preetam rai's betterdays

So now that OS 3.0 is publicly released, I can post some pictures of tethering and how it works.

ACHTUNG, Xiao Xin, Abunai !!!!
Please check your mobile company on data rates and your allowance before you use this feature. You don’t want to end up paying a huge data fee.

PART A - On the iPhone Enable tethering on your iPhone (running os 3.0)

1. Go to Settings on your iPhone. tap on GENERAL button

2.Under General, tap on NETWORK button

3. tap on INTERNET TETHERING

4.Turn it ON

5.Select BLUETOOTH or USB. I am using the USB as the phone gets charged too while you are using it.

PART B (using USB cable)
Just connect the iPhone to your Mac via the USB cable.

And you should be able to use the internet.

I have seen a lot of interest in the recent years among educators to be more aware of copyright laws. Many teachers are also looking at getting their students exposed to the good practices of using pictures and music created by others in their own projects.

I have been running some online and offline workshops for educators and non-profits on Creative Commons. Creative Commons is an organization that supports people who are interested in allowing people to use their content.

A bit about Creative Commons licensing

Lets say, I have a picture of durian, its not that important to me as I live in South East Asia and I can take pictures of Durian everyday if I want.

Say a student in Iceland wants an image of durian for her presentation. She googles and find the image, ideally she would have to write to me to get permission.

Luckily for her I use a Creative Commons License and my license clearly states that anyone can use the image as long as they attribute me. She can download and use the image and all she needs to do is mention that the image came from me.

I have the flexibility to specify what kind of usage I allow - for example I can say that my pictures can only be used in non-profit projects.

Thanks to services such as Flickr, that lets its users tag their images with a Creative Commons license, it has become easier to find images and use them.

Free Online Class on Using Creative Commons Resources

If you are interested in learning more about using Creative Commons resources for your students, please join me

Date: Sun, Jun 21 2009 10:00 PM Malay Peninsula/China/Singapore/HongKong Standard Time (2PM UTC)

Venue: Online (as long as you have a computer with internet connection you can join)

Coverage:
1. Copyright laws relating to online media
2. Where to find creative commons licensed images and sounds
3. How to use and properly cite the source
4. What else should we be aware of while using Creative Commons licensed images. How about the privacy rights of people featured in the images.

I will be making this online class interactive, you will be doing stuff with me and not just listening to me talk.

Click on this address to join
http://www.wiziq.com/online-class/149310-Creative-Commons-Licensing-for-Educators

Lately, I have been doing more video and an additional monitor makes the work so much easier. A lot of my work also involves scanning through hundreds of feeds mining for information. An additional screen makes this task easier.

Earlier this year I was in the Singapore Blogout event and they had Samsung’s Lapfit LD190G monitor on display. I wanted to buy it but it was not available for sale yet. I need additional screen space so bad that I ended up buying a mini-USB monitor in Tokyo last month.

Last week, Samsung contacted me and they sent me a LD190G for review.

I have been using for the last couple of days and I will probably end up buying it from them.

My Observations

1. The profile of the monitor and the box that it comes in is compact and portable. I like this as I keep moving often and want to have as little worldly possessions as possible.

2. My previous secondary monitor was also a Samsung and I was happy with the colors etc. This one is good too and more importantly it has the wider dimensions - means good for video playback.

Here I am working on my assignment for a course I am attending in Second Life. I can watch the tutorial on YouTube and build in Second Life at the same time.

3. The flexible stand at the back has a nice feel and can support the monitor at two angles.

4. The overall design is cool. I like the buttons.

5. Mac drivers for the LD190G and LD220G are can be download online from their support site. It is in .rar format. You will need the free UnRarX utility to expand it.

Thanks to Lester Chan for pointing to the drivers. Please check out Lester’s web for an excellent review of the LD190G.

Pricing and Special Offer at Singapore PC Show

There are two models - The LD190G(18.5 inches, Resolution : 1,360×768) and the LD220G (21.5 inches Resolution : 1,920×1,080) and the Singapore prices are LD190G at $239 and the LD220G at $339.

They are offering promotional prices at Singapore PC Show (11 to 14 June at SUNTEC), LD190G at $229 and the LD220G at $309 respectively.

Additionally, if you print this coupon and show them at the PC show you will get a free 20$ Takashimaya Voucher.

A restful repast was taken in this fine establishment in the Arabic quarter of Singapore. And now with a fine polynesian brew at the ready, I think about pleasant distractions of the week past. If you wonder, why my vocabulary seems different, I have been reading classic books from a century back on this new ebook reader on iPhone called Eucalyptus.

Looking to pass the time on the flight from Thailand, I had downloaded Eucalyptus. it is a e-book reader that at the moment only reads the ebooks available on the Gutenberg project.   I ended up downloading classics such as Around the World in 80 days by Jules Verne and some texts on China by Herbert Allen Giles. Let me show you how the page flip looks like on Eucalyptus.

