This is a Wacom Graphire 4 Digitizer Tablet, but of course you can't be blamed if you can't tell since it seems to be still wrapped in it's shipping packaging. It's hard enough to read the box to see what it is, and it's impossible to read the features list off the back of the box.

When I told the workers that I needed to take a look at the box and thus I needed to rip up the shipping packaging. He said "we can't open it unless you want to buy."

Wait... you mean it'll be like a lottery then? I buy something that I don't even know exactly what it is?

Ghheeeezzz....

I bought Silverlit Palm-Z plane to show WZ how a plane flys around, instead I end up teaching him a valuable lesson about QA, after ripping it out of the box, waiting about 10mins for the plane to charge from the controller, I turned on the plane I slide the throttle forward and the propeller roars to life... for the whole of one second! Puzzled, I slid the throttle up and down but there was no response. Eventually after trying for a while the prop came to life for a few more seconds.. and has never ever spun since.

Bloody hell!!!! Maybe I should have just bought one of those cheap RC cars and have WZ chase it around instead?

Hope Jusco accepts my return or there's gonna be hell.

This seems to be one of the more easily available portable 5V power supplies right now. They seem to be sold almost everywhere phones are sold, and come with a variety of power tips. And since we're talking about cheap China made knock offs of each other, some of them would come with only one tip, some of them would come with a few.

I managed to score one which came with a USB Mini A tip among a few others, I'll now see if I can find a Mini A to A female converter before I splice one of the cables with a socket.

The main difference between this and the other portable power sources which I have is that this thing uses AA batteries to provide the power instead of an internal rechargeable battery. This means that as long as you can find AA batteries you can keep recharging your phone, that's of course better than using the hand cranker in a pinch I guess. But is of course bad in the sense that you have to keep buying more batteries if you want to use this. The packaging states that an input voltage of 1.2V to 1.5V is supported, so you should be able to use rechargeable batteries in this.

Nice to have if you're the type of person that SOMETIMES run out of power for you phone when you're on the move, why sometimes? Cause if you were using the other rechargeable battery packs, they might have ran low on juice while in storage in your bag whereas since this uses batteries, at least in a pinch you can just slap in a AA to do the charging.

Got this for RM35 at Low Yat Plaza

God damnit! How dare you make me wait 30 minutes and then still have to gall to say that you've FORGOTTEN TO TAKE THE ORDER and NOT suggest giving us a free meal as a form of apology!

Never ever coming back to this place again!

Edit : Interesting point to note is how fast it took from the incident to having this post up... almost instantaneous, so... remember not to upset customers that are accessing the internet with their computers, cause it's very likely anything bad immediately gets blogged.

This is what happens when you leave your son's teether in the car when you know he needs to bite something.

Getting WZ to stand on his own two feet is a matter of getting him to lean on something, then coaxing him to start clapping his hands.

Daddy and WZ in gaming trance mode together.... I blame Mario!

God!!! The amount of forms I need to fill out.....

Wow... adrenalin numbs pain I see.

Wow.. errr... I guess this is going to be how it is...  you must have something to get your child under control.

Something weird happened to the eeePC the other day, I booted up the system and the boot up image (which displays when the BIOS starts up) wouldn't go away. Effectively the system hung at the BIOS screen. I managed to clear the BIOS image and get a more proper look at the BIOS messages and saw that it was trying to see if there was a bootable medium in a USB Mass Storage device, and since the only thing connected to the machine was the SD card, I pulled the card out and the system immediately booted into Windows.

Once the OS came up I tried to read the SD card to see what went wrong, sure enough there were problems accessing it, either Windows would stall cause it was unable to communicate with the card, or it'd ask if I wanted to format the card.

I reinserted the card a few times and then as sudden as the problem came, it vanished and everything is back to normal.

For now......

This is a Canon CP740 Dye Sublimation printer, I bought it after my father got his own digital camera and would need to start printing more pictures. The interesting thing about dye sub printers is that you always print EXACTLY the number of pictures they say on the box, so you can perfectly calculate how much one picture costs, in this case... RM75 / 108 photos = RM0.70 a photo. This compared to a full load of my inkjet printer which is (6 * RM38) + RM38 for a box of 100 sheets and even with that I STILL can't be sure how much a printout costs since.. it's ink, there's no way of knowing for sure how much ink is used in a print out.

Anyway.. as to the quality of the printouts, they are pretty good, a bit gloosy, and the printouts are a bit on the dark side, so low light shots look gloomy. If you connect and print from a computer then you can try and fix it somewhat by tuning the brightness and saturation, etc. etc. The cable used to connect the printer to the PC is a standard USB A to B cable, the printer itself doesn't come with one. But the sales person was nice enough to try and sell a "USB PRINTER CABLE" to me for a mere RM50, and I didn't even want to screw him even after he told me that if I printed pictures with more colors then I'd end up printing less pictures.

I can't say this is a MUST BUY piece of gear for the casual digital photographer, but it's not "Oh my god what have I just wasted my money on?" bad, so it's ok I guess.

WZ now pays a lot of attention to the TV, previously he just stares at it for a few seconds, now he stands up in front of the TV zombified by it, he's particularly attracted to the bright colors of cartoons.

I'm not sure wheter he's kissing the glass or attempting to bite it.

I'm gonna have to remember to pack a first aid kit in the diaper bag when he starts running around.

This is why we now have to make sure WZ is doubly strapped into the high chair.

