Since I've ordered an iMac for myself online and it's stated to arrive by Tuesday, let's do a rundown of the most important apps that I'll be installing on my new computer.
The most important apps
1) Chrome, and Firefox.
This one is a no-brainer. It's so basic, such an integral part of my life that I almost forgot that you have to install it yourself. Of course it's the first thing I'll download and install.
Sure, there's Safari... But with all the numerous extensions on the Chrome app store, and the ability to sync bookmarks and extensions across platforms... Chrome is my go to browser now, even replacing Firefox that I was enamoured with previously. I still use Firefox occasionally though, because I have multiple accounts of things like LJ, tumblr, etc, so instead of having to log in and out, I just log in to a different account on a different browser.
After those two, I'll probably pick up Opera as well, though I rarely use it.
2) Microsoft office suite.
Again, there's Apple's numbers, pages, and keynote... But microsoft office still rules my day. I use that at work. All my documents are in the office suite format... Yeah. It's a must. Only caveat is that I'll need to either get a usb cd/dvd drive fast, or I see if I can hook it up to the laptop and read the cd remotely because I have an old version of MSoffice in a CD, and the new iMacs don't have a CD-rom drive.
3) Alfred.
Alfred 3 just got released, rejoice! I've blogged about that app before, a long time ago... And yes, I'm still using that thing now. It's just so convenient! The latest version even brings text expansion ability into the table, so you might not even have to buy a separate text expander/typinator app anymore!
Ok. Let's backtrack a little to what Alfred is. It's well... A lot of things.
At it's most basic, it's an app launcher. A search box. It can find your files. It's a calculator. It's like a soaped up version of spotlight. But what makes it really shine, it when you pay for the powerpack. Or become a 'mega supporter'. I became a mega supporter after paying once for the powerpack features... And I must say I regret not becoming a mega supporter earlier. By becoming a mega supporter, you get all the updates free, for life. Even through major revisions of the app. As a powerpack supporter, you only get updates free through one major revision. And it only costs twice as much to be a mega supporter. This is the third major revision that Alfred has been through since I started using it, so basically I've gotten my mega supporter money back.
So what's in the powerpack you ask? Well. A lot of stuff.
Besides the snippet/text expansion mentioned earlier, you things like a music player, workflows, clipboard, hotkeys, shell integration... And a lot more.
My single most used feature would be the clipboard manager. I cannot live without clipboard managers. I had to spend my time searching the web for a decent clipboard manager to use on windows when I started using windows again at work.
Hotkeys. You can set up a ton of hotkeys on Alfred. And I have hotkeys for opening Chrome, Firefox, Word... For playing and pausing music... For skipping tracks... Yup. I love hotkeys.
The iTunes controller was used often too, when I my own lappy was still usable. These days I'm using my dad's lappy and my songs aren't here so... No more music listening on the computer for me.
The workflows. Ah. Workflows. You can make a note in Evernote from the Alfred search box, make a tweet, convert currency or units... Or you can launch a shell script, control your favourite app... The possibilities are endless, and the interface is presented in an easy to use way, so that even programming noobs like myself can use with ease. Or, better yet, you can simply download one of the many workflows that other Alfred users have made.
Of course, you can use change the theme and appearance just to way you like it. Pretty cool app, and definitely one of the first few I'll be installing.
4) Typinator
It's a text corrector and snippet expander... And has other cool functionalities (that I hardly use though) like being able to run shell scripts. I mostly use it for the auto correct feature. Snippet expander is really cool too, if I'm writing stuff a lot. Sure, Alfred just got the snippet expansion capabilities as well... But nope, Alfred can't correct regular typos for you like 'teh' to 'the', not unless you program it to I guess. Typinator has a humongous list of common misspellings also built in for you. Plus, I got the app a real long time ago. You can pick Text Expander over Typinator. Personally I think they are both about the same. I don't use the text expansion ability as much now since I do less work at home these days. But when I was writing my undergrad thesis it was extremely useful. I basically just keyed in the full name of the protein I was working with and never had to type that thing again. Ever. Setting up snippets for emails is very useful too, and I certainly spent a lot of time search for a windows equivalent to use at work (turns out there's PhraseExpress on windows, and gasp, it's free). So I type 're1' and my email ending pops up. Or 'dz1' for a email opening... Or 'quote1' for the whole shebang on my name, title, and office address when asking vendors where to send the quote to. Very neat, and saves me a lot of time typing the same thing, or even looking up things like my office address. Like. Who memorizes those stuff right? Well, at least, not me. Anything that I find myself typing more than once, I'd make a snippet for it. Sure, you can copy and paste, but then you have the save the text somewhere. And open that up to copy. So unless you're using the text right away, text expanders are the way to go.
5) Dropbox.
Hidden away in the finder... I almost forgot this gem. It maybe now shout out to you like Chrome does. but it's there in the background working all the same. I use dropbox to backup my iPhone photos, and to sync files between computers... Say my ebook collection. It's definitely an app that I need to install whenever I switch to a new computing device.
6) Evernote
It's the favourite writing app now. I write my fics there (well, my fics are short, so it works great), I save important snippets of information there. I save important emails there (thanks to outlook integration!). It's my to go place for information storage. Sure there's Apple notes that I also use on the iPhone... But for anything that I might be working on in the office? I'll put it on Evernote for sure. I've got my entire fanfic collection saved in there too. With the ability to make notebooks and sub notebooks (essentially folders and sub folders), you can organise you notes really well, and even share the notes with others. I personally don't see the need to pay for the service though, since I tend to only use it when I have Internet and thus the greatest premium feature - offline notebooks - doesn't appeal to me. (You need space on your device for that too, and my phone doesn't have enough space...)
7) Dayone
My favourite journalling app, that I've been using for over 3 years now. Also recently imported all my LJ entries in there. It's Mac and iOS only though, but still good enough for me. It also recently got IFTTT functionality, so I've been using IFTTT to put my fb status updates and instagram photos into my journal as well.
8) Better touch tool
The hotkey master for your mouse, trackpad, and keyboard. I rig up windows positioning with this app. I put this in number 7... It's not one of the things that I'll notice is missing right away... Till I need to reposition a window and hit Alt-V and hey! Why is nothing happening??? Yup. Then I get pissed and start hunting for better touch tool. Or a similar app on Windows. I like hotkeys, and hotkeys to help me place word documents side by side, just in a particular quadrant of the screen etc... It's essential for me. Esp in the office when I have a big screen... Or when my iMac arrives. There's so much real estate on the screen and you need to be able to use it effectively, and efficiently.
I'm not quite sure if you can do the same with Alfred workflows, but I got better touch tools set up before Alfred workflows were even called workflows, so I didn't bother trying. Like Alfred, you can save a preference file and transfer it between computers, and that's exactly what I did when switching to colonise my dad's lappy.
9) Bartender
Oh this one. Again, another app that you don't really notice till it's gone.
Well, for me that is.
Reason? Because I install on much stuff with menu bar items. And on the 13 inch macbook pro, there's not much real estate space. The icons are often covered by the menu bar items. And so I need something like bartender to help me manage the menu bar items... Hiding those that aren't needed to be seen, but that I need the app running in the background.
I used to have more of those apps in my menu bar, but not on my dad's lappy. I didn't install as many apps here.
10) Razer Synapse
Ok. This is a very recent addition. But since I am using the razer widow and mamba... And I spent my time configuring the lighting... Yup, you bet I'll install this. I've changed the layout of my keys too, so alt is now command and vice versa. So I'd alt-c to copy, which is the same key positioning as cmd-c on a mac keyboard layout. Unfortunately for me... This leads to some confusion when I'm at work... Since the keyboard layout is the same windows type as the widow... I end up pressing alt-c to copy a lot. Till I realize that it doesn't work and then I'd realize that 'Oh! I'm not on the mac!'. Didn't use to be so much of a problem because the mac and windows keyboard layouts are slightly different. Oh wells.
So that's the list of most important apps that I would install right away.
Then next comes the ones that are important when you need them. But aren't necessarily going to be needed right away. Like, tier 2 apps so to speak.
Important, but not that urgent
1) VLC player.
My go to player for video files. It plays a HUGE variety of video formats, has de-interlacing functionality, lets you skip videos back 3 seconds, and most importantly, allows you to assign hotkeys for many of it's functions. As someone who did video translations, ultra short backward skips are really important to me. Often times I'll just be stuck at a particular phrase, trying to figure out exactly what was said. And I don't need to waste time going back 30 seconds and listening to everything else all over again. I might end up forgetting what I was trying to listen out for even. So yup, VLC is the player for me. Not to mention that it pretty much handles everything that you throw at it. And you can re-sync the audio track or subtitles timing too. Love it.
Of course... Being the Arashi fan that I am, with a ton of different videos from various sources, I also have mxplayer and quicktime to supplement VLC, for the rare case that something might not work on VLC... Or so that I can check if the video glitch is due to my computer/vlc/the video.
2) MarsEdit.
My favourite blogging app on the mac... Unfortunately though... Support of it seems to have waned and this thing unfortunately doesn't play nice with LJ. I have to go back to LJ and add in the tags and things like LJ-cut myself. Can't blame them though, considering how dead LJ was, and still is.
Still, the ability to paste photos/screenshots into the editor, and have it automatically upload the photos for you later one is really a life saver when it comes to making show reviews. Since each of my show review is filled with like, hundreds of photos... The auto uploading feature is really, really a life saver. To be honest, I don't use it these days since I don't do TV show reviews... But once I get back to doing them? It's definitely MarsEdit for me. It plays nice with blogger and wordpress so that's great.
3) LINE
My favourite group messaging app. Well, I use whatsapp and fb messenger too, but those two are browser based when on the computer. Comparing the three messenging apps on the computer, I absolutely hate whatsapp. It's the weakest of them all. Because it's mobile based. They don't have their own servers that keep your data. Nope. Instead, the web browser app uses wifi to connect to your phone, and syncs messages from your phone to the browser. This means that the connection is lost pretty often. Like when you phone hasn't been used for a while, the connection tends to go off. On the other hand, both LINE and fb messenger lets you connect directly to their servers to download the messages. No phone required (save for the initial set up for LINE).
LINE of course, has the added advantage of having a desktop app (both for mac and windows). Ok, on the other hand you can't access LINE from the browser... But I prefer having a separate chat app, rather than open a facebook chat just so that I can chat. I know, FB debut a messaging only website sometime back... But the page looks bad. I still keep a tab open in fb just to chat even now.
