I've Moved

Hi guys, this is maybe the last post of mine on blogger. I've moved to wordpress with a new domain, http://phalkunz.com. See you all there!
Continue reading...

I'm back

Sorry for the disappearance. I've been busy for the last few weeks. It's not that I couldn't come online- I was just not in the mood for writing in my blog until some friends pushed me to come back again (it's all good). Well, what's new you ask? There are just a few things. First one is I've been busy. Why do I keep telling everyone that I've been busy? Hmm.. oh yeah because I just have been! The second thing is there was a rumor saying my dad passed away of heart attack. Who made this up and for what reason? I don't know but that was so ridiculous! Thirdly, one of my tooth went bad so I had to go to a dentist and the dentist ended up performing a root canal that cost me almost a grand. Gosh, I could have saved that money for a new laptop. Second last, I have been so attracted to the new iMac. I'm so in love with it. I think I'm gonna get one when I can afford it even though I wanna switch to Linux, to be specific, Ubuntu. Lastly, I'm gonna move to a new home. Don't get it wrong ok I don't mean a physical one. Actually, I'm just gonna to move to wordpress so hope i can get my wordpress up and running soon.

Alrighty, that's about it for now. Thanks for continuing to check my blog :)
Continue reading...

Creativity Quote

Creativity and ideas don't come on command, they seem to spring up when we least expect it.

by Mattias seen on ALA (A List Apart)
Continue reading...

Metal Mushroom

Continue reading...

Menu Icons

My old blog template was messed up. In fact, it was quite heavy to load as some people complained so I thought I better start again with this template and try to keep it as light and simple as possible. I've made a few changes to the new template now and I'll do more later coz I'm so not free at the moment. In addition, I've also drawn 3 menu icons as you can see below.



If you happen to like the icons, feel free to download and use them. if you want Photoshop versions of these icons, let me know.
Continue reading...

A Bit of Steve Jobs and Apple History

What an inspirational speech


Short yet good documentary about Apple
Continue reading...

Internet Explorer is discriminating?

For some stupid reason, IE doesn't render my blog at all. Not only does it not show my page correctly, it doesn't even show my blog at all. Oh come on IE, at least show me something so I can track the bug and fix it, it can't be that bad. I've tested my blog with firefox 2 (mac and windows version), Opera 9, and Safari and they all work fine except that stupid IE. I know most of the viewers use IE so for now I've just changed my template temporarily. Why don't people switch to other browsers? When IE comes with Windows, it doesn't mean it's the best application and you have to use it. Don't be afraid of change. I don't need to say why you should switch to some other web browser besides IE because this site (http://browsehappy.com/) explains it all.


Continue reading...

Try Out My Cooking

I never thought I would enjoy cooking this much but it's so much fun when I can experiment with something new and it turns out good (or it fails sometimes but it doesn't matter much).
Continue reading...

Auckland City

Continue reading...

Censored

Original photo.
Continue reading...

Messy

I realized that I haven't taken any photos with my dslr for like a month now. Here's a photo taken with my dslr after a long time.

Continue reading...

Clean Mighty Mouse's Scroll Ball

I love mighty mouse for the fact that it's simplistically beautiful and highly functional. But i guess there's no such thing as perfect. The drawback of mighty mouse is the scroll ball traps dirt and grease easily and after sometime it doesn't work at all when you scroll downward. I was trying to clean the dirt and stuff that was trapped inside the mouse by following official instruction from Apple but it didn't work at all. I've googled and found out that many people have the same problem. Some said the official instruction worked, some took a step further by applying alcohol to the ball, and other went to the extreme by disassembling it. Well, I've tried them all except the last option. I left it unused for months now and thought well I don't do anything about it I won't be able to use it anyways so I rather get it fixed or chuck it in the bin. I was in dilemma because if I was to take it apart then it had to break it because it has a ring that keep top part and second part of the mouse together and Apple attaches the ring to the mouse by gluing. If it used clips or things like that I would have done it ages ago. Yeah, finally it disassembled it and found out there were big chunks of dirt and lint on the wheels driven by the scroll ball and I was amazed by the simplicity of the design and yet it works like magic. But i had to glued them back together and it is the worst thing :( Ok, I have a question. Why don't they use clips (I wouldn't want screws though) instead of glue? Or do they encourage us to buy a new one every now and then?

