MUST.STOP.DOUBLE.DIPPING!!

Been a long time .... but was cleaning up and doing some 'self-auditing' when it became clear that I've been double-dipping too much. Here are some duplicates I found ...

Disney's Dinosaur 2-Disc Collector's DVD (R4) vs. Blu-ray (Region A)

HSM2 Dance Edition 2-Disc DVD (R3) vs. Blu-ray (Region B)

B&TB Platinum Edition 2-disc CE DVD (R2) vs. Diamond Edition 3-disc Blu-ray/DVD (Region B/2)

Snow White Collector's Edition 2-disc DVD (R3) vs. Diamond Edition 2-disc DVD (R2)

Aladdin Collector's Edition 2-disc DVD (R3) vs. Trilogy 3-disc DVD (R2)

Toy Story 2 Collector's Edition 2-disc DVD (R1) vs. SE 2-disc Blu-ray/DVD (Region A)

Ratatouille Collector's Edition 2-disc DVD (R2) vs. Blu-ray (Region B)

Farscape Ultimate Edition 32-disc DVD (R2) vs. Complete Edition 20-disc Blu-ray (Region B)

Sound of Music 40th AE 2-disc DVD (R4) vs. 45th AE 3-disc blu-ray/DVD (Region B/2)

Hairspray 2-disc DVD (R3) vs. 2-disc blu-ray (Region A)

Phantom o/t Opera DVD (R3) vs. Blu-ray (Region B)

The Little Mermaid Trilogy 3-disc DVD (R3) vs. Platinum Ed. 2-disc DVD (R2)

Monsters, Inc. CE 2-disc DVD (R3) vs. 4-disc Blu-ray/DVD/Digital (Region A)

The Lion King Platinum Ed. 2-disc DVD (R3) vs. Diamond Ed. 2-disc blu-ray/3D (Region A) vs. VHS (PAL - not shown) vs VCD (PAL - not shown)

Indiana Jones Adventure Collection 3-disc DVD (R2) vs Indiana Jones Complete 5-disc DVD (R3)

Step Up 2-disc DVD (R3) vs Step Up (R2) vs Step Up blu-ray (Region B - not shown)

Simple Plan CD vs Simple Plan Deluxe Edition Digipak CD/DVD

South Pacific VCD vs DVD (R1)

Michael Jackson Dangerous CD vs Dangerous CD/DVD

Muppets in Space VCD (PAL) vs DVD (R4)

Something tells me I'll probably be tempted to get newer versions of the Pitch Black saga, Firefly, Serenity, Blade series ...... ughs.

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Three weeks in .....

Got me a new iPad three weeks back and after all this time, what have I found out? Here are some personal truths and fallacies of the new iDevice

1. The screen is resolutionary
   Uhm ... yes and no. If you're looking at just the new iPad you will not/can not really tell how different the screen is. Yes the resolution is stupidly high for such a small screen (2048×1536 pixels) which is higher than most commercial LCD screens, monitors and TVs. Place the new iPad against the first and second generation and then only you'll see the difference. The new iPad is a tad brighter and more evenly colour saturated in comparison with earlier models - this was one of the talking points on how the new iPad is good for photography and image editing.
   
   Bad points, non-retina iPad apps with non-vector graphics look really bad - some scaling is done by iOS but the jaggies are bad and text is a big mess. Good points, not that many apps are affected by this and actually scale quite nicely to the new resolution with minor artefacts. All this is easily resolved by app updates with the new SDKs.
   
2. Battery life
   Personal findings of casual use (web browsing / facebookin / occasional gaming) and few movie sessions manage to drain the battery to around 30%. This is at center brightness and volume settings and only wi-fi always on for a total of around 6-8 hours use. At relatively heavy loads with apps like Infinity Blade II or NFS2, a one hour session runs the battery down by around 10-15% per hour. Just doing web browsing with Safari and/or Dolphin drains the battery around 2-5% every hour.
   
3. Can't charge the new iPad
   Most PCs and laptops won't charge the new iPad because of its drain. There are workarounds to this which I may blog about later. The fastest way to recharge the battery is with the original iPad charger which pumps out the required 2.1amps of juice and can charge the battery to >90% in around 3 hours (in standby mode). Compatible chargers from online vendors do not charge the iPad properly.
   
