freshbytes

Heheh – two exams today, so this post is brought to you by the freshbytes lackeys who seem to have nothing else to do but study… Apologies for not putting it up sooner, I wanted to get some sleep.

You hear the horror stories about how calculators can die suddenly due to a loss of power during end-of-year exams, and you worry.

You hear how harsh the TQA are on spontaneous calculator battery death (as we’ll call it), and how they don’t tolerate any excuses for spontaneous calculator battery death.

You hear how someone was sitting on an EA before they went into the exam, but are now only going to get an SA because they suffered spontaneous calculator battery death.

Well, okay – so I made that last one up, but I’m sure it has happened to someone, somewhere at sometime in the past!

Right – so I wasn’t going to let that happen for me. No way. I needed as many points as I could get, and spontaneous calculator battery death would just lead to a whole world of pain – namely, year 13 at Calvin (that, in and of itself wouldn’t be so bad, but having to do year 13 in the first place would be)….

Anyway, as you shop for batteries, there are a lot of questions to be pondered, such as:

• What brand of batteries should I get?
  This question is quite important as if you’re paying for the brand, then you’re doing it wrong, especially when it comes to mundane things like batteries. I managed to pick some nice red evereadys as they have worked well for me in the past – and if good performance is for this particular brand, that’ll bring me back to that brand, time and time again.

• How many should I buy?
  This is also an important question – if you have other devices in your house that use a large number of specialised batteries, you should probably buy them in bulk so that you always have some of those batteries on hand when you need them. Running out of batteries sucks at the best of times, and well, you can never have too many batteries! Of course, there is a limit, so don’t rush out and buy cartons of batteries – after all, you need to be realistic.
  I ended up going for an 8-pack of AAA’s as they were on special.

• Should I buy rechargeable batteries?
  If you’re asking yourself this question, you probably should – provided you’re prepared to lay out the extra initial cost of the rechargeables, as well as a charger if you don’t already have one… Supposedly rechageables are more cost effective, but in reality, you’re paying for the power that you use to charge them, too!
  I didn’t buy rechargeables as the batteries were for a caluclator – and I’ll probably use it once every couple of months after exams are over.

Anyways, that’s about the end of my battery-buying advice. If you’ve got any more tips that you feel I’ve missed, then shout out in comments!

As for school, well, I’m smack bang in the middle of exams. Chemistry was last Friday, and I’ve got Maths Applied and Computer Science tomorrow (Monday). Thursday sees the Physics exam, and after that – the Magazine needs to be done, I’ll work a heap, and work on a couple of projects I’ve got planned… Yeah, my holidays are fairly jam-packed as is.

On the Radi8 front, we should have a couple of good events to finish up the year with, which should be good.

The song for this week is Michael Buble’s Everything – from his album Call Me Irresponsible. If you’ve got iTunes, hit the links – they’ll take you to the correct iTunes Music Store page.

Other that that, I’ve got nothing.

Comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: batteries, Blog, calculator, calvin, chemistry, exams, physics, radi8, School, shopping, study, TQA

Right – as a sort of payback for the abysmal 50th post here on freshbytes, I’d like to try and write something a little better now that I’ve got some sleep, and also because I”ve got some study out of the way.

Righto – so I’d just like to open by saying that I’m not a fan of leaving Calvin. It’s been more than fantastic, and many people will tell you that your school life is the better part of your life. For me, I feel like there won’t be too many events which eclipse the pure awesomeness of your school, and especially your high school.

Having been a Calvin-ite for all my schooling years I feel like there’s this connection to the place which will always be there – as it should be!

I was asked by a colleague (who also went to Calvin, incidentally) if I shed any tears at the final assembly. I didn’t, but I’m sure that some of last year’s year 12’s did, and some of the girls this year were on the verge… Anyway, my colleague – he’s a man’s man. They kind that drink intense amounts of beer, go on massive outdoor treks, party hard, etc. I was actually surprised that he, of all people would have been one of the ones to get all emotional at something like your last assembly.

Perhaps the difference between us was the fact that he shed tears – and I didn’t, so maybe that’s why I’ll keep hanging on for a long period of time. I have no idea whether he wants to go back or not – but I am dammed sure I do.

So I read somewhere that people might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel – and I just thought that was incredibly profound.

Now, how have I made people feel? Once you ask yourself that question, you’ll know how you stand when you meet your friends in the street.