It was hard to take the following photo, because when I take out the camera and focus for the moment, WZ just stares at it and behaves...

OK... here's what's been happening with the eeePC so far.

It's currently running Windows XP SP2, after I was unable to remove the Page File from the Windows Vista install. Since I don't want to wear down the SSD, I have to make sure that I remove the Page File from the OS. Also... following some drama at the Asus service center, my eeePC is currently has 2GB of RAM in it, that pretty much means I shouldn't need a page file as long as I don't run too many things at the same time.

Another source of disk trashing was the temporary internet files folder, I first tried to move that to the SD card but the slow speed of the card SERVERLY hampered the browsing experience. After a suggestion by someone at LowYat.Net, I've dedicated 150MB to a RAM disk where the files are stored and it seems to work great so far.

I think my other laptops like the company.

In order to carry the eeePC around, I decided to buy a new bag for the trips where I don't need all my gear.

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have bought a NORMAL messenger bag, I should have bought a messenger bag for a computer, cause now... all I get is a BIG pocket.. and a zippered REAR pocket, I guess I'm not used to normal bags anymore. Anyway.. the rear pocket fits the eeePC nice and snug.

And the adapters and other shit goes into the main compartment. Part of the reasons as to why I got the bag was because I was entranced by the pictures on the flap of the bag.

But... since it carries my stuff so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

Went to my grand aunt's birthday dinner just now, and it was a good test for the new equipment to placate WZ with.

And to think a few months back I was thinking that a giving a kid a Portable DVD player to watch was too much. But heck... this is much better than a DVD player and next time WZ will be able to do more than just watch movies on the thing.

And I also caught this pic.

I wish I caught it BEFORE I ate the fish!

I'm almost done with my little Silverlight Slideshow application, just have one irritating bug to take care off first. In the mean time, here's a sample of the output, basically you either embed in your blogs like such.

God.. such a blast from the past. Or you can give a link to the app so only those who know the URL can see the slide show for example:-

http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/5089/mywedding/iframe.html

Pretty neat when all you want to do is to show people some pictures. I just have a few more bugs to work out before I can release this to the general public, but if you're interested in trying it out WITH NO SUPPORT AT ALL!!! Knock yourselves out with it.

So here's tonight's progress. Give it a quick run through before continuing reading.

The cheesy looking title slide is in because one of the typical usage scenarios of this slideshow app is to be used in blog posts, if all the images of ALL the slideshows on a single page are downloaded without user interaction that'd be a waste of bandwidth.

The controls now have a lead header to show users that there's something waiting for them at the bottom of application.

Thumbnails are loaded first, then upon first viewing of the thumbnail the full version is queued for download.

This concludes my Silverlight exercise.

For now...

It's important to show progress when doing something that takes time such as downloading a large picture file, so the user doesn't just staring at a black screen wondering what the heck are they suppose to do at that point of time.

Of course.. it also makes more sense if you download the smaller thumbnails first before moving on to the large files, but that's another night's work.

I think I found out what was wrong with the Soapbox videos I was trying to upload. When I upload videos of WZ I default them to HIDDEN visibility state which means that the videos don't show up on Soapbox when someone does a search, so it's hidden by obscurity.

Somehow yesterday when I uploaded the videos and set them to hidden, they weren't visible to the internet at all, so I just toggled between PUBLIC then back to HIDDEN visibility and everything's fine now.

2 good examples that WZ wants to play soon!

All it takes is a little work every day.. and something wonderful happens..

So now.. the pics fade in and out when changing for that oh so important OOOOOOO effect. Also the center button on the control panel is to go to fullscreen. Try it and see what happens.

You all can see where this is going right?

I realised that I'm way behind in my WZ quota. So here goes..

WZ is a LOT more attentive to the TV now, he actually sits down and stares at the moving picture for a few minutes before moving on. Mommy of course takes the time to rest since she doesn't have to chase him down.. hmm.. that's why TV is the first babysitter? But I've already given stern warnings to my wife. NO FARKING PURPLE DINOSAURS!

2 things are evident from the picture below

1. He has the right standing posture already. 2. He's not gonna be able to play underneath that shelf soon.

It doesn't help that my mother encourages him to explore, WZ's default reaction when his hands touches a platform higher than where he is? Start stepping and see if he can climb up the platform.

WZ and Grandma.

OK.. let's see if this works first.. yes.. it's your typical Silverlight slideshow app... gheeezz... I think this is turning out to be like writing a ticker app when learning Java applet programming. Anyway.. this is my first... super basic Silverlight slide show application.

Note the complete and utter lack of animation and transitions and auto moving to the next slide in the queue, you have to do it manually, just move the mouse to the bottom of the plugin area and you'll see the controls pop up.

Yes.. this is stupid and looks like crap... but I'm just testing something first.

I was playing with WZ just now and I was popping up from behind a sofa while WZ tried to climb up from the front of it, then when I popped up I saw WZ staring at me laughing, STANDING UP UNASSISTED, I gave out an audible yelp cause I was scared he might just topple backwards. After a few more seconds WZ realised he wasn't holding on to anything and quickly grabbed the sofa.

But in those few seconds it felt kinda weird, I think I actually felt proud of him since he was standing up by himself. Those feelings quickly subsided once I realised all the trouble he's going to cause when he starts walking.

What can you do other than saying FARK!

Oh.. not talking about Streamyx here.