On my journey to becoming a gadgeteer I came across these quick release keychains.

With a simple addition of a quick release mechanism, a simple keychain becomes a utility belt.. err.. ring. You could just keep attaching gear to it which you know might come in handy, like a light, separating different set of keys (house keys, car keys), heck I'd attach one to my trusty Leatherman Squirt if only I can get a spare! Cause I don't feel like just leaving my one and only Squirt on a keychain. (It's hard to find a replacement cause our Leatherman distributor doesn't seem to think it's a good idea to bring in what I'd call the BEST DAMN pocket sized tool ever!)

So when I saw this in ACE Hardware the other day.

A Niteize S-Biner which is essentially.. a key chain with 2 quick release ends.I don't really have a specific use for it right now but I thought I should just get one and keep it around.

Google's webbrowser, called Google Chrome has just been released in Beta form. It's a browser based on the webkit engine (used in Safari, iPhones) so luckily it means that I don't have to do *much* additional testing to see if our web sites work with it.

Among the various interesting features is what Google calls 'Applications Shortcuts' which allows you to save a URL to an icon on your desktop and then you can basically double click and run it as if you were running an application. This along with the built in support for Google gears is meant to help developers bear more powerful web applications that can integrate and work as well as native applications, check out the illustration in their introduction comic here on Page 34 ~ 35.

Wow.. making web applications that can have access to native resources, and pretty much grant the best of both web and native app worlds. Such a GREAT idea! Microsoft introduced HTML Applications waaaay back in IE5, it was meant to allow the development of web applications that when run on the client machine would have the capabilities and power of a native app. But for some reason it never took off, maybe it was because the idea was introduced by Microsoft and to many people native app meant Windows app and thus they didn't pay much attention to it.

Wonder how well people would receive Google's idea then?

August 31st is Malaysia's independence day, and for some reason I decided to stop and take a closer look at my grandfather's World War 2 medals.

The descriptions you see in the slide show above came from medals.org.uk, I realize that it's very hard to manual focus on such fine details, not getting a perfect picture on the left most medal.

The medals aren't for any special acts of bravery or anything like that. It just shows that my grandfather, fought protecting his family and adopted homeland for much of his life. According to my mother he was severly wounded and almost got thrown out with the garbage on one occasion.

It's a pity while he was around I did not realize what he had gone through, I guess I'm embarassed that I never even asked about his past. It was only after he passed away and the medals were taken out of his drawers that I found out that he fought in the war.

He was an immigrant to this country, but he put his life on the line to fight for his family, and for his adopted home.

100% Synthy!!! Means no pictures where wasted, you can check out my games collection, inspect Haruhi and Yuki, and look at my Xbox 360 (the tape is to stop WZ from pressing the power button!)

I showed my wife this and she repeated the same question "Why would anyone go through all this trouble normally?" Correction, one person would not be able to get enough pictures to stitch together a proper synth. But, let's see you were part of a tour group, and at the end of the trip you collect everyone's digital cameras and put all the pictures together, you might get some unexpected results.

After I mention that to her I came across this blog post from the Photosynth team that explains how to best nab a scenario like this.. wedding photography! It short it recommends that you get one person to take pictures that are meant to be thrown into photosynth and then add photos of every other camera and mix it in the synth to get the best results.

If you're the type of person that likes to test out Beta web browsers, IE8 Beta 2 has been launched and this they're asking users, not just developers to try it out as well. But of course it's still a Beta so please only download and install on a machine that you can sacrifice if necessary.

One Very Important Note!

There is one very important change in IE8, IE8 now displays web pages in a heavy handed standards compliance mode now (like what Firefox does) which while a good idea when you talk to people about it (we're standards compliant! :P) it means that for all the pages out there that had code that was tailor made to handle IE's quirks will now not display correctly like say... thestar.com.my

Note how the drop menus aren't showing properly.. But don't fret, you don't have to go screaming at the developer of your favorite websites to fix the problem, or even scream at Microsoft for 'breaking' the site. Just remember to click THIS BUTTON when you see weird stuff happening on sites that were ok in IE7.

That's the compatibility button which will tell IE8 to display and process the site the way IE7 does. So after pushing the button...

Everything works just the way they did previously, so do remember about the compatibility button when you're using IE8.

For developers, info on this compatibility switch can be found here.

Update please read this blog post from the IE team before installing this beta. Also please also read the release notes about known issues and such