how does orange suit me?

i finally got my SES uniform a few weeks ago, which means i now need to wear it to training every week. putting a high visibility vest over my (civilian) clothes was a much easier option, but at least i can look the part alongside the rest of the orange-clad membes, and not stick out as the non-uniformed new recruit.

it's still not all smooth sailing though - i'm missing a few items in the kit, and have no idea if/when these will come through. weirder yet was that my boots only came with one shoelace...

with no time to visit the shops to buy new laces, i stole the laces from an old and falling-apart pair of sneakers. but these were at most 60-70% of the length of the boot lace, so it was off to google for some inspiration on different lacing methods, and boy are there lots of ways of lacing a shoe!

i settled on the army lacing method, mostly because this method uses less lace length and is used for combat boots. it was pretty much just right for the old laces on the new boots.

so, i'm all geared up (more or less) and ready to be deployed.

and i just so happen to be going on my first deployment tomorrow! 5 days in st george (about 500km west of brisbane), helping with post flood efforts (the town has just been flooded for the third time in less than 2 years). i'm told the conditions will be rough, which is outside of the experiences of this urban creature... but this is what i signed up for, so it's time to finish packing, get a good night's sleep, and set out early in the morning.

- - - - -
related posts: joining the SES

getting more out of my NAS

funnily enough, not long after my last post on using a NAS for download automation and thinking it would just be interesting knowledge without a paid usenet account, i came across a free usenet service! so, with a bit of fiddling around, i installed sabnzbd+ and sick beard, and started using this to keep up with a few tv shows out of the states.

it was working pretty well, except for the post processing part which never worked. essentially this meant that the downloaded files remained in the sabnzbd area rather than getting moved (and renamed) to more organised folders under sick beard. it wasn't a major issue, since i could just look in the former location instead of the latter.

however, today i somewhat chanced upon the cause of the post processing problems and got it working - it was pretty simple: a config file needed to be updated with the actual login details for the NAS. i also recently enabled the twonky media server on the NAS, and installed BubbleUPnP on my phone to access the files using UPnP, which i'm told should be a better/more stable solution than the SMB mounts i was previously using for this purpose.

good times. except that the usenet service seems to have gone down about the same time i was getting all these wins with improving my home network setup! oh well... maybe i'll just have to wait for homeland to play out on australian tv, as i'm presently missing more than half the season!

joining the SES

about a year ago some major flooding hit my home city. there had been flooding to other parts of queensland prior to brisbane being affected, including some pretty serious flash flooding in toowoomba just a few hours drive away. whilst i personally did not see any damage to my property or livelihood, i had friends whose homes were flooded, and got to see first hand some of the devastation when i helped with some of the cleanup.

(it wasn't a day for photography, but i did take a few on my phone, including this "favourite", if such a term can be appropriate. pictured is a friend whose home had water about a foot past the second storey floor.)

probably like many others in the community who responded with aid in the days and weeks following the flood, i was left feeling mostly helpless - wanting to do something, but not really knowing where to start, what to do, or how to best give of my time and energy and convert the willingness into something worthwhile. this is part of the reason i decided to sign up as a volunteer with the SES (state emergency service).

that was in mid january last year, and probably the worst time to join. it wasn't until september that i eventually got into a recruit intake group and began my induction. some three months later, i'm about to finish my probation period and become a community member, which means i can officially take part in activations and call outs. it hasn't all been quite what i expected so far, but i plan on sticking with it for the time being and continue getting trained and better prepared to be able to help and respond to times of emergency. it's also a good opportunity for me to work at forming friendships (maybe) with people outside of my normal circles. and one day, i hope to turn out in my orange uniform and be a part of a well coordinated effort to help someone in need.

first wedding for the year

i have a few weddings to attend over the next few months, but another one came up last weekend on fairly short notice. i didn't even know this person was getting married, but since they took the trouble of inviting me and i wasn't already busy, i went along to the ceremony.

she's a friend of a friend from my uni days, so at best an acquaintance with whom i've had minimal contact over the years. having said that, we have had some deep-ish facebook/email conversations about church/faith related topics, and wifey and i had her over for dinner once.

anyways, i went along expecting to only really know the bride, however found that i knew/recognised a fair few other people:

