The Websolace

You’ve probably seen me with a status of “View my Webcam” on Yahoo! Messenger too often these past weeks.

That’s because I have a new toy.

..and it’s called WebcamMax! (check it out and get yourself a trial at http://www.webcammax.com/)

It makes me feel less insecure about the petty things like facial appearance. I believe I look a ton better using it.

Looking… cute.

You know this wouldn’t be just any technology review if there wasn’t at least a bit of technical stuff in it. The concept is easy! WebcamMax installs it’s own video source driver, think of it like adding another hardware webcam in your computer with your existing webcam feeding to it. Basically, it’s a middleman between your webcam and the actual output (Yahoo! Messenger, WLM or another video capture program*); best described as post processing for your webcam! Outlined it’s Webcam (the actual source) -> WebcamMax (for effects processing) -> Output (probable internet fame).

Bored.

Personally, this product shines because I’ve always enjoyed having my picture taken in one of those cute pink Japanese photobooths where you get to play around with the picture and take home stickers. Yep, pretty manly stuff for a manly man like me. Now with WebcamMax… I can take my manly habits to the next level.. with movement… AND ON THE INTERNET! Everybody loves a good e-go. It’s really just the fun effects that makes you feel a lot, lot, younger than you really are.

Other awesome things? SCREEN CAPTURE. I cannot stress this enough. The screen capture part is FRIKKEN COOL. You can set it to capture your whole screen so your buddies can see you play Farcry on your new badass computer. Practically speaking, I’ve found it REAL USEFUL when I’m trying to help someone with their computer problem, it’s a good way to avoid having to remotely connect to his computer, or worse.. being physically summoned.

One neat effect I like is this one which displays the time. Timestamping on the actual video output can be real useful in many different situations. Other than that, it just sparks my inner geekiness.

More features? Yes. Aside from webcam post processing, screen capturing… YOU CAN ACTUALLY FEED IT A MOVIE SOURCE. I frikken kid you not. Best of all, since processing is done client side, if your computer can play it… you won’t run into codec problems streaming it. Additionally you can use a picture or a blank background of whatever color you wish! The latter is useful for … doodling….. Yep DOODLING! You can ‘doodle’ on whatever source you’re using, be it a webcam, screen capture.. you get the point.

I’m sorry for this badly outlined review, there’s literally TOO MUCH features to share about WebcamMax. One thing I’m finding hard to gauge is what’s more useful to me and so far… all of ‘em. These pictures I posted weren’t gotten off a screencapture and cropped off using another program, it does that for you and video recording.. with sound too. Now thats something I should have said sooner, but again, there’s too much cool stuff to mention!!

If I haven’t mentioned.. it also works on more than a dozen IM clients, some I haven’t even used since I’m only on Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger. In fact, it should work on any program (whether or not it’s an IM client) as long as it can support video feed off a video source. Awesome, really.

My rating? A 10 out of 10. It’s vast library of fun effects to revolutionize the way you… ‘camwhore’ will come in handy someday. Well, if you’re butt ugly the Brad Pitt mask should. Don’t ever take it off. Seriously though, if you’ve ever found yourself in a similar situation where in this product has helped me (like for helpng people troubleshoot their computer), consider buying this product. Get your trial copy first at http://www.webcammax.com/.

Happy camming!

Now here’s an interesting one.

I accientally threw my N95 out of a moving car and surprisingly it’s still working, but due to my being OCD, I cannot bare to use it without looking at the scratches every now and then………… so I had to resort to use the only working phone in the house –the iPhone!

You may know me as a big hater of the iPhone and yes nothing much has changed. I still don’t understand why people like the iPhone.

Unlike my other post I really have used an iPhone now (more than a week now I believe) and guess what… MAKES NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL.

Let’s get down to the basics shall we?

With the iPhone you get these preinstalled applications:

• Phone - for access to calls and contacts, with the new firmware there’s also a separate application called Contacts
• SMS
• Safari - it’s web browser
• Mail - for e-mail
• Calendar
• Photos/Camera
• Calculator
• Clock
• Notes
• Youtube/Stocks/Maps/Weather/iTunes/AppStore - web powered applications
• .. and of course, it’s an iPod too!

I FAIL to see the desirability of it’s features for it’s price and overmarketed hype. It DOESN’T have anything any phone made in 2007 or to be specific, 2006 doesn’t already have. Multi-touch? Cool but seriously a failed implementation.

To give you an indepth review of this device let’s go through some of the applications listed above:

Phone - Horribly designed user interface, especially when using the iPhone with one hand you’ll find yourself in an uncomfortable position to hold it as you’re going to rely on your thumb to go through your Favorites, Recents, Contacts, Keypad and Voicemail, depending on the size of your hand, may tilt the iPhone in a way that it’s liable to drop. On another note, Favorites was a nice idea to implement on a phone lacking speed dialing.