Hmm stickers. LINE has much cuter stickers than FB IMO, and the way of associating words that you type in chat with relevant stickers? That's something that FB could really really learn from. I hardly even use stickers on FB because it's too troublesome to search though my hoards of sticker sets to find something relevant to use. Sure, they recently included a search function... But really? I won't purposely look for a sticker. I just type. So that's one functionality FB could definitely use. As for Whatsapp? Geez. That lousy thing doesn't even have any stickers! Sheesh! Sure there's emojis, but what are emojis! These days, we want STICKERS!
4) Megasync
For downloading files from mega.co.nz. Well, this is only if you use mega. Which I do, a lot. When I'm getting my Arashi video files. So this is a must for me. Similar to Megasync would be apps like baidu pan, though they only have that for windows.
5) Keka, unarchiver, RAR extractor free, other file unzipping apps.
The unarchiver is supposed to be the best, and free unzipping app out there, but often times it refuses to unzip the file for me. Like, an ad asking you to select the file types it can handle pops up. Which you then dismiss... And nothing happens to the file. And then you rinse and repeat till the app finally, by some stroke of luck, decides to unzip the file for you. As a result, I got Keka. Yeah. I paid for that thing... Because it gives me an easy way to zip up my files and put a password for them without having to open up terminal. Because I'm a forgetful person when it comes to terminal commands and I hate having to google how to do it each time. And for some unknown reason, I can't find a decent free app on the mac that lets me zip files with password. Sheesh!
As for why I need that many unzipping apps... It's because I download Arashi files from a ton of sources and somehow some files that can't be unzipped with one program unzips fine in another... *shrugs*
6) YoruFukurou
Literally meaning 'night owl' in Japanese, YoruFukurou is a very elegant little twitter client for all your tweeting needs. It supports multi account, shows your lists, allows you to make searches... And most importantly is very light weight. By that, I mean that it takes up little real estate space. A lot of people use tweet deck, and I've tried it but dislike it. YoruFukurou is more minimalist in my opinion, and I recommend giving it a try.
6) Growl
Ah... The first of the many apps that stay hidden for the most part. Growl is a notification app that will enable apps to well, notify you of changes. Be it a new tweet mention or a new song playing... You can set the notification style, timing, which notifications to receive and so on.
7) NTFS for mac, Fuse for OS X
I can't remember exactly which app is needed anymore. I mean... I blogged about this a long time ago, regarding how to get you mac to read FAT (aka windows format) drives. I subsequently decided to shell out the buck and pay for it. It was on offer on one of the numerous mac app site that I subscribe to, and they bundled if with a program that lets windows computer read mac formatted drives too. If you are wondering why the hell your mac can't read your disk drive... Well, here's why. It's in the wrong format. You either have to reformat it, or get an app like NTFS and Fuse to let your mac read the drive. When I bought my seagate HD last time, they gave a driver that lets you read windows formatted seagate drives on the mac. Says it only works for seagate hard disks, but since the rest of my hard disks were mac formatted, I couldn't try. Still I found it really slow and problematic though... But my laptop was already really aged by then so I don't know who to blame. I subsequently transferred all my files out of the HD and reformatted it to mac format. I've not used it ever since either, since it's a non-portable drive that requires external power. Nope, no more HD drives that needs external power for me. Too troublesome!
Other Apps that I will install
Ok, here we are at the tier 3 apps. Apps that provide great functionality... But it's in some area that I hardly use.
1) Photoshop, and the whole Adobe creative suite.
Ok, I got this sometime ago on a CD... So I need that darn dvd drive again. I don't use it *that* often, but I do use photoshop every now and then. Would definitely need to pick up on illustrator as well... Though I have no idea when that's going to happen.
2) Calibre.
All, the ebook management app for my kindle. Well, that's not the only thing calibre can do of course. You can use it to convert PDFs and epubs to mobi format (or vice versa) too. If you have a lot of ebooks, calibre provides a nice and easy way to manage your files. You can sort the books by titles, author etc. And if you have a kindle? Calibre lets you mail the books directly to your kindle. No wires needed.
3) Mirovideo converter
I use this mainly to rip CMs into mp3s. For my mixlr radio broadcast. It's really lightweight app that does the job quick. No fanciful menus and stuff. Which you don't really need anyway. It can also help you to 'downsize' your video to a lower quality so that you can save space on your mobile. But with beautiful retina displays on the mobile these days... I'm not sure if anyone would do that anymore...
4) Mixlr
Well, for me to do random mixlr broadcasts of course. Nothing else there is to this.
5) Dropzone 3
A cute little menu bar app that lets you drag stuff to it. You can set the short cuts you want, an icon to upload the image your drag there to imgur for example. Or to open up whatever file in whatever program... Convenient, though hardly part of my work flow.
6) Popclip
A little pop up that appears when you highlight words, that lets you look the word up in a dictionary and so on. Good to have but not essential to my work flow.
7) Handbrake.
If you work with videos, then you'd have heard of this. It's a great app for ripping dvds, converting videos, and burning video subtitles. I hardly do any of that though so... :P Usually my teammate handles that part for me.
8) Aegisubs
A fantastic, free subtitling program. It lets you time the subs, set colors, fonts... You can even do karaoke with that thing. Again, I let J handle all that for me so I'm blissfully unaware of the inner workings on this program.
9) Artrage 4
We got this app when we got the wacom tablet. This is better than photoshop for drawing, especially if you're drawing anything more than simple black and white cartoons. In fact, this app lets you paint. Oil painting style. You can digitally mix then paint and stuff too. I don't do well in art in terms of drawing... But I guess I can always install this for fun...
10) Ink
I got this app before we got the wacom tablet. It lets you turn your mac trackpad into a drawing pad. Great for people who want to try doing some digital art but don't have a tablet. Sure the trackpad isn't very big... But trust me, this is way, way better than trying to draw with a mouse. Also, your computer screen is larger, and the app lets you zoom into a particular area of the screen to draw, so I do think you could get a better experience with Ink than with your phone.
Of course, nothing beats the iPad Pro and Apple pencil for digital drawing IMO. But then I've not had a chance to try the Apple pencil yet. Darn you stores! Why don't you let us try the pencil! :(
11) Teleport
This is great if you have more than 1 mac. It essentially lets you control multiple computers with a single mouse and keyboard. Pretty cool, but I don't see myself using multiple computers at the same time much since well... My lappy is basically dying.
Ok. I think that about covers most of the major apps that I'll be installing.... On the other hand... There are some widgets that I must have. Even though Apple has completely the dashboard widgets and there's even speculation that the dashboard will be gone before long... I really do like my dashboard and the widgets the way they are. Especially love the sticky notes feature. I clip random bits of information that I'll only need on my computer there. It's right there at your fingertips. Or with the moving of the mouse to the bottom left hand corner in my case. I like to have my dashboard as a translucent overlay. Not as a separate space. So that I can refer to my digital sticky notes and check the widgets I have...
Widgets
1) iStat Pro
They don't even make this anymore. You have to get the file off someone online... I know I had it uploaded somewhere... They now make it a menubar app and charge you for it. Well, I have no problem with paying a few bucks on a good app that I know I'll be using for ages... But alas, I have more than enough stuff crowding my menu bar as it is! I like it on my dashboard, thank you.
2) Screenshot plus
For al the random times when I want to take a screenshot. Sure, there are shortcut keys for that. But can you really remember all the shortcut keys? I think it's cmd+crtl+shift+4 to drag an area of the screen for a screenshot and copy the thing to your clipboard. I think. It's been a long time since I did reviews. But yeah... How about saving it to your desktop instead? What key is it? You can google. Or just get a widget to handle it for you.
3) Organized
A soaped up version of the calendar! You have notes, to-do list, and you can set multiple time zone clocks too.
4) TunesTEXT
For displaying the lyrics of the song that's currently playing in iTunes. Lyrics are pretty hidden in iTunes... TunesTEXT enables you to quickly refer to the lyrics, and get on with work.
5) Currency Converter
Ok, I admit I used this a lot more often in the past... These days google is really smart and you can just do a quick google search instead. Currency converter lets you compare multiple currencies at once though, an advantage if you are trying to convert to multiple currencies every time.
6) PEMDAS
Hands down the best widget calculator available. It's a scientific calculator, right on the widget, for all your scientific calculation needs.
7) LunarPhase
Ok, this is just for fun. But it's really interesting to see what phase the moon is right now. When is a full moon coming? Is it a crescent moon today? Incidentally, the app says it's a full moon today. Hmm, I should look out the window eh?
8) Other widgets...
There's loads of other purpose built widgets out there... Even though they're most likely very very old. If you keep playing scrabble you might want to check and install a unscrambler widget. Or maybe a widget to countdown to your big day. Or maybe something to play a plain old game of snake, or a digital lava lamp to waste your time away. Or you could simply check the weather with the stock weather widget.
It seems unlikely at this stage that Apple will revamp the dashboard... But I do hope they keep it. For one, I'd really, really miss it if it's gone.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Things that work and don't work - Update
Ok. So I've continued experimenting (read: trying) things out, and I thought I'll do a little update about the things I've tried.
1) Podcasts.
Oh no. I'm a little addicted now. Well, sometimes. Sometimes I get the urge to listen to podcasts and not do anything else. Which isn't very good. But at least I'm enjoying myself listening.
I'm using Overcast on my phone to listen to the podcasts... Because the stock Apple podcast app irritated me when I couldn't find the 'download' podcasts button. The internet at my workplace is so ridiculously slow it can't even stream a podcast. My favourites are still the TWI-series by Vincent Racaniello, no thanks to *somebody* for getting me addicted. But I like Vincent's voice, really nice and soothing. And of course, the content is interesting too. I've not listened to any of his parasitism episodes yet, but I'm liking the microbio, virology, and his latest in the series - evolution. Love that a lot, because it's the subject matter that I'm most familiar with. Heck, I never even knew that people did such cool stuff with evolution. When I heard about the kind of interdisciplinary stuff they were doing, combining molecular biology with field work with this and that I'm like. Shit, I want to do that. Well. That's the trouble now. The more fields I learn about, the more choices I'm aware of... The harder it is to narrow things down. But it's good I guess. Never too late to go on a journey of self discovery. Ha.
Some other science, but much easier listening podcast I've tried.
The Story Collider. Now that's a good one. People share about their own encounters with science, and for the most part the story is more about people's lives than it is science. The speakers I've heard so far are good though. Humorous and charismatic. And of course, the best part. Each podcast is only about 10-15 mins long. A short bite sized podcast for when you need some cheering up. Unlike the TWI-series which are usually 1 - 1.5 hours long and full of hard science (they usually discuss a paper or two, which is great because I've never had a journal paper discussion before), this one is purely for casual listening.