• the celebrant (not that i really know him, and not that it's a total surprise given he's a pastor of the church where the ceremony was held)
• my elder sister's high school classmate/s
• my younger sister's uni coursemate and husband
• people from CCCB Coopers Plains
• people from a previous church i attended
• someone i know from my YF days
• someone i know from my uni course
• the photographer (a mutual friend who covered our wedding some 4 years ago)

i even found the groom familiar, though i have no idea where i might have seen him before.

hey jacaranda

so i was walking along on a breezy afternoon, approaching a jacaranda tree, seeing some of its flowers being blown off by the wind, thinking to myself that wouldn't it be cool if I reached out my hand and caught a falling flower (like some kind of super hand-eye coordination skills)... when suddenly a flower blew into my slightly cupped hand whilst my arm was swinging in the normal act of walking. just like that. ha!

i held into it a while longer as i continued walking and marveling about what just took place. then i stopped to take a picture, so that i could remember this moment.

NAS and download automation

i'm relatively new to the world of NAS ownership, so was somewhat amazed when i discovered how it's possible to set one up to act as a PVR of sorts, and to automate download of shows. there may be others, but this is one way i found from a bit of research:

• install SABnzbd - an Open Source Binary Newsreader written in Python
  SABnzbd makes Usenet as simple and streamlined as possible […] everything […] will be automatically downloaded, verified, repaired, extracted and filed away with zero human interaction.
  http://sabnzbd.org/
  http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=133&t=6752
  
• Use SABnzbd in conjunction with one or more of the following:
• Sick Beard - The ultimate PVR application that downloads and manages your TV shows
  NB does not download actual TV episodes, it only downloads .torrent/.nzb files. In order to automate your downloads you need to also configure SB to communicate with your favorite download program (eg can put torrents in a "watch folder")
  http://sickbeard.com/index.html
  http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=223&t=35015
• CouchPotato - automatic NZB and torrent downloader
  You can keep a "movie I want"-list and it will search for NZBs/torrents of these movies every X hours. Once a movie is found, it will send it to SABnzbd or download the .nzb or .torrent to a specified directory.
  http://couchpotatoapp.com/
  http://forums.sabnzbd.org/viewtopic.php?t=4636
• Headphones - sick beard for music albums and artists
  https://github.com/rembo10/headphones
  http://forums.sabnzbd.org/viewtopic.php?t=6486

of course i'm not suggesting or condoning piracy of movies and music etc, but i could definitely see a use for this sort of thing when it comes to keeping up with TV shows, particularly those from the other side of the pacific ocean. beats checking for torrents manually and/or scouring youtube.

anyway i started trying this out before realising that i'd probably need to pay for an account to access binary news groups, without which these tools won't be doing much downloading at all!

oh well, looks like it's back to an ad-hoc combination of regular PVR / torrents / youtube / local tv station websites for me...

Santos City of Lights and other light displays

i wished my camera battery didn't die on my half way through the show, nevertheless i managed to capture a few minutes of the city of lights display:

"The first laser light show of its kind in Australia... Santos City of Lights will fill the space between Kurilpa and Goodwill Bridges with a nightly choreographed spectacle of lasers and lights that can be seen across the city", happening 3-24 September 2011 in Brisbane as part of the Brisbane Festival.

i also tried to capture some stills:

more info at http://brisbanefestival.com.au/Santos-City-of-Lights

also at southbank during the festival are things like the light sphere

and the liquid interactive light scope, of which i don't have a nice picture... but here's one i took while queueing for the light scope - it's some art piece which looks to be lost of bits of paper or other light material, attached to a net/mesh structure, which all go a-flutter in the wind:

swype beta - now my keyboard of choice

i posted about the flexT9 android keyboard earlier, noting some issues i had while using it. i had a few other gripes which i did not write about, so when i found out about the swype beta, i immediately signed up and installed swype.

it's good! the current version (v3.25) introduces gestures and personal dictionary management, which i think are great improvements. there are also a number of tips/tricks in using some shortcuts to do various things, which make using swype much more pleasant than flexT9 - basically i installed swype about a month ago and haven't looked back.

plus it handles Chinese text entry (pin yin) pretty well too. (there are other language options which i haven't looked into/tried)

find out more about the swype keyboard here.

