Wednesday, May 08, 2013

It was another early start [8am] to a very long day. As I've only came back from Phuket within the same week, I wasn't exactly the keenest in going overseas again.

However, I wasn't dreading the trip at all, in fact I was really looking forward to it. The activities that we have planned was totally my cup of tea. Go-kart and Paintball, who would've thought that I would get to do the both of them on the same day.

Before I continue ranting, I should probably mention that this was a 12 man group. Again, because of my paranoia I shall only give the initials of the people: A, JH, KQ, V, MC, L, J, XK, YJ, C, D. Well, that introduction was stupidly pointless. So anyway,  my point was that there was definitely enough people for this to be a really fun event.

Go-kart is definitely my favourite. I say it with such confidence even though I have only done it once in my entire life. (not counting this one)

If you somehow missed the title, these activities were held in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. JH helped us book a minivan to drive us around for the entire day. If I'm not mistaken the price was SGD $450. Definitely not a small amount but definitely something we were willing to pay considering that the presidential elections were the next day.
(looking at the news, I'm rather glad we weren't caught in any deepshit)

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Labels: 2013, awesome, featured, fun, gokart, johor bahru, life, overseas, paintball

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Sunday, October 14, 2012

Why would you style your hair when you're going to play in the sun?

For some reason I really liked this shot

I went to Sentosa with my classmates the other day. Since we're not going to USS or some other stuffs there, I don't understand the appeal of the crazily hot beach. It looked like it was going to rain at first, with ominous clouds loitering the skies, but the sea breeze blew them right off!



Of course, there also isn't an abundance of female to guy ratio, which made me even less motivated. But surprisingly it was a rather interesting day out. There was volley ball, frisbee, captain's ball and a lot of running around. Running towards places with shades that is.

Epic volley ball spike!

Half way through, a bunch of SP guys asked if we wanted to play captain's ball with them. Of course, it's only because they didn't have a ball and we actually have girls with us. *inserts maniac laughter* But of course, the 6 of us shred their asses to pieces. It's rather shocking how good we are actually, or maybe they felt shy and held back or something.

Well, I didn't actually take a lot of pictures because I'm more interested in playing around in the sun that day. I probably became darker, though the effect is not as pronounced as I thought it would be.

However, I did manage to take quite a few shots that I liked.





I've applied a lot of filters in this batch of pictures. Mainly cause I downloaded some new ones and wanted to test them out. They turned out pretty okay!

I suddenly realized that I don't write a lot about the food I eat. Unlike my other friend Y, who almost exclusively write about food. I realized that because I wanted to write something about dinner, but I totally don't have any pictures of the food at all.

So after dinner, we actually thought of going over to B's house and play Mahjong overnight. But we were so shagged, the only choice was to get some rest at home. The story did not end there though, we decided to meet up at 8am the next day to play. Everything proceeded as planned the next day, but we got bored after playing for about 5 hours. The obvious thing to do next? Basketball! We played only for a little while though. Maybe an hour? Before heading to have lunch.

I'll say that this has been a rather excellent way to end my holidays. To end off this post, I'll put up a picture of my friend. He said and I quote, "If you put my handsome face up your blog, you'll get a thousand views immediately."

We will find out soon enough, won't we? ^^

Labels: awesome, beach, friday, fun, life sentosa, photography, singapore, sun, volleyball

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Friday, October 12, 2012

I recently got my hands on a 2nd hand Thinkpad x61s for $250 bucks, which might seem a lot for such an old machine. (about 5 years since it came out) But it's a great little PC and it's worth every cent. Sadly, the deal was to let my mum have the machine. But it is so nice that I actually want to bring it to school instead.

Which might be a little problematic to answer to my dad. We'll see about that.

Model: X61s 7669-88UOperating System: Vista Business 32 Bit
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz L7500 4MB L2 Cache 800MHz FSB
Chipset: Intel i965M
Memory: 2GB DDR2 PC5300 2 Slots, 0 Open 4GB Max
Hard Drive: 100GB 7k100 Hitachi 7200RPM (HTS721010G9SA00)
Screen: 12” XGA UltraLight 1024x768 180 nits
Graphics Card: Intel X3100
Wireless: ThinkPad B/G
Inputs: 88 Key Keyboard, PointStick with UltraNav Buttons
Buttons: Power, ThinkVantage, Power Up and Down, Mute, and WiFi/Bluetooth On/Off Switch
Ports:Three USB Ports – One Left Side, Two Right Side
Four Pin FireWire
Ethernet and Modem
VGA Out
Headphone and Microphone Jacks
Slots:SD Card Reader
Express Card Slot
Dock Connector
UltraBase
Modular Hitachi-LG GSA-U10N 8x DVD+/-R/-RAM
Four USB Ports – Two Left Side, Two Rear
Modem and Ethernet Ports
Headphone and Microphone Jacks
Parallel and Serial Ports
VGA Out
Two Front Speakers
Security Lock
Battery : Eight Cell
Dimensions With Eight Cell Battery:Width – 10.5”
Depth – 9.4”
Height – 0.8”(Front) / 1.4”(Rear)
Weight: 3.3 Lbs

