Updating Your iOS Device Without iTunes

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Mark

As clueless I was, I didn’t know that iOS 5 came out with this new feature, which was the ability to update your iPhone’s/iPad’s iOS version via Wifi without the need to plug-in to iTunes. It’s very easy to do it, just follow the following steps.

Go to your iPhone’s “Settings” option
Select “General“
Then select “Software Update“
The phone will search the servers for the latest patch

photo 1 Updating Your iOS Device Without iTunes

Select “download and install”

photo 2 Updating Your iOS Device Without iTunes

Make sure that your phone is also plugged into a power source

photo 3 Updating Your iOS Device Without iTunes

Wait for the download to complete and voila, your iOS device is now updated.

Internet Rantings

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Mark

BERSIH came twice with protests on the streets and garnered a huge publicity. Upheavals in the Middle East brought down governments and don’t even get me started on the countless of revolutions which happened over the past hundreds of years. Riots and panic caused a lot of damage and even death to some of the people caught in the stampede. Most of this time, it all takes a bit of spark to set off the mob mentality.

Nowadays, we take that very same mentality to the internet. First we had the case where a video of a guy punishing his poodle and that was publicized on all social media networks from Facebook to Youtube to blogs and even news portals. Then came many more rantings and created that mob mentality online. It all just takes a spark and the whole internet community became enraged.

The problem is that, as much as we say that facts are sometimes turned around on our news and mainstream media, I tend to see the same thing happening on the internet as well.

Take this story about a bartender in the US of A, she waited on a couple one night at the bar and lo and behold, when the couple left and paid for their drinks, they didn’t leave a tip. That might seem normal here especially in Malaysia where service charge is already charged into our bills but in the states, it is deemed as rude not to leave a tip.

A normal tip usually ranges from 15-20% and whenever I travelled to the states, I made sure I used an app on my iPhone to help me calculate my bill when eating out (which I do anyway since I was travelling).

The worse part for that bartender was that, the couple also wrote a small note on the receipt.

p.s. You could stand to loose a few pounds

Image source: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/

By the way, that’s “lose” instead of “loose”.

Anyway, she became enraged and posted this receipt on her Facebook page and the thing just went viral. She gotten tonnes of support from people and they even started researching for this alleged person who left the note and the no tip and when they found the guy, a whole hate smear campaign onslaught went on.

The problem with the whole entire episode was that the bartender, gotten the wrong guy! I guess with “gwailo” fellas, a first and a last name such as John Smith (just an example, the guy’s name wasn’t John Smith) would be extremely common.

I can just imagine that one day just waking up and finding out that half the internet community is knocking on your social media door asking for comments or just plain bashing you in.

Of course the news site have then issued apologies here, here and here. But the damage has been done already. So the next time you decide to start an online vigilante campaign, just make sure that you do your own proper research and homework before hitting out on innocent folks out there.

Clearing out your Gmail Inbox

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Mark

There are times when you are just stuck in queues and have to wait for your turn. I think society in general tends to make us think that we are in a uber fast paced world but only to hit you back to reality with long queues and lines. Traffic jams are a norm these days and long queues at most outlets such as “ChaTime” or the immigration department seems to be one of these norms.

2117388 Clearing out your Gmail Inbox

Anyway, the other day, I sent my car in to the service center and while I was waiting for my car to be serviced, I tapped into the free wi-fi and started trying to figure out some site online to fill my time. Of course in this digital world, emails are one of my key communication tools so I logged in to my email accounts. First mail I read was an automated email from my email administrator informing me that I was reaching the limit for my mailbox size.

I guess I still am not used to having a 150MB limit especially ever since I have been using Gmail. So being the usual curious guy, I went to my Gmail account to check how much space I have actually used.

Yikes! 51% usage for my Gmail account and increasing! The first thing I did like every other normal Outlook user would do, was to try to figure out how to sort my emails by size. And only by then can I select the largest sized ones and delete them. Apparently that didn’t work because based on Google’s Gmail theory, you don’t need to sort your mails with Gmail.

After mucking through the search results, I chanced upon this site, https://www.findbigmail.com/

What it basically does is to help you scan through your Gmail account and then provides you with an email which provides several pie charts to visualize the emails you have archived.

The image above shows the scan results of my Gmail and the top 20 emails are all more than 20Mb in size. Most of them are me sending images about and after clearing them, I have managed to free up quite a fair bit of space within my mailbox.

As a result of the scan, it also creates 3 categories or 3 labels in your Gmail account and labels the emails accordingly.

By clicking on these labels, it pulls out emails that are either larger than 2Mb, somewhere between 500kb to 2Mb and finally any emails that are larger than 100kb.