Google - warning PC owners of malware

it's not quite the same as remotely removing malware from your android phones, but if Google detects some malware on your PC, they'll now warn you about it as well.

thanks, Google - i hope i never (need to) benefit from you watching over me!

Official Google Blog: Using data to protect people from malware

Nuance responds to flext9 bug reports/enhancement requests

i decided to contact flext9's technical support about some of the things i'd found from using their keyboard (see previous post). it wasn't quite the 48 hours suggested by their submit a ticket page, but they did eventually reply after about 2.5 weeks, and with some detail:

Hi,

Sorry for the late response.

Our software engineers' investigation points to WhatsApp text buffer management as the culprit. Here's how they explained it:

For this particular app, this problem happens only if we're trying to recapture the only word in the text buffer. It works fine if there are more than one words in the text buffer. Seems there is bug in this application’s text buffer management.

Notice that when the problem occurs, the inline word does not have the underline. This is because to recapture a word, we first copy that word into our text buffer, delete that word, call core recapture function, build the word list, then display the word list and the inline word.

But for some reason, WhatsApp does not delete the word and did not render the inline word. And if we press the delete key again, it then displays the inline word after the word that should have been delete but it was not.  So we believe this is a bug in WhatsApp.

Moving forward, we suggest:

1) As a workaround, long-press on the delete key to delete the only word in this text buffer.
2) Report the problem to the WhatsApp development team.

About trace mode in URL entry box: The fact that you cannot use the FlexT9 Trace feature in the URL entry box is intentional by design since it was discovered that tablets maximize the input buffer when the URL is in focus. As a consequence, the entry box fills the entire viewable area of the screen -- you would no longer see any part of the webpage you were on.

Note that our engineering team is following closely this situation with tablets and will look into findind a workaround or improvement for it.

As for the case toggle and trace shortcuts, we have received similar suggestions and feedback from other users and we have forwarded them to our Product team.  These features will be considered in future releases.

Thanks for the feedback!

FlexT9 keyboard for Android

tapping away with thumbs/fingers at an on screen keyboard for data entry is not my favourite thing in the world, but it's pretty much what you have to put up with on smartphones without a hardware keyboard. whether you call it sliding, swiping/swyping, tracing or whatever, the concept of keeping your finger on the screen while you move over the relevant letters of a word is a much faster way of "typing". i had been using an old version of shapewriter (from here) which was working out pretty well given that it was no longer available on the android market, i didn't like slideIT that much, and i couldn't get swype.

and then multi-input flext9 came along. i first saw it via gizmodo, followed by ausdroid (and subsequently on ozbargain also). i've been using it for a few weeks now and have been finding it pretty good - at least as good as shapewriter (which should be expected, given that shapewriter was recently purchased by flext9's makers, nuance communications). my thoughts on flext9 so far:

• PROs
• Versatility: can trace, tap, draw or speak straight from the keyboard - the latter two cannot be done in Shapewriter (no draw option, and need to switch to another keyboard to be able to access microphone key)
• Voice recognition seems to work better than Google's
• CONs
• Bug in whatsapp application: deleting (backspace) sometimes doesn't work properly
• Can't trace in URL entry box in browser (tried with Dolphin and stock browser) - could be feature
• Can't change case easily with entered words (cf. Shapewriter's case toggle key)
• Can't trace shortcuts/commands (cf. Shapewriter's command strokes)
• Can't add new/custom words to recognition dictionary
• NEUTRAL
• Voice recognition requires network (this is also the case with Google's voice recognition service), and uses own server side processing (not Google)

the australian english version is free until september 14, so try it out while you can do so at no cost.

you know those manual settings on your digital camera?

this is what they do:

handy (for beginners) to know for when you step out of auto-land :)

from gizmodo

Google Reader phasing out support for older browsers

i guess i must have missed this announcement: Phasing out support for older browsers - Google Reader Help

sure i've been prompting to upgrade whenever i used google reader from work (yep, still on IE6 there...), but i took that as a suggestion/recommendation rather than a warning of impending cessation of support.

oh well. less distractions i suppose. though viewing it on my phone probably takes more time...