Oh yes, it's a 4:3 ratio screen. It has been years since I've played with one. I also switched out the hard drive for my VAIO's old 500GB hard drive.

I've installed 3 operating systems on it, Windows 7 Ultimate, Ubuntu and Backtrack. With the other 2 being Linux distributions. I won't go in too much about the Linux since I haven't explored too much yet and that is for a post another day. This laptop is, however, really splendid with Windows 7. With just normal web surfing and chatting, the battery could last over 6hours. Sure, modern day ultrabooks could do that, and they have so much more power underneath, but I really don't need all that power.

What I need is a decent laptop, that is light, doesn't generate a lot of heat, doesn't make a lot of noise, and has a good battery life. This pretty much fulfills all of the criteria. The only gripe I have is the location of the fn and ctrl keys



I hate this, I use the ctrl key very often and hitting it wrongly all the time makes me wanna tear my hair out. Oh wait, this laptop doesn't have a touchpad either, so I have to use the red nipple joystick pointing device.
It does have a very nifty trick up it's sleeves. A reading light. No kidding.

Left: No light | Right: Lights!

Why don't every single laptop include this?! It's freaking ingenius. Of course, keyboard backlighting is way cooler and useful, but still, it's a laptop with a lamp!


Well, I've been tweaking Windows 7 on it extensively, Making sure that no resources will be wasted, getting it as fast as I possibly can. Sure, it isn't anywhere near a Core i series laptop, but it's fast enough for most of the daily activities. Speaking of which, I managed to get the boot times to [inserts boot timing], which is pretty good for something like this.

I'm going to keep experimenting with it, writing random posts as I discover new things. Let's see how things go, shall we?

Labels: awesome, computers, fun, geek, historical, lenovo, lordofgeeks, rant, thinkpad x61s

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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Yesterday, me, D and BK went to play LAN for 10hours. From 9pm to 7am, only because they didn't have the 12hour package. Of course, to play for another 2 hours would've killed us there and there.

Before the craziness began, we had a scrumptious meal with G, some sort of chicken broth? I don't know the name in either chinese or english. I do remember that it's from one of the shops around Kovan though.


We ordered the one that is supposedly only a tad spicy, but holyshitballs it was spicy. I was sweating all over like a dog in heat. I'm really not fond of spicy things. Which was unfortunate, the soup is incredibly delicious. It's probably one of the best I've tasted. Though I'm not really sure if it's counted as soup or sauce. If it's soup, the taste is too overwhelming, and if it's sauce, then the chicken must have had a great time swimming in it.

Oh yes it is chicken, my favourite.

We then proceeded to get a cash card, it's split among the 3 of us and it's well worth it.
What was the game of choice?
Blackshot


It's a first person shooter game, imagine playing for hours at a go. Oh, but we did stop to play GunBound for an hour in the middle. It's hilarious as hell as we pretty much forgot how to play it, and shooting your teammates and yourself is a good cause of laughter.

Naturally, there isn't any pictures for the fun that ensued, we were playing computer games in a dark noisy room, what do you expect? But god were we good?! We were surprisingly kicking the ass of many top players in the games, consistently occupying the top few spots in the games that we played. Sadly, we are only good at killing people, not exactly the most important criteria in joining competitions. Else I'm sure we would've done a pretty good job at it!

I guess everything we've done could be summarized in that two paragraphs. Which sounds really lame in retrospect, I swear this sounded a lot cooler in my head.

We then had breakfast (nasi lemak ftw) and crashed B's house. Slept for an hour or so, were supposed to go eat Kiseki (a japanese buffet, wrote about it months ago). But I backed out, which makes me feel really bad but I have policy in life.


