seamy history of videogame sex

Sex in video games. It's certainly a hot hot topic for some. 1up.com has up on their site a feature on the "Secret History of Videogame Sex". It looks at some milestones in games that has to do with sex, or sexier aspects of games, such as the introduction of Lara Croft, the busty girls of Dead or Alive, the notorious BMX XXX, and of course, the Hot Coffee thingy from GTA:SA.

Androids dream of electric sheep screen-saver

Electric Sheep is an amazing screen-saver. It is open source which means it's free and works on PCs and Mac. What it does it is that when it is activated, it will communicate with other computers on the Net to create amazing looking fractal like images. You have to try it to see how amazing the images created are.

Mother of all torrent list

On the Web of Knowledge blog, there is a torrent site and resource listing that could jolly well be the mother of all torrent info. It groups the various sites into categories including unsigned bands, bootlegs, educational, etc. Some are perfectly legal while others are a little on the wild side. You decide.

Web browsing in 3D

3D certainly beats 2D by 1D right? If you believe so, check out this neat 3D web browser that allows you to display pages in 3D. Called uBrowser, this app will allow you to look at web pages from different angles. Don't know how useful or usable this really is, but it's fun while it last.

read more | digg story

No games regulation please, thank you

Games regulation seems like a necessary evil. Especially with controversy of games leading to violent behaviour and containing certain undesirable content (think GTA and Hot Coffee). However, there are still some who thinks that games should not be regulated. On the Next Generation website, an opinion piece by John Geoghegan, former VP of global marketing and sales for LucasArts, argues for a hands off approach to games. The chances of this becoming a reality is remote, but gamers can still dream.

Using the Quicksilver Trigger

Quicksilver is one of the best freeware that is out there for the Mac. It is truly a powerful tool and there's a "trigger" feature that will certainly make you a power user. However, the feature is a bit difficult to start using so this website has a really useful tutorial that'll help you start to use "trigger" on your QS.
Link

Lego iPod Dock assembly step-by-step

Apple's original iPod dock is a tad expensive, if you ask me. If you really want one, and you're a LEGO fan, you can follow the step-by-step pictures and build your own LEGO iPod dock. Just follow the picts that're posted on linuxmatt's Flickr photo set.
Link

Pictures of Treo running Linux

Can a Treo 650 actually run Linux? Well, different versions of Linux is suppose to be able to run on certain devices. And some folk seems to have managed to boot and run the GPE 2.7 version on a Treo. I don't know if it is true but the pictures that are posted on the website seems real enough. Go see it for yourself and decide.
Link

The Future of the iPod

What's next for the iPod? This article from ShortFlip.com posits everything. From the display to the capacity of the device, from the design to the OS running it, the piece is a comprehensive and interesting look at the iPod that you'll be carrying in the years ahead.

read more | digg story

Games are good for you

Games are big business, if you believe the figures that compare revenue from games to that of Hollywood. Maybe that's one of the many reasons games are under attack from certain US politicians. Can't be help really, the more popular one is, the more people will "hate" you for it. Anyway, if you're sick of hearing the why games are bad, here's something upbeat that will cheer you up. Modulo26.net has a piece that looks at why games are good for you. This is my favourite line from the article

...games are not a waste of time-nor are they only for children.

Something that I've known to be true for a long, long time.

Read fast and faster

Too many books, too little time. This is what book lovers and readers will tell you. So what can you do? Well, you can take up speed reading. In truth, some folks think that speed reading is the magic drug for those with plenty of reading materials to digest, while others think that it is all bogus. Regardless, you might want to pick up some of the useful tips that are found on this web page to help you to digest information on printed pages faster.

The Singapore Elections Rally Archive

The Singapore Elections is coming soon and some folks on the Net are trying to collect and archive the rallies that will be held during the period. Pretty ambitious but all possible with today's technology.

Not everyone can attend all the rallies. Not every rally is televised or covered. Hence the purpose of this blog.

If you attend a rally, any party's ally, and record it as video or as audio, digitize it, and upload it to Google Video, then send us the link. We will post the links to the recordings so that all Singaporeans can watch and listen to the speeches for themselves. Please record the rally speeches without commentary.

Link

Seen @ Art of Star Wars exhibition

View All

I finally got a chance to go to the Art of Star Wars exhibition at the Singapore Science Center. It was quite an experience to see the actual art and props from the movies. However, the total number of things there are quite limited. Still great though.

Build Your Own iPod...

... or more accurately, create your own flash memory-based MP3 player. This website will teach you how to make your own player that uses standard MMC or SD memory cards with sizes up to 1GB. Well, it's definitely not an iPod from a design perspective, but it probably can do the job. For the tech-minded.

read more | digg story

Fixing Windows with Knoppix

There are times when your Windows system just won't work for you. This is where the Penguin will save your files. With a Knoppix Linux distro, you can use it to help recover your computer and data. ExtremeTech guides you through the process of fixing Windows with Knoppix, which includes resizing Windows partitions, solving key system file problems, and recovering data. Useful stuff.

read more | digg story

The truth behind Steve Jobs' $1 yearly salary

We've heard about Steve Jobs getting paid only for $1 a year. Is that all there is to it? MSN Money digs deeper and unveils the fine print behind CEOs getting only $1 in their paycheck... In truth, they are compensated much, much more. I won'd mind getting a $1 payslip if the compensation is as generous as what these CEOs are getting.

read more | digg story

Carry your apps around

PortableApps.com has come up with a suite of applications that you can carry around on your portable storage drive. Included in the collection are a web browser (Firefox), email client (Thunderbird), web editor (NVU), office suite (OpenOffice), word processor (AbiWord), calendar/scheduler (Sunbird), IM client (Gaim) and FTP client (FileZilla). It's like a Swiss Army Knife of applications, if you ask me. Go grab it and become an instant road warrior, without the computer.

Looking into Google's future

Everybody loves Google. The extremely useful search engine has become the de facto search engine of choice among many Net users. However, one really wonders what Google will be like in the future. CNNMoney.com has an interesting article that attempts to look at the future of Google and they have enlisted the help of some notable folks to help them gaze into the crystal ball.

What kind of company will Google become in the coming decades? Will it succumb to hubris and flame out like so many of its predecessors? Or will it grow into an omnipresent, omnipotent force--not just on Wall Street or the Web, but in society? We put the question to scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries like Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram. They responded with well-argued, richly detailed, and sometimes scary visions of a Google future.