Personally this tool is somewhat useful, mainly because Gmail does provide us with so much storage space that it would take a lot of emails to delete before seeing large space savings. Any how if you are running out of space on your Gmail account, do try out this tool. You never know how handy it might turn out to be. Best of all, this service is free!

How I Use Dropbox to Simplify Things

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Mark

One of the many questions people ask me is what do I use my iPad for? Well I would love to say I use it to wow my clients and also showcase not just my presentation skills but also some of my photography work as well. And I managed to do just that using a very nifty software called Dropbox.

You see, I have a number of laptops and PCs and a Mac about, each of them having a specific purpose individually. So when I want to share files and work with some files, it is rather cumbersome to keep on using a thumbdrive to transfer the files and after a while I ended up overwriting the wrong versions of documents and this caused a huge nightmare for me.

So when I started looking around for a cloud storage software, I found out about Dropbox. First of all, why I chose Dropbox was because it was free! Yes, absolutely free for 2Gb worth of space. Now if you are thinking of using it for large files then I would suggest another alternative but if it is to sync some of your important documents, 2Gb is more than enough. Of course, if you want more than 2Gb of files then you have to pay for the service.

So how does it work?

Dropbox functions as a specific folder that resides on your PC/Mac which syncs directly with the cloud. It looks exactly like a folder in your PC and you need to do is just treat it as your folder! So you can copy and paste files into it, create sub-folders according to your own liking and drop files into that folder.

Another cool feature about it which I learned about it recently is that Dropbox allows users to share their folders with other people! How cool is that? When I was submitting my photos to be included into The Nut Graph’s article (I blogged about it here and view the article here), I worked with Jo-Ann by sharing my photos via Dropbox. This also included me making some changes to the photos as well as include in captions explaining what the photos meant. Now this was extremely helpful for us both as I am sitting here in Cyberjaya while she is all the way in KL.

Now earlier I mentioned that I had a more elaborate setup, well it isn’t too complicated as Dropbox makes it so much easier now. So I decided to create this diagram to show you all what I really mean when I use it extensively.

In my work environment, I would also assume that most of our work laptops have certain limitations as to what we can install on our laptops and one of them is iTunes. So thanks to that, I can’t really sync my iPad with it and hence I can’t really sync files with it. Thanks to Dropbox, that is all in the past. Note that with the iPad, I can’t edit files in my Dropbox folder but I can view them. Tip, for best viewing pleasure such as presentations, I would save my presentations as PDF files so that the formatting doesn’t run.

Anyway, if you are really interested with Dropbox, you can head over here and sign up for a free 2Gb account now!

Whats on my iPhone

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Mark

I recently learned how to actually take screenshots of my iPhone screen and thanks to that, I can actually post up a post which has been lingering in my mind lately but I just was too darn lazy to actually capture screenies on my phone using my camera!

Anyway before I proceed with the actual post, here is a short tutotial on how to take a screenshot of your iPhone screen. Just click on the two buttons simultaneously as shown on the screenshot below and if your phone is not set to vibrate only, you will hear a shutter click sound (fake shutter of course) and your screen temporarily turning white and fading off.

screenshot Whats on my iPhone

So thanks to this new trick which I learned (by the way, the image above is definitely not a screenshot!), I happily took some screenshots of my phone.

First one up is the main screen of my phone.

photo3 Whats on my iPhone

Pretty much everything is standard here except for one application on the bottom right of the screen. To be honest it is not an application but it’s actually a link to Google’s To-Do list which is integrated in Gmail. What it is, is that its an online to-do list. I have always been trying to have a fully integrated to-do list and this seems to be a useful tool which I am currently experimenting.

Next on my iPhone screen would be my list of applications.

photo Whats on my iPhone

The two most commonly used application I use would be Facebook as well as Twitterfon. Totally ignore that myMaxis link there as it is totally USELESS, why? Because it just brings you to their site where you can “subscribe” to more of their “services” only to pay them more money. It is a total WASTE of time.

I like Facebook because I can actually keep up to date with it on the go.

photo5 Whats on my iPhone

As well as allow me to take photos with my phone and then upload it directly! Here is a picture of a blurry keyboard I tried taking with my phone.

photo6 Whats on my iPhone

It totally got blurry when I tried to take a snapshop of me taking a shot.

The other application is Twitterfon. I have become a Twitter addict lately hence the obsessive need to read tweets as well as tweet wherever I am.

photo4 Whats on my iPhone

If you do have a Twitter account, do add me in here.

Now on to the 3rd page on my phone. As you can see below, its mainly my games page with the except of Skype which is a newly added application.

photo2 Whats on my iPhone

Previously before this, I never had a Skype account so the only person I have on my Skype list is Ian. Do let me know what your Skype accounts are and I will gladly add you in

p.s. I am way too embarrassed to show my Skype list hahahaha

My favourite games would be Simcity and Bejeweled 2 followed by Hells Kitchen. I am already quite bored with the rest as well but I am still in love with Simcity, my city is still halfway built though but its generating enough cash on its own.