4. The iPad gets very hot
   Yes and no again. In comparison to all the previous generation models, the new iPad DOES get warmer at the bottom left corner (screen facing you with home button at bottom). By how much? Depends on what is running. Non-cpu intensive apps do not raise it by much. Running FPS apps like RageHD, IB2, Hockey Fight or Max Payne raises it to be noticeably warmer than the rest of the device but not enough to burn. A laptop's CPU fan output vent is much warmer than the heat generated by the new iPad.
   
5. The camera does HD
   Yes, it records at 1080P for video and does waaay better at photos than the previous generation model. Photos have better saturation and clarity especially in low light situations BUT it suffers from the rolling shutter effect which affects panning and tilting shots in video. Front camera remains the same at low 640×480 resolution which is lower than most desktop webcams. The absence of a flash makes night photography impossible
   
   There is no way to change the resolution of recorded photos and videos with the default iPad apps ... so photos are always 5MP (around 1-2MB per photo) and videos are always 1080P. Installing other recording apps will allow for other resolutions but IMO, its stupid for the default apps to not offer this as a basic feature.
   
6. Wireless connection has problems
   Haven't tested the 3G connections because everywhere I go, I get wi-fi. Additionally, can't test 4G-LTE connections because those only work in the US and Canada .... *sigh*. Users have been noticing the new iPad drops connections more frequently in comparison to earlier models. Personally, I haven't noticed much difference when comparing all three iPad generations. Same performance and number of drops were experienced on all the devices. On the new iPad, whenever the connection drops, it only does that during lulls of traffic when reading an article/PDF. The connection always comes back on (maybe after a second or two) when a browser/store/web aware app is executed.
   
   The only major problem I had was it did not want to associate with my access point at first. My D-link was set to using channel bonding at 40MHz 802.11n and try as I might, the iPad just would not connect/associate/handshake with the AP. Setting the AP temporarily to use only the default 20MHz channels fixed this and once it associated, resetting the AP back to 40MHz caused no further problems .... weird.
   
7. The A5X processor is faster
   Speed at launching apps - not by much when compared to the iPad 2, a lot when compared with original  iPad. The processor only truly shows its power when running graphic intensive apps like FPS and video apps.  Occasionally, simple apps like Sprinkle seem to run more fluidly (pardon the pun) and this may or may not be attributed to the processor. Apple claims the GPU is more powerful and I mostly believe that is true but I believe that Apple does a better job at optimizing everything on the iOS platform towards a better performance. Compared to the Android platform (with its fragmentation issues) every aspect of the iPad - peformance wise - seems to work better. The interface flows better, everything reacts/interacts faster and feels more unified. 

Overall, the new iPad may offer a slightly better performance with its new A5X cpu assisted with the quad-core GPU, but its main selling points is only its better retina-resolution screen. Users of the iPad 2 will not notice much difference and may want to skip an upgrade until the next generation (iPad 4? the even newer iPad?) unless camera and image editing options are important to them  since all existing apps continue to work on the iPad 2 with not much difference (something which the Android platform needs to overcome)

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Where's the cheapest country to buy an iPad?

The iPad is currently the most popular tablet on sale and is pretty much available worldwide ... with the new iPad slowly being released in batches. Malaysia recently joined the ranks of countries with the new iPad on sale at both retail Apple retailers and the online Apple store. Currently 28 countries 'officially' sell the new iPad alongside the iPad 2 16GB variants. Curiously, Malaysia is also the cheapest country to buy the iPad (both new and second generation) ... its even cheaper than US by US$11!!

Based SOLELY on each country's online Apple store (i.e. sans offers, bundles, packages, tax etc) here's the breakdown of all the prices of available models (6 for the new iPad and 2 for the second generation, note that Japan only carries the WiFi version)

Prices were obtained at individual online Apple stores and
exchange rates were obtained on 20th April 2012 from xe.com.

Although Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Finland (Suomi), Spain and Italy use the Euro, their prices are slightly different because of exchange rates. The iPad is the most expensive in Hungary at nearly 4.2 times the US price. On average,the iPad costs roughly US$100 more outside of the US .... who knows why its cheaper here, and I'm not complaining ;)

Note: Any errors/omissions on data/calculations are regretted.

Finally a new GPU!

Last year, the graphic card of my PC decided to die on me because of blown capacitors .... not one, not two but ALL of them.

Whether this card was affected by the plague or not, the card wouldn't boot, would crash, display weird graphics (inverted!!) and became sooooo frustrating. I had a few caps replaced (top right two in the pic above) but as they continued to explode, I finally gave in and removed the card altogether and have been running onboard graphics until now (thankfully it still has a adequate Geforce onboard GPU which is waaay better than IntelHD options).

