Apple.com at Launch Day (Apr 03, 2010)

Well, the day has finally arrived for the much anticipated launch day for the iPad. Launch day for the iPad is obviously a huge thing for Apple as there are plenty of hype built up surrounding the product, with customers lining up, eager to get their hands on one. Even the Apple main page, the declaration “iPad is here” shows no lack of anticipation on Apple’s side. As reported by AppleInsider, Apple retail store employees were already starting to prepare for a mad day at 1am in the morning and reportedly begun unboxing iPads for display at 3am.

Insisting to fulfill a promise of shipping tens of thousands of iPads today (Saturday, April 03, 2010) to eagerly awaiting customer (I’m one of them =D ), they have employed UPS instead of FedEx (Apple usually ships with FedEx) to deliver them. It seems that it is an enormous task for even UPS to fulfill such a request as when the UPS delivery man handed me my shipment, he lets of a really big sigh of relief, saying “Oh thank god you’re here. It’ll be really messy if you didn’t open the door!”, and rushed off most probably to deliver another machine to someone else. I don’t really have much of an idea why he would say that but I am so glad that I’ve gotten mine without having to queue up for hours and some store with the probability that it might sell out before I could even get close. Besides, there isn’t an Apple store where I am nor a partnering retail outlet here that’s carrying it. Thanks UPS guy (although I don’t know your name)!

Okay, enough with the miscellaneous details! Here’s the main “dish” of this post: iPad Unboxing!

The original iPad Box before unboxing

Upon opening, the iPad takes center attention! Seems like Kyouka wants a piece of it too!

Like all classic Apple packaging, the iPad sits right in the middle of the box with no distraction from the piece. It’s a simple yet elegant and classy presentation, which is what Apple’s packaging is widely known for. Dig deeper and you’ll find the quick intro booklet along with the usual apple logo sticker. After that you’ll get to the power adapter and the USB to Apple dock connector.

The size difference of the iPad and the iPod. At first look it really looks like an iPod with a 9.7" display...

What comes inside the iPad box: the iPad itself, a quick start manual + apple logo stickers, USB power adapter, and the USB to iPad dock connector.

Thickness comparison between iPad (center), iPhone 3G(S) (right), and 2nd Generation iPod Touch (left).

Minimal buttons: Other than the home screen button right at the bottom center, you get the rotation lock, volume, and power controls.

With such minimalist design, the iPad is fairly simple to understand. The rotation lock is a much welcomed feature that I was hoping that they include in the next iPhone/iPod touch refresh. I do read stuff laying down on my side and it is really annoying having the screen change orientation all the time. First launch of the iPad was pretty straight forward, just push and hold the power button on top until the screen lights up.

The first thing you'd see when you first power-up the iPad out of the box

... and after that it screams: "Connect me to iTunes!" Albeit it's graphically represented

It’s required to connect to iTunes for initialization and registration before you could use the thing. It’s a little annoying but it’s just a 2 minute “next next next” work.

iPad waits as iTunes took its own sweet time to launch.

After you've let iTunes initialize, you can skip registration, but it never hurts to register the device.

The gazillion page License agreement that we rarely actually read.

Provide your iTunes account information here to have it synced to iPad.

After that iTunes gives you the option to create or use your existing Mobile Me account to sync all your devices together. Since I don’t have Mobile Me, I’ve just chose to skip this part. After that you’d have to give a name to the iPad and choose to use a previous setting from another device. It could use settings from both the iPhone and the iPod touch if you have them. It took me hours to decide on a name and ended up with Azunyan (From K-ON!). Well you can change the name anytime from iTunes but heh~ I just like to name my stuff. Now I’ve added another daughter to the family! Welcome Azunyan!

Well although you could choose to import settings from the iPod/iPhone, I chose to customize the settings as I have special uses for it. Each of my device has a role so their settings are all different. Most of the considerations are based on space and functionality and what I’d want to do with them. My iPod gets to sync all the media but limited in apps. iPhone gets my whole calendar, contacts and the entire app library but is limited on media. iPad… well I’m planning to have it used as my laptop replacement so it’s nature is very experimental right now.