Last but not least, it’s my blog on Safari. I installed an iPhone plugin which automatically transform this blog into an iPhone friendly site. Check it out below.

photo8 Whats on my iPhone

And here is a shot of an individual post with an image in it.

photo9 Whats on my iPhone

Anyway, before signing off, I would like to ask the readers a simple question. What is on your iPhone as well? I would definitely love to find out what are some of the cool (and free!) applications about.

My New File Backup Method

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Mark

Its not uncommon for many companies to backup their data and nowadays it is the norm to do that especially since there are always many risks that can occur to wipe out all of your important data. Normally in larger type systems, having a backup and then having a DR (disaster recovery) backup of that backup seems to be a way to ensure that important data is never lost.

At the meantime, I don’t have the budget of what most larger companies have hence I just went ahead with my own backup strategy. Previously I had always procastinated on getting extra external hard disks as I was always wonder what size I would get. Yesterday I took the bullet and bought two external 500Gb hard disks.

As you can see above, its the Western Digital Mybook Essential Edition. Both of these hard drives will be identical in terms of data meaning that one will store my photos and the other one will be a backup. Unfortunately I haven’t devised a true DR backup strategy yet where I should have another backup somewhere at least 100km away from the original.

Previously I used Acronis True Image to backup my work but at the moment I wanted the files to be available even from the backup side so I decided to try this software called Allway Sync which allows me to synchronize both my drives with a click of a button. Best of all, it is free

Getting these two additional external hard disks allows me to free up more space on my desktop as well as use my other external hard disk to be a backup for my personal laptop.

Other than that, I decided to beef up my desktop at home with more RAM.

Yup that is two sticks of 2Gb of DDR2 RAM for my desktop. Yes I also do know that my 32-bit Vista machine can only take in 3.5Gb but its cheaper to just get two sticks of 2Gb RAM. Cheaper than that I paid for my MacBook Pro.

And finally, I managed to sell of my older MB-D200 to fund for a MB-D10. In case you were wondering what these are, they are actually battery grips which fits to the bottom of my two cameras, the Nikon D200 and the Nikon D300 respectively. And yes, the D200 and D300 are actually cameras and not some secret government code which is meant to be kept a secret (mind the pun as I just watched the Bourne Identity recently).

With this I have actually switched my shooting strategy, which is to have the D200 use the wide angle lens I bought the other day and the D300 to use either the 50mm f/1.4 or the 85mm f/1.8 lens.

More Nikon D700 leaks with pictures!

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Mark

Late last night after my meeting, I managed to catch Eugene’s site on this bit of news. Today I found the site that reportedly published the Nikon D700 and the new SB-900 (new flash unit) will be out at the end of July.

Nikon D700 profifoto More Nikon D700 leaks with pictures!

Mind you, its in a different language (German if you can understand it) but its Google translation to the rescue!

Translated bits:
After Nikon with the full-format camera D3 in August 2007 is the first Nikon model with full small image sensor-Formar 24×36 mm that was now follows is not entirely unexpected, the D700. Derselbe 12-Megapixel-Sensor, augenscheinlich dasselbe 51-Punkt-Autofokussystem, etwas geringere Serienbildgeschwindigkeit (5Â B/s statt 9Â B/s – allerdings kann das mit Batterieteil auf 8Â B/s gesteigert werden), Sucherbildfeld 95 statt 100 Prozent, dafÃ¼r aber ein eingebauter Blitz (auch zur Drahtlos-Blitzsteuerung), ein Sensor-Reinigungssystem (dazu morgen mehr) und ein interessantes Preisschild: knapp 2600Â Euro soll die Neue kosten und ab Ende Juli 2008 erhÃ¤ltlich sein. The same 12-megapixel sensor, apparently the same 51-point autofocus system, slightly lower image speed serial (5 B / s instead of 9 B / – however, the battery part to 8 B / s increase), the viewfinder field of 95 instead of 100 percent, but but a built-in flash (also for wireless flash control), a sensor-cleaning system (more about this tomorrow) and an interesting price tag: just under 2,600 euro, the new costs and from the end of July 2008 will be available.
Next is a flash Nikon SB-900 as a successor model of the SB-800, whose zoom reflector should be directed to focal lengths from 17-200 mm and in DX and FX sensors recruits, and in which the user firmware updates for the first time in a Nikon Lightning can even aufspielen.