Stuff to Blow Your Minds by howstuffworks.com is also another great podcast. Also on the casual listening side, though the topics vary greatly and can range in terms of their seriousness and difficulty. I listened to 3 podcasts from them so far, one was on the organic food debate, another introducing Akademgorodok, a science town in Siberia, and the last podcast was on the use of acids in video games and Hollywood VS the real acids that we have in science.
Inquiring Minds is also an interesting podcast to listen to, presenting topics where science, society, and politics intersect.
Yeah. That's all the podcasts I've listened to so far... Not that many, since I'm mostly listening to the TWI series... And this brings me to my next point...
2) Ingress.
I've hit level 8, and I'm pretty much giving it up. I still bother to log at least once a day when I'm out to hack a portal or two. Or three. But with podcasts to listen to, Elevate and Peak apps to practise, fics to write, and news to read... There are too many things to do on the train ride. And Ingress is not on the top of my list anymore. Level 8 reached, goal attained. I guess I can say goodbye again. (Plus, getting level 8 resonators and bursters is hard!)
3) Fics/writing.
Definitely writing a lot more now, and started writing fics again... Taking my inspiration from dreams and real life this time, since I'm still not watching any Arashi shows. Let's see if I can finish the other two dream series fics... So that I can release all four at once.
4) Studying.
Still coming along way too slowly. Esp for JLPT. No good. No good at all. And N1 is way beyond my abilities... No good, no good...
5) Crafts.
Doing some random crafts here and there, when I feel like it. Just last night, I made a washi tape box, and a blog post about it.
6) Going out...
Meh. Well. Last week J was in Sg, so I bought her around a little. But otherwise... Even for lunch I'm eating alone quite a lot. If I don't run into someone, esp my China colleagues, on my way out. I've been having lunch with them a lot. A little too much maybe. Too much Chinese. I message them in Chinese on WeChat. Talk to them in Mandarin. Have discussions in Mandarin. And somehow when the PhD student GJ messaged me a while back he suddenly used Chinese. And so I replied in Chinese too. Yes even when talking to the 'big boss' it's mostly in Chinese. Someone talk to me in English please? (Of course, I speak to my parents mostly in Mandarin too). I need some intelligent discussion in English. Talk to me. Someone! Ok. I do go for lunch with English speaking colleagues sometimes, but the discussion hardly leaves me satisfied... *Gets bricked*
Hmm I wonder who reads this stuff... Does anyone even read this? Though it's linked to my FB through IFTTT... I miss you unsup! (You should go read my LJ too...) *runs away and hide*
7) Catching up with Arashi stuff.
Nope, not happening yet. But I'm excited about my iMac that's stated to arrive on Tuesday! Hurrah! With 1TB of hard disk space... And at least a USB port that works... I can start downloading Arashi shows again. Well, the USB ports on my own lappy still works, but it takes super duper long to recognise anything. It's old. Sigh. Looking forward to being able to mass download stuff again. I don't want to do it on dad's lappy because I'm killing it already... :P
I guess that's all for this post?
1) Podcasts.
Oh no. I'm a little addicted now. Well, sometimes. Sometimes I get the urge to listen to podcasts and not do anything else. Which isn't very good. But at least I'm enjoying myself listening.
I'm using Overcast on my phone to listen to the podcasts... Because the stock Apple podcast app irritated me when I couldn't find the 'download' podcasts button. The internet at my workplace is so ridiculously slow it can't even stream a podcast. My favourites are still the TWI-series by Vincent Racaniello, no thanks to *somebody* for getting me addicted. But I like Vincent's voice, really nice and soothing. And of course, the content is interesting too. I've not listened to any of his parasitism episodes yet, but I'm liking the microbio, virology, and his latest in the series - evolution. Love that a lot, because it's the subject matter that I'm most familiar with. Heck, I never even knew that people did such cool stuff with evolution. When I heard about the kind of interdisciplinary stuff they were doing, combining molecular biology with field work with this and that I'm like. Shit, I want to do that. Well. That's the trouble now. The more fields I learn about, the more choices I'm aware of... The harder it is to narrow things down. But it's good I guess. Never too late to go on a journey of self discovery. Ha.
Some other science, but much easier listening podcast I've tried.
The Story Collider. Now that's a good one. People share about their own encounters with science, and for the most part the story is more about people's lives than it is science. The speakers I've heard so far are good though. Humorous and charismatic. And of course, the best part. Each podcast is only about 10-15 mins long. A short bite sized podcast for when you need some cheering up. Unlike the TWI-series which are usually 1 - 1.5 hours long and full of hard science (they usually discuss a paper or two, which is great because I've never had a journal paper discussion before), this one is purely for casual listening.
Stuff to Blow Your Minds by howstuffworks.com is also another great podcast. Also on the casual listening side, though the topics vary greatly and can range in terms of their seriousness and difficulty. I listened to 3 podcasts from them so far, one was on the organic food debate, another introducing Akademgorodok, a science town in Siberia, and the last podcast was on the use of acids in video games and Hollywood VS the real acids that we have in science.
Inquiring Minds is also an interesting podcast to listen to, presenting topics where science, society, and politics intersect.
Yeah. That's all the podcasts I've listened to so far... Not that many, since I'm mostly listening to the TWI series... And this brings me to my next point...
2) Ingress.
I've hit level 8, and I'm pretty much giving it up. I still bother to log at least once a day when I'm out to hack a portal or two. Or three. But with podcasts to listen to, Elevate and Peak apps to practise, fics to write, and news to read... There are too many things to do on the train ride. And Ingress is not on the top of my list anymore. Level 8 reached, goal attained. I guess I can say goodbye again. (Plus, getting level 8 resonators and bursters is hard!)
3) Fics/writing.
Definitely writing a lot more now, and started writing fics again... Taking my inspiration from dreams and real life this time, since I'm still not watching any Arashi shows. Let's see if I can finish the other two dream series fics... So that I can release all four at once.
4) Studying.
Still coming along way too slowly. Esp for JLPT. No good. No good at all. And N1 is way beyond my abilities... No good, no good...
5) Crafts.
Doing some random crafts here and there, when I feel like it. Just last night, I made a washi tape box, and a blog post about it.
6) Going out...
Meh. Well. Last week J was in Sg, so I bought her around a little. But otherwise... Even for lunch I'm eating alone quite a lot. If I don't run into someone, esp my China colleagues, on my way out. I've been having lunch with them a lot. A little too much maybe. Too much Chinese. I message them in Chinese on WeChat. Talk to them in Mandarin. Have discussions in Mandarin. And somehow when the PhD student GJ messaged me a while back he suddenly used Chinese. And so I replied in Chinese too. Yes even when talking to the 'big boss' it's mostly in Chinese. Someone talk to me in English please? (Of course, I speak to my parents mostly in Mandarin too). I need some intelligent discussion in English. Talk to me. Someone! Ok. I do go for lunch with English speaking colleagues sometimes, but the discussion hardly leaves me satisfied... *Gets bricked*
Hmm I wonder who reads this stuff... Does anyone even read this? Though it's linked to my FB through IFTTT... I miss you unsup! (You should go read my LJ too...) *runs away and hide*
7) Catching up with Arashi stuff.
Nope, not happening yet. But I'm excited about my iMac that's stated to arrive on Tuesday! Hurrah! With 1TB of hard disk space... And at least a USB port that works... I can start downloading Arashi shows again. Well, the USB ports on my own lappy still works, but it takes super duper long to recognise anything. It's old. Sigh. Looking forward to being able to mass download stuff again. I don't want to do it on dad's lappy because I'm killing it already... :P
I guess that's all for this post?
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Books, eBooks, and Amazon
So I've been reading a lot of books on my Kindle... Getting the Kindle has helped me to reverse the trend of me browsing for books - both in the library and online, then borrowing/downloading the books, and then not reading them. Still, that only applies to the digital books...
I can't help snatching books off the book shelf in the library... But when I get home... There's so many other things vying for my time that I pretty much never get to the books. Plus these days, I'm getting lazy to bring books out to read... Either I read stuff on the phone or I'd take my Kindle...
Which brings me to the main point of this post. The procurement of eBooks.
I love the email system of the Kindle - you can set an email for your Kindle, and just mail the books to your Kindle. I personally use Calibre to organise my eBooks and mail them to my Kindle. It also can convert PDFs and ePUBs to the Kindle Mobi format. Doesn't work for all PDFs though, sometimes the resulting format is just unreadable.
But regarding the procurement...
Now that's just troublesome. It's even more troublesome for me to buy eBooks than to download illegal copies. Why? Because of location restrictions. Amazon doesn't sell eBooks in Singapore. Neither does Apple. You need complicated things like VPN to buy Kindle books from Amazon. Apple? It's even worst. You need a US payment method - credit card or debit card - before they let you download anything from the US app store. Used to be that I could download free apps without a payment method... I just tried the other day. Nope, they won't let me do that anymore. *sigh*
Amazon puts ads on your Kindle - you can pay extra to disable the ads, but I've come to like those ads. It's usually some advertisement for a book, and the ad only appears when you 'turn off' the Kindle - it's an eink display so keeping the screen on practically uses no battery - so the ads are really no intrusive. I've actually found quite a few of the books advertised interesting. And I would have purchased them if I could. You know, like without having to do all the VPN, gift card crap. If I had to go to such lengths to buy a book... I could spend a similar amount of time to get the book through some other methods... (And really, the alternative is really fast if you know where to look.)
I remember a Chinese essay regarding music piracy I had to write over a decade ago. Back when the concept of piracy was in it's infancy and I was still using things like Kazaa to get my songs. The problem then was that there was a lack of legal means to get digital music, and that many teens, myself included, has no access to a credit/debit card to buy our songs online. So what do we do then? You can't stop us from listening to songs. We just pirate. The credit/debit card problem is still there for many teens, especially in an Asian country like Singapore where parents can be pretty strict. But the next barrier is that of geographical location. After years of negotiation, Netflix has finally landed in Singapore, Malaysia, and a bunch of other countries in the region. Some dramas/movies are not available here due to copyright laws or other legal restrictions, but being able to get on Netflix without VPNs and other web trickery is definitely an improvement.
Sure there are loads of legal hoops that cooperations need to jump through, but as consumers, we don't care. Well, those who do care a little more would go through the trouble of tricking Amazon to think that we are in the US. But the rest of us would just do it some other way. And that other way does not involve publishers/authors getting a single dime.