At that point of time, fatigue had a firm grasp on my spontaneous self, I am definitely not going to do anything stupid. Eat a buffet after over 24hours of non-sleep is pretty stupid. They even wanted to go Sentosa after that, which I strongly declined. Well, they are crazy. (about a girl of course) And I was all like "Leave me out of this madness!"

Overall, this was a really fun experience. We should really do this another time with more people, and a lot more food on our hands. Oh I also got my hands on a 2nd hand Thinkpad x61s laptop. More on that in another post!

Labels: awesome, blackshot, chicken, epic, food, fun, LAN party, life

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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

I'm running a really complicated network in my house. 

Surprisingly, the reason is not "Because I can" this time round. It's more of, I screwed up and it just ended up like this. Since everything is working fine, I didn't bother optimizing it due to the lack of time. (thanks exams!)

Since words are really not helpful in this situation, I shall make a simple diagram to illustrate my network. (I feel paranoid and insecure doing this, I pray the hackers stay away from me)


R1 ~ R3 refers to routers. (yes I am using 3)
SSID refers to the name of the wireless network
The grey dotted line is a wireless bridge between 2 routers
My NAS is connected to R3

What I ended up doing is actually quite interesting. It is stupid, but it's amusingly secure somehow. Now, all 3 of my routers are on separate networks. How the fuck? Because I treat each link from the router as a WAN connection. That means that each router thinks that it is directly connected to the internet. Which, is only true for R1.

What do I end up with? R1 is unable to access R2 or R3. R2 is able to access R1 but not R3. R3 is able to access both R2 and R1. Interesting right? Well, I am on R3. I could give my friends access to R2 or R1, using it as guests networks and it will be totally separated from me.

This also means that technically, I am behind 3 physical firewalls. Because I am actually triple NAT-ing my network. It might seem really stupid to the real geeks out there but well, I really don't know if this is ingenius or full retard.

To make this work, your normal home routers with their default software probably couldn't make such an interesting configuration work.

Introducing, OpenWrt.

What is OpenWrt?
OpenWrt is described as a Linux distribution for embedded devices.
Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developer, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned.

It's relatively easy to flash a the Linux firmware onto your router. The hard part comes when you have to telnet/ssh into it and do a bunch of command line stuffs to get your web interface working. (I'm too noob to work solely in CLI) Of course, this is relatively advanced stuffs. Even I don't know half the settings that exists on the software. So if you want to mess around with your own hardware, do it at your own risk. As usual read the fucking manual and make sure you have a plan B in case something fucks up.

Many of the supported routers are not exactly stable per say, so please read carefully. I recently bought a TP-LINK WDR4300 and I think I haven't wrote about it yet. But it was relatively buggy with the first few OpenWrt firmwares and I had to power cycle it often. However, after switching to OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment r33276 / LuCI Trunk (trunk+svn9138) today, the connection is more stable and I didn't have to mess around with it anymore. My other TP-LINK 2543ND has been up and running for 5.5days without any hiccups at all.

Alright, how is the performance? I just took a test from www.speedtest.net
(R2 has been running for 13hours)


My connection is 100mbps. Using the direct wireless I could achieve roughly 60+mbps (due to overhead and whatnot). So my connection at R3 is about 60~70% of my maximum wireless throughput. Which is not bad, considering my location and overhead wireless has. Though technically this is only 36% of my total available bandwidth. However, since my wireless bridge link is my limiting speed, I could achieve average 3MB/s downloads, and bursts of up to 4.5MB/s.

I also ran a pinging test from R3 to R1 for about a minute or so, the average latency is about 7ms, with a minimum of 2ms and maximum of 28ms. Which is good enough for gaming.

Well, it's good enough for now. I will still continue to work on this little project and improve my networking skills over the holidays. There's still Dynamic DNS and VPN to set up. This is going to be one hell of a fun thing to experiment on.

Labels: fun, geek, life, openwrt, project, router

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Saturday, March 24, 2012

That's the gist of what yesterday was about.

We watched The Hunger Games at Tiong Bahru yesterday because the town cinemas only had the front rows available, curses for not booking early.


What up! For the record, I haven't read the book yet, so this movie was really awesome. It's not mind blowing in any sense. It's just a really nice story. It's rare these days to have movies to have a real plot that is worth watching even though there isn't a heck lot of visual flare (not that there is little in this show)

Verdict:
Watch it.

Now, for the part that comes after the movie.

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Labels: awesome, friday, fun, life, movie, music, the hunger games, we are young

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