The top part, the bottom part and the ring

The scroll ball compartment (there are 4 other wheels in it)

The wheels attached the compartment

The wheels driven by the scroll ball

Put them back after cleaning

It works now :)

Continue reading...

Baby Snail

I just picked this lil' guy (see another photo with my fingers so you can tell how small it is) from downstairs for a photo shoot.
Continue reading...

Starry Starry Night

I was fixing my pc and suddenly the electricity was out. I thought I must have done something wrong with the power plug but then I looked out the window everywhere is so dark. The electricity was cut off again (by again I mean this is not the first time. ) but i don't know it was just this area (northcote) or the whole North Shore city. Then I walked out of the apartment and looked up the sky and I could see the stars so clearly. So I thought it would be a good time to shoot the sky hehe. Well, I did. I swapped my camera lens to 50mm 1.8f because of all my lenses this one is the fastest one (means can take more light thus works well in low light condition), set the shutter speed to 30 sec, put the camera to self-timer mode and put the camera face up on the bench (I can't afford a tripod yet). It didn't turn out nice after all :(

Continue reading...

Green On Red

Continue reading...

Insectz

Click the image to view larger.
Continue reading...

Daily Word On Desktop

Mac + GeekTool + www.urbandictionary.com + ruby
Continue reading...

Sparkling Earrings

This another photo taken with my studio.
Continue reading...

Page Icon (PixelArt)

I've just drawn a blog icon with Pixen. Finally, pixelart has a place in my blog.
Continue reading...

Get 'Em Analyzed

Recently, Google's just introduced a new web-based tool called Analytics. What does it do? It collects statistic data about your web site and that statistic tells you things like how many hits your site's got, how many distinct visitors, where they are from, how they get to your site? what operator systems they're working on, what web browsers they use, what connection speeds they have, what their screen resolutions are, and many many more. What do you get out of this information anyways? Well, from that information you can design your site accordingly. For example, it helps you to decide on the width of your web pages by reading collected information on screen resolution. If the majority of the visitors use 1024x640 resolution, then design your site best for that resolution. To conclude, it is a great tool and again it is FREE.
Continue reading...

Flash Ruby Programming Book

I'm really amazed by the writing style of the author. Check it out. It's great and it's FREEEE.
Continue reading...

Recent Flickr Photos with Javascript

I've just written a javascript code to extract my recent photos' thumbnails from flickr. You can see the demo on the sidebar of this blog. Yeah finally I made it :) You're welcome to download the code to use/modify. To get it working in your blog, replace YOUR-KEY in the first line of code with your Google API key, url in Feed with with your flickr feed, and create a new html/javascript widget with the code. That's set!
Continue reading...

I'm The Biggest Procrastinator But ...

I'm addressing my procrastination and trying to manage it. I've been quite productive in terms of my thesis in the last few days. I knew I needed some help on doing this and found an article on how to stop procrastinating. If you realize that you always leave your important work that needs to get done behind and do other things instead, that article is for you.
Continue reading...

Download/Save Unsavable Flickr Photos

Has it ever happened to you when you tried to save a flickr photo but you ended up saving another blank image file called "spaceball.gif" instead? I don't exactly know what flickr is trying to do. Preventing people from downloading those photos? Maybe. What flickr does is it uses another transparent image to overlay the main image to block users from downloading the actual image. Is there a way to get around it? Yeah of course. It's no wonder that if you can download youtube videos, you must be able to save protected flickr photos somehow. There are a few ways you can do this. One approach is to screenshot and then use image editing application to crop the part that you want but believe me it's such a pain in the arse. Another one is to actually read the code and extract the real image url and the paste it to browser address bar but i'm sure you don't wanna do this. Ok enough of all that hassle. I've written a few lines of javascript code that can be plugged into Greasemokey to display an actual link to the image. The code is written as follows:


// ==UserScript==
// @name SaveFlickrImg
// @namespace http://phalkunz.blogspot.com
// @description Displays a download link for an unsavable flickr photo
// @include http://www.flickr.*/*
//
// ==/UserScript==

var imgsrc;
var img;
var imgParent;
var flag = false;

var imgs = document.images;
for (var i=0; i<imgs.length; i++) {
var src = imgs[i].getAttribute("class");
if (src=="reflect"){
img = imgs[i];
imgParent = img.parentNode;
imgsrc=imgs[i].getAttribute("src");
flag = true;
}
}

if (flag) {
var my_banner = document.createElement("div");
my_banner.innerHTML = '<div style="border-bottom: 1px solid #333333; margin-bottom: 10px; font-size: small; background-color: #336699; color: #FFFFFF;>' +
'<p style="margin:0px;padding: 5px;">' +
' <a href="' + imgsrc + '" style="color:#FFFFFF; font-weight:bold; font-size:10px;">main image link</a>' +
'</p></div>';
imgParent.appendChild(my_banner);
}



Save that code as, for example, saveFlickrPhoto.user.js and install that file in greasemonkey. That's it. Go to that flickr photo that you couldn't download but this time it will show a link under the photo. That's it. I'm sure you know how to do it from there.
Continue reading...

Reverse Lens = Macro

I've been thinking of buying canon 100mm macro lens. This morning I was reading reviews and also looking at some sample photos taken by that lens on flick and then I found one guy's comment on one photo. He mentioned about reverse lens and a link to a reverse lens flickr photo groups. By the name of the technique I had an idea of doing it already so I started by detaching one lens of mine from my camera and held it the other way around to the camera and it worked. Thanks to those people out there and flickr as well. However, it is no substitute for lenses which are designed for macro photography because you have no control over focal length and aperture of the lens and the depth of field is too shallow (I tried with 18mm, 28mm and 70mm). At least it is something to experiment and play with and it can be used when you can't afford a macro lens. The above photo is a photo taken by my 50mm 1.8f (and here is another photo of the same subject taken from different perspective).
Continue reading...

The Light of Knowledge

I shot this photo like a month ago. Don't get it wrong it's NOT photoshoped. I did this by projecting my table lamp light through a camera lens onto a book. The picture of the light bulb is then printed onto the book. I'm quite proud that I discovered this by myself. This concept has been used for overhead projector but I only realized this after shooting that photo.
Continue reading...

Pixel Art

Some of you might know that apart from photography, graphic stuff is also my interest. Lately, I started to get interested in another form of graphic art. I've seen it many times on the web and magazines recently. It's not something new though, you saw this kinda graphic in old video games like Super Mario. I didn't know what it was called and was wondering what the heck people would call it until a few days back while looking through a graphic design magazine and I saw it again and so I scanned through the text and then I found out that it's called pixel art. This evening I was googling to see some pixel art works and I came across this website. The author of this site recommends a tool called GraphicGale for creating pixel graphics so I decided to download the program and gave it a try and after like an hour I had a picture (my canon camera) as below.
What is pixel art anyways? Literally, you create it by drawing pixel by pixel. As Mark (the author of the site above) says it is time consuming and often difficult. Well, I think that's what most arts are anyways. They requires a lot of patience and effort.

10 times zoom of the picture above

Related links:
- Isometric pixel art tutorial: http://rhysd.syntesis.org/tutorial/index.php
- Wax icon museum: http://www9.ocn.ne.jp/~iconwax/
- Flickr's pixel artist group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/the_pixel_artists/

Continue reading...

Rolleicord III type 2

I was thinking of buying Nikon FM2 a week ago. Why? I just thought I would own a durable film camera that I can use for my whole life and while digital cameras are much more convenient than film ones, the quality of film still cannot be replaced by digital yet. This morning I was suddenly reminded that there's a shop selling old cameras and stuff close to my place. So I decided to drop by and have a look whether they have the one I wanted. I went into the shop and I was so amazed by the old cameras, so many actually, some work and some do not. It turned out that they didn't have FM2 but then I got attracted to another one. It's Rolleicord, a medium-format twin lens reflex camera made in Germany. In the end, I decided to buy it with a roll of film. I haven't had time to test it out yet. I tested the aperture and exposure speed and they seem to work fine. Even if it doesn't work, I can still keep it. I know it's gonna be hard to use because it doesn't have exposure check so I'm thinking of using exposure meter of my digital camera hehe. I don't know which model of Rolleicord is it but according to this page, it's model III type 2 and the manufacture date is between 1952-1953. So it's much older than me. It's classic man ;) It's not a brand new one, so I didn't expect that it would include the case and manual but it does. Cool huh?
Continue reading...