It's simple. Give us an easy way and we'll be a lot, A LOT more inclined to do things legally. If I can get the book in two clicks, without even leaving my Kindle, why would I take the time to search for the book online, download said book, load it into Calibre, convert it into Mobi if it's in the wrong format, then email it to my Kindle?
Till the day it's easy for me to buy Kindle books on Amazon!
I can't help snatching books off the book shelf in the library... But when I get home... There's so many other things vying for my time that I pretty much never get to the books. Plus these days, I'm getting lazy to bring books out to read... Either I read stuff on the phone or I'd take my Kindle...
Which brings me to the main point of this post. The procurement of eBooks.
I love the email system of the Kindle - you can set an email for your Kindle, and just mail the books to your Kindle. I personally use Calibre to organise my eBooks and mail them to my Kindle. It also can convert PDFs and ePUBs to the Kindle Mobi format. Doesn't work for all PDFs though, sometimes the resulting format is just unreadable.
But regarding the procurement...
Now that's just troublesome. It's even more troublesome for me to buy eBooks than to download illegal copies. Why? Because of location restrictions. Amazon doesn't sell eBooks in Singapore. Neither does Apple. You need complicated things like VPN to buy Kindle books from Amazon. Apple? It's even worst. You need a US payment method - credit card or debit card - before they let you download anything from the US app store. Used to be that I could download free apps without a payment method... I just tried the other day. Nope, they won't let me do that anymore. *sigh*
Amazon puts ads on your Kindle - you can pay extra to disable the ads, but I've come to like those ads. It's usually some advertisement for a book, and the ad only appears when you 'turn off' the Kindle - it's an eink display so keeping the screen on practically uses no battery - so the ads are really no intrusive. I've actually found quite a few of the books advertised interesting. And I would have purchased them if I could. You know, like without having to do all the VPN, gift card crap. If I had to go to such lengths to buy a book... I could spend a similar amount of time to get the book through some other methods... (And really, the alternative is really fast if you know where to look.)
I remember a Chinese essay regarding music piracy I had to write over a decade ago. Back when the concept of piracy was in it's infancy and I was still using things like Kazaa to get my songs. The problem then was that there was a lack of legal means to get digital music, and that many teens, myself included, has no access to a credit/debit card to buy our songs online. So what do we do then? You can't stop us from listening to songs. We just pirate. The credit/debit card problem is still there for many teens, especially in an Asian country like Singapore where parents can be pretty strict. But the next barrier is that of geographical location. After years of negotiation, Netflix has finally landed in Singapore, Malaysia, and a bunch of other countries in the region. Some dramas/movies are not available here due to copyright laws or other legal restrictions, but being able to get on Netflix without VPNs and other web trickery is definitely an improvement.
Sure there are loads of legal hoops that cooperations need to jump through, but as consumers, we don't care. Well, those who do care a little more would go through the trouble of tricking Amazon to think that we are in the US. But the rest of us would just do it some other way. And that other way does not involve publishers/authors getting a single dime.
It's simple. Give us an easy way and we'll be a lot, A LOT more inclined to do things legally. If I can get the book in two clicks, without even leaving my Kindle, why would I take the time to search for the book online, download said book, load it into Calibre, convert it into Mobi if it's in the wrong format, then email it to my Kindle?
Till the day it's easy for me to buy Kindle books on Amazon!
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Things that work, and things that don't work
This year has been a year of trying out new things...
And as per the title... I've been trying to find out more about what works for me and what doesn't.
Things that don't work:
1) Keeping a paper planner.
Nope. Just doesn't work. I hardly used planners in the past, and now, it's still the same. I don't keep track of time that way anymore. If I need to remind myself about some important event... Either I make a mental note of it (usually enough for meetings with friends, I'll remember), or I note it down in my phone calendar (for chores that I need to remind myself to do, and for work related stuff that I would otherwise forget, e.g. attending a seminar. Also for important things like attending a meeting or appointment, that I won't forget, but is too important and therefore I prefer the extra reminder.)
2) Using desktop/wall calendars
Unless it's at work... Then maybe the calendar can be useful. Like I used to jot down when I needed to feed my 'babies'... Or collect samples... Or the dates and times of meetings and seminars. But I don't do that anymore now so the calendar at work is pretty much useless. At home? Months can pass before I even notice that it's no longer February... Heck, it was two weeks into April before I noticed that the calendar in my office desk is still showing 'March'.
The downside is basically that... I hardly take note of the passage of time and therefore I often get surprise when public holidays roll around. And then I get frustrated and stressed because I'd planned a ton of experiments to be done on that day.... :X
3) Keeping my desk organised.
Gosh yes. This has been the struggle of the ages for me. Granted, my desk in the office is pretty neat... Kinda... Well more and more pieces of paper has been piling up and I've yet to bin them... But really... It's still pretty neat. Compared to my desk at home... There's barely enough space to put my books. Yeah. I'll just keep clearing till there's enough space to do whatever stuff when I want to get stuff done but that's it. The rest of it is a mess. An organised mess. I know where everything is and I can locate them within a minute mostly. But when I try packing... I couldn't find my item even after searching for a whole freaking hour. No seriously! I kept it away in some drawer and yes it took me like a freaking hour and a half to find it. Granted I wasn't looking for it all the time... But still! Talk about frustrating!
I'll keep things decently organised but that's it. It's not going to be very neat and stuff... Not with the HUGE amount of stuff I have compared to the space. I'm definitely not one for living a minimalist lifestyle, I know. I love my stationery... You can call me materialistic. Whatever.
It's been said that a more messy desk encourages creativity, whereas a clean desk encourages productivity... In which case it's consistent with how neat I keep my office desk and home desk...
I really do wish I had a bigger desk and home so I could have my mess and still have enough space to comfortably do work though... :X
4) Scheduling.
Well... This one... I can hardly even bring myself to schedule anything. Unlike work when I can say that I'll do X experiment when, or I'll run how many qPCRs today... and at what time... I can't do that outside of work. At all. Has always been the case for me. I'm not the type to have a study plan. Then again, I hardly ever even study so...
No. Even if I draw out some sort of a plan, I won't stick to it. Plans are just not for me... When it comes to me personal life, I can't plan anything. I can't even plan a holiday properly. It's too stressful for me. I'm more of the... Spontaneous, it depends on my mood kind of person.
5) Waking up early
Ok. The verdict is still yet to be out on this one... But after being a night owl for so long and never having been a morning person... It's hard for me to get anything done in the early morning. Like, at 4 or 5 am in the morning when my sleeping pattern was messed up. My brain just can't wake up you know? And then I'll be trying to fall back asleep... And before I know it, all the time would have passed by. Or even if I do pull myself out of bed, I can't do anything intense like studying... I only feel like doing simple things like reading the news. And then again, all my time would be wasted. Ok, reading the news isn't a waste of time. But after the news, I'll find more stuff to read. Like Quora. And once I get on there... I'll read. And read. And read. And read. You get the idea. And then all the time just flies by. I console myself by saying that at least what I'm reading isn't trashy stuff. Some are actually pretty useful and intelligent answers. But too much reading ends up being a waste of time. Unproductive. Too much consumption and no production. A screwed C/P ratio as they call it. Bear in mind that while I occasionally go on answering sprees, I usually don't write anything on Quora. So I mostly just consume things there and don't produce.
Alas I'm going off topic. Yeah. I tend to be a lot more productive at night than in the mornings. So sleeping late works better for me. Like today... I basically wasted the whole morning and napped half the afternoon. And only started writing near the evening. It's like... The day only started after my nap or something. It would certainly do me good to get rid of the habit of wasting my mornings away... But I do prefer a good night's sleep at waking up after the sun rises rather than at some unearthly hour in the middle of the night. Well I wasn't even trying to wake up early though. I didn't even change the timing on my alarm clock. It was just the stress that was screwing up my sleep. First making me wake up earlier and earlier... Than changing my whole sleeping pattern completely. I mean, who collapses on the bed at 10 pm, only to wake up at 4 or 5 pm? And that's on good days. On bad days, I wake up at 1 or 2 am. And I can't sleep the rest of the night.... Nope, I'd very much rather sleep at 3 or 4am and wake up at 8:30. At least I feel like I've slept. I sleep better if I go to bed late than if I sleep early... I can survive perfectly fine on 4 hours of good quality sleep... But of course I'll need more sleep that night. I've done 3 days of 4 hours sleep before and I really felt like a zombie on day 3. Had to nap a little in the office. Nah. I try to get at least 5 hours of sleep for the most part. 6 hours is luxury. Anything more... Well generally I can't even sleep that much. I just wake up. Let's hope I get back to that sort of sleep schedule soon. Think I'm almost there...
Things that do work:
1) Switching hard copies for soft copies. I love my kindle. It's thin, has a ton of books... And I can just bring it out and read during lunch without being judged by the kind of books this weirdo is reading. Well mostly science books I guess... But then I do love Rick Riodan's Percy Jackson series too, and I'm still looking for fantasy books as good as Harry Potter. Nope. No journal papers on my kindle. At least... Not yet. Lol. I'll like to keep journal papers to the computer. Or the phone. Yeah.
It's not that I don't love physical books. I do. But they are heavy... So I tend not to bring them out... And most of the time when I'm at home... I'm on the computer, on the phone, or sleeping. And so... I end up not reading anything... And returning the books to the library unread... :X Opps.
The same goes for writing too. I prefer doing things on the computer. And preferably somewhere in the cloud. Like Evernote, Google docs... dropbox... Things that I can do at work, then continue from where I left off at home (or even on the phone) is good for me. Google docs is more for collaborations with other though... Though if I try doing some sort of game calculator again I might do it on gdocs instead of excel. Previously with my own lappy, I was using gdocs because my lappy can't take opening another program. Takes ages to open up excel. Lol. But if I were to do it again... Yeah, maybe I'll do it on gdocs instead just so that I can work on it anywhere. Sure, you can do the same with dropbox too but... If it's going to be in the cloud, and it's not something that needs to be sent out to others in excel/msoft word format... Might as well just do it in gdocs in the first place.
That said... I do love writing though. Like, actually picking up a physical pen to write on physical paper. Even though my handwriting sucks but that's another issue. There's something nice about scribbling on paper. I've come to really enjoy 'scrapbooking'. By that, I mean recording on my lab notebook....