or i could start taking in my own netbook (+ byo internet connectivity) like i've seen some others in my office do!

he who has ears, let him see

no i haven't gotten my basic human anatomy mixed up, i did really meant to link ears to seeing. for it is with ears that some blind people have learnt to "see" the world around them. echolocation is where it's at.

it was via a post on gizmodo that i came to know about daniel kish, as written about in this article: The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See | Men’s Journal

it was through the comments on that post that i learnt about another echolocater by the name of ben underwood. watching this documentary on him was just fascinating - it's amazing how the human body is able to adapt in this way - that the loss of one sense (sight) can be replaced, though not perfectly but to such a functional extent, by another (sound). the first part (of 5) of the doco is embedded below.



links for the whole series:
[Part 1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA (10:51)
[Part 2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1QaCeosUmw (10:37)
[Part 3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikpNZOx5FGk (10:20)
[Part 4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Px-aPnk4ZU (10:34)
[Part 5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNkJ1diTxOE (05:12)

TSO Photography

came across these beautiful timelapse videos recently. lovely stuff...


The Arctic Light from TSO Photography on Vimeo.


The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.


The Aurora from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

updates available on his facebook page at facebook.com/​TSOPhotography

change is the only constant

i've never known where (the idea behind) that quote came from, but thanks to a quick google, i learn that it's from a greek philosopher by the name of heraclitus.

that was a digression.

this is to say/announce that i've finally decided to change the layout of this blog. goodbye rounders template, hello watermark by blogger. i've probably lost some of the various hacks and customisations that have been implemented over the years, but right now i don't think i could be bothered to care. maybe later.

i have no idea who actually reads this blog (anymore?), but if you're viewing the site in all its webpage glory, at least the embedded videos and pics fit in the blog post columns now. or you could just subscribe to the rss feeds if you're that keen on my blog :) all the cool kids do that these days. use rss feeds i mean, not necessarily for my blog.

anyways, looks like so far 2011 is at least as prolific in terms of numbers of posts as 2009 was. 11... that's less than one post a month on average. onwards and upwards i say!

Google's new flight schedule feature

from Plan your next trip with the new flight schedule feature - Inside Search:

finding flights is one of the most popular online activities, so to make it a little easier to find results for your travel-related searches, you can now see a quick summary of flight information right on the results page

i just gave it a test to see if it wasn't just an american thing, and it's not :) pretty nifty, and helpful for knowing which airlines do overnight flights vs. daytime flights for example. or how many airlines do direct flights from one city to another, such as:



now if only it could include more than just the non-stop flights, we'll have something super useful.

leaving a bad church?

pastor ying recently suggested that perhaps we often regard a church as bad (and thus want to leave) because/when "we expect more of our churches than we would of churches in missionary field", ie "we expect the church to grow up faster than what it really can".

or maybe we've got a naive understanding of what it means to serve the gospel:

Just as it’s crazy to think that going to war is like a walk in park and then are surprised that someone is shooting at you, why are we surprised when people shoot at us [in a gospel work context]?

so that's probably all the more reason we should actually strive to stay to fight for and defend the gospel in a bad church, helping to "move things from worse to better, from bad to good, from corruption to honesty, from error to truth."

nevertheless, there are some good reasons for leaving a church. read the whole series here: part1, part2, part3, part4, and part5.

A new kind of computer: Chromebook

hopefully when it comes time to replace my netbook, the chromebook will be available in australia.

and hopefully by then mobile internet would be more widely available and affordable. after all, "out of all the exciting announcements that came out of Google [recently], every single one of them relies on high speed broadband."



(direct link to video here, since my layout is too skinny and i can't quite be bothered to tinker with it atm)

Best Online Videos | Wimp.com

i don't normally do any youtube surfing, cos there's a lot of chaff amongst the wheat. so i was intrigued by wimp when anDrew mentioned it on his blog, where he says it has ruined his productivity. it's not quite at that stage for me (yet?), but so far in my brief exploration of the videos there i have found some nice/interesting/entertaining ones (ie. did not leave me feeling like i wasted my time to view crap), such as:

• Street dance in Paris.
• Every photographer needs this.
• Arranged marriage, can love be arranged?

as he warns though:

Only check it out if you're ready to be sucked in.