Why can't you understand?

Have you ever asked yourself or other people why can't (s)he can't understand this or that? If so, you should read this article.
Continue reading...

Loofa

Scrub scrub scrub... hehehe
Continue reading...

Where Fishes Live

This was also taken on the goat island trip day. If you tilt your head down to the water, you can see blue maomaos swimming around but due to the low visibility of water I couldn't take any photos of them. I tried but it didn't work.
Continue reading...

Freeze

Continue reading...

Play At The Beach

The beach area near Goat Island where you would have to take the Glass bottom boat from.

Best viewed large.

Continue reading...

Budget Studio

I've just set up my very-budget conscious studio for taking portraits, you might not even call it a studio hehe. I can't afford professional lighting equipments, not even for the backdrop. All I can afford is one table lamp (and I borrowed one from Bex), a few meter squares of red cloth as a backdrop, toilet paper as a light diffuser, and cooking foil as a reflector.

And these are the photos I took using my studio. Click the thumbnail to enlarge.

Continue reading...

Goat Island Trip

Yesterday I was part of a group that went to goat island. This was organized by the Malaysian student association (UMSA). We couldn't actually get to the island itself due to the choppy water & high tide, we could only see it across from us at the shore. However, it was not bad after all because we had a chance to do other things instead like going to other beaches, dropping by to see kauri trees, going on a bush walk, and most importantly having a lecture given by Dr. Floor Anthoni on marine environment, ecology and conservation. Furthermore, we had a chance to see his small homemade sustainable aquarium.UMSA group photo.

Read more about marine conservation at seafriends.org.nz
Continue reading...

Self-Portrait

Continue reading...

Lomography effect

I was browsing for lomo camera yesterday and then I came across this post in which the author provides a lomography photoshop action. I tried it out and I was like "coooool". ok, you might wanna try it out, go to this post and download the action for your photoshop.


Continue reading...

EF 50mm F/1.8 II

This is my first prime lens ever.

Testshot:

Continue reading...

Friendship Star

The alternative title of this photo should be "South East Asian Star". Who are in the photo? Ok, start from the front most one and go clockwise direction, me, Wei Long, Desiree, Bex, and Melissa.
Continue reading...

Malaysian Carnival

There was a Malaysian carnival yesterday in front of Britomart. We had decided to go there early because the important shows and performance took place early but unfortunately we all woke up late and we got there about 2pm so we missed a lot of things including food :(

Malay wedding performance

Click the thumbnails to enlarge

Thumbnail photos' titles:
1: The crowd
2: Selamat Datang (welcome)
3: Queueing up to buy food
5: Performance
Continue reading...

Gone

If you have read this post you might be able to figure out what "incomplete" really means. There was a fern in that little vase but now it's gone (dead) again. By saying again, I mean it's not the first time I couldn't keep a plant alive. Well, realize that I can't take care all those kinda things. Anyways, I took this photo with my tokina 28-70mm lense, which I rarely use it, with iso 1600.
Continue reading...

Unwantedly Grows

Continue reading...

Last Day of (Khmer) New Year

Got 2gether with my gang again after awhile last night for some drinks and dinner (mainly roasted pig head)


Thy and Bong Ponlok danced to the music.
Continue reading...

Stormy Weather

Just played around with Photoshop (Curve tool) and came up with the image below. Oringinal image is here.


Better viewed large.
Continue reading...

My New Toy (Canon IXY Digital 10)

Yeah, I finally bought a new point and shoot camera yesterday. The reason why I decided to buy a P&S camera is because I can't take my DSLR with me all the time since it's too bulky. Ok here's a little review of mine.

Pros:
Body design (squarish - thaaat i like)
Easy to use
Vibrant colors
Small enough to take with you everywhere
Variety of built-in functions

Cons:
Doesn't work well in low light condition (while most people said it does)
With ISO 1600, photos are unusable for me
Sharpness is not that good

Here are some test shots. They're straight out of the camera except for some resizing. (Click to enlarge)



Continue reading...