Writing physically is something that I don't do enough of for sure. I started a physical diary in addition to all my electronic ones... But naturally I hardly write on that physical diary. It's a good thing that I have multiple blogs though... Together with my private, electronic but unpublished diary (well, I use the app day one for that), I have a pretty complete record of my thoughts and things happening in my life. For my own reading pleasure (and others too) now and in the future... Recently I'll make a grab for that physical diary once in a while... Every few weeks or so... But often times months can pass between entries. So it's a good thing that I type a lot more than that.
I do want to write more though... As in pen and paper write. Because I've bought a few really lovely pens recently. And it's such a pleasure to write with those tools. I'm definitely going to get diaries with thick paper though... Because the inky pen refills in those lovely pens bleed all over and seep through the thin paper. Tsk. Alas it's been a year and a half since I started that diary and I'm just over 1/10 of the way through. I really need to start writing more often so I can finish up that book and get rid of it huh...?
2) Doing random crafts
Ok. Admittedly I don't get enough of this done recently. But that's fine I guess. Once in a while... When I get in the mood... It's been months since I did some eraser craving but yeah... I'm way, way better at crafts than say... Design or painting or drawing. I'd love to be able to do those at a passable level someday... But that'll probably take a decade or something. *shrugs*
I'm good with my hands... But not when it comes to holding a writing/drawing instrument. I can even carve things out just fine. Sis says that I can only do the '3D stuff'. Whatever that means. I wonder what will happen when I get my 3D simi 3D doodler. It'll probably come in June? Oh wells. We'll find out then. Been really excited about that ever since I pledge it on kickstarter last year... It's been quite a long few months and I sure can't wait to try it out!
Things that I need to work on/try out
1) Going out once in a while.
Have not been out on the weekends since... Since the last time I met up with my colleagues. Ok. That wasn't that long ago I guess. Just two weeks? But nope, I've not met up with anyone outside of work in that two weeks. At least I have a meeting with my jc friends scheduled this coming Friday. If it comes to fruition. And then after that... Nothing again? Oh... Probably a trip with a former colleague to JB next week. But that's about it... But no... I feel a lot less social already. As in, my motivation levels for going out to meet with people has decreased. A lot. I don't even feel like stepping out of the house. Yeah, I'm an indoors person... A little too much I guess.
2) All my random side projects
Still need to work on getting everything done. My crafts blog... The gaming blog that got abandoned again... Well, none of those will become anything... So I'm not enforcing my weekly post rule on them. But weekly posting on Nihongo Manabu is a must, and it'll be nice if I could make more than a post a week. Managing my time and motivation levels is a huge challenge though. Motivation levels especially...? How to manage my time with all the things that I want to do... Things that I have to do... Things that I need to learn... That's definitely a challenge. I'm a procrastinator for sure. Doing things last minute is my speciality. And heck, I actually get good quality work done in that short amount of time. But last minute work doesn't work for learning something. For that you need a continuous effort over a period of time. But how I'd work that out with my lack of ability to follow schedules and plans remains to be seen. Currently I'm aiming to learn about 1 chapter of my Japanese grammar book each week. And it seems like it'll be left till the very last minute for this week's requirements... Lol. We'll see if I can actually keep this up.
3) Listening to podcast/videos.
No, I actually don't like watching things... I prefer to read things. Like books VS movies. Or even just reading the wiki page about the movie is enough for me. Or anime VS manga. I prefer to read. Takes less time IMO. Though there are things like Arashi shows, varieties where there is no substitute for watching... (Then again, remember I've not watched anything Arashi in a whole year!) But otherwise... I find that watching takes up too much time, and the amount of satisfaction, the gain I get is too little. If you talk about CP ratio, yup, watching too much videos is a surefire, easy way to screw that up. All watching and no doing. I've not tried listening to podcast in place of music for when I'm in the lab etc though. I'm not sure how that would work out. If I need to concentrate on the experiment, I don't pay attention to the music, and I'd prefer to listen to a set playlist of songs that I like and am familiar with, because I'm already familiar with the music and it doesn't take any addition brain power to process the tune, lyrics etc. Of course, not having to spend time putting down the micropipette and hitting the play button twice on my earphone remote is a huge plus (For that reason, my earphones must have remotes). A lot of people trump audio books as a way to be more productive... But I really.... Doubt it... I tried listening to audio books once, and boy, they talk so slowly that I felt like strangling the narrator throughout. Like. Just give me the damn book and I can read myself way faster than that. Even though I'm not a speed reader.... But I bet I can still read faster than they read. Sure it's supposed to be for when you're doing something. Like, exercising, or cooking... Or doing something else. But I can't... Unless I'm paying full attention to something, my mind will just drift off. It's different for songs. I don't actually listen closely or carefully to songs. Often times I find that many songs passed by without me even noticing it. My mind is thinking about other stuff. And I like my thinking time....
(Case in point, I can barely concentrate on my writing now cos I'm paying attention to the song that's playing now... A song that I've never heard of before. But just before that, I can concentrate perfectly fine because it's a song I'm familiar with.)
4) Ingress.
Still wondering if I really should play Ingress again. It's fun and all, and I only stopped because my phone died last time... But... Using the time spent on commute to play Ingress instead of doing other stuff...? Maybe I'll play it less after I hit level 8... Or only play it part of the commute... Or only on the way there or on the way back. But yeah... I actually get quite a lot of things done on the commute otherwise. Especially on the way to work. Like firing a short status update in Chinese or Japanese to weibo... Post something on instagram... Read my favourite tech news.... Clear my emails if I've not already done so after I crawl out of bed in the morning. Daily training on elevate... Maybe even make a blog post on LJ.... I'll probably play it less often once I hit level 8... Or limit it to just the commute home... Since the commute back is usually not productive anyway... Or maybe I'll get bored of the game again and drop it completely... We'll see.
Other games... Not been playing vainglory again... Maybe I'll pick it up again in a few months when I'm more free. Would definitely like to play some sort of games on the 'puter occasionally as well... Would also love it if I could cure myself of motion sickness... But I guess those will be year long projects... As with all the electronics that I got... Gotta learn enough about programming to play with them so... That'll take years too... Though hopefully by the end of the year I would be able to start doing something with them already... We'll see. Too many things that I want to try out, that often times I'm just lost in myself and have no idea where to start.
5) Writing.
I'm definitely writing a lot more now... But as for writing something more than random blog entries? Now that's something I need to do more of. Like more posts for NM, and get back to writing fanfiction again. You know, something more than just unstructured, random blog entries. I was keeping up with my 1 fic a week thing for quite a while last year... Before fatigue set in and I ran out of inspiration... And well experiments swept the rest of my writing ability away.
It's a balance. Two sides of the same coin. If I'm doing tons of science, I can't write. The science and the creativity seems to be on opposite ends of the seesaw. (I'm guessing scientific writing is not included here, but then the last time I did scientific writing proper... Like really properly... Was during my FYP thesis. Granted, I wrote some stuff in my previous job, but that was also more than two years ago. So it's really a good thing that I'm writing online. At least some writing practice is better than none.... Scientific writing is something that I need to work on for sure.) Keeping things balanced... Yeah I have to work on that so that I can keep on writing. And not have the case of having no posts appear on NM for months repeat. The lack of updates really did a huge number of the site rating... *Sigh*
6) Taking notes and making notes
*Sigh*
This is something that I'm *still* working on now. Well, I can take notes in class just fine and all. But now that I'm self studying... I'm the type who loathes writing in books. I'm trying to make myself highlight things and all in the books... Or at least my notes... I mean... I bought so many notebooks and fooscape pads and pens... I gotta use them all up right?
Well at least for Japanese I think notebooks are good because it's troublesome for me to type in Japanese. Switching languages is troublesome. Well. It's not troublesome, just slow. Really slow. Thanks to all the crap that I do on dad's lappy... It's slowing down too. I mean... But... I don't even know what I do...! I mean, there's only chrome open right now, though it has about 20 tabs open, but hey, just 1 window. And then Line is open... But that's all... Stupid ram guzzling web browsers. I'm not even running any pages with flash or games sheesh. Sure there's a bunch of stuff in the background, but it's mostly just chrome gobbling up all 8 gb of space. Somehow I've also managed to used up tons of hard disk space on my dad's lappy too... I think the photo backups from my phone to dropbox is currently eating up a lot. My Arashi songs also take up like... 10 GB at least... And I might have some videos that I downloaded years ago still sitting in the downloads folder... *shrugs* But in my defence... This lappy is old too! It's late 2011! Sure, it's 1 year younger than my mid 2010 lappy, but it's almost 5 years old already too! Yeah. I really need a new lappy. Or should I get a desktop...? Dad wants his lappy back later this year anyway... And I really need to give him the lappy back in decent working condition... :X
7) Catch up with Arashi shows
Definitely this... Have to catch up with their shows... And do a few bangumi reviews too I guess. I can put the reviews on NM so that'll be killing at least 3 birds with 1 stone. Still takes me way, way too long to do bangumi reviews though... But it's good because I'm preparing for JLPT now and watching Arashi shows and doing reviews especially is in line with my Japanese learning efforts. As for subs... They still take way too long. I think I'll leave it for now and start watching shows instead... Would be nice if I can watch at least 1 show before collapsing dead on my bed every weekday... We'll see...
8) Miscellaneous stuff that I should figure out
How to export my LJ entries... and automatically have them imported into day one. Similarly for blogger. So that if LJ ever dies one day... I'll still have my entries elsewhere to read. I still regret not having a copy of all my entries from that moblog thing that MOE did last time in collaboration with whoever. All my science loving craziness and love proclamations for chemistry... That was my first blog... I wrote all that in sec sch. This one only came in JC... By then my enthusiasm was already dying out....
Either way, it's nice to have all my entries together in the same place. And I tend to write way longer entries on these blogs than the personal diary that I keep so... A lot of the events and happenings can be traced on my online blogs, but not in that personal one. It's like, after typing a long entry on my blog... Why would I want to write the same thing again on my Day One entry? Plus Day One is a a daily thing (I try anyway), so I usually just type like... One or two sentences entries about what I'm doing at the moment. And not because I genuinely have something to write about...
It's funny how when I was putting together that video last month... I was using my blog as a tool to trace back when things occured and to remind myself of what happened. On the other hand, my personal diary only contained fairly useless information like 'I'm so bored today.' or 'Tiring day.' Lol. Pretty useless indeed... That's why I've been linking my instagram and fb statuses to it... It says a lot more than my daily entries... But my blog entries says a lot more so... :P
Yeah, time to get working on it. Automating the process is the part that's more challenging... Especially for LJ with their outdated tools...