This app costs 10$ on the iTunes app store. It is a thing of beauty, worth the price. The rendered text is so crisp, so close to print. Thanks to Eucalyptus, now I am enjoying these old books and remembering the innocent years on my childhood when I first read these, dozens of summers back, in a land far away, with Mayflowers blooming and the scent from eucalyptus trees all around.

I would love all cameras to have built in wi-fi so that we can upload the pictures to Flickr or other sites without having to download the images to a computer first. I know now there are couple of cameras that do this but mine is an older camera and I am not looking to upgrade camera anytime soon.

I had heard about these Eye-Fi cards and when I saw one at a electronic store in Tokyo, I decided to get one and try it out.

It looks like a regular SD card that goes into your camera but this one has a wi-fi antenna built in. Where? you will ask, the card is so thin. Yes that’s what I thought too. But it really is there - such wonders of science and technology these days.

First you must configure the card by plugging it into your computer via an USB card reader (supplied in the box). There is software inside the SD card that installs the software drivers and a manager utility. With the manager utility, you can tell the Eye-Fi cards
1)What wi-fi networks you want to use and
2) What services (Flickr etc.) you would like to use to upload pictures.

Once you have configured the card, just slot it in to your camera.

Now as you take pictures, the Eye-Fi will keep uploading them to your online photo storage.

Some pictures we were taking in a pub in Bangkok and seeing them come up on Flickr instantly.

I am often at events and meet live bloggers or twitterers who are frantically trying to post text, picture and videos of the happenings. This eye-fi card could be useful to them.

Some links here from the “Tech in Africa” sessions I presented at the recent Bangkok and Tokyo barcamps.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/03/db.malawicellphones/index.html
Text service provides more than a Band-Aid for rural health service - CNN.com

http://afrigator.com/
African Blogs, Videos, Photos & Social Media - Afrigator

http://www.naijapals.com/nigerian-music
Nigerian music online | Free Naija music | Nigerian tracks

http://www.ushahidi.com/
Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS)

http://votereport.in/
Vote Report India

http://appfrica.net/blog/archives/1815

Deploying OhmSMS in Uganda - Appfrica

http://appfrica.net/blog/archives/1828
Status.ug: A Local Mobile Portal for Facebook - Appfrica

http://appfrica.net/blog/archives/1774
Appfricast 8 - Appfrica

http://www.kazi560.co.ke/
Kazi560 | Kenya’s Biggest Job Alerts Service

http://www.iccwbo.org/uploadedImages/WBA/Safaricom%201%20-%20Kenya.jpg

Mobile payments in Kenya

http://www.afrigadget.com/

AfriGadget

http://www.flickr.com/photos/niyyie/sets/72157617672371068/

BarCamp Nigeria 2009 - a set on Flickr

http://whiteafrican.com/2009/02/09/30-great-african-tech-blogs/

30 Great African Tech Blogs | White African

http://www.netvibes.com/preetamrai#Africa_Tech

A netvibes page containing most of the blogs from above and some others.

Felt nice to hold is what I would say first and I got to hold it courtesy of Nokia and Text 100 who oranized a preview.

Let me show you some pictures

There is a slide out keyboard that is at an nice angle.

Also stays put well on a desk.

5 megapix camera, 30 something gig memory, has the Ovi store to buy music and apps. Touch screen - so you can tap on the icons and scroll though web pages. Double tap enlarges the web page.

Home screen can be populated by widgets. Its going to come with widgets for popular social networking sites and local news.

My facebook.

No details on price yet. Launching soon.

Check out Mohd. Hisham’s take on N97

Let me show you the latest gadget I got from Bic Camera at Yurakucho.

Its a small 7 inch external LCD display on the left. You can use it on a Mac or a Windows notebook.

It connects to your computer via an USB cable. You don’t need external power. This makes it compact and portable.

There is a little stand at the back that can be swiveled to position the display vertically or horizontally. Its made by IO-data and I have not seen this product outside Japan.

Its useful in situation such as one in this image where I am editing a video on my notebook display and monitoring YouTube upload on the secondary. I also use the secondary display for my Skype and other IM windows. It might also come in handy for netbook users.

On my macbook, it works great even when I am connected to the projector. I can mirror my Macbook screen and the projector screen. The secondary display, I use as a secret window to keep my browsers with search, skype, twitters etc. that I don’t want the audience to see.

It costs about 14,000 Yen or around 145 USD.

Figuring out getting to Ghana for this interesting event happening in Accra at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT. The events brings together inventors and unique innovations from around African continent.