You want Mobile Me?

Took me hours to decide on her name. Finally she's called Azynyan (from K-ON)

Sync your stuff from iTunes and you're good to go!

Well unboxing and taking pictures took some time, and I had really spent time thinking about what name I shall give to her (yes all my devices are females, and I call them daughters!) but overall it took no more that 5 minutes to get through the setup.

Well this is the end of the first look at the device. Tune in for more as I get acquainted with my newly adopted daughter and find out what she can do (or the “creative” things I’ll do to her)!

For now, what I can say is that I’ll be touching on a few new topics, mainly my interests and experiences. I’ll be back!

Google hired goats to mow their lawn!

Wildfire?

Yes, wildfire. California is prone to wildfire as constant drought in certain areas dries up the weed. Grass and brushes that grow during brief rainy season in the spring months could turn into nature’s WMD during the summer months. During the summer months, under dry and uber hot conditions, the dried weed poses a serious threat as any ignition source, may it be a lightning bolt or as simple as a lit cigarette butt could spark an inferno that causes millions (if not, billions) of dollars in damage, and possibly even the loss of life.

Okay… but why goats?

According to Google’s Blog, it costs about the same to operate a lawn mower and to “hire” goats to weed out the brushes. Besides, the goats don’t consume petrol (thus less CO2), they are much cuter, and much more fun to watch. They’ve even got the green lights from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for hiring of goats to mow their lawn. Goats, Google’s environmentally friendly wildfire prevention method. Nice. =D

Paul Potts in "Britain's Got Talent"

I believe that this story has been told over and over again in so many other forms and in as many ways, but still, it is worth re-telling how a little courage goes a long way that could change someone’s life. I’ll let the video do the talking, since it’s locked (cannot embed), you’ll have to click the link to watch the video.

You Tube: Paul Potts in “Britain’s Got Talent” audition

You wouldn’t have guessed that Paul was actually a mobilephone salesperson (okok… front line managerial level) before the audition. I could hardly believe that myself too.I am truly touched by his talent. Simply amazing. Even Simon was stunned the moment Paul opened his mouth and sung.

Before this, he has been pretty much surpressing his talent because he lacks the confidence to pursuit his passion. He was later encouraged by his wife and given a much needed push to enter the show. His wife actually filled in the entry form and sent it before telling him, and the most amazing part is… his decision of whether he wanted to go to the show was decided with a coin toss. It appears that it is time for him to fulfill is destiny, and he did it, flawlessly.

The story of Paul Potts is simple but inspiring. One needs to have some faith in yourself and have a little more courage to pursuit your dreams.

Today, Paul Potts has already sold more than 3 million copies of his opera CDs. This is Mr. Potts, after he wins Britain’s Got Talent:

Paul Potts after Britain's Got Talent

Now a professional Tenor. Go Paul!

His first album: One Chance

Now at least double platinum status in most countries.

Makes you wonder, if you also summoned up some courage to pursuit your dreams, could you be the next Paul Potts? Though not in opera (I can’t sing, lousy voice), I hope that I can one day do something great for once in my life. The only problem is, what could that be? Hmm…

Samsung SSD

Finally I’ve somehow manage to find some time to blog again. Right after my finals I’ve been bogged down with much overdue work left since before the finals. A few design assignments from the student council, more prep and planning tasks for the Editorial Board, “networking” (well… sort of) in the student council annual conference (more on that later), and many more minor tasks. Now that I’ve gotten most of it done, it’s time to come back to blogging! YEY! Anyway, even though it’s already semester break (2 weeks, more or less), I’ve gotten myself in a job in the school’s ICT department. Already started work and there are interesting parts and the not-so-interesting parts to the work. Nonetheless, it should prove to be great experience there.