That's all I can think of now I guess. This is a really long entry eh? Definitely something I'll like to save in Day One for sure. I wonder how much of this will remain the same 10 years on. Or even just 5 years. Would be interesting to look back and compare eh? That's the good thing about keeping things electronic. It's there, in the cloud. I can search it anything. Plus, I can use the search function. You can't 'search' in a physical diary... And there's labels/tags too. :P
And as per the title... I've been trying to find out more about what works for me and what doesn't.
Things that don't work:
1) Keeping a paper planner.
Nope. Just doesn't work. I hardly used planners in the past, and now, it's still the same. I don't keep track of time that way anymore. If I need to remind myself about some important event... Either I make a mental note of it (usually enough for meetings with friends, I'll remember), or I note it down in my phone calendar (for chores that I need to remind myself to do, and for work related stuff that I would otherwise forget, e.g. attending a seminar. Also for important things like attending a meeting or appointment, that I won't forget, but is too important and therefore I prefer the extra reminder.)
2) Using desktop/wall calendars
Unless it's at work... Then maybe the calendar can be useful. Like I used to jot down when I needed to feed my 'babies'... Or collect samples... Or the dates and times of meetings and seminars. But I don't do that anymore now so the calendar at work is pretty much useless. At home? Months can pass before I even notice that it's no longer February... Heck, it was two weeks into April before I noticed that the calendar in my office desk is still showing 'March'.
The downside is basically that... I hardly take note of the passage of time and therefore I often get surprise when public holidays roll around. And then I get frustrated and stressed because I'd planned a ton of experiments to be done on that day.... :X
3) Keeping my desk organised.
Gosh yes. This has been the struggle of the ages for me. Granted, my desk in the office is pretty neat... Kinda... Well more and more pieces of paper has been piling up and I've yet to bin them... But really... It's still pretty neat. Compared to my desk at home... There's barely enough space to put my books. Yeah. I'll just keep clearing till there's enough space to do whatever stuff when I want to get stuff done but that's it. The rest of it is a mess. An organised mess. I know where everything is and I can locate them within a minute mostly. But when I try packing... I couldn't find my item even after searching for a whole freaking hour. No seriously! I kept it away in some drawer and yes it took me like a freaking hour and a half to find it. Granted I wasn't looking for it all the time... But still! Talk about frustrating!
I'll keep things decently organised but that's it. It's not going to be very neat and stuff... Not with the HUGE amount of stuff I have compared to the space. I'm definitely not one for living a minimalist lifestyle, I know. I love my stationery... You can call me materialistic. Whatever.
It's been said that a more messy desk encourages creativity, whereas a clean desk encourages productivity... In which case it's consistent with how neat I keep my office desk and home desk...
I really do wish I had a bigger desk and home so I could have my mess and still have enough space to comfortably do work though... :X
4) Scheduling.
Well... This one... I can hardly even bring myself to schedule anything. Unlike work when I can say that I'll do X experiment when, or I'll run how many qPCRs today... and at what time... I can't do that outside of work. At all. Has always been the case for me. I'm not the type to have a study plan. Then again, I hardly ever even study so...
No. Even if I draw out some sort of a plan, I won't stick to it. Plans are just not for me... When it comes to me personal life, I can't plan anything. I can't even plan a holiday properly. It's too stressful for me. I'm more of the... Spontaneous, it depends on my mood kind of person.
5) Waking up early
Ok. The verdict is still yet to be out on this one... But after being a night owl for so long and never having been a morning person... It's hard for me to get anything done in the early morning. Like, at 4 or 5 am in the morning when my sleeping pattern was messed up. My brain just can't wake up you know? And then I'll be trying to fall back asleep... And before I know it, all the time would have passed by. Or even if I do pull myself out of bed, I can't do anything intense like studying... I only feel like doing simple things like reading the news. And then again, all my time would be wasted. Ok, reading the news isn't a waste of time. But after the news, I'll find more stuff to read. Like Quora. And once I get on there... I'll read. And read. And read. And read. You get the idea. And then all the time just flies by. I console myself by saying that at least what I'm reading isn't trashy stuff. Some are actually pretty useful and intelligent answers. But too much reading ends up being a waste of time. Unproductive. Too much consumption and no production. A screwed C/P ratio as they call it. Bear in mind that while I occasionally go on answering sprees, I usually don't write anything on Quora. So I mostly just consume things there and don't produce.
Alas I'm going off topic. Yeah. I tend to be a lot more productive at night than in the mornings. So sleeping late works better for me. Like today... I basically wasted the whole morning and napped half the afternoon. And only started writing near the evening. It's like... The day only started after my nap or something. It would certainly do me good to get rid of the habit of wasting my mornings away... But I do prefer a good night's sleep at waking up after the sun rises rather than at some unearthly hour in the middle of the night. Well I wasn't even trying to wake up early though. I didn't even change the timing on my alarm clock. It was just the stress that was screwing up my sleep. First making me wake up earlier and earlier... Than changing my whole sleeping pattern completely. I mean, who collapses on the bed at 10 pm, only to wake up at 4 or 5 pm? And that's on good days. On bad days, I wake up at 1 or 2 am. And I can't sleep the rest of the night.... Nope, I'd very much rather sleep at 3 or 4am and wake up at 8:30. At least I feel like I've slept. I sleep better if I go to bed late than if I sleep early... I can survive perfectly fine on 4 hours of good quality sleep... But of course I'll need more sleep that night. I've done 3 days of 4 hours sleep before and I really felt like a zombie on day 3. Had to nap a little in the office. Nah. I try to get at least 5 hours of sleep for the most part. 6 hours is luxury. Anything more... Well generally I can't even sleep that much. I just wake up. Let's hope I get back to that sort of sleep schedule soon. Think I'm almost there...
Things that do work:
1) Switching hard copies for soft copies. I love my kindle. It's thin, has a ton of books... And I can just bring it out and read during lunch without being judged by the kind of books this weirdo is reading. Well mostly science books I guess... But then I do love Rick Riodan's Percy Jackson series too, and I'm still looking for fantasy books as good as Harry Potter. Nope. No journal papers on my kindle. At least... Not yet. Lol. I'll like to keep journal papers to the computer. Or the phone. Yeah.
It's not that I don't love physical books. I do. But they are heavy... So I tend not to bring them out... And most of the time when I'm at home... I'm on the computer, on the phone, or sleeping. And so... I end up not reading anything... And returning the books to the library unread... :X Opps.
The same goes for writing too. I prefer doing things on the computer. And preferably somewhere in the cloud. Like Evernote, Google docs... dropbox... Things that I can do at work, then continue from where I left off at home (or even on the phone) is good for me. Google docs is more for collaborations with other though... Though if I try doing some sort of game calculator again I might do it on gdocs instead of excel. Previously with my own lappy, I was using gdocs because my lappy can't take opening another program. Takes ages to open up excel. Lol. But if I were to do it again... Yeah, maybe I'll do it on gdocs instead just so that I can work on it anywhere. Sure, you can do the same with dropbox too but... If it's going to be in the cloud, and it's not something that needs to be sent out to others in excel/msoft word format... Might as well just do it in gdocs in the first place.
That said... I do love writing though. Like, actually picking up a physical pen to write on physical paper. Even though my handwriting sucks but that's another issue. There's something nice about scribbling on paper. I've come to really enjoy 'scrapbooking'. By that, I mean recording on my lab notebook....
Writing physically is something that I don't do enough of for sure. I started a physical diary in addition to all my electronic ones... But naturally I hardly write on that physical diary. It's a good thing that I have multiple blogs though... Together with my private, electronic but unpublished diary (well, I use the app day one for that), I have a pretty complete record of my thoughts and things happening in my life. For my own reading pleasure (and others too) now and in the future... Recently I'll make a grab for that physical diary once in a while... Every few weeks or so... But often times months can pass between entries. So it's a good thing that I type a lot more than that.
I do want to write more though... As in pen and paper write. Because I've bought a few really lovely pens recently. And it's such a pleasure to write with those tools. I'm definitely going to get diaries with thick paper though... Because the inky pen refills in those lovely pens bleed all over and seep through the thin paper. Tsk. Alas it's been a year and a half since I started that diary and I'm just over 1/10 of the way through. I really need to start writing more often so I can finish up that book and get rid of it huh...?
2) Doing random crafts
Ok. Admittedly I don't get enough of this done recently. But that's fine I guess. Once in a while... When I get in the mood... It's been months since I did some eraser craving but yeah... I'm way, way better at crafts than say... Design or painting or drawing. I'd love to be able to do those at a passable level someday... But that'll probably take a decade or something. *shrugs*
I'm good with my hands... But not when it comes to holding a writing/drawing instrument. I can even carve things out just fine. Sis says that I can only do the '3D stuff'. Whatever that means. I wonder what will happen when I get my 3D simi 3D doodler. It'll probably come in June? Oh wells. We'll find out then. Been really excited about that ever since I pledge it on kickstarter last year... It's been quite a long few months and I sure can't wait to try it out!
Things that I need to work on/try out
1) Going out once in a while.
Have not been out on the weekends since... Since the last time I met up with my colleagues. Ok. That wasn't that long ago I guess. Just two weeks? But nope, I've not met up with anyone outside of work in that two weeks. At least I have a meeting with my jc friends scheduled this coming Friday. If it comes to fruition. And then after that... Nothing again? Oh... Probably a trip with a former colleague to JB next week. But that's about it... But no... I feel a lot less social already. As in, my motivation levels for going out to meet with people has decreased. A lot. I don't even feel like stepping out of the house. Yeah, I'm an indoors person... A little too much I guess.
2) All my random side projects
Still need to work on getting everything done. My crafts blog... The gaming blog that got abandoned again... Well, none of those will become anything... So I'm not enforcing my weekly post rule on them. But weekly posting on Nihongo Manabu is a must, and it'll be nice if I could make more than a post a week. Managing my time and motivation levels is a huge challenge though. Motivation levels especially...? How to manage my time with all the things that I want to do... Things that I have to do... Things that I need to learn... That's definitely a challenge. I'm a procrastinator for sure. Doing things last minute is my speciality. And heck, I actually get good quality work done in that short amount of time. But last minute work doesn't work for learning something. For that you need a continuous effort over a period of time. But how I'd work that out with my lack of ability to follow schedules and plans remains to be seen. Currently I'm aiming to learn about 1 chapter of my Japanese grammar book each week. And it seems like it'll be left till the very last minute for this week's requirements... Lol. We'll see if I can actually keep this up.
3) Listening to podcast/videos.