I know that I’ll have made some people feel awkward. Awkward silences can do that, as can incredibly-long, over-stretched relationships (or lack thereof) that have just peetered out (yes, that is a word) into the void… My fault, not theirs.

I also know that I’ll have made some people feel relaxed. Don’t feel obligated to to say anything when you’re around me – we can just sit, each to their own thoughts, and just “be”.

Maybe that’s the kind of person I am – if so, I can live with that

Regrets? Sure. I don’t think I know anybody who wouldn’t do it all again differently – at one point or another, we’ve all stuffed up in our life and for some, that can have real consequences – but for others, it’s mainly stuff that that they wouldn’t have done again.

Would I have started my own website had I had the chance? By all means, yes. A hundred times, yes.

Would I have spoken more had the time called for it? Probably.

Would I have bought black forest cake for a certain someone again? Definitely. A hundred thousand times yes.

In the end, it is about the choices that we’ve made, and it is those very same choices that will shape how we are as human beings – and I feel that Calvin has played a huge part in how those choices have affected my life.

Comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: awkward, Blog, calvin, choices, feel, regrets, study

These days it seems like I’m stuck in a rut:

Wake up, eat, study, eat, study, eat, study, sleep.

After rinsing and repeating for x number of times, you start to go a little crazy.

You start having weird dreams which have don’t reflect reality, but the truth is that your subconscious mind is processing information – stuff that you might have learned, thoughts you might have floating about, and anything else which it can lay it’s ever-reaching arms on.

Sometimes, your subconscious mind tells you things which you madly wish were true – ah, if only such things could happen in reality!

Anyways, if you haven’t noticed, I am, along with the rest of my known universe (because you guys matter to me that much) busy studying.

This has lead to what I call study syndrome – where you stay up really late every night, cramming examples, formulas, and just about everything bar the kitchen sink onto your information sheet, in the feeble hope that you’ll have enough information to take into the exam with you.

It’s exam week now, and everyone is in full study mode; in particular, I’d like to make a shout out to those lucky guys and gals who have Biology and Legal Studies exams today. I salute you for your valour.

I won’t, however, wish you luck – if you need luck at this point in time, you’re in the wrong reality.

Reality – you’re doing it wrong!

You can tell by the quality (or lack thereof) of this post that it’s very late (or is that early), and I need some sleep.

I’ll catch y’all sometime later.

There might even be something (better than this, to be sure) up tomorrow morning.

Heh, just noticed that this was Freshbytes’ 50th post. Wow, how utterly anti-climatic…

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: Blog, School, study, time

[Quick shout-out to the last episode of season 4 of The O.C – The End’s Not Near, it’s Here]

So I had my last day of formal school last friday.

Last day of school – for ever.

For ever – it means no more BBQ Bonanzas from Bakers Delight, no more Ronson, no upper common room superiority, no shouting obscenities at innocent passers-by, none of that.

To think that I won’t ever run another assembly at Calvin again, nor ‘just hang’ with my mates outside the common room, taking in some serious sunlight.

Unless I see bump into my friends in town or something, I probably won’t ever see them again. I can guarantee you that there will be people from my year that I will never, ever see again (after the formal, of course).

Everyone says that they’ll stay in touch, but they never do – this is a proven fact.

It’s no secret that I’m really disappointed about leaving. Hell, I doubt you’d want to leave a place filled with people who care about you, a place where you’ve experienced the highs and lows of the best friendships of your life, or the place where you’ve never consumed so much junk food in any single day.

We say we’ll look onwards and upwards to Uni, or whatever we’re doing next year. In truth, we probably will, but we’ll never forget how good the upper common room smelled, how it felt, what kind of a vibe it had.

We say we’ll keep in touch, but the sad truth is that we almost never do. If we happen to bump into each other in the street, sure, we’ll stand in the middle of the road and catch up, but we’ll rarely go out of our way to dedicate some time to really catch up – usually because we’re far too busy doing our own things. Besides, that’s what FaceBook is for Speaking of FaceBook, I’ll be getting one sometime after exams. I detest MySpace with a passion, though, so I definitely won’t be getting a MySpace.

Alternatively, you can contact me through various ways – the easiest is to shoot me an email (bennglingbling [at] gmail [dot] com), but you can see other ways to contact me here.

Anyways, freshbytes is here to assist you in keeping in touch with your mates from Calvin – for those who aren’t into the whole “social networking” thing at all, freshbytes is here for you.