Additionally I did have problems in this part. Synchronizing with Outlook was a breeze, too bad it had to go wrong in some areas. It doesn’t sync all your contacts as they appear in Outlook. For example, on my best friend’s contact profile I have both her US and local number stored. They’re neaty defined as both Mobile Phones, in my best understanding, in the iPhone you can have a contact with two or more mobile phones. So yeah, if you were like me you probably wouldn’t worry about anything not synchronizing well, well.. you would be wrong too! It appears as though whatever was responsble for synching my contacts (iTunes) MAGICALLY picked only one of the two numbers. So here I am in the Philippines not noticing all this time that I’m actually texting her US number who now belongs to some pissed off guy receiving gibberish text messages from another country. FAIL.

SMS - Someone finally got it right! Whoever created SMS probably had one way messaging in mind, sorta like how paging works. Hence why most mobile phones handle SMSes by having multiple threads of messages, even if it’s from the same person. The iPhone handles SMSes like instant messaging, best of all it has timestamps and will properly place any delayed messages in their proper chronological order to avoid further confusion when your mobile network is clogging up. What sucks? Well is that it doesn’t handle archiving like our IM clients do. I personally like having a copy of conversations for future blackma….reference. In fact I have about 400,000 or more probably worth of text messages backed up from my N95.

Over the past few days I’ve come to realize that I have to stop bashing the iPhone because I can’t text with one hand or that I may never find my way around it without looking because of the lack of buttons. I’ve made my peace with touch screen devices……. I’m STILL ANNOYED AT THE IPHONE THOUGH. WHY CAN’T I TURN OFF THE SPELL CHECKER? Why? WHY? It’s EVIL. For really long messages I find myself with more than fifty unnecessary taps at my Taglish message compositions. MAN I’D LOVE TO GET RID OF THIS PHONE JUST BECAUSE OF THAT. How ignorant is Apple? They’re releasing this phone to other countries which are not necessarily English speaking too!

Safari - Someone.. got it right again. Safari has to be where the iPhone shines, in fact, you can happily avoid the iPhone and just get the iTouch just for the browser. It’s fast and the multi-touch interface really shines here the best. It feels fluid to use and FAMILIAR. Good job Apple, good job.

Photos/Camera - Browsing through photos is mediocre; zooming in photos is fun though. The camera….. well.. we all know megapixels don’t matter. If you didn’t … to quickly explain and debunk the whole megapixel myth.. well, megapixels is simply a measurement of how big (literally) the image is going to be. Like VGA for example translates to a resolution of 640×480 or 0.3 megapixels. Where did I get that 0.3? Well 0.3 actually means 300,000 pixels… by multiplying 640 and 480! Image quality is found somewhere else and on many factors. The iPhone.. does *again*… mediocre at this. Actually, it fails. If the iPhone came out about two years early it would have been great, but in this day and age where it’s competitors are giving digital cameras a run for their money …. phone cameras shouldn’t BE just phone cameras.

Youtube/Stocks/Maps/Weather/iTunes/AppStore - Youtube is nice, I love being able to watch videos over a wireless network without a computer, the search functionality works like a charm. As for the other applications they really don’t cater much to me at all. Stocks is a nice attempt to lure businessmen on using this phone though, but… still fails!

iPod - Works like a charm. Sadly the phone itself somewhat fails at it’s implementation. One huge problem I have with it is that I can’t change songs while the iPhone is in my pocket. I know you can probably get an external remote for it but I’m just saying, you can’t… this is another feature best left for the tactile response of something awesome called buttons. Oh yeah, album view or whatever it’s called.. gets boring after a while. No pracitcal use other than brag rights on how clean your music library is.

Overall.. what do I have to say about the iPhone?

Sucks, stay away from it. The only good thing about this phone is an game not bundled with it.. and it’s called aMaze!. By the way, when you get one, ditch AppStore and jailbreak it. It’s easy. Ask me how!

Oh by the way, I went to Nokia Care and it’s going to take about a month for the parts to come from Singapore. SO yeah.. about three more weeks with this thing.

You will.

By the way, this post will be very frank.

Let me introduce the beast..

It runs Windows Vista Ultimate x64..

What is it? It’s a Sager NP9262. Big deal right?

It’s a quadcore laptop.

Before specifics or should I say specifications, please review the next picture; yes, that is it’s power adapter.

Alright, what does the monster of a power adapter really power? An Intel Q9450 which runs at 2.66GHz per core with a 1333 FSB to start.. Graphics? GeForce 8800M GTX, 512MB. Four gigabytes of 800 MHz memory to be upgraded to eight in the future. Storage? Two 200GB 7200RPM drives in a RAID 0 (stripping) configuration. Not convinced how awesome this thing is? It’s native resolution is 1920×1200 on a 17″ screen. Four onboard speakers, four bottom fans to keep it from meltng.

Still not convinced? 3Dmark06 gave it a score of over 10,000…. out of the box.

I didn’t get it SLi’d because the cost was.. obsenely high at my configuration already. Of course..because of the modularity of it’s chassis (the Clevo 900 series) I can swap out parts easily. The processor (easily because it’s a desktop processor), RAM and hard drives (up to three 2.5″) of course.. and.. (this is where the modularity comes in) the graphics card too! YES, that means in the coming months I can swap my 8800 GTX for a 9800 GT! Awesome, real awesome.