No, I actually don't like watching things... I prefer to read things. Like books VS movies. Or even just reading the wiki page about the movie is enough for me. Or anime VS manga. I prefer to read. Takes less time IMO. Though there are things like Arashi shows, varieties where there is no substitute for watching... (Then again, remember I've not watched anything Arashi in a whole year!) But otherwise... I find that watching takes up too much time, and the amount of satisfaction, the gain I get is too little. If you talk about CP ratio, yup, watching too much videos is a surefire, easy way to screw that up. All watching and no doing. I've not tried listening to podcast in place of music for when I'm in the lab etc though. I'm not sure how that would work out. If I need to concentrate on the experiment, I don't pay attention to the music, and I'd prefer to listen to a set playlist of songs that I like and am familiar with, because I'm already familiar with the music and it doesn't take any addition brain power to process the tune, lyrics etc. Of course, not having to spend time putting down the micropipette and hitting the play button twice on my earphone remote is a huge plus (For that reason, my earphones must have remotes). A lot of people trump audio books as a way to be more productive... But I really.... Doubt it... I tried listening to audio books once, and boy, they talk so slowly that I felt like strangling the narrator throughout. Like. Just give me the damn book and I can read myself way faster than that. Even though I'm not a speed reader.... But I bet I can still read faster than they read. Sure it's supposed to be for when you're doing something. Like, exercising, or cooking... Or doing something else. But I can't... Unless I'm paying full attention to something, my mind will just drift off. It's different for songs. I don't actually listen closely or carefully to songs. Often times I find that many songs passed by without me even noticing it. My mind is thinking about other stuff. And I like my thinking time....
(Case in point, I can barely concentrate on my writing now cos I'm paying attention to the song that's playing now... A song that I've never heard of before. But just before that, I can concentrate perfectly fine because it's a song I'm familiar with.)
4) Ingress.
Still wondering if I really should play Ingress again. It's fun and all, and I only stopped because my phone died last time... But... Using the time spent on commute to play Ingress instead of doing other stuff...? Maybe I'll play it less after I hit level 8... Or only play it part of the commute... Or only on the way there or on the way back. But yeah... I actually get quite a lot of things done on the commute otherwise. Especially on the way to work. Like firing a short status update in Chinese or Japanese to weibo... Post something on instagram... Read my favourite tech news.... Clear my emails if I've not already done so after I crawl out of bed in the morning. Daily training on elevate... Maybe even make a blog post on LJ.... I'll probably play it less often once I hit level 8... Or limit it to just the commute home... Since the commute back is usually not productive anyway... Or maybe I'll get bored of the game again and drop it completely... We'll see.
Other games... Not been playing vainglory again... Maybe I'll pick it up again in a few months when I'm more free. Would definitely like to play some sort of games on the 'puter occasionally as well... Would also love it if I could cure myself of motion sickness... But I guess those will be year long projects... As with all the electronics that I got... Gotta learn enough about programming to play with them so... That'll take years too... Though hopefully by the end of the year I would be able to start doing something with them already... We'll see. Too many things that I want to try out, that often times I'm just lost in myself and have no idea where to start.
5) Writing.
I'm definitely writing a lot more now... But as for writing something more than random blog entries? Now that's something I need to do more of. Like more posts for NM, and get back to writing fanfiction again. You know, something more than just unstructured, random blog entries. I was keeping up with my 1 fic a week thing for quite a while last year... Before fatigue set in and I ran out of inspiration... And well experiments swept the rest of my writing ability away.
It's a balance. Two sides of the same coin. If I'm doing tons of science, I can't write. The science and the creativity seems to be on opposite ends of the seesaw. (I'm guessing scientific writing is not included here, but then the last time I did scientific writing proper... Like really properly... Was during my FYP thesis. Granted, I wrote some stuff in my previous job, but that was also more than two years ago. So it's really a good thing that I'm writing online. At least some writing practice is better than none.... Scientific writing is something that I need to work on for sure.) Keeping things balanced... Yeah I have to work on that so that I can keep on writing. And not have the case of having no posts appear on NM for months repeat. The lack of updates really did a huge number of the site rating... *Sigh*
6) Taking notes and making notes
*Sigh*
This is something that I'm *still* working on now. Well, I can take notes in class just fine and all. But now that I'm self studying... I'm the type who loathes writing in books. I'm trying to make myself highlight things and all in the books... Or at least my notes... I mean... I bought so many notebooks and fooscape pads and pens... I gotta use them all up right?
Well at least for Japanese I think notebooks are good because it's troublesome for me to type in Japanese. Switching languages is troublesome. Well. It's not troublesome, just slow. Really slow. Thanks to all the crap that I do on dad's lappy... It's slowing down too. I mean... But... I don't even know what I do...! I mean, there's only chrome open right now, though it has about 20 tabs open, but hey, just 1 window. And then Line is open... But that's all... Stupid ram guzzling web browsers. I'm not even running any pages with flash or games sheesh. Sure there's a bunch of stuff in the background, but it's mostly just chrome gobbling up all 8 gb of space. Somehow I've also managed to used up tons of hard disk space on my dad's lappy too... I think the photo backups from my phone to dropbox is currently eating up a lot. My Arashi songs also take up like... 10 GB at least... And I might have some videos that I downloaded years ago still sitting in the downloads folder... *shrugs* But in my defence... This lappy is old too! It's late 2011! Sure, it's 1 year younger than my mid 2010 lappy, but it's almost 5 years old already too! Yeah. I really need a new lappy. Or should I get a desktop...? Dad wants his lappy back later this year anyway... And I really need to give him the lappy back in decent working condition... :X
7) Catch up with Arashi shows
Definitely this... Have to catch up with their shows... And do a few bangumi reviews too I guess. I can put the reviews on NM so that'll be killing at least 3 birds with 1 stone. Still takes me way, way too long to do bangumi reviews though... But it's good because I'm preparing for JLPT now and watching Arashi shows and doing reviews especially is in line with my Japanese learning efforts. As for subs... They still take way too long. I think I'll leave it for now and start watching shows instead... Would be nice if I can watch at least 1 show before collapsing dead on my bed every weekday... We'll see...
8) Miscellaneous stuff that I should figure out
How to export my LJ entries... and automatically have them imported into day one. Similarly for blogger. So that if LJ ever dies one day... I'll still have my entries elsewhere to read. I still regret not having a copy of all my entries from that moblog thing that MOE did last time in collaboration with whoever. All my science loving craziness and love proclamations for chemistry... That was my first blog... I wrote all that in sec sch. This one only came in JC... By then my enthusiasm was already dying out....
Either way, it's nice to have all my entries together in the same place. And I tend to write way longer entries on these blogs than the personal diary that I keep so... A lot of the events and happenings can be traced on my online blogs, but not in that personal one. It's like, after typing a long entry on my blog... Why would I want to write the same thing again on my Day One entry? Plus Day One is a a daily thing (I try anyway), so I usually just type like... One or two sentences entries about what I'm doing at the moment. And not because I genuinely have something to write about...
It's funny how when I was putting together that video last month... I was using my blog as a tool to trace back when things occured and to remind myself of what happened. On the other hand, my personal diary only contained fairly useless information like 'I'm so bored today.' or 'Tiring day.' Lol. Pretty useless indeed... That's why I've been linking my instagram and fb statuses to it... It says a lot more than my daily entries... But my blog entries says a lot more so... :P
Yeah, time to get working on it. Automating the process is the part that's more challenging... Especially for LJ with their outdated tools...
That's all I can think of now I guess. This is a really long entry eh? Definitely something I'll like to save in Day One for sure. I wonder how much of this will remain the same 10 years on. Or even just 5 years. Would be interesting to look back and compare eh? That's the good thing about keeping things electronic. It's there, in the cloud. I can search it anything. Plus, I can use the search function. You can't 'search' in a physical diary... And there's labels/tags too. :P
Sunday, April 03, 2016
iOS 9.3
Well, the biggest feature in the iOS 9.3 release is the introduction of the night shift mode. And for someone nocturnal like me, the night shift mode is a godsend.
I don't know if the thing about blue light is really affecting my sleep... But I do know that it was making my eyes hurt because the screen was too bright. Even the dimmest setting is too bright and painful to read on when the room is completely dark. I've even tried tweaking in the accessibility settings to have a mask over to make the screen dimmer, but it was quite a troublesome process and I didn't do it much. So in the end, my eyes hurt each time I tried to read/play on the phone before bedtime. And unlike many people who can't sleep if they use their phones before bed, it's often the other way round for me. I get sleepy playing stuff on the phone... (And I've fallen asleep and dropped the phone without first charging it, and woke up to a nearly daed phone - games were still running - several times).
So what I've found about the night shift mode is that cutting off the blue light makes the screen dimmer, less glaring, and perfect for using at night. Nonetheless.... Thanks to my varied sleeping habits... The current way of implementing night shift mode is less than desirable for me. I first set it to start at 10 pm. Then I realised 10 pm was way too early in most cases. Because I'd set the red shift to the most extreme option, the screen looks pretty... Red, and therefore I'd like it off if I'm not in bed yet. I'm most probably using the laptop, with my room lights all on anyway. And if I'm doing work, I actually don't want to fall asleep. Oh worst still if the reason I'm reaching for my phone is so that I can snap a few pictures. I *need* the night shift mode off so that I can properly judge if the lighting and color are right.
Rather than a timer... A quick on off switch say in the control center would work much better.
Or... I could ask siri to do it for me.
I just tried. It worked great. Only that I'm still shy when it comes to talking to siri.
Thus far the most that I've asked her to do was to 'wake me up at 8 am'. Or whatever time of my choosing.
More than 3 months in with a 'Hey siri' phone and that's about all I ask for siri...
Still, it's an improvement from the previous phones without an active hey siri feature. I don't use siri at all.
But well, I've always been the shy type eh?
Not much else for iOS 9.3... Notes can now be password protected. I might activate that... Though it's not that necessary since my phone itself is already password protected. And my phone tends to stay in my hands. Still, since I can use TouchID, there's no harm activating it though...
(Well, unless I'm in the lab. Then TouchID won't recognise my gloves. And it won't work properly when my fingertips are moist from sweating my gloves either. Unless I stay in the office... I end up having to type my password most of the time at work.)
The Apple Health app supposedly got an upgrade, but I've never used that app much so I don't see the difference... I've always used other apps like Argus and UP to keep track of my step count anyway... So I only go to the Health app once in a blue moon if I want to look at how many flight of stairs I've climbed.