Visit the forums, or simply post comments on posts. I’d appreciate it

Comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: Blog, bonanza, calvin, facebook, forums, myspace, ronson, School

Well, the inagural Study Camp for 2008 has been and gone.

Sure, the study sessions could have been longer and more frequent, but it was fine. Really, it was.

Sure, there were 6 laptops there (and one most excellent Linksys WRT-54GL router w/DD-WRT), and Mr Lineage is more than correct in saying that they were just going to be a distraction from study – which they were. I’m glad I didn’t take mine.

Because of the Study Camp, I don’t have any pre-prepared content for y’all to enjoy this weekend, so I’ll just whip something up now…

On my last post, there was a comment from turkeybrain about how he doesn’t think that anyone else reads this stuff.

Now, he may have gotten that from the fact that y’all don’t post any comments, man! I mean, really! Go ahead. make a comment – for what it’s worth, they’re free and you can say whatever you like – internet anonymity is awesome for that kind of stuff. Of course, I’ll know who you are (depending on your screen name and whatnot), but at least you’ll have the satisfaction of posting on freshbytes…

Anyway, I can safely say that there are actually people who read this stuff – even if you don’t know about it. Just because there is a definite lack of comments doesn’t meant that this place is a ghost town, turkeybrain.

I fully understand that not everyone is into the whole “ooh, Internet!” thing. While I certainly am, there are those of you who clearly aren’t with the exception of the odd MSN/MySpace/FaceBook session. I get that, I do.

Another thing I understand is how geeky it is to have your own website, let alone two. That’s a topic for another time, though.

Anyways, I hope you’ll leave a comment on this post – if you haven’t left a comment, ever, why not post one on the Freshbytes Wall? It’ll show up on every page – it’s the little block on the upper right hand corner of every page. Hit the button to get started.

I’ve been wanting to post this for a while now, so here it is…

Ever since McDonalds bought out the new burger packaging that has the funky info on the inside, I’ve been wanting to know what the value of M is. You know the one that tells you how much beef McDonalds bought, how many Mmmmm’s that equates to, etc.

Well, Lumus from the MacTalk Forums managed to work out the value of M – as according to McDonalds. Unfortunately, his working was out by a factor of 16, but hey – his post on his MobileMe shows just how easy it is to create a quick website using Apple gear.

You can read his post here. (Original credit MacTalk Forums)

One last thing – there are 5 days of school left. Forever…

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: Blog, camp, mactalk, mcdonalds, School, study

So along the same lines of last fortnight’s post, “iPhone, therefore I am“, as well as the very old “OSX > Linux > Windows“, I though I’d tell you why I use Mac.

So I saw this post that was comparing either Android and the G1 vs iPhone and it’s iPhone OS, or Android vs the iPhone OS, or the G1 and the iPhone, or Windows and Mac, or Microsoft and Apple, or any combination of the above. For the purposes of this post, we’ll assume that it’s the comment has been said comparing Android and the iPhone OS.

You can obviously tell that I can’t find the actual article/post that I’m talking about – if I could, I’d show you in a heartbeat. Anyways, what the post (or commenter on the post/article) said was:

“…polished and shiny? As opposed to what? Dull and lacklustre?”

Yeah – you can obviously see how that ties in to comparsions between Android and the iPhone OS, or Windows and OSX.

You can obviously tell that OSX is all polished an shiny, as compared to Windows which is, for the most part, dull and lacklustre. I’m all for Windows when it comes to gaming (damn Steam and they Windows-only stance), but for general productivity and what-have-you, OSX for the win.

I’m going to take another quote here, this time from Slashdot, Chris J’s favourite site in the world. Well, apart from the obligatory…

If someone is happy using, say, Word and Photoshop, what’s attractive in hearing that Linux can’t run Word and Photoshop but they can do pretty much the same things with Openoffice and Gimp, once they take the time to learn how to use them? Why should they do that when they can keep on using Word and Photoshop?

Like I said, i used Linux for ten years. I switched to Apple a few years ago because I wanted wireless to work. Now, I need to buy new hardware. I could easily save a few bucks and run Linux on something. But, why should I? I like Apple software, I’m accustomed to using it. Everything I did in Linux I can do on a Mac, often with greater ease and reliability. Why should I care if Linux allows me to do the same things once I learn how to use it and a bunch of new programs? Where’s the incentive? There are tens of millions of Windows users thinking the same thing.