Make Faire Africa Website

I am very much interested in lost cost hacks that gets things done. There are lots of such interesting ideas world over and a lot of these ideas will work in some other region too. Let me introduce Afrigadget. This site aggregates examples of African ingenuity in solving day to day problems.

Let me show you another co-incidence. Just earlier (previous post) I was thinking of Suriname and now I am thinking of Ghana. Check out their national flags.

Flags of Suriname and Ghana

Heard this song after something like 15 years. The original was back in the early 90s by Pakistani singer Zohaib Hassan. This version is by Bryan Lotulung. Now I miss Suriname.

I have intermittently posted video on my blogs and YouTube etc. I went through couple of inexpensive no-name cameras and tried Sanyo’s Xacti too. The trouble is that though some of these cameras are good, they are still too bulky and don’t work well in situations when you just want to shoot something interesting in a hurry.

I have been tried to get compact video cameras made by FLip but they don’t sell here in Asia. In November last year, I saw famous podcaster Mr. Brown using Vado HD. Earlier this month I too bought a Vado HD, a camera clearly inspired by Flip’s feature set and design.

I am happy with Vado HD. It shoots high-defination video. The colour are good in daylight and acceptable at night. You can shoot 2 hours of high quality video on the built-in 8GB of memory. The audio quality is good too. I don’t have the other similar cameras (Flip HD, Kodak Zi6, Sony Webby HD) to compare it with, but whatever demo footage I have seen on the internet from these other cameras, I think Vado HD captures better videos and has a better lens.

The controls are simple. Just press the middle button to record. You can zoom in and out with the buttons on top and bottom of the record button. The two buttons on the right lets you play or delete a pre-recorded video clip. I am happy that Creative has resisted building in a MP3 in this device and kept is very simple - just does what it is supposed to do.

There is a little USB connecter that you can pull out and plug it into your computer and transfer the clips. Video editing software for Windows is already pre-loaded on the Vado. You can do some simple editing and post the video to YouTube.

For the Mac though you need to download the Perian plug-in as the Quiktime player on Mac does not recognize the video. Also, iMovie09 cannot import the video files crated by Vado HD. You will need to download the free Mpeg Streamclip video convertor utility and batch convert your files to a format iMovie can understand.

As a Mac user, it is a bit irritating that Vado HD does not work out of the box (with Mac) but the ease of use the camera and the quality of video makes up for it. I wish Creative had a more descriptive web page for the product with instructions on how to download the Perian plug-in and using Mpeg Streamclip.

UPDATE: Creative guys left a message with the link to instructions for using Vado HD with a Mac

The price listed by Creative is around 300 Singapore dollars but there are some places in Singapore you can get it for slightly lesser.

Here is a slightly higher resolution sample clip that I took with Vado HD.

Some sample videos. They appear squished as I did not put the proper dimensions while exporting it.

Here is a sample of low light indoor shoot.

My favorite Korean restaurant in Singapore, WooriNara on Lorong Kilat. Has great fried chicken.

Daytime video

Close up

I have had so much fun and met so many interesting people in previous Thailand Barcamps that I will surely be there for the next one in Bangkok (May 23 to 24).

Hotels and airfares are at all time low. And you will get to meet people from Cambodia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and hopefully from Indonesia and the Philippines too.

One special feature of Bangkok Barcamp is decent numbers of non-IT sessions. I am myself thinking of doing some DIY sessions on green living.

Bangkok Barcamp homepage

People like my google search themed cards. All they need to do is to search for my name and they get my homepage with my contact data. I have often thought about making it easy for people to share their contact information. Many people are working on this and to figure out a more modern alternative to business cards.

I came across this little gadget called Poken. It is a cute little figure that you carry with you.

The Poken’s arm is an USB drive and using the Poken software, you can store your social network data on it.

When you meet someone else who has a Poken - you place the two Pokens next to each other.

The profile information is exchanged between the two Pokens.

The glowing light indicates that the Pokens have read the information stored in each other.

Once you get back home to your computer, just slide out the Poken’s arm and slot it into your USB. Poken will be able to pull in the information of all the people your Poken interacted with.

The above screen shots are from this video that describes how Poken works

It a cool idea but both the parties need to have Pokens. I just ordered a couple of these Pokens. I’ll probably have them next week.

Here is a Poken developer talking about extending online social network to real world

Poken web site

There are some Poken meetups happening in Tokyo.

Japan seems to be the first place where Poken is seeing adoption in Asia. There is also a Poken festival happening in Tokyo on May 23 at Ginza.

Also check out this Connecter gadget made by mynameisE, a Dutch company. Similar concept.

Last weekend I was in Malaysia for the Barcamp KL. It was good to meet friends from Malaysia as well as people from Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Singapore.  It was really a regional event.

My first presentation was on Travel, expanding on the previous presentation at the Singapore Blogout 09. This time I talked about the online resources I use while traveling.

