Benny Ling’s Bling

Right, getting through these photos is proving to be more of a task than I originally thought. Nevermind, nevermind…

So I spotted these mega chup-chups at at the local Penang airport, just as we were going to leave for KL (and, by extension, home).

Thought they were pretty cool. They’re huge – they could easily fit 20-30 chups chups inside them. I didn’t buy one because they were pretty exxy (roughly AUD $20, I’d say), and because I’d have no where to stick it on the plane…

In any case, this has been brought to you by the song of the day, Lollipop by Mika. Where has this kind of boppy music been my entire life!

Here’s another pic of the awesome mega-chups:

Okay, so there’s a lot more images in that folder than I expected. No worries, it just means more posts for you! Here’s another, entitled “Wait, I’ve seen that somewhere! (Part Two)”.

Nazi or Bhuddist?

Right – so yet more late-night driving. I think this was after my Gramp’s 80th bday party, but in any case, we had seen this a couple of times before.

Armed with lots of photon-capturing devices (read: cameras, iPhone), we went back to take some good photos.

Now, the question remains: what is it? Sure, it’s a swastika, but it’s not for a Nazi party. Nope – if you read the text at the bottom of the image, it says something along the lines of “Buddhist Church of Sitiawan”.

The design of the swastika is actually pretty cool – it’s made out of lanterns which make for an ominous sight at night-time.

Pretty blatant of them to just stick it out there, though, considering how easily it could be mistaken for a Nazi symbol, and it’s not a small sign either, easily being taller than 2m in height, with a couple more for elevation.

Yes, I’m not quite done yet. On my desktop, there’s a folder with blog-able pics from my trip, and this one’s one of them. There’s a couple more to come, so we might reach Part X if we’re lucky (and if I can be bothered).

In any case, the reason I haven’t been blogging lately is because my internet has been painfully slow. You can read all about it here.

So, lets get into it, yeah? This one’s called I’ve seen that logo before, and goes out to all my mates on MacTalk Forums.

Apple Allied Resources

We were driving along, going from A to B (as you do in Malaysia), and I was looking out the window, taking in the sights (as you do) when I suddenly spotted a familiar logo…

Of course, I whipped out my iPhone, and snapped a picture as fast as I could. My sister was also snapping a pic of something random (I think it was a school bus), but the Apple logo was just too good a photo oppurtunity to pass up…

Of course, now that I’ve taken the photo, you can go ahead and tell Apple to sue the pants off Allied Resources. Unless they’re actually a part of Apple, of course. But that’s unlikely. :p

Comments below.

So we were at my Gramps 80th Bday bash (haha – now THAT’S an overstatement), and during one of the courses, I noticed there was something funny in the rice dish we were having. It wasn’t a rice dish, more like a rice dish on a platter of assorted Chinese delicasies, but whatever it was, there was, unmistakably, a fly.

Now, the way the rice was presented meant that the fly had to have been cooked into the rice bowl – or, at least, crushed between the plastic, rice, and whatever the nutty stuff on top is.

Needless to say, my cousins and I were similarly grossed out – we only ate the parts of that dish that we liked, and yeah – that was that.

The next dish came and went, and the night continued on…

So I just had the task of trawling through all the Engadget posts that I missed while I was away (some 43 pages of posts). I must say, Endgadget has turned into something that doesn’t quite cut the mustard for me. Maybe I’ll have to start subscribing to Gizmodo – maybe they’ll have a better SNR. 20 out of 440+ isn’t so bad! /sarcasm.

In any case, there are a hell of a lot of links, so I’ll just get right into it:

DIY Screw-Nut Rings
Corny? Undoubtedly. Geeky? For sure.

DIY Prosthesis in Tasmania
A post on Engadget, about Tasmania! Woot!

DARPA’s 1.8 Gigapixel digicam
Whatever happened to “less is more”? Then again, this is DARPA we’re talking about…

Cell Phone Reunion
iPhone is bad-ass. Owning one doesn’t make you so.

