tin_the_fatty weblog

The question is, who are the target audiences?

I don’t see how this TV ad would pursuade any kids or parents to want to go to the Disneyland. Is it aimed at adults or kidults? Why would people dressed up as Stitch and Mr Incredible be attractive to these people?

FAIL.

Me and the Lady have just spent a long weekend in Beijing, and I have had the opportunity to use a friend’s newly bought Canon 500D. It’s compact and very light. The camera is snappy and the built-in flash works rather well as fill-in in standard program mode. Nice.

The only complaint I can think of is the cheap kit lens. The Nikon counterpart, which is another cheap kit lens, is AFS and therefore supports full-time manual. Full-time manual makes the whole system so much easier to use, and is well worth it.

A Tribute to KODACHROME.

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,
Oh yeah I got a Nikon Pentax camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Because of the thick film base, K64 was also a real pain to scan into electronic format until a few years ago when affordable 35mm film scanners became good enough, but K64 was already on the decline then.

Which reminds, me, I’d need to find a custom curve simulating K64 for my Nikon D300.

What happened, and comments.

Jasper的舞蹈班上有一位可愛的小女孩子，膚色和輪廓與我們無分別，與其他小朋友溝通時亦是用粵語，只不過她與她母親講通時用的方言則並不常聽到。一問之下，她自認是越南人。

人種上，她們一家很可能是漢族，不過未曾來香港之前，世代住在越南，故此認同自己為越南人。兩三代之後，當他們完全融入了這個社會，可能會認同自己是中國人，先祖是越南華僑（不過很難証實）。

No wonder why it doesn’t bloody work! The Nokia E71 barcode reader only reads 2D (i.e. QR) barcodes and not the more common 1D barcodes at the back of books and CDs. How hard is it to support more types?

Yes the browser is the OS. I have just installed Opera Unite, a new and special version of the Opera browser. It contains some P2P features which are very cool, and it has an API for developing your own plug-ins. I have only played with it for a few minutes but the initial impression is very good. There are some missing features (e.g. no encrypted network traffic) but this has a lot of potential.

Shiny new toy!

I checked out the HTC Magic at the Tuen Mun Smartone-Vodafone shop. It was obvious that SV has its own agenda on what phone models to push, ‘cos I had to ask one of the sales people there, and he had to go to the back of the shop, and pulled out a working sample from this big drawer containing about 30 different phones.

The phone was nice. The display is as crisp as the iPhone display. The web browser doesn’t feel as quick (in response) as the iPhone, but much better in capability than the Symbian browser on my E71. Lack of a standard headphone plug is PITA, but my E71 is also guilty of this. Lack of multi-touch capability on the OS puts Android at a pretty big UI disadvantage IMO. Battery life is supposed to be very good. The soft keyboard is okay but I’d prefer a good hardware keyboard myself. I think it does Chinese handwriting recognition, which I didn’t test.

I played with the unit for about 5 minutes, and the initial impression is very good.

完全係個陰謀！

天眼冇鬼用，特區政府大條道理整到周圍都係。香港特區將步英國後塵，變成CCTV國度！

前宗主國d好野又唔學，學埋d衰野！

The Lady needed to submit her Master’s Thesis in PDF format. She couldn’t get her thesis all in one Word file, so we had to do some PDF acrobatics to put together this one single PDF file.

I found PDF reDirect, which is rather neat piece of free software. The idea is, it is a PDF queue, in which you could print to from any Windows applications, and add any PDF file to the queue. Once you are happy with the contents and order in the queue, you save everything to one PDF file. You could therefore use it to rearrange, combine, extract, splice and slice PDF pages all you like.

It doesn’t seem to handle UTF8 (i.e. Chinese) file names and would crash, but this is no big deal, just rename those damn files.

Neat.

I replaced the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 5000 I use at work with a Logitech V550 Nano Cordless Laser Mouse. The metal wheel on the latter feels much nice than the plastic/rubbery wheel on the Microsoft, which is no longer smooth because of stuck grit but I’ve never really liked its wheel anyway.

Google Sync for Nokia S60 seems to work fine for synchronizing Google Calendar and the Calendar on my Nokia E71. Setup was relatively easy. Only deficiency so far: not supporting more than one calendar.

(This is an old entry first written in December 2008.)

I was chatting with Jasper last night. We went from the movies Hellboy II to Hellboy I to the villian Rasputin in the movie and the real guy in history. We got onto Wikipedia and I read him the entry to the guy who just would not die.

For some reason we also got to the Malaysian mythical monster the Manananggal/Penanggalan, which our maid confirmed having heard the folklore. We had a good laugh at it flying around with its guts hanging out and getting caught by barkwire on walls. The whole point, I explained to Jasper, is that these “things”, no matter how horrible they might be, always have an Achille’s Heel. Or, in the case of Rasputin, would go down if you hit him hard enough, and long enough.

EPIC. FAIL.

The Hong Kong Police can’t count.

We went to this new MOS Burger place in Tuen Mun last night after Jasper’s swim lesson. I had a shrimp burger, Jasper had a Sakusaku Chicken burger, while the Lady had a hotdog. The food was fine but a bit odd.

If White Spot Triple-O’s is this big friendly Canadian guy who tries very hard to please, MOS Burger is this little Japanese young lady wearing a Victorian dress and a blond wig who’s doing her own fine stuff. Just an odd combination.

First officially supported Google Andriod phone in Hong Kong. Smartone-Vodafone is the sole supplier. The shop in Central (near Central market) has exactly ONE working sample lunch time today. I couldn’t be bothered to wait for my turn to play with it so I left.