You know what? I agree totally. People shouldn’t have to change their choice of Operating System just because it’s “the next best thing”, similarly, people are as entitled to their Win-Mo smartphones just as I am to my iPhone. I’m not happy with Windows Mobile, and as a consumer I get some sort of choice over what OS I use on my phone – obviously, I could have chosen between Symbian, Palm, Blackberry, Win-Mo, or the iPhone, or even Android if I was feeling ambitious. However – I like Mac, I use Mac – iPhone OS was the obvious choice.

A little further on, it says:

Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, people coped perfectly well with competing computers and operating systems. Sure, an Amiga was a bit different from an Atari, which was a bit different from a PC, which was a bit different from a Mac, which was a bit different from an Archimedes… but so what? People coped, just like they cope with the way every washing machine or DVD player today has a different interface. When you started using computers, you became computer literate, just like everyone’s more or less washing-machine-literate and DVD-player-literate. And once you’re literate in a technology, you can learn to use any form of it relatively easily.

What the Windows monoculture has done is to destroy computer literacy among most users. Now, instead of learning to use a computer, people are trained to use Microsoft Windows. Instead of learning about launching applications and using word processors, they’re trained to click on the big button at the bottom left of the screen that says “start”, then to click where it says “Microsoft Word”. And so as soon as that button turns into a picture of a foot at the top left of the screen, and the icon they’re looking for says “Word Processor”, they’re left bewildered and uncomfortable.

Of course, this has now bitten Microsoft too: it’s one reason why Vista and Office 2007 are so unpopular.

It’s doesn’t get any better – now you have someone to blame for this mess! Handy, no?

Microsoft.

Leaving that aside for a bit, I know nothing is perfect. Certainly freshbytes isn’t (a few more readers wouldn’t go amiss ) and neither is Mac OSX, the iPhone, or any beloved Apple creation. The iPhone itself has crippled bluetooth, and it’s battery life isn’t exactly spectacular – not great, better than other 3G smartphones, but still rubbish compared to my old dumbphone(s), Mac OSX has strange quirks which leave some users utterly bewildered as to why it would perform in that apparent non-sensical way, and the iPod, well, it doesn’t have as much codec support as your nearest Rockbox player does. Hell, there are even entire websites devoted to telling the boys at Cupertino about what’s what, and what the end-user would like to see. (Disclaimer – I write for DearCupertino.com – and that was yet another shameless plug…)

I was in the PC lab one day and the same person who asked if the iPhone could text asked a teacher why he was using a Mac in a room filled with PCs. The teacher responded: “It’s because I like to live on the edge.” – GOLD! Now, I’m not suggesting that using a Mac is living on the edge in any sense of the phrase, but at the end of the day, it’s not about which OS is better than the other for whatever intangible reason – it’s about what OS you’re most comfortable using.

For many of you reading this, that would mean Windows undoubtedly. For many others that would mean Linux exclusively. And then, OSX whole-heartedly. I was once asked to decide which OS was “the best” – and I couldn’t. I’m intelligent enough to see that there are merits to all OSs – not one OS is most suited to any one task, be it productivity, entertainment, business, or otherwise.

In my opinion, Linux should stay on the supercomputers, in the Cicso routers, the embedded devices (and their derivatives), and the web-servers. For those purposes, Linux does an excellent job – an example of this is Wikimedia (and, by extension, Wikipedia) changing their servers over to Ubuntu.

Windows can be relegated to gaming only and the business sector – even though there are more and more businesses changing to Macs, I’d say over 80% of people are most familiar with Windows – and market share goes a long way in determining how popular something is. Internet Explorer is a great example of this – it’s complete rubbish, yet it’s the most-commonly used web-browser in the world, simply because it comes pre-installed on each and every single Windows machine.

Mac OSX, on the other hand – I’m happy for it’s market share to stay roughly where it is. One by one, I’ve seen people turn from the Vista juggernaut, and those basic consumers (who only word-process, access YouTube and MySpace) who are sick of all the viruses, turn to Mac OSX. And I”m fine with that.

You won’t hear me preaching the gospel according to Jobs – similarly, you’ll won’t hear me singing the praises of Ballmer.

However, I reserve the right to cringe everytime I see someone using IE.

Comments below.

written by Benny Ling \\ tags: android, apple, blackberry, Blog, iphone, iphone 3g, linux, microsoft, osx, slashdot, symbian, Tech, win-mo, windows, windows-mobile