kelvin quee

I caught the Flickr bug. I have been posting photos online incessantly.

Partly, Flickr is to blame. They made photo sharing so simple and fun. That’s not a terribly difficult thing to do, but I don’t see many companies doing that either. I used to host my own photo gallery, now I just use Flickr – that says a lot.

Next, my Sony Ericsson K750i is guilty. While the 2-megapixel camera is not anything to gush about, it’s sufficient for most purposes. To add on to that, the nondescript form factor makes taking photos easy without attracting too much attention, especially from your subjects. I can take my time to frame my subjects right before committing. Of course, there were many times I wished for higher resolutions, manual apertures or shutter speed, but I’m more than glad that I can now point and shoot to capture the moment.

Take it from me. I bought a Canon Powershot S3 IS thinking that it will be my dream camera due to the overwhelmingly positive reviews everywhere. It is still a good camera, but the size of it makes phototaking a chore and the AUTO function always does ambitiously low shutter speeds, making most of my low light photos look fuzzy. Disappointed, I sold the camera after 3 days.

Try reflecting the above in a user forum and you will be bombed with harsh comments like “Go get a tripod” or “Get a new pair of steadier hands”, but who carries a tripod everywhere?

Photography should be about capturing images as close as possible to what the eyes see in the shortest time possible.

What’s a camera’s auto function worth if it gets settings (aperture size, shutter speed, white balance etc) wrong half the time?

Enough of the whine. See my proud captures at Flickr. Photography is just starting to get fun!

Macintosh, or more specifically, OSX users will probably scream at this. Either that, or they will probably scroff it off as downright loser.

In anycase, it is now really simple to get an Windows XP desktop to look really like OSX, with all the bells and whistles.

Or, even better.

Here’s what my desktop look like after revamping. Go take a look:

As you can see, OSX’s all-too-famous dock is implemented, complete with the magnification. Drag-N-Drog to dock works too. OSX’s Spotlight is also emulated, courtesy of Google’s Desktop Search. There’s also the very useful function of labelling your folders with different colours, just like on OSX.

Perhaps more importantly, you get all the bells-and-whistles of the the pow-wow eyecandy like drop-down shadows, transparency and the, though weak, implementation of the genie-effect.

Incredibly, the author somehow managed to alter the boot screen to show a silverised (think laser-etched) Apple logo against a cool background while Windows loads. The Windows login screen is also emulated nicely.

To achieve this, if you’re lazy like me, just go download FlyakiteOSX. It’s a 30mb download. Warning: The software does extensive changes to your computer which may be irreversible. Make sure you do a System Restore point, which the installer will very helpfully ask you if you want to, before installing.

Otherwise, if you’re a diehard hacker, just go ahead and do it manually and enjoy the process. alang has an extensive and detailed manual to guide you through.

If you want additionally functionality, like the ubercool Exposé which is missing from the package (read: Not free), try Topdesk which is working very well for me. Additionally, Topdesk will emulate Vista’s mode of taskswitching. How cool is that?

Of course all these coolness and functionality comes at a price. While all the addons are surprisingly stingy on RAM, they do use up processing speed. Make sure you’ve a decent graphics card. My builtin Intel Extreme Graphics 2 barely limps along. The sacrifice of speed for functionality is still worth it though.

Still, there’s one major caveat emptor that I’ve yet been able to handle - the uneasy fit of OSX looks on PC (read: cheap) hardware. Seeing the Apple boot screen on a all-so-serious Thinkpad almost made me chuckle out in laughter.

Remember that no amount of emulation will be able to reach what Apple has achieved, that is the epitome of usability. It’s a philosophy, not just looks alone. If you really want to explore usabability on a PC, go get Gnome. You may have to ditch Windows for Linux though.

Or, if you want to know what all the fuss about MacOSX is all about, so much so that even PC users go all-out to emulate it, go read up on its features.

Again, I’ll emphasise on usability. I know getting your desktop to look exactly like OSX is really ubercool, but if your PC will only limp along and crash every now and then, it’s really pointless. I’ll be testing driving this hacked-together setup for a while, to see if it works. So far, so good though.

