Prince William and Kate Wedding

Wow it was really a grand affair from what I could catch on Astro. My wife wanted me to record the Prince William and Kate wedding event and it was 4-5 hours long! Fortunately my DVD can record 4 hours of it and not to mention the countdown and behind the scenes documentaries I had to use 2 disc instead. So that would about 8 hours worth of recorded DVD to watch later!

Faulty free gift - USB thumbdrive

If ever a free gift looks too good to be true, this is it. Spend 10 difficult to get points from All IT to redeem a faulty Microsoft free USB thumbdrive gift. Thought I would use it to store MP3 songs for my Red Fox wireless MP3 player. Unfortunately the data kept getting lost after transfer. Even back to exchange for another USB thumbdrive, but that too turn out to be faulty.

The All IT PIC wasn't very keen to entertain me the first time round and to change the second time round to another gift would probably be a bigger hassle. Talk about consumer rights and poor customer service hiding behind the policy of redeemable free gifts are not entitled for exchanges. Looks like I will just end up using this as a useless pretty looking keychain. I guess if I ever want to store important precious data, I should only use brands that I know, at least the defect would be under controlled and at the very least warranty against product defects. Next time I will be more weary about unknown generic IT brands. Always better to pay a little more for peace of mind!

[update]
While browsing around the internet, I found people actually bought fake branded flash drive. How the fake flash drive worked is by showing false capacity, ie if the counterfeiter would make the chip inside the pen drive show up as a 2GB capacity thumb drive, but in actual reality, the memory chip could only hold 512MB of data. I guess the same falls for this faulty thumb drive that I got from All IT.

Why do they do that? To save money from putting in the required memory chips and sell it at the market value of the higher capacity, but in the end the product is faulty and you can't use it at all.

However there are some tools out there where you can fix the reported capacity to the actual capacity and thereby you could still use it but up to the real capacity. Well, kinda too late now that I have thrown it away.

Anyway at the current rate of decreasing price of flash drive, I could get a 4GB thumb drive for as cheap as RM20! Anyway, I have many flash drive and I'm aiming at the high capacity ones with my latest procurement at 64GB! Wow! And yes, it is not cheap!

End of Flock Browser

Aw, shucks. And I really liked the Flock browser. But when I received the announcement in my inbox:

Support for Flock browsers will be discontinued as of April 26th, 2011. We would like to thank our loyal users around the world for their support, and we encourage the Flock community to migrate in the coming weeks to one of the recommended web browsers listed below.

Just too bad for me. Although it uses the same engine as Mozilla Firefox, it has added features to enhance it including the various social website integration. I suppose the Flock browser people decided to pull the plug and not maintain another version of the Mozilla Firefox browser.

So looks like I will have to revert back to good old Firefox. The latest update to Firefox 4.0 has some updated features. But somehow I noted that the Google Toolbar has some issues with it. I keep losing the Gmail button if I tried to customized the Firefox toolbars.

Well, it was good while it lasted. I have been using Flock for many years now. So will just have to re-acclimatized with the Firefox layout.

Got my HP officejet J3508 all-in-one fax scanner printer

Just my luck. My 3 year old HP all-in-one fax printer went kaput and I had to get replacement. Opted for HP Officejet J3508 all-in-one fax scanner printer.

This one uses black ink cartridge 702 only. That's all I need as I basically use it for faxing mainly with occassional document printing.

The colour print version, the J3608 is more expensive though it has a higher print speed of 20ppm vs 15ppm for the cheaper model. That's ok for me, no need so expensive. Besides my soho home business is still in the early stages. So not expecting any heavy fax volume.

My old HP officejet all-in-one could still print and scan though. Looks like it will just end up as printer only. I think I'll just place that in my in laws place wher a printer is required.

This HP Officejet J3508 is sufficient at least for now.

HP OfficeJet Warranty Exchange Problem

[update] Aug 2012

My good old HP all-in-one finally went kaput in my in-law's house, instead of getting another HP printer, decided to replace with a simple Epson desktop printer. Simple printing was all I needed in the other house.

As for my current house HP J3508, decided to not leave it on all day long due to lightning strikes. I have lost several surge protectors and it was very inconvenient when the surge protector failed to prevent damage to the fax printer itself. Though fortunately HP replaced a another set with no question asked. But it was not a brand new fax machine, just a repaired version from another user who had a problem with it. I found another solution to my personal fax requirement and that was to subscribe to a virtual fax service. It wasn't so cheap, but it was very convenient and less problematic.

Recently my work place 8 year old Panasonic Laser Fax was not working well. It could not feed in the paper for outgoing fax. Although it was an expensive fax, I thought it was not value for money for the repair. The fax toner was expensive plus every 4 toner changed, the laser drum need to replace and it wasn't cheap!

Nowadays people tended to scan into a PDF file and email over, so the amount of receiving fax was less. So opted to get the cheaper HP J3608 fax printer. It was simple and lightweight (the Panasonic fax was heavy!) and good enough for our simple daily usage. I couldn't find the black ink cartridge version only HP J3508 anymore. Perhaps it was so low priced (I bought the J3508 for RM200) or perhaps not popular, the vendor decided to sell the colour printer version instead (the J3608 was RM270). Since most incoming faxes would be black, the colour cartridge would definitely be under used and become unusable come the expiry date. No matter, the fax machine would still run without the colour cartridge, and if truly needed, it would be cheaper to replace it when compared with Panasonic toners and drum.

The only disadvantage I see is the HP inkjet printout would smear when come into contact with water. So if our hands were wet or sweaty, the fax copy would smear. This incident would not be common so I guess it would still be acceptable.

Cat got sore throat?

Can cat get sore throat? Coz my cat seemed a little weak in her meows and not at all noisy and loud. And the meowing sound sure sounded somewhat hoarse to me.
The weather in Malaysia rather hot these few weeks though fortunately the hot spell did have heavy showers once in a while that helped to break the heat for a brief period anyway.
I myself and family members just recovered from cough and flu.
But my cat got sore throat? Now that is something new to me.

Benefits of eating Papaya Fruit

Papaya Fruit - new information of goodness added

 

Papaya

 

No need to cry about scarcity of blueberries, strawberries, etc in SINGAPORE.  We have our wonderful payayas, pineapples and bananas, and durians and mangoes are affordable.

 

Papaya was the only studied  food found to halt breast cancer

 

Scientists studied 14 plant foods commonly consumed in Mexico to determine their ability to halt breast cancer cell growth. These included avocado, black sapote, fuava, mango, prickly pear cactus (nopal), pineapple, grapes, tomato, and papaya. They also evaluated beta-carotene, total plant phenolics, and gallic acid contents and antioxidant capacity. They found that only papaya had a significant effect on stopping breast cancer cell growth. (International Journal of Food Science and Nutrition, May)

 

Papaya is a store-house of cancer fighting lycopene

Changing to HTC Desire Z - thinking

I'm considering to change my android phone Sony Xperia X10 mini pro to HTC Desire Z. Sure I've just updated the firmware for this X10 and i liked the new updated stuffs. But there is still one drawback: the tiny fonts. At my age a larger font would go easier on my eyes especially since i do a lot of texting and mobile blogging. I couldn't find the font size adjustment in this Xperia and many of the rich text mail has extra tiny fonts. Fortunately the road sync has very nice comfortable fonts but it only allow one email account though. So my next best option is to plough in some dough perhaps trade in or sell my Xperia X10 and upgrade to HTC Desire Z. I know HTC got font sie adjustment base on my short lived experience of using HTC Wildfire. So it is just a matter of time for me to change my mobile phone.