LaserPup
Lazors fire! PEW PEW PEW!

Recompute – the cardboard PC
Cool design. Recyclable exterior.

Windows 7 SKUs
Wait – how many versions?!

Tokyoflash’s Heko watch
Again, this is the watch I’d be wearing. If I wore watches.

Seagate’s 2TB HDD
Lots of data (to lose).

Western Digital’s 2TB HDD
But this ones’s GREEN-er.

Days to 1 million
How long did it take to each smartphone to hit 1 million units sold? FYI, the iPhone 3G took 3 days.

Gigapixel image of Obama’s inaguration
Because we need a mega-close up, okay? You can buy one of the devices, too!

Canon doesn’t suck
No, they do not. For those of you that don’t know – no, Canon do not make vacuum cleaners.

Windows 7 Beta Impressions
It’s good, actually. Better than Vista, and better than XP.

Apple vs Palm
A good read, if a little long.

That’s it!

Go away – I don’t want your comments anyway.

24 Hour McDonalds Delivery!

So – while I was in Malaysia, I needed some way to access the internet ocassionally, to check email, Facebook, and so on. There wasn’t any at where we were staying, so each week or so we would take the car and drive down to the local McDonalds. Luckily, they had free Wi-Fi that anyone could access and use. I didn’t feel like being a douche and steal their Wi-Fi without buying anything, so a trip to McDonalds usually involved a small snack as well.

Anyway, it was on one of these particular trips that I discovered that that particular McDonalds offered 24-hour delivery. 24 hours! Delivery! McDonalds!

Needless to say, I was pretty impressed. If you woke up at 3am and wanted a burger, or some curly fries (only available during Chinese New Year), then all that stood between you and your deep fried goodness was a phonecall.

Of course, I never tried out the service – but still, impressive, no?

Comments below.

Previous entries in the Malaysia series can be found here:
Part I – Don’t Sweat It
Part Ia – Keeps Getting Better
Part II – Dactyl

Dactyl Highscores

So, I finally managed to beat Turk’s high score on the iPhone game, Dactyl.

As you can see from the image above, he’s managed to rack up quite a lot of scores – and finally, I’ve managed to beat him in a fit of epic boredom when I was in Malaysia.

Now – the next thing is to crack the 500 mark. Shouldn’t be too hard, considering that I got 492 without putting in much effort.

Maybe I should tell him that there’s already a sequel  – Dactyl 2 in the App Store – then again, maybe not…

This has been Malaysia 2009, Part II – brought to you by Benny Ling’s Bling.

Previous entries can be found at their respective links below:
Part I (Don’t Sweat It)
Part Ia (Keeps Getting Better)

So – lots of things to blog about.

I’ll try and break it up for you so that you don’t get overwhelmed with one MEGA-post – instead, I’ll break it up into about five (give or take) posts spread out over a couple of weeks. Please also note that they won’t be in chronological order – so I might blog about some place in Melbourne in the middle of a series of Malaysia posts, for instance. This isn’t just ‘cos I’m a lazy tool who just can’t be bothered, but mostly for organisational reasons – organising all the stuff would make my brain explode…

Thanks for bearing with me.

Also upcoming in the general Benny Ling Bling scheme of things is a post detailing what’s gonna happen next in regards to this blog.

Previous entries in the series:
Don’t Sweat It!

…and this has been Malaysia 2009, Part Ia, brought to you by Benny Ling’s Bling.

Okay – so this is a little short, and a little lame. Bear with me, though – it keeps getting better!

Well, I’m back from my huge overseas trip.

There are a heap of things to do now, ‘cos I need to catchup on so much stuff, so stay tuned.

As some of you may already know, I’m heading overseas for the next couple of weeks. During this time, I’ll be handing over the reins to my very capable (when he’s bothered to be) co-founder, Chris Jacques – which means you’ll still get your weekly dose of freshbytes-love.