I finally bought a new replacement in the form of a nVidia GT430 .... definitely NOT a gamers' card but better than onboard (I don't game that much anyways). Why this particular card? Bad experiences and conflicts in certain video rendering software makes me avoid the AMD 5000s series eventhough they offer better performance/price ratio. Plus if they finally decide to offer GPU programming where I work, I'm ready for it anyways (this card has 96 CUDA cores which is more than enough for simple GPU programming). Lastly, I needed one that was low powered enough so that I didn't have to upgrade the PSU on the PC .... the built-in one runs at a miserly 250W max so this card was the lowest in power consumption (additionally, I'm UNDERclocking it).

I'm happy with it - its silent, improved my WEI score and runs Alan Wake at 1366×768 at mostly medium settings or lower res at higher settings ... not bad for RM195.

P/S: I DO have another 600W PSU but don't plan on using that because its a power hog and generates too much heat.

DESPERATE need for storage space

What started out as one - two purchases every quarterly suddenly exploded and I am TOTALLY out of space. The pic above does not even include stuff which I haven't collected in US (6 documentaries), UK (3 TV series box sets), Singapore (5 Pixar box sets) and Australia (dunno what was sent there .... ). The shelf space on the left is already three DVD cases deep (you only see the front rows) ... and yes that IS Mr Bean's teddy on the right. AARRGGHHSS!

Hello old friend ...

I've been procrastinating too much again ... *sigh*

But news of the upcoming iPad launch has me excited. Most sources have already "confirmed" the presence of a higher resolution display and possibly faster CPU but everyone is expecting a wow factor that Apple is famous for. So what is going to be new on the latest version? Gizmodo has stated the possibility of having no home button, whilst others have stated the use of LTE (which BTW is still far and away in Malaysia for now) .... I'll take a wild guess for the heck of it and say that Apple will have a pad with touch sensitivity as its wow factor. This would allow the pad to function as both a normal tablet AND also as a high resolution input device for artistic use - this would most certainly benefit with the recent release of Adobe photo apps for the iPad. Who knows? Maybe I'll be right at this guessing game :D

Other things to get excited about is the consumer preview release of Windows 8 tomorrow .... which heralds another round of formatting and reinstalling software .... yay or nay? Oh well, hope me gets a license later for the operating system from the academic alliance store.

New bank notes for the new year?

Bank Negara Malaysia recently released a new series of bank notes for the Malaysian Ringgit which brings back into common circulation the RM20 bill. Accordingly, the old RM20 bill was never put out of circulation and is still legal tender as opposed to the RM500 note and RM1 coin. The old RM20 note had a brown theme and is especially hard to find nowadays which actually reminded me about the rare notes I used to/still collect. So here is a short list of what I currently have.

Pre-RM ringgit notes
There were notes used the dollar sign eventhough the wordings used the ringgit representation such as this $50 ringgit bill. This bill was printed in Surrey, England (the company is listed on the note on the back in small print) and uses the old spelling for Gabenor as Gabenur (i.e. Governor in English). It is the largest bill I have for the Malaysian currency sizing up at 14.7cm×8.8cm or 5.75"×3.5".

The one ringgit bill on the other hand was far smaller measuring 12cm×6.4cm or 4.7"×2.5".

Pre-'Merdeka' dollar notes
These are even older and was used during the British colonization of Malaya hence the use of the word dollar instead of ringgit. As far as I know, the British pound (£) was not replicated and used for local trading but accepted as tender (I'm not a historian so I could/most probably am wrong). These dollar notes were also printed in England and carried multiple denominations - and some featured the Queen of England although the $10 note did feature a water buffalo plowing a paddy field. These notes were accepted for legal tender in the countries of Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, Brunei and Singapore ... when/why was the North Borneo name changed to Sabah? I have no idea.

Interesting fact - you may notice a trend in the notes above that the current denominations for the ringgit (all the new and old series releases) STILL use the same colour scheme for the values they represent!

Another thing is that smaller denominations were also paper!!

Commemerative CG98 RM50 ringgit note
The first ever polymer banknote for the Malaysian ringgit was not the RM5 or the current RM50 but actually a limited run RM50 bank note released for the 1998 Commonwealth Games held in Kuala Lumpur. I got this for a steal at only RM50 (at the time it was retailing for RM120 I think) because I knew someone working in BNM. It comes sealed in a folder describing the note which can be viewed both sides through a clear window.