Other pictures..

Oh yeah, you need a pro mouse too if you’re going to survive in the battlegrounds.. with that, here is my Logitech G9 and additionally, my UPEK Fingerprint scanner (which by the way, is the only fingerprint scanner that fully works with Vista and more importantly, 64-bit drivers!).

Lastly.. it weighs around eleven kilos including the power adapter, so goodluck to me.

A friend of mine just lost an important file on his USB drive and since he didn’t have a backup, I was quick to recommend file recovery programs. Prevention is always better than treat me so I was thinking if there were any programs that backed up whole USB drives. I came to a conclusion that for most end users its probably impractical. So instead of giving him a program that would chop his space capacity in half in no time (a graphic artist, those huge PSDs) I went with a solution that’s already in Windows.. none other than Briefcase!

I’ve never used it since Windows 98 or was that 95? It’s always there for anyone to use but sadly just highlighted by in the New context menu. Some probably use it, I would starting right now!

There’s no point in making another step-by-step since Symplebyte.com has a fantastic tutorial in the following link. Read about it here:

http://www.symplebyte.com/microsoft_windows/the_basics/synch_files_using_briefcase

Wow, what a title and yes this is real.

You see (you can skip this part if you’re eager to make that call fast) I have a sister and a brother who are both living somewhere else now; Japan and America respectively. I have a G-Flex 3500 Globe subscription and that’s not even enough for my local calls not to mention when the international fees are added! Globe and Smart (not sure with other networks) both charge forty cents ($.40 USD) a minute for calls to the US which is roughly sixteen pesos ($1 USD = 40 PHP conversion), it may not look expensive but when you pill up all the five-ten minute calls you’d come up with a four digit to a five digit bill for international alone.

For so long I’ve been wanting to cut that in half without cutting them out.

I have a solution!

How do you make five peso calls to the US?

Okay, the five peso calls are only for Globe subscribers but Smart subscribers get to save too.

What do you need?

• 3G phone (explained later)
• Globe SIM (preferred)
• Skype account with Skypeout
• Fring
• Credit card

1. Get yourself a Skype account if you didn’t already have one here.

2. Top up that Skype account with Skypeout which enables your Skype account to call outside (PC to landline/cellphone) anywhere in the world. It costs $10 which is awesome partnered with their cheap rates, take note that countries differ (Calls to the US are $0.02 per minute which gives you more than 600 minutes worth of calls to the US with $10 and 100+ to Japan which is $0.154). From this point on you’re actually able to make eight centavos per minute calls to the US. You can also check their other promos here.

3. Install Fring on your 3G mobile phone. Alternatively, you can use any other Skype client which works for you. I chose Fring because it’s feature rich as it can also run as a background process (even main) on my phone.

4. For Globe subscribers, if you haven’t already, text TIME to 1111 to activate time based mobile internet access. What this does basically is change how you’re billed for acccessing the internet through your mobile. By default you pay per kilobyte you download, by texting this you’re requesting that you be billed five pesos per fifteen minutes you surf or access the internet wirelessly regardless of how much bandwidth you use. You should receive a confirmation text within an hour.

4. Login to Fring on your mobile using Globe 3G which now costs only five pesos per fifteen minutes compared to Smart’s ten pesos per thirty minutes. This is where the five peso calls really come in; you see through Globe 3G and your Skypeout account. You pay five pesos for mobile internet access for fifteen minutes which in most cases is even more than enough for one call, you maybe using up your Skypeout account but with $0.02 USD or 0.8 PHP rates it’s disregardable. That $10 will last you a very long time not unless you really religiously call the US, either way I still saved you a ton of money!

You can still do this with Smart but it costs double as their time bracket is allocated at thirty minutes. I suggest getting a Globe SIM specifically for this, prepaid will do anyway at 50-100 PHP per sim pack.

What makes this cheap? I’d like to thank two technologies at work. VOIP and 3G.

VOIP - It stands for Voice over Internet Protocol which is fancy talk for a technology that allows digital phonecalls ergo it uses the internet to route calls anywhere in the world whether its destination is another computer, an analog phone or a mobile.

Don’t be confused, Skype is company that delivers VOIP solutions like Skypeout. It’s cheap because rather than travelling through analog phonelines, Skype uses peer to peer technology (research that on your on!) which lets Skype use it’s great big pool of users (their bandwidth, not actual phones!) to help hop phonecalls to their destination. Read more about Skype’s VOIP technology here.

3G - The third generation of mobile phone standards and technology. It is NOT synonymous to video calling as it is only a feature, be it, one of the most popular uses though. You can actually relate it somehow to it’s cousin WiFi who basically is a faster 3G network (bandwidth!) but with shorter range. First developed and implemented in Japan to say the least! 3G mixes in data transmission for uses such as surfing with broadband like speed on your phone, video calls, calling through the internet to make cheaper calls of course and more.

Yep, again, I saved you a ton of money didn’t I?!