Now, the first thing in people’s mind would be, “Is this another rumour?”. Well rumours tend to be true most of the time but upon closer inspect of the image on the magazine, you can see that one of the newer characteristics of the D700 is the viewfinder. Seems different from all of the other DX range of cameras.

So this is the best piece of news since they even mentioned that it will be out late July, perhaps a pre-empt strike against the upcoming Canon 5D MkII? Who knows but for one thing, everyone is waiting for the release of this baby.

“The Best Firefox Yet”

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Mark

“The Best Firefox Yet” screams the title on the page of Mozilla’s latest offering to their web browser, Firefox 3. With features such as 15,000 improvements and also faster surfing, everyone is of course interested in finding out just how fast the improvements are and what are the newer features.

Being available for download a week ago, I decided to put hold on this blog post about Firefox 3 until I have tried it for a while before writing this post.

To me, its just another browser which I do hope that it is more reliable and more secure as I do plenty of online activities such as buying cinema tickets online as well as my personal banking activities. Although I haven’t really had the time to test them out, there are a lot of new tips and tricks with this new version of the browser.

At the mean time, I haven’t really noticed much improvement in terms of sites loading because of my erratic internet connection back home where sometimes its blazing fast and sometimes its just crawling. Also I can’t really test it out at work as the connection speeds here are very fast and its not easy to just perform some tests (thought I would like but I can’t install anything on my work laptop).

The one thing which I thought was an improvement is that the fact the “Back” button is bigger, hence I can easily press back faster. Other than that, the one thing I like about the new browser is that when I sort my bookmarks by name, it actually groups RSS links and normal links separately. Previously I would have a folder in my bookmark with all the RSS links and some random links here and there. Whenever I did a sort by name on that folder, it just sorts everything by name. Now it separates them which is better!

Anyway, if you are already a Firefox user, this upgrade will be worthwhile. Else if you are still using Safari on a Mac, there are reports that Java still loads faster on Safari as compared to Firefox 3. The article goes on to say that if you are already comfortable with Safari, maybe it might not be a push to migrate over to Firefox.

p.s. I just installed Firefox 3 on all my PC’s at home lest for one more.

"The Best Firefox Yet"

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Mark

Being available for download a week ago, I decided to put hold on this blog post about Firefox 3 until I have tried it for a while before writing this post.

p.s. I just installed Firefox 3 on all my PC’s at home lest for one more.

Gadget lustings!

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Mark

As much I would love to keep all of my own desires deep within my heart, slowly trying to bury it in such a way that it takes forever to claw its way out into my nervous system, especially the ones that make me buy impulsively, sooner or later, they keep clawing free! I need something new to release all that built up tension of cravings!

Of course it doesn’t help that I read gadget and tech news daily but there are these few things that keep haunting me to purchase. But so far, I have been able to resist well enough and saved a little bit of cash as well (even after spending in my last trip). Anyway here are some of the items that constantly get shot about my brains.

#1 – A spiffing new Nikkor zoom lens (Nikon Nikkor 70-200mm AF-S VR F/2.8 lens)

This baby costs a whopping RM5,900 and I still can’t justify it’s cost yet. I need to get at least 6 confirmed wedding shoots first before getting one of these bad boys.

#2 – iPhone 3G

This baby was recently released by Apple and being a new Apple fan and having tested out the hyped-up HTC Touch Diamond yesterday (I wasn’t impressed at all by the lousy touch interface and slow moving graphics), this is the phone to be lusting over. It’s interface is to die for and it is still slim and sleek. No news of it being officially released yet in Malaysia but priced at USD$199, it is so cheap for a phone packed with so much features.

#3 – Nikon D700

The last craving I had for a camera body was the awesome Nikon D3. Now this camera cost RM14,500 alone just for the body but it was one of the best high ISO performer in the market. The latest round of rumours appeared to be the upcoming Nikon D700 and it is supposedly the cheaper variant of the D3. Still in the rumourmills, I am awaiting for Photokina in September for Nikon to either say that its just another hoax or something they would launch to rival that of Canon’s 5D Mark II. Expected price for this baby is RM9,000 and its still within reach!

#4 – Drobo (My own storage robot)

I have been contemplating about getting Western Digital’s Mybook and setting up a backup storage device for all of my work and photos until I set my eyes on Drobo. It is meant to be a highly intelligent backup device which checks the integrity of the physical hard disks inside it. Priced at USD$449, its not something cheap but how can you put a price on all the work that you have worked on, right?

Anyway I think I have had enough of my gadget lustings, looks like its time to get back to the real world and where money doesn’t come in easily. Hopefully one day I might be able to afford these beauties but realistically, when that time comes, it will already be obsolete!

Mark Leo Dot Net

Loving all things photography, tech, gadgets, Apple and cars

Tag Archives: Technology