50th Merdeka RM50 notes
Although not really rare (except for a limited number with specific serial numbers/sets/folders), the current RM50 bill had a special release to mark the 50th Independence Day for Malaysia. The notes look exactly the same except for the top right corner at the back which has an additional '50' logo. I stumbled upon these 5 at an ATM machine where I work ... was withdrawing RM500, saw these 5 bills and thus had to withdraw another 5 bills because of that.

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More and more cloud services

Malaysia has its own cloud music server with the launch of WOWLOUD and initial previews look good so far. The service is still in testing phase and is open to invitations only but after being offered an inivitaion here's a summary of what I've found out so far:

- Service is ad-based and this provides 20hours of music per month (which is supposedly renewable somehow). Premium accounts with unlimited service are available at RM9.90 which I think is pretty steep since most of the music on the cloud is available for free *ahem* elsewhere. A better price point would be at RM5 per month which would total RM60 a year. Companies still hard-up with all this 99 bullshit (i.e. 3.99, 9.99 etc) should just give up and state a round figure to make lives easier.

- WOWLOUD requires its own player which is relatively lightweight when running but requires a hefty 36+MB download. Granted that they need to provide some means of DRM or encryption or control ... couldn't they just have used WMP or Quicktime as their player instead? In terms of the application, its pretty with animations and transitions .... but runs a little lethargically. After playing around with the interface you can't help but feel everything runs too slowly. Thankfully song selections are lighting quick.

- The current 'Search' function is not intuitive enough. Typing in buble resolves to bubble and bulle instead of bublé. Although not case sensitive, the search engine needs to improve on character searching with accents, umlauts etc.

- Streaming is almost instantaneous even on congested networks and quality is approximately 128kbps equivalent (don't really know what bitrate they are encoding/streaming at) but not too overladen with compression artefacts. Things may change as servers cope with load as users increase.

- Startup offerings are quite varied but of course not complete. This is set to improve once they start hosting more items but its a very good start. Genres are available and should satisfy most listeners. It does seem that classical listeners aren't very well serviced unless they like crossover classical pop and more mainstream artistes.

- They should offer 'free' streaming options to promote music that will not 'eat' up limited accounts. Playing a 3-minute song twice eats up 6 minutes (each repeat is counted), so free accounts may find themselves without service upon repeating a song.

- Glee fans can rejoice! Songs not found on their CDs are now available on the WOWLOUD service. This includes songs like Defying Gravity (the individual solo versions) and karaoke versions.

- Playback is (currently) limited to Windows and Mac platforms only but rumour has it apps for portable devices are in the pipeline.

All in all, the service is not too shabby although there is plenty of room for improvement .... now if there was only some way to combine WOWLOUD with iCloud and Amazon's cloud service.

Wants and Needs

I WANT an iPhone/iPad/Galaxy but I NEED a car .... so no prizes for guessing what made my bank account RM43k lighter today :(

DDR2 > DDR3?!?!

Dunno what is going on here but just realised something while idling my time away. The scenario is two PCs with different configurations (yeah I know its unfair)

PC1 (2011)	PC2 (2009)
Intel Core i3 550 3.20GHz 4GB DDR3@1333 Dual Channel Intel Q57 Exp chipset Intel HD Graphics 500GB SATA Win7Pro 32bit SP1	Intel Core2Quad 6600 2.40GHz 4GB DDR2@667 Single Channel MCP73 chipset nVidia 6600 (on board built in) 750GB SATA Win7Pro 32bit SP1

PC1 WPI score

PC2 WPI score

Using just Win7 Performance Information, its funny to see the older PC beat the newer one on two important aspects. Obviously with four cores, the C2Q do more calculations per second whilst the i3 only has two cores and creates 4 threads through HT but in real-world use, the cores beat HT anytime (especially in rendering, simulation and graphic/image processing). SATA harddisk scores are equal (both running same Win7 image so no software differences). Graphic scores are not comparable since one is using on board graphics whilst the other is using on-die GPU (Note: PC2 scores with a nVidia 9200 was 7.0 for both catagories... but I shorted that card out and haven't replaced it yet)

Whats weird here is that the DDR3 memory running at twice the frequency AND in dual channel mode is thwacked by the DDR2 by a large margin! Somehow the Q57 chipset on the newer Dell PC may be limiting the performance ... it IS a budget motherboard anyway (it only has two SATA, two RAM slots ... nothing else! All other headers were removed). So getting a new PC with a newer CPU doesn't necessarily mean better performance.