Anyways, here’s an insane YouTube video to share:

My colleuges for the part time job shared this video during a short break between work. Showcasing some insane ways you could spend money which you have no idea how to spend (better still, donate to me!). Some Samsung marketing dude tried to show-off their flagship SSD products by constructing a PC built with

1. TWO Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition 9775 CPUs,
2. TWO Zalmans (prolly CPNS9700LED by the looks of it),
3. TWO ATI HD4870X2 in Crossfire mode,
4. 4GB of 800MHz Custom FBDIMM DDRs (prolly 2x2GB),
5. some server-like mobo (note: it’s not a server board per se, just that you can mount 2 consumer class procs onto the board),
6. 24x 256GB Samsung SSD in RAID configuration mounting to a whooping 6TB of total disk space (most prolly RAID 0) and 2Gbps throughput
7. TWO 1 KILOWATT PSUs to power all of that nonsense

To me, that’s just plain overkill. With each drive costing about USD$650.00 (RM2,340), 24 of those “things” (USD$15,600, or RM56,160) could easily buy me a car. Fast? Maybe. Practical? Don’t even dream about it.

Hijacked from Apple's website

Guh… blogging sure requires much more commitment than I’ve anticipated. With so many other things having higher priorities than blogging, I’ve chose to leave it aside for a while. First was the F1 weekend in Malaysia Ｏ(≧∇≦)Ｏ , then I had my Japanese oral exam (which I think I screwed ToT), Japanese written exam up next  ((T.T； )(； T.T))おろおろ･･･ , college finals next week ＼(>o<)／ギャーッ！, pile o work with club and society… and my to-do list goes on… Finally managed to free myself up to write something short.

Just a while ago a friend of mine had some PC problems with a new tread of worm (again, Mac vs. PC, Mac wins!). Manage somewhat to get it fixed but ended up having weird disk space usage readouts, and that, I’ve still yet to figure out. He asked a good question during the diagnostics: He has a 160GB HDD, but Windows shows only 149GB. What gives? The OS took 11GB? Wow…~!

Neh… The answer is: NO, you do have a 160GB hard drive, the OS did not take up that space, and it is still a 160 GIGA-byte hard drive, despite the 149 gigabyte readout… HUH?

(warning: technical data ahead!)

The long, technical reason

Okay okay… Here’s the actual reason why any operating systems will show you less space than advertised on the packaging on the hard drives.

Here’s the catch. Hard drive manufacturer notes the disk space in byte units: for example – 160 giga-bytes means you have 160 billion bytes of storage space. That’s 160,000,000,000 bytes. The giga prefix in metric system means one billion, or 10 to the power of 9. And all those calculations are in decimal. In computing however, things are slightly different. Computing calculations are usually expressed in number base of 2 (binary) instead of 10 (decimal). in order to do conversions, the numbers are expressed also in binary numbering system. The closest thousand that can be expressed in base 2 is 2 to the power of 10: or 1024 in decimal.

In short:

Metric converts bytes to kilobytes by dividing bytes by 1,000

Computers converts bytes to kilobytes by dividing bytes by 1,024

And… the same goes to all increments after that, kilo to mega, and mega to giga, giga to tera

So… In English?

Computer logic : 160,000,000,000 / 2 power of 30 (also 1,073,741,824)  (giga) = 149.0116119384765625 gigabyte

Basically some marketing genius thinks that by using metric conversions to note disk space, you’ll get a “larger-looking” drive space than it is. And he is not exactly lying to you either. It’s just like expressing weight in KGs rather than pounds, so you’d feel slimmer. They are technically misleading you into believing you have a larger disk space than there actually is. Well… at least the entire storage industry uses the same “error” in expressing storage space, so a bigger number do represent a bigger drive. However do bear in mind that that’s not the exact storage space you are actually getting. And no, the operating system did NOT take up the “lost” disk space, despite what some less-informed sales person might tell you. The difference is caused by the different conversion methods they use to express numbers.

Sound familiar?

I’m not surprised. Forwarded mail now are about just as common as spam; the only differences being that spam gets filtered out 99% of the time, while forwarded mails… just sometimes and while most people delete spam on sight, some do read forwarded mails, and forwards them.