During my 3 month long part-time job, I was lucky enough to be allowed to learn Macromedia Freehand for work. There and then, I was damning myself for not actually knowing it earlier.

To say the least, it was so fun and useful. That was the first time I was actually tempted to go purchase a legal copy and use it at home.

But thanks to the wonderful folks at Inkscape, now we have a, though not as powerful, equally useful open source vector graphics tool. The best part is, you don’t have to be running on Linux, Inkscape is available on Windows and OS X too. To give yourself more reasons to use Inkscape, go drool on the screenshots.

Anyway, even as a newbie in vector graphics, I found Inkscape 0.42 surprisingly easy to use (or maybe it’s because I’m new). Everything was inituitive, perhaps the only downside being that the floating menus are abit too huge. There’s that sense of unfamiliarity, perhaps brought over from Freehand, but nothing like the shock I got when switching from Photoshop to Gimp.

I think Inkscape 0.42 is a great replacement for Freehand, if you are not really into the more advance features. I’m don’t have much high requirements. Looking from the screenshots, I think I’ll be just happy enough if I can emulate all of the techniques shown. In some sense, a simpler product actually gives more room to the creative mind.

If you’ve never heard of a vector graphics program, Inkscape is a great introduction into this field. It’s the right tool for making signs, designing brochures and posters or just for the very necessary diagram to insert into your word document. C’mon, everyone’s sick of Microsoft Office’s Autoshapes.

It’s the right time to get a bit creative, now that the tools are available for free. Previously, you’ve to fork out a fortune (or break some laws) just to gain access to those prohibitebly expensive tools from Macromeda and Adobe. Now, it’s free. What’s stopping you?

Go download Inkscape now.

I managed to get Ubuntu working usefully finally. I mean, what’s the point of having a geeky system running but without all the usefulness of your previous Windows XP system?

Slackware is speedy. I would have stick to it if not for Ubuntu, charming its way with it sleekness and initiative. It really sticks to its philosophy of “Linux for Human Beings”.

First hurdle to overcome on Ubuntu was to get my D-Link DWL-120E usb wireless adapter to work on kernel 2.6. The Ubuntu forums proved to be a great resource, but my situation was unique. Here’s my solution.

Next up - making my box configured for daily usage. One of my major complaints is the bloat of Gnome, a full-fledged desktop environment for Linux. It runs quite unbearably slow when I’ve more than 5 programs running on my relatively old hardware (AMD 1.1Ghz) and noticeably slower than KDE. A lookup at the forums tell me that I should install Xfce, a lightweight DE. Once done, Ubuntu is a breeze. :)

Now, I’ve 3 bittorrent windows, Firefox, Evolution (an MS Outlook replacement for Linux), Gaim(multi protocol IM client), xmms (music player) and Synaptic all running without a glitch. Fantastic.

It’s now time to put this old hardware to some good use finally.

I just can’t help being excited. Finally a blogging software that’s so simple, elegant and yet immensely powerful, you can’t just help but actually use it to do what you are supposed to do, write, instead of tweaking here and there, finding workarounds to the bug you’ve found.

Considering that I came from the era of greymatter, when blogger was at it’s infancy, when movabletype was still free and installing webblog software will take you hours on a 56k modem.

And I took less than 30minutes to fully comprehend and install Wordpress. Wow. And it’s actually possible in 5 minutes.

But thinking back, tweaking an ancient greymatter taught me the basics of unix filesytems and eventually lead to knowledge of mysql databases. Just like how coming from a background where my first PC was running windows 3.11 taught me not to fear the dreaded command line interface.

Those moments taught me how to read documentation that came with software, the lingo of computer speak, that there’s defintely a way out even when the terminal in front of you keeps replying you “Bad command or file name”.

Somehow, that built the person I’m today. I don’t believe things can’t be done simply because someone said so. I believe in going out and researching on it. Read it. Try. Try again.

Good things don’t come easy.

Parts of my old blogs, just for the sake of linking:
Learning… and kelvin quee