LiveScribe distributor Big'Ant in Malaysia is no more

Talk about bad timing! Big Ant (M) Sdn Bhd under the K-One Technology Berhad who was authorized distributor of Livescribe Pulse and Echo digital pen products has gone bust! Just at the time when my 2GB Pulse pen just ran out of ink and I thought of buying a refill ink cartridge.

I found it strange when my usual IT haunt at All IT Section 14 PJ suddenly removed all the Livescribe products. At first nobody seemed to know what was happening and they weren't able to sell me any of the accessories and replacements. So I searched online and obtained the contact number for K-One Technology / Big’Ant division. Called them up but nobody picked up the phone. After several futile attempts, it dawned onto me that this company may have gone bankrupt.

DNS Servers in Malaysia and Overseas

Every now and then, I would tinker with my router modem and network adapters. In most cases DHCP would be fine. But some of the legacy devices like my very old HP Laser Jet 5000 series printer as well as our re-cond all-in-on Ricoh photocopier machine (although fairly new, but uses some very old network communication protocols) worked better with a fixed network IP protocol.

For small office like mine, manually configuring each PC to a fixed IP was not such a big issue. However when setting the Internet Protocol TCP/IPv4 from DHCP to manual settings, the "obtain DNS servers address automatically" sections gets grayed out.

So I would need to key in the DNS servers manually in order for internet connection to work. Scrounging around the internet, I managed to gather all the local DNS Servers as well as some international ones too! I set up this list because I can't remember the DNS server address, so this post was made as sort of a note for me for quick access!

Google App is no longer free

I know this news about Google App being no longer free comes a bit late from me, but phew, been really busy! Didn't really have the time to blog or tinker with my websites!

I was rather surprised that Google was pulling out the free version of the Google App. However for those who has already signed up before 8/Dec/2012 news announcement were indeed rather fortunate! Google has been shrinking the free account features starting with reducing the number of inboxes available from 50 free users to 10 free users on 10/May/2011 for new signups. And now the bombshell, no more free Google app account offering!

Messed up my Wordpress Blog and now lags, trying to find a solution

I think I really did it this time round and messed up my Wordpress blog big time! While playing around with StoryTlr, I noticed it was hogging up a lot of server space. Yeah sure, I'm using a very low cost hosting but figured it was good enough for my current needs. I decided to get rid of StoryTlr since I couldn't get the auto update to work anyway. However, after deleting it, much of my server space were still being hog. I said no way, how could it be?

So browsing around trying to find out where the culprit files were, I decided to delete many log files in the /home directory figuring it would be of no use. Finally I chance upon the main culprit error log file in Wordpress which was hogging about 70% of the limited server space. Zap! And that's it, deleted the offending large file.

Panda and Penguin, very potent web traffic killer

The recent Panda and Penguin updates has severely affected many web site traffic. Being very busy myself, I have not the time to do a proper cleanup of the Panda and Penguin traffic killer factors. So much to my dismay all the hard work of getting website traffic is now going down the drain and not many people has much clue as to how to gain back the traffic.

Basically, Panda is more about content and on page ranking factors while Penguin is about off page ranking factors particularly about inbound linking. When Google came up with the plan to limit the effects of these factors and come out with penalties, many websites were affected.

Too much on my mind or getting forgetful

The last many days has been very busy for me. Too much on my mind, could be a contributing factor to my forgetfulness! I may not have the best memory but it has been said you could train your brain for better memory retention. Probably true to a certain extent. Having to remember as much details on a road trip for my blogging sure helped out. Still there are situation that I found I could not remember simple things. Probably just too many pending things to do in my mind.

With a new boss changeover in the company, I suppose there will be added burden to get him settled in while at the same time trying to secure new prospects for the company. Not to mention the recent and not recent changes in the Google SEO scene meant I need to do a lot of things to clean up my sites both on site and off site ranking factors. It can get complicated so sort of procrastinating on it much to the detriment of my website traffic.

Galaxy Hotel in Shanghai, and the surrounding area

Galaxy Hotel in Shanghai is quite a nice hotel for business stay. It's quite pricey at RMB¥689, which is far more expensive then PJ Hilton with our company's corporate rate. It is located next to Rainbow Hotel which I've stay once during one my holiday tour to Shanghai.

Flight from KL to Shanghai was rather smooth despite me getting a mild cold. The last many days running around in the hot humid weather of Kuala Lumpur really wore me down. So the 28°C was a nice change. It wasn't too warm and neither was it cold.

The check in counter was located on the second floor so when I arrived I was a little lost as to where to check in! This was the first time coming to Shanghai not on a tour group so many things have do on my own. I was told to take either a taxi or bus, taxi would be quicker but costly at about RMB¥200 while the bus ride cost RMB¥24. Walking around the Pudong Airport I somehow ended up at the bus stop rather then the taxi stand.