As an added bonus, you might even see a post or two from me while I’m away, thanks to WordPress’ excellent publishing tools which allow me to publish a pre-written post on a specific date, at a specific time. Depending on how much writing I manage to get done before I fly out on Thursday.

via freshbytes » A Freshbytes Fresh Update.

So yeah – same thing goes for here, except that Chris Jacques will NOT be posting anything here. Sorry, fans of Chris! This is a personal blog, after all…

Try not to wreck the place while I’m gone, and hopefully I’ll have some awesome posts when I get back, as well as some sort of direction (no idea if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been cross-posting via Press This a lot lately. I don’t want this to become a gadget blog [that's better left to Engadget, Gizmodo, etc] but I do post things here which I think are cool).

From yours truly,
Benny Ling..

Reviews Editor Tae K. Kim says: “Taking the survival horror genre to new heights, Left4Dead is an adrenaline fueled kick to the sensory organs. Cast as one of four survivors who are under siege by an undead horde, you must shoot, run and survive. What elevates the game to greatness is the fantastic multiplayer component. You can go online and play with friends in a cooperative mode-four players all acting as a team to survive the zombie onslaught-or play deathmatch where you can cast yourself as one the undead masses to take down survivors controlled by other human players. It’s an insane amount of fun and definitely deserves a spot in every PC gamers’ library.”

via Feature : 75 Must Have Games for the Holidays [Domestic] – Page 4- from GamePro.com.

Left 4 Dead, huh?

I have it, but if only I had a computer that could handle it…

Well, it’s officially the holidays now – and if you’re wondering why I just have to post this, it’s because my holidays are all set!

I’ve got three books to finish off:

• Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, AJAX, and PHP
  I’m mainly reading this for the AJAX and PHP parts – while I have a working knowledge of CSS, I couldn’t write my own CSS from scratch. Not without a WYSIWYG editor, anyway.
  PHP is HUGE in the webdesign world. If I want to be serious, or at least semi-serious about Web stuff, I want to learn PHP.
  And Ajax, well, that’s just cool
• Physics of the Impossible
  This is an awesome book by one of my all-time favourite authors, Michio Kaku, the author that “built a 2.3-million-electron-volt betatron particle accelerator, which consumed 6 kilowatts of power an generated a magnetic field 20,000 times that the earth’s magnetic field.” – all while he was in high school!
  It covers everything from the technology that is impossible today, but does not break physics as we know it (such as force fields, death stars, telepathy and teleportation, antimatter), to technology that sits on the boundary of our technical knowledge today (such as a speed faster than light, time travel, and alternate universes) to things that are just plain impossible – things such as perpetual motion and precognition – things that violate known laws of physics.
  It’s a really good read – if you’re thinking about doing something in Physics, then I highly recommend that you read this book – you’re welcome to read my copy, but only when I’m finished with it
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
  Regarded as “the Bible” for Cocoa programming on OSX, for OSX, Cocoa programming is a minor hobby of mine. I started it way before we started Java at school, and compared to Java for GUI stuff, it is so much easier!
  For those special few of you that have worked with a Java GUI interface, the way that I’ve been taught it just plain sucks.
  With Xcode’s Interface Builder, I don’t have to write the code for each radio button, write yet more code for where I want it to go, or even what I want to do – all this can be done using a GUI. Easy, no? Objective-C is great.
  This book is a little hard to acquire in Australia, though, so I’d be looking to your closest bookshop to see if they can order it in. Mine certianly did, and I”m so glad for it…

Yep, I’m all set. So I might have to do a little work, but I’m cool with that, I’ve got plenty of time for that kind of stuff… Take, for instance, the Steam Weekend Deal – this week, it’s 50% of all ID games, you know, like Commander Keen, Quake, Doom, etc. I bought the super pack for $35 – you can check it out here if you have Steam and are interested.

So, what are YOUR holiday plans? Shout out in comments.