I Like "I Dreamed A Dream"

I'm a fan of the talent show "Britain's Got Talent" since 2007.
That year, Paul Potts was the winner.

Two years later, an "auntie" came on to surprise the crowd and the world with the song "I Dreamed A Dream" from Les Miserables. She was Susan Boyle.

That was the first time I heard of that song.

Sometime later, I heard an original version from the Les Miserables musical sung by Ruthie Henshall.

While Susan Boyle's version is sweet, Ruthie Henshall's version is more "powerful" and emotional.

The latest version came with this year's screening of Les Miserables and sung by Anne Hathaway.

Her version is a bit "soft" and lack impact.

My personal preference, I really love the version by Ruthie Henshall the most and that powerful vocal and emotional feel it brings.

Strange Phenomenon of the Gadget World

Not many years back, companies like Nikon, Pentax, Casio were trying to make their cameras as small and compact as possible and charge a higher price.
Today, we see people shooting away with a 9.7" squarish and flat device.

A biggest-sized camera of all time. (2013)

Again not many years back, companies like Ericsson, Sony, Nokia were trying to make their mobile phones as small and compact as possible.
Today, we see people putting a 5.6" flat slab to their face. One can even see people holding a bigger 7" one with a brand starting with "S".

Are we "going backwards"?!
Strange phenomenon.

iRevolution

Think about this...

2007 - The smartphone world was revolutionised.

+3 years,
2010 - The tablet world was revolutionised.













+3 years,
2013 - Something is gonna got revolutionised. Right?

With vast cash to burn on its side, I very much doubt the "i" smartphone is going to die, to the utter disappointment of the "dessert" community, I guess.

I'm not a fan of the fruit company, but I'm a lover of their product, particularly the "i" smartphone.

An iOS App Offering Alternative to Widget Functionality

iOS doesn't support Widgets like Android does.

The app, "My Dashboard" for iOS though not bringing widgets functionality to iOS, does provide multiple apps content to be put in a "dashboard" layout which is user-configurable.

For iPhone version, you can arrange up to 2 app stacking vertically per screen.
You can have up to 8 on iPad.

There are quite a number of app content that are supported out of the box:

Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Photo, RSS, Calendar and Weather, to name a few.

Blk 85 Market Revisited

Ask people where's one of the most popular food centre at Bedok.
Many will say Blk 85 Market Food Centre.
They have some of the best food in Singapore like the Carrot cake and the all famous Bah Chor Mee (Minced Meat Noodle).
I once queued near 40 minutes just for a bowl of that! Crazy!

Many months back, the market went for a full renovation. A make-shift temporary market and food centre were built and are still operating today.

The newly-renovated market will be opened this coming 7th January 2013.
Today, the construction fenced-out doors are opened and I went in to take a look.

Now, I'm seeing neat rows of tables and chairs with quite a few catered for handicap people. Nice!
The centre isle is more spacious to walk now.

At one corner of the food centre, a row of taps and basics is built. Very neat, very nice, very thoughtful!
In the middle of it, there are also several smaller washing basins with soap detergent dispenser. Nice!

Now comes the important part... toilets.
The toilets now follow the design of those classy shopping centre types with no front doors. They are spacious inside (at least for the Male toilet, don't know about the Female one).
There's also now one labeled "Family Toilet" with handicap facilities and baby diaper changing station. Very nice!

One interesting thing I've noticed is about the table design.
I noticed that there are 2 diagonally-located round holes on each table.
There are no labels or instructions beside them.
What are they used for?
Now, my guess is that they are for slotting in our wet umbrellas during rainy days.
Very nice! Very thoughtful!

For the open-space area, they used to be placed with untidily-arranged tables and chairs.
They are now replaced by nice-looking stone tables and chairs.
Very nice for cooling evening open-space dinning!

I must say I'm impressed by the effort and design for a neighbourhood wet market.

Now, I just hope they don't charge 10 cents for entry into the toilet! Not that we can't afford, but it just looks so "not modern".

Free Gifts From Apple

A few days before Christmas this year, Apple released a free app called "iTunes 12 Days of Gift".
The first "gift" would be available on 26th December 2012.

Now, there are already quite a number of "Paid-apps-gone-free-for-a-limited-time" app on the App Store. What makes this offering from Apple different from them?

On the 26th, when I launched the app, the gift was there!
It's an EP by Maroon 5! A 2-track plus a video EP.
This is an obvious different from the rest of similar app.

I was hoping to see what other goodies it got to offer.
To my disappointment, the following 2 days are just the same paid-app-gone-free apps. However, these 2 apps are real quality apps.

On the 28th December, I went to App Store's top "Free App" section and I see this:

The 2 free apps offered on the 27th and 28th December occupy the first 2 places with the main app itself taking 3rd place!

You don't see other paid-app-gone-free recommended by other app shoot up to the top spot like in this situation.

What an impact a big name company app (Apple in this case) can shoot an app to immediate fame.

iPhone 5 Panoramic Photo Quality

Apple built in Panorama feature in iOS 6 and introduced it during the iPhone 5 launch event.

Before iOS 6, I was using third party panorama apps such as "360 Panorama" and "Photo Synth".  The main problem with these 2 apps are that the final stitched panorama photo are of low pixel resolution.

With iOS 6's built-in Panorama feature, the final stitched photo has a much higher pixel resolution and thus better quality.

Here's one photo that I took few days ago at 77th floor of the Skypoint building in Australia's Surfers Paradise.

It's very clear in the original photo. Not sure if some quality are lost when uploading to this blog.

And here's the technical specs for this stitched photo:

Width  7360 pixels
Height 2332 pixels
DPI    72
Size   10.9 MB