My Most Memorable Brands

The good old days when English soccer matches on TV were free; Local school boys were groomed to become future soccer stars; Division 1 was the top of the leagues; Sharp and Crown Paints became my most memorable brands.

Red Hot Wallpaper on my iPhone 6

Sporting a red hot wallpaper on my 6 today!

My Favourite Less Well-Known 90s Singers' Songs

Here's the list of some of my favourite songs from four 90s female singers.

陶晶莹, while famous as a host, wasn't that super popular as a singer.

陶晶莹 - 天空不要为我掉眼泪 （1990）

徐雯倩 - 美丽的预谋 （1991）

陈冠蒨 - 你若爱我请你说出口 （1994）

侯湘婷 - 两个冬天 （2001）

I'm Recharged

Listening to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbscQj5AV6M

by the playground on a 26 degrees Sunday morning + 放空 = Total Recharge.

Haw Par Villa Revisited (21st March 2014)

Here I am at Singapore's Haw Par Villa after 20-odd years!

This is the first trip here for my daughters and the last time I was here I was about their age!

Other names for Haw Par Villa are Tiger Balm Gardens and 虎豹別墅.

The entrance stands majestically in the middle for a gentle slope.

Seems like they have maintained the structure well over the years.

The car park area at the foot of the hill just before the entrance.  Parking lots are not a lot but as the visitors here are not a lot as well, it's easy to get a vacant parking space.  Parking fee is $5 per entry.

The sign board that greeted us right after the entrance looks new and nice.

There are quite a number of outdoors displays.  Many are nice for taking pictures with them.

Here are more pictures of the outdoor displays:

Many displays come with description sign boards that explain the moral of the stories behind them.

There are nice sceneries to immerse oneself in also.

And finally, we arrived at the iconic attraction of Haw Par Villa - The 10 Courts of Hell.

Inside are the displays of what sufferings one will go through after death. The level of sufferings depend on how bad one's deeds that one has done before one's death.

The scenes are just too gruesome to mention here. I will leave it to your interpretation and imagination.

With the tenth court of hell seen, we made our way down the slope and exit out to pick up our car.

It's a memorable and educational trip for the kids while it's down memory lane for the adults.

iOS Timer Apps

I've used a few "timer" apps that allow multiple concurrent timers setting.

But I goes back to the stock Clock app for the timer because it's integrated into the lockscreen, showing the time left before the alarm sounds.

Just hope that iOS 8 opens up the lockscreen API to allow third party timer apps to display such info.

Software Project Code Names - Android vs Linux

Modern software projects like to use code names for their various versions.
You might be familiar with the ones for Android.

Just when you think that Android project code names are tasty... (and the latest Kit Kat is tempting..), Linux project code names are no less attractive than the Android desserts.

Here's a listing of all the code names used for the various Android versions:

• Android 1.0 - unnamed
• Android 1.1 - unnamed
• Android 1.5 - Cupcake
• Android 1.6 - Donut
• Android 2.0 - EClair
• Android 2.2 - Froyo
• Android 2.3 - Gingerbread
• Android 3.0 - Honeycomb
• Android 4.0 - Ice Cream Sandwich
• Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean
• Android 4.4 - Kit Kat

Yummy ...
What's interesting is that the names are in alphabetically order.
Interesting...

What you might not know is that a few years before Android came out in 2008, Linux Operating System was already adopting an alphabetically-ordered project code names.  That was 2006.

Here's the listing for the Linux project codename:

• 1.0 - Ada
• 2.0 - Barbara
• 2.1 - Bea
• 2.2 - Bianca
• 3.0 - Cassandra
• 3.1 - Celena
• 4.0 - Daryna
• 5.0 - Elyssa
• 6.0 - Felicia
• 7.0 - Gloria
• 8.0 - Helena
• 9.0 - Isadora
• 10 - Julia
• 11 - Katya
• 12 - Lisa
• 13 - Maya
• 14 - Nadia
• 15 - Olivia
• 16 - Petra

So there you are.
Now, do you prefer dessert's names or lady's names?

What is Innovation?

With the advent of mass consumer smartphone technology, phone manufacturers compete aggressively in becoming a more, if not most "innovative" company.

Apple, being the company that brought to the world a game-changing, life-changing revolutionary smartphone, is being challenged aggressively in this area.

How do I define innovation?

In my view, innovation involves having a new concept.  It can be evolved from old ideas.

The most important factor for it to be claimed as real innovative is that competitors try to follow suit and start copying.

Here's one that I consider an innovation.  Back in the days of resistive touch screen smartphones and PDAs, PalmOne was the leader.  However, there was a major issue in all those devices.  When they went out of battery juice, the data will be gone. A restart of the device by recharging will not bring back the data. You can only restore from the desktop.

Figure: The Palm Tunsten T2 with Resistive Screen

To resolve such shortcoming, PalmOne introduced a new way of making the data persistent even when the battery is flat.  They introduced NVFS, "Non Volatile File System" and implemented in their then flagship Palm Tunsten T5 PDA in 2005.

All was good. And competitors saw it succeed and copying began.

And sure enough, Microsoft followed not long later and came out the "Persistent Storage" in their Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system.

And all devices following that have persistent storage that stay beyond battery flat.

This is innovation.

And then in 2007.  Apple introduced a new way of interacting with the phone and the copying begins.

This is innovation.

Now, most recently, a certain smartphone company came out with many new features.

One of them allows you to pause your video by looking away from the screen.  Another one allows you to scroll your screen without touching the screen.  And then they tried to bring back the "stylus" from the dead.

What seem to others as innovation for the above three features do not fall under my definition of innovation.  They obviously did not arouse enough interest or mass market appeal for their competitors to copy these features.

2014 is a year which I really think new innovations are imminent.

Most Memorable Album Arts

Music in the 80s/90s really belong S.A.W (Stock Aitken Waterman), who have produced successful artistes like Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Rick Astley.

Here are 3 album arts of the cassette albums of them that I've bought.

Unlike the digital album art of today's music, those printed cassette album photos are so memorable.

I Love Chinese Rock

I love English rock ballads and Chinese rock songs. While my favourite Chinese rock singer is 姚可杰 of 东方快车, 信 is another power house I like.

Here's a string of good Chinese rock oldies that he sang live.

Nice!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RdzkJ3dMcI

Another Widget for my iPhone

The jailbreak for iOS 7 has been released for near a month now. New tweaks keep pouring in.

One of the latest tweaks which I love a lot is "Live Weather Icon".

It changes the static icon picture of the stock Weather app into a live animated update of the weather condition of the current location.

It shows three information:

1) the weather condition, eg Cloudy

2) an animated image such as raining droplets and moving cloud, etc

3) the temperature

It's particularly useful for me as the workplace that I work in doesn't have windows and I've no vision to whether it's raining or now.

And when I put this icon beside the stock live Clock on the first home page, it feels right at home!