No hard keyboard.

Update (23:00): It seems Hutchison 3 has it too.

and you are as good as your last piece of work.

I have personally paid and bought 4 of the excellent Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 wifi routers, so when my old Linksys died I went for another Buffalo. The local importer was no longer importing the old 802.11g models, so I went for the WHR-G300N, which was cheap for a 802.11n wifi router.

While I was happy that the laptop computer can finally talk to my home network at 802.11n speed, this new router doesn’t do WDS (wifi relay) nor can it act as a wifi client/bridge. No WDS means my wifi equipment no longer covers the podium downstairs. I wasn’t entirely happy with this Buffalo router, but little did I know how awful it is.

Been playing Team Fortress 2 in the last couple of days, and I kept getting crappy connections, which could be temporarily fixed by rebooting the router.

Since the good Buffalo router is no longer available, I checked the websites of DD-WRT and OpenWRT. The ASUS WL-520GU is about the only router that is locally available which supports 3rd party OSS firmware. The logic is, if the stock firmware sucks, I could always install the excellent OSS firmware.

So I bought one last night for under HK$300, and spent an hour or so to set it up as my main router. The stock software appears decent. The problem w/ poor connections under TF2 also disappeared.

I am now weary of those new Buffalo wifi routers, and thinking about getting another WL-520GU as spare.

Update (11:22): It looks like the WHR-G300N is somewhat supported by DD-WRT.

Update 2 (23:45): I’ve managed to load the DD-WRT firmware onto my WHR-G300N router. The trick is to start tftp as soon as the red light stop flashing, when the router enters RECOVERY mode.

Update 3 (3/6): Tried two versions of the firmware, both buggy. While the G300N has potential, it’s not working very well yet. Funny enough, I found a local Yahoo! Auction where you pay HK$179 or HK$199 and turn you DD-WRT-supported Buffalo/ASUS/Linksys routers in for a G300N.

[梁文道] 要抬黃乃忠，就連我們一起抬

我從來都覺得，以前土發，現在市建局強制收樓都是不公義的。為甚麼私有產權可以如此被人侵佔？

我完全唔同意「保育份子阻住發展」的說法。點解要有due process？原因就是希望阻止不公義或者不適當的事情發生。記不記得九龍城寨？當年冇乜保育份子阻住發展，港英政府幾日之內拆晒，大家今日重o係度後悔！

公民社會需要像黃乃忠這樣的人。支持他們的方法有很多：留意有關他們的資訊，向有興趣認識的人解釋和討論，現場觀察和記錄等等。公眾多談論和多留意，是保障公民權利的一個好方法。

李文雋 《擁抱伊朗》 萬里機構：我被書名和封面的兩個女子所吸引，一向亦對伊朗這個國家很有興趣，所以只看了一下內頁，有圖畫有文字便買了下來。

只花了幾小時就看完了，因為事實上這本書內容有點貧乏，頭幾章有關伊朗的資料，在這個人人可用維基百科的網絡時代，可有可無。之後整本書就像一篇又一篇格式重覆的中學家課式遊記，描寫不太深入，沒有甚麼insight。書中的圖片亦多是到此一遊式照片，不過幾張手畫地圖反而可喜有趣。

整體上，有點失望。

美玲、芳子 《敲打天堂的門。古巴》 大家出版：前衛有趣的封面，有趣的國家，加上作者介紹，和封底兩位作者所寫有關古巴的短短幾句，吸引我買了這本書。

兩位作者都在古巴住了一段不短的時間，我想她們亦會西班牙文，能夠與當地人溝通，所以能夠對古巴，與及書末幾章有關的幾個中南美洲國家有較深入的認識。她們的故事主要圍繞著她們在當地認識的人，以這些人的生活、文化、工作、看法、宗教等等作為切入點，給讀者們一個更深入，完整的故事。

推荐這本書。

Wetland Park 20090508

Bumped into old friend from the NPC-era, Wilson Lee. He’s now a professional photographer doing rather well.

The Nikon binos I got for myself and Jasper are both very good, and very useful.

I got Jasper and myself our own “Nature Journal”, for jotting downs birds we saw today. This is intended for Jasper to learn about keeping scientific records.

Jasper really enjoyed our time in the bird houses. It’s nice and breezily cool in there, and quite a few birds to see. Mosquitos are a bit of a nuisance, but some insert repellent spray takes care of that.

Nice day out. Will go again.

We went shopping in Yau Ma Tei in the afternoon. Jasper’s always wanted a pair of binoculars, and I was thinking about picking up something for bird-watching at the Wetland Park.

Kowloon Life has Nikon Spotting Scopes at a good price, but the very knowledgeable sales person advised that, these may only be used with Nikon Coolpix P&S cameras for digiscoping, while Nikon Fieldscopes may be used with DSLRs for superior image quality, but are 3 times as expensive. He plainly advised that most bird-watchers use both binoculars and scopes as they do different things.

I want to get my feet wet first, so I went for a pair of these 8×42, which are very nice and not too expensive. We also picked up a pair of these 8×25 for Jasper, which the Lady finds much easier to use than the big ones. The Lady suggested getting 2, so the whole family could enjoy bird-watching. We thought about getting a 10×42 instead of the 8×42, but I found the latter much easier to use than the former.

We should be using these new toys this Friday.

Members of the staff at Kowloon Life were wondering why folks are buying binos and cameras this weekend. I suggested that, because of the pandemic, people are expecting to spend lots of time outdoor, so they go for the gear.