The truth is…

But do you know that forwarded mail leads to getting spammed? The truth is, forwarded emails is a tool employed by spammers to collect email addresses. Not convinced? Open up a few random forwarded emails and write down all the addresses you see that was before yours. You’d be surprised that you could collect a few hundred from just one or two emails. I even went as far as to do an experiment of this with a few of my friends. We just created a new account with gmail, sent a forwarded mail to 10 people, and wait to see how long it reaches our own mailboxes. The return period varied, but all of us eventually got the mail that we initially sent through from that gmail account. After tallying our results and removing duplicates, we collected almost 1,000 unique addresses in a span of about 1 month. This method of collecting email addresses might be slow, but it remains one of the easiest, and costs the least effort. Now multiply by the numbers of variants that is now floating all over the Internet. The numbers could run in the millions for all we know.

What we can do

Coming to the sense of it, we all hate spam, but ironically, sometimes we bring it onto ourselves by falling for a spammer’s bait: forwarding emails. Call me cold-blooded, but I think we should all just stop forwarding emails to reduce the chance of getting spammed. If you really must forward some email, don’t be lazy, delete the preceding addresses and sent it using the BCC function (BCC = blank carbon copy, which means the recipients only see their own address). It takes collective effort to stop spammers. One less source of email addresses is one less chance people will get spammed.

Picture hijacked from Apple's Website

Apple has announced on Mar 17, 2009 in the Apple Developer’s Forum that there will be an update to the iPhone / iPod Touch operating system, dubbed the iPhone OS 3.0. This would be an exciting update for all the iPhone / iPod Touch users as this new update contains about 100 new features, some, long awaited. You can view a Quick Time video of the conference here. Be warned though, it’s about 1 hour and 30 minutes long.

Here are the highlights:

1. Cut, Copy, and Paste: Finally, this essential feature finally gets implemented. This should quite down some of the critics.
2. Undo / Redo: Just shake the iPhone / iPod to undo / redo
3. Landscape in Mail, SMS, and Notes: some genius left it out in the previous updates finally realized that it was a mistake not to include them
4. MMS: now you can send photos, contacts, and audio files over the cell network
5. Forward / Delete multiple SMS / MMS
6. Voice Memo: goody! Now I don’t have to keep a separated voice recorder for lectures, meetings, and interviews
7. CalDAV subscriptions: another feature that finally made it into the iPhone / iPod touch. Now you can sync Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar and other calendar services that uses the CalDAV standard without going through iCal
8. A unified search, which is appropriately named Spotlight: Now they have one search for everything on the device instead of each program keeping its own search
9. The new Spotlight search will be located at the home page
10. Stocks updated: now with News, highlights, specific point value, and many more
11. Notes: FINALLY, it can be synced! Gee… that’s late. Well, at least we know the Apple guys are listening
12. Shuffle: a feature that is solely available on the iPod Shuffle is now being implemented, shake to shuffle!
13. Bluetooth A2DD support: now you can use that stereo Bluetooth headset with iPhone
14. Auto-fill function: a feature that fills up common fields automatically. Nice feature but I don’t use them. Sounds kinda dangerous to me. Will you use it?
15. VPN on demand: now you can tunnel into your own secured network. Meant mostly for business users, though it can be convenient for power users too.
16. Call Log: details now with each call instead of an aggregated total.
17. Peer-to-peer on Bluetooth: apps can now utilize Bluetooth for anything they can think of, and the most likely to utilize this is gaming. Multiplayer games in iPhone! YEY!
18. Push Notifications: you can’t launch multiple applications at the same time, so you can’t IM while surfing the net. With push notification, you can do that… well… virtually.
19. Meebo goes native: now you can have all the IMs in one sweet package. Coupled with push notification, you can now be on IM anywhere, anytime!
20. EA’s the Sims 3 on iPhone: for those of you who can’t get enough of the Sims, you can now bring them along on your iPhone / iPod Touch
21. ngMOCO – FPS on iPhone / iPod Touch
22. …and may more!

