Founder of lesterchan.net, a Singapore tech and gadgets blog running since 2002. An engineering leader by day and a WordPress plugin developer since 2003, with a soft spot for gadgets, smart home, and a good deal.
Finally upgraded from SingTel Red Rewards to Red Prestige membership. Red Rewards is SingTel's loyalty programme, letting residential customers earn points off their bill to redeem from a wide catalogue of products, lifestyle perks and lucky draws.
Bought the Power Support Smart Pen for Li Xiang at Challenger for S$39.90. Four colours are offered; I picked Brushed. Made in Korea, it feels solid, though I can't draw on my iPad so it suits designers better.
Todai Singapore opened on 18th February 2011 at The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, near the Marina Bay Financial Centre. The huge 1,300-square-metre space seats over 400, with four private rooms and more than a hundred employees.
Spent the weekend wrestling Cacti onto this VPS. Because it runs WHM on CentOS, packages like Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl and Ruby are installed outside Yum, so the dependency check kept failing when installing rrdtool for graphing.
Google +1 reminds me of HardwareZone forums, where people post '+1' just to bump their post count. The button is shorthand for approval, helping friends and contacts surface the best stuff when they search the web.
Sharing a good cause: M1, SingTel and StarHub, with Ericsson's IPX, are letting post-paid customers donate $5, $10 or $20 by SMS to aid Japan's disaster victims. All three telcos are waiving their administration fees.
After WatchMouse flagged daily performance issues since my health status went live on 17th March 2011, I spent a Saturday optimising the site. First change: the home page now shows five posts instead of ten so it loads lighter.
Li Xiang and I were invited to Sony Ericsson's blogger gathering at Orgo on Esplanade's Roof Terrace, a lovely spot. They showed three phones: the Xperia Arc, Neo and Play, the Arc succeeding the X10 with a BRAVIA-enhanced display.
Li Xiang and I attended HP's Everybody On blogger event at The Gallery in Hyatt Hotel, where five new consumer products were shown, including Pavilion dv4, dv6, g4 laptops, the TouchSmart610 PC and the x2301 micro-thin LED monitor.
I am twenty-seven today, firmly in my late twenties now! Li Xiang surprised me with two cakes from Pine Garden delivered to my office. My colleagues lit the candles and sang, embarrassingly letting the whole office in on it.
Mozilla has officially released Firefox 4.0! Highlights include performance up to six times faster than the previous version, with improved start-up, quicker page loads, speedy web-app handling and hardware acceleration. Take the video tour or watch the live download stats.
In today's press release announcing iPad 2 availability across 25 more countries this Friday, Apple confirmed Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore will get the second-generation tablet sometime in April 2011, a little after the initial wave of launches.
Li Xiang got me the Crumpler Herbas (L) Wide as a birthday present, thanks Dear! The bag is lightweight, slim and compact, fitting an 11-inch MacBook Air nicely. I'm using it as my iPad bag for now.
Attended LG Blogger Night at Black Coffee Dessert Bar in TripleOne Somerset, where they showed the Optimus 2X and Optimus Black. The 2X's headline feature is its dual-core 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, which made the phone feel genuinely snappy.
Samsung's Nexus S is now available from all leading mobile retailers at a recommended S$828, contract-free and inclusive of GST. The world's first handset with a contour display, it launches in Singapore on 18 March 2011.
Sometimes the site returns a blank page or null response, with curl reporting an empty reply from the server. I haven't pinned down the cause, but a simple Apache restart fixes it; with 2GB RAM, memory isn't the problem.
Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9, promoted on a new site called Beauty Of The Web whose URL honestly looked like a phishing page at first. The latest version of the world's most-used browser launched in 39 languages.
Hooted the A.C. Ryan Playon! HD Mini 2 at IT Show 2011 for S$189 after the CitiBank card discount off its S$199 RRP. This January-launched media player features USB 3.0, gigabit LAN connectivity and the brand-new GUI 2.0 interface.
Fancy an Angry Birds plush or SingTel Droid toy? Head to the SingTel booth at IT Show 2011, like their Facebook page, show your profile to staff, and grab one using the UFO catcher machine.
About time! By end July 2011, consumers will enjoy significantly faster smartphone surfing inside MRT tunnels. The Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts told Parliament that Singapore's three telcos must complete the network installation by then.
Invited to the blogger session of Canon's first product launch of 2011 at the brand-new Canon Imaging Academy beside their Keppel Bay Tower office. The academy develops curricula, courses and events to enhance participants' photography and imaging experience.
Here are Apple's own direct download links for iOS 4.3 across iDevices: iPhone 3GS and 4, iPod Touch 3G and 4G, and all three iPads. The iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G are deprecated and miss out.