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Google Earth


I’ve been knocking myself out with Google Earth recently. I found the activity of looking for some location from a generally “uncharted” map of the Philippines (it only goes as far as showing major cities) very engaging.

Still, there are some misgivings I have with it. First is the free version doesn’t allow you to draw polygons. I could understand why the Plus and Pro versions give you better network access, which is fair enough. But drawing custom shapes/polygons can be done locally in a machine, I wish they just enable it on the free version as well. Having the ability to input custom shapes to draw area perimeters is very useful especially in the Philippine context – because we have lousy Civil Engineers who make me wish there was some kind of SIM City feature in real life to just obliterate a chunk of area and replace it with properly distributed structures and roads. But I digress. Read More

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Battery-talk

I was able to get my replacement battery for my powerbook and the replacement battery grip for my 20D today. It all happened at the last-minute. My supplier said the battery was available for pick-up. I thought I should call Canon as well to check if the grip was done as well (since both were in the same area).

Luckily, both were ready. Plus the driver wasn’t doing anything today, which was a godsend. There’s nothng better than not having to think about parking in those parts of Makati.

Also, the bottom case of my powerbook will be replaced as well… I swear, I could start selling this powerbook at a really good price as it practically will be in a refurbished condition. Any takers?

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Of the last 48 hours

Now you see it – now you don’t

Today was pretty boring – which wasn’t supposed to be the case since I got my powerbook back yesterday. But was pulled out again today.

Apparently when they said they’d do a full diagnostics check – they meant the opposite. I eventually opened up the laptop’s backplate and was staring down at two 512MB DIMMs – which is correct. So why do I mention it? Because the OS is only reporting 512MB of RAM instead of a gig! At least they were commited to replacing the logic board.

Once that’s done, I will now be able to enumerate the stuff that hasn’t been replaced:

  1. Superdrive.
  2. LCD shell (the LCD itself has been replaced)
  3. Keyboard.
  4. All inner-components except for the logic board.
  5. Battery.
  6. RAM DIMMs

Can’t help but wonder if I had just saved all of those, and just asked for a new MacBook or something hehehe – I can dream can’t I? Sobrang na-sulit ko na yung warranty. – and still got a whole year to go! Read More

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Browsers, etc.

I felt compelled to post this as Nono mentioned me in his recent post… which could lead people to misinterpret some stuff.

What I said was correct though, so no change is necessary in his entry, but I just had to qualify something I had said, something which I think may be interpreted wrongly by those who don’t know (or be slammed by those who do hahahaha). Also, to reiterate what I posted as a comment.

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Flickr-ized

I decided to maximize the use of Flickr as an image repository specifically for my blog. While it would be nice to just move the entire gallery to Flickr, I really don’t like the idea of not being able to skin it (and that the gallery’s URL will be outside of my domain). I’m not sure if they have an API released that allows a fully blown gallery to be created outside of their servers, but for now it’s not an option for me.

I finally finished editing each and every entry to fix the broken image links after I moved everything to Flickr. And while modifying the posts, I realized some things that may be useful in case you guys didn’t know it yet. One cool thing about Flickr is that stores its images statically, which allows you to do some legitimate hotlinking to [your] images in the Flickr server from virtually anywhere.

The drawback was that you had to do a decent amount of clicking before you can get to the “static URL” field of the file… at least that’s what I experienced until now. This post is just a discussion on how to access and use those static URLs quickly and efficiently for your hotlinking needs. Read More