There are many more to list down, but the listed are the most prominent features that almost everyone is waiting for, plus a few apps that will come to the platform. As the last update, it will be free for iPhone users, but cost USD$9.95 for iPod Touch. It is slated for release in June or July. The SDK (Software Development Kit) and the iPhone OS 3.0 Beta is now available on the Apple Developer Connection website, and is exclusive for members of the iPhone Developer Program. You can go over to Apple’s Developer Connection website for more info on the SDK and Beta.

Earth Hour 2009

Earth Hour was originally conceived as an event for people to turn off their lights for one hour during that day. It was first started in Sydney, Australia in 2007. The simple but brilliant idea caught the attention of other people of the world, and in 2008, it went global. Over 35 countries participated in the 2008 iteration, with an estimated 50 million people participating in that event. In 2009, the idea came to Malaysian shores. I’ve seen various TV and radio advertisements urging people to switch off their lights from 8:30pm – 9:30pm. There was as much talk about it on the Internet.

Of the Malaysian free TV channels, 8TV was the sole TV broadcaster that participated in the event by temporarily stopping broadcast during that hour. We all know that time is actually the prime time, where TV braodcasters gets the highest number of viewers of the day, which in turns translate into the time slot in which advertisements are the most expensive and where the money is for them. Despite that, 8TV has shown great social responsibility effort by participating in Earth Hour and also continuously airing awareness advertisements for the past few days. Kudos to 8TV!

I was not aware of Earth Hour last year, but this year I got to know the event from working on some of Editorial Board’s articles, and I did my part too. I’ve got my parents to turn off not just all the lights, but also nearly other non-essential electrical appliances and devices. The only thing that stayed on during Earth Hour in my house was the fridge, and a fan in the hall. Everything else got switched off on the socket level.

Oh, and did you know that, according to one of the Earth Day ad on National Geographic Channel Earth Day advert, 75% of the power usage in the average house actually comes from stuff that’s in standby mode / suspended mode / sleep mode? The best way to eliminate this source of power leech is to actually turn it off a the socket. Better still, unplug it from the wall socket. Now that fact really surprised me!

I remember seeing the Earth Hour advertisement somewhere, which started off with one person asking this question: I am only one person, what can I do? Which is a really good question. What can I do?

I’ve started looking around for all the things that I use. Generally I think my family keeps rather ok habits of being environmentally friendly. All the lightings in my house are Compact Florecent Lights (CFLs), we use mostly glass and ceramic containers for all of our food stuff, showers instead of tubs, uses fabric shopping bags instead of taking plastic bags, fans instead of air conditioners… etc. Observing all the things that I do, I think the one thing in my daily life that uses a lot of power is my computing habit.

I turn off my main desktop when I’m not using it, but I do keep one of my rig online almost 24/7; downloading stuff to play with (some beta/free software, not games), and for it to act as a server for various purposes. To conserve power, I’ve reused an old, underpowered laptop. It is a Core 2 Duo Centrino, which is one of the more power efficient processor class out there. If you run a torrent box and keeps it on 24/7, I do suggest that you find a power efficient platform, like a netbook or so. I think I should study my usage patterns are start to re-consider all the equipments that I have.

Did you participate in Earth Hour 2009? Please do share any of your power saving tactics that you do on a day to day basis.

Cat Shit One

Now here’s something interesting that just recently came off from Japan. Cat Shit One is a 3D animated Japanese series that was previewed at the 2009 Tokyo International Anime Fair. Feels a lot like Metal Gear Solid with adorable bunnies replacing Solid Snake as the main characters. Seems to be like some serious war zone thriller with very comedic characters. Makes you think whether it is a military thriller or just plain comedy. It’s hard to take it seriously but well, who knows? You’ve gotta love the Japs for their creativity. Official Website here.

There’s no release date announced yet, and the length of the series is also unknown. Below is the YouTube trailer.

Thanks to Paul for bringing this up. I’ve actually spotted it on some other anime/otaku news websites/blog, but the name turned me off and I didn’t bother. Well, turns out to be very different than expected. As the saying goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover”. It’ll definitely be on my watch list.

Will Cat Shit One be on your watch list?