The rest of the updates - CarPlay, and News and Education - doesn't affect me. Our new car doesn't support CarPlay. News is still only available in the US, and Education? I'm not in school anymore. And I doubt educators in Singapore will have it implemented any soon.
So that's about it for iOS 9.3.
What else was announced in that Keynote?
iPhone SE and the smaller iPad Pro. The iPhone SE is great news for several of my friends with small hands and loving the iPhone 5s form factor. Sure, TouchID is still the 1st gen version, and there's no Force Touch. But the first gen TouchID work pretty darn well already... And ForceTouch? I tried to use to often initially, but now I can't even remember the last time I've used it anymore...
For those who aren't gadget loving geeks like myself, and prefers a smaller phone, I think the iPhone SE is a great choice.
iPad Pro. Once again, it's the Apple Pencil that I'm interested in. And it's really irritating because none of the stores in SG lets buyers test out the Apple Pencil! Sure the iPad Pros are on display... But I have an iPhone and I've seen an iPad. But I've not seen the Apple Pencil. Nor the keyboard.
The iPad Pro sounds like a fantastic tool to get... But adding on the cost of the Pencil, and maybe even the keyboard... And you have a really, really expensive iPad. Sure it's still a great deal for creatives. But for a pseudo creative like myself? Nah dah. I'm pretty hopeless when holding writing instruments. Though I definitely see better results with a physical pen and paper as compared to a walcom pen and tablet. Which is why I'm interested in the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil in the first place.
But still. The iOS is not enough for my complete geeky needs. Sure it'll be quite a step up in terms of productivity with the keyboard - I can do all my light blogging on it - but not if I'm writing something that requires some research. Like. 'Some' research by having about 20 tabs open, and trying to search up the Japanese dictionary and English thesaurus. I know that you can have apps open side by side with split screen but... Well, it's probably ok if you're only using two apps at once. But more than that? I think there'll be trouble.
Say, if I'm trying to do a show review... Taking tons of video screenshots, while trying to translate, and blog at the same time... On my mac that'll be VLC (video player), MarsEdit (blogging tool, also uploads all my screenshots), Chrome (for all my Japanese dictionary needs). Oh and messenger on facebook too... for discussing with my friends if I need English phrasing help (also on Chrome, but it'll be a seperate app on the iOS). I think a computer is still better suited for that purpose... (And I'm not even doing anything really high tech or groundbreaking here?) Taking screenshots on the iOS would be a pain too because I'll have to crop each and every screenshot in a separate app. On the Mac I just press Cmd+Control+Shift+4, crop out the video area I'm interested in, then paste it on MarsEdit. I don't even pick a location to save the picture and upload it... Because that would take too much time. My reviews are always extremely photo extensive, easily having over a 100 photos per review... So you get the idea.
Well... Computers. I need to get my own computing device soon. I'm still borrowing dad's lappy now but he'll need it back soon. Why oh why are the macbook pro with retina display's base stats still so low? Even the iPad Pro has options of more storage than the basic macbook pro!!! 128 GB of storage space is NOT enough! Even 256 GB is too little... Gah. And of course the more you add on... The more expensive it gets. Hmph. *huffs*
I'll have to upgrade the ram too, because 8 GB ram? Hello... Do you have any idea how much ram web browsers eat up these days? I don't even do much. Just playing a video, Chrome/Firefox, MSWord at the same time... And my ram is all shot. Even 16 GB of ram (the max upgrade) seems... Kinda little.
Or maybe I should stick to my original plan and get a desktop after all. Sis will happily take it if I'm going overseas... Will be sometime before that happens (if at all) anyway.... Gah.
Alrights. That's all for now!
I don't know if the thing about blue light is really affecting my sleep... But I do know that it was making my eyes hurt because the screen was too bright. Even the dimmest setting is too bright and painful to read on when the room is completely dark. I've even tried tweaking in the accessibility settings to have a mask over to make the screen dimmer, but it was quite a troublesome process and I didn't do it much. So in the end, my eyes hurt each time I tried to read/play on the phone before bedtime. And unlike many people who can't sleep if they use their phones before bed, it's often the other way round for me. I get sleepy playing stuff on the phone... (And I've fallen asleep and dropped the phone without first charging it, and woke up to a nearly daed phone - games were still running - several times).
So what I've found about the night shift mode is that cutting off the blue light makes the screen dimmer, less glaring, and perfect for using at night. Nonetheless.... Thanks to my varied sleeping habits... The current way of implementing night shift mode is less than desirable for me. I first set it to start at 10 pm. Then I realised 10 pm was way too early in most cases. Because I'd set the red shift to the most extreme option, the screen looks pretty... Red, and therefore I'd like it off if I'm not in bed yet. I'm most probably using the laptop, with my room lights all on anyway. And if I'm doing work, I actually don't want to fall asleep. Oh worst still if the reason I'm reaching for my phone is so that I can snap a few pictures. I *need* the night shift mode off so that I can properly judge if the lighting and color are right.
Rather than a timer... A quick on off switch say in the control center would work much better.
Or... I could ask siri to do it for me.
I just tried. It worked great. Only that I'm still shy when it comes to talking to siri.
Thus far the most that I've asked her to do was to 'wake me up at 8 am'. Or whatever time of my choosing.
More than 3 months in with a 'Hey siri' phone and that's about all I ask for siri...
Still, it's an improvement from the previous phones without an active hey siri feature. I don't use siri at all.
But well, I've always been the shy type eh?
Not much else for iOS 9.3... Notes can now be password protected. I might activate that... Though it's not that necessary since my phone itself is already password protected. And my phone tends to stay in my hands. Still, since I can use TouchID, there's no harm activating it though...
(Well, unless I'm in the lab. Then TouchID won't recognise my gloves. And it won't work properly when my fingertips are moist from sweating my gloves either. Unless I stay in the office... I end up having to type my password most of the time at work.)
The Apple Health app supposedly got an upgrade, but I've never used that app much so I don't see the difference... I've always used other apps like Argus and UP to keep track of my step count anyway... So I only go to the Health app once in a blue moon if I want to look at how many flight of stairs I've climbed.
The rest of the updates - CarPlay, and News and Education - doesn't affect me. Our new car doesn't support CarPlay. News is still only available in the US, and Education? I'm not in school anymore. And I doubt educators in Singapore will have it implemented any soon.
So that's about it for iOS 9.3.
What else was announced in that Keynote?
iPhone SE and the smaller iPad Pro. The iPhone SE is great news for several of my friends with small hands and loving the iPhone 5s form factor. Sure, TouchID is still the 1st gen version, and there's no Force Touch. But the first gen TouchID work pretty darn well already... And ForceTouch? I tried to use to often initially, but now I can't even remember the last time I've used it anymore...
For those who aren't gadget loving geeks like myself, and prefers a smaller phone, I think the iPhone SE is a great choice.
iPad Pro. Once again, it's the Apple Pencil that I'm interested in. And it's really irritating because none of the stores in SG lets buyers test out the Apple Pencil! Sure the iPad Pros are on display... But I have an iPhone and I've seen an iPad. But I've not seen the Apple Pencil. Nor the keyboard.
The iPad Pro sounds like a fantastic tool to get... But adding on the cost of the Pencil, and maybe even the keyboard... And you have a really, really expensive iPad. Sure it's still a great deal for creatives. But for a pseudo creative like myself? Nah dah. I'm pretty hopeless when holding writing instruments. Though I definitely see better results with a physical pen and paper as compared to a walcom pen and tablet. Which is why I'm interested in the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil in the first place.
But still. The iOS is not enough for my complete geeky needs. Sure it'll be quite a step up in terms of productivity with the keyboard - I can do all my light blogging on it - but not if I'm writing something that requires some research. Like. 'Some' research by having about 20 tabs open, and trying to search up the Japanese dictionary and English thesaurus. I know that you can have apps open side by side with split screen but... Well, it's probably ok if you're only using two apps at once. But more than that? I think there'll be trouble.
Say, if I'm trying to do a show review... Taking tons of video screenshots, while trying to translate, and blog at the same time... On my mac that'll be VLC (video player), MarsEdit (blogging tool, also uploads all my screenshots), Chrome (for all my Japanese dictionary needs). Oh and messenger on facebook too... for discussing with my friends if I need English phrasing help (also on Chrome, but it'll be a seperate app on the iOS). I think a computer is still better suited for that purpose... (And I'm not even doing anything really high tech or groundbreaking here?) Taking screenshots on the iOS would be a pain too because I'll have to crop each and every screenshot in a separate app. On the Mac I just press Cmd+Control+Shift+4, crop out the video area I'm interested in, then paste it on MarsEdit. I don't even pick a location to save the picture and upload it... Because that would take too much time. My reviews are always extremely photo extensive, easily having over a 100 photos per review... So you get the idea.
Well... Computers. I need to get my own computing device soon. I'm still borrowing dad's lappy now but he'll need it back soon. Why oh why are the macbook pro with retina display's base stats still so low? Even the iPad Pro has options of more storage than the basic macbook pro!!! 128 GB of storage space is NOT enough! Even 256 GB is too little... Gah. And of course the more you add on... The more expensive it gets. Hmph. *huffs*
I'll have to upgrade the ram too, because 8 GB ram? Hello... Do you have any idea how much ram web browsers eat up these days? I don't even do much. Just playing a video, Chrome/Firefox, MSWord at the same time... And my ram is all shot. Even 16 GB of ram (the max upgrade) seems... Kinda little.
Or maybe I should stick to my original plan and get a desktop after all. Sis will happily take it if I'm going overseas... Will be sometime before that happens (if at all) anyway.... Gah.
Alrights. That's all for now!
Friday, January 01, 2016
Friday, December 25, 2015
The Three Critters
Once upon a time,
In the Land of Critters.
There lived three bacilus.
Their cell walls was white as snow,
And pili black as coal.
They were as close as bacteria to dirt.
When they slept, they slept together.
Everywhere they went, they went together.
There were no lonely nights, for they had each other.
They had many a
crazy adventures
and exhilarating rides
 |
| Saved in the nick of time! |
and close calls together.
But alas.
One day, they were not so lucky.
The first was killed, in a giant landslide.
And the second was buried, alive.
And the third got caught in the jaws of death.
The rest of Critter Land lived happily ever after.
~The End~
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Revival!
It's been a long time.
I've finally done it.
Wrote a post on my other gaming blog...
And now I'm writing here.
It's high time I revive my blogs, even as I have new ones to deal with. So far so good!
I've finally done it.
Wrote a post on my other gaming blog...
And now I'm writing here.
It's high time I revive my blogs, even as I have new ones to deal with. So far so good!
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