Had to remove the images etc. for faster loading. Anyway, the gist is here. It was fun sharing travel stories and we had a fun little discussion.

Next up, for people interested in attending events in South East Asia, here is a list of Twitterer’s I follow to get updated on events.

I know there are more people twittering these. Leave a comment and I will add them to the list in the next update. 31o5 san recommends her twitter bot @BKK_Events for Bangkok events.

We had a discussion on tweaking Netbooks. Tips and tricks to make them work better. Bytebot has compiled the notes from the session, do look at the comments too. We talked about what OS, what anti-virus, how much ram, what browser etc.

I have been following ebook readers for couple of years now and from the start wanted them to win. Most ebook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle use the e-ink technology.

Since 2007, I am using the French Cybook Bookeen. I buy a couple of books from ebook stores such as Fictionwise. I am also able to download PDF files, HTML files and various other free ebooks available on Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks.

In addition to ebooks, I use the Cybook Bookeen to store e-tickets when I travel, I don’t like printing stuff if I don’t have to. I also save the Wikitravel page for the city I am traveling to onto my Bookeen.

I am also able to borrow books from couple of libraries (Singapore’s wonderful National Library is one of them).

The reading experience is great but I have to say the book publishers have let us down. When you borrow out a digital copy of a book, others are not able to borrow it. Creating artificial scarcity in digital world is not nice at all. Even the prices on ebook stores are the same as physical books which prevents widespread adaption. With ebooks, you don’t need to worry about printing and disctribution costs. Why still you price them at printed book cost? Only Amazon with its Kindle eco-system has shown some innovation in pricing ebooks.

I found this video of an e-ink reader from China. Looks good and has wi-fi too. Wi-fi is one thing that I miss in my Bookeen. It syncs to my computer but it is nice to be able to download stuff straight away.

Kindle is still tempting because of the low prices on the books. I hope Amazon makes Kindle content appear on some of these non-kindle ebook readers.

I was at Blogout09 on March 07, talking about my experience as a traveler and a blogger. The presentation has ideas on how to use your blog/social network to add value to your travels, save money, make friends, contribute to the place you are traveling to and have a good time generally.

Oh, yeah, pls excuse the typos in some of the slides.

Had to get someone to record a Skype conference and was not planning on creating step by step tutorial.

Minimalism works

Couple of years back, at the Cambodian blogger summit at Phnom Penh, Kalyan connected to us via Skype from the US. This time we were lucky to have Kalyan in person at the Singapore Barcamp 3 last weekend. Though, two other interesting speakers, Kevin and Zibin skyped-in from the US and Norway respectively.
The speakers called my macbook which was connected to the projector. We took the audio out and gave it to the PA system in the room. The macbook (the webcam) was setup facing the audience.

The audience in Kevin’s session on Social Media titled “Aiyah, if only you listened”

Kevin presenting. The computer’s webcam is facing the audience. Kevin has written about his experience on his blog.

Zibin of Opera Software came in from Oslo to talk about open standards.

Some notes on the Sskype sessions and how to improve future such skype ins:

1. First of all, the latest Skype beta’s screen sharing feature worked well. We did have minor audio pop outs but the video came out well. It helped that the venue had decent bandwidth. We have some experience of skyping in speakers at the same venue previously. What we did the last time was to do a dummy skype test a day or couple of hours before so that we are prepared for the actual session.

2. We should have gotten the attendees to come closer to the computer were using to Skype. The presenters could only see the classroom via the little webcam on the computer and it was probably hard for them to see the audience’s reactions. If possible I will try to mount a better camera to the computer next time and use it as the webcam.

3. We should have a little “hang out time” with the remote presenter before we start the actual presentation. Have some of the people in the audience huddle around the computer and introduce themselves to the speaker. That way the speakers also get to know some of the audience.

4. For the Q&A have a person seated near the computer to repeat the questions for the speaker.

Overall it was good. We should do Skype-ins more often in the future.

For some reasons, my recent moo cards orders are not reaching Singapore. Came up with this design couple of weeks back when I was in Hong Kong.

I usually search for people or businesses on Google rather than try to locate their business cards or open my computer’s address book. I hope this card will encourage people to do the same for me. I also added a VCF file to my first page that visitors can download, facilitating easy addition to their address book.

Last week I was at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore talking about how one can use social web to facilitate travel.  The audience were students from the Business School studying Travel and Hospitality.  I encouraged the students to look at some of the emerging web properties that are using or  running on content already generated by bloggers and netizens. 

In the second part of the talk, I looked at Virtual Worlds - specifically Second Life and how in particular in Japan, tourism agencies were using it to generate interest and involve people. We looked at some examples and also talked about the sudden rise and now somewhat tepid involvement with virtual worlds and what to expect in the future.