There are many crap cable modems out there, but Singnet one just hit a new low.
Recently, a friend of mine dropped his phone and spoilt it. With the drop, gone are all his contacts stored in the phone. Another one lost her phone a couple of weeks back, and since she hardly comes online, I was wondering why no news at all from her after so many weeks. Apparently, she lost her phone and with it, all her contact numbers.
That made me realize, in this time and age, when people are so dependent on storing contact numbers in their phone, it is more important than ever that our connection with friends should not be severed by a single point of failure, our phone. People should be backing up their contacts somewhere else, such that when disaster strikes their phone (fingers crossed don’t happen), it should be a simple task of restoring their latest contacts, rather than trying to ask their friends one-by-one via email or facebook for their contact numbers.
I periodically (as much as daily, or a few times a week) syncs my contacts, calendars, and tasks from my Nokia E90 to Mac’s iCal and Address Book via iSync. Sync-ing is done via Bluetooth, so I just need to have my phone within 5-7 metres of my Macbook, launch iSync, and click on “Sync Devices”. As simple as that. Calendar entries from iCal are then synced in the background to Google Calendar. I don’t sync any contacts to online services. Maybe I should, but in the mean time, I trust Time Machine backup that keeps me safe up to the last hour of my data. Good enough for me.
There are TONS of online services, most of them are free, that allows you to sync your contacts (and possibly calendars) from your phone to that online service. Check out Windows Live Contacts and Windows Live Calendar for you Microsoft and MSN users out there or Google Sync for Gmail fans.
Do you backup the data in your phone? How, and where?
For someone who uses Google Docs and Spreadsheets for storing documents and collaboration with friends, the ability to finally be able to edit them on the phone is a great news.
Until today, I’ve only been able to view documents and spreadsheets, and I have to wait until I get to a desktop or laptop in order to edit them.
To check out these new capabilities, just go to http://m.google.com/docs in your mobile browser and log in. If you are like me who uses Google Apps, I go to http://docs.google.com/a/hendrikch.com.
Available for Android, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Symbian S60 (high-end Nokia) phones.
This is what happen when you have the ability to watch Olympics matches anywhere in the island, for free !! 
So far, I’ve watched all kind of sports, on the road in the bus and MRT, and at home when channel 5 doesn’t show the game I wanted to watch.
This is only the fourth day I watched Olympics on my mobile phone, and I’ve already hit an astonishing 700MB of data transfer.
With Olympics still due to end in a couple of days, expect me to hit 1GB transfer very soon
This year’s Olympics are only shown on Starhub Cable TV channel 601 to 606. With the old set top boxes we have, we can only go as far as 99, so we can’t watch Olympics on TV. Navigating to Starhub Gee! on my mobile phone, I found out that they have the Olympics menu under Sports item. Clicking the item will give me six channels similar to channel 601 to 606.
I tried streaming China vs Brazil soccer match LIVE on my mobile phone, and here’s the data usage after the first half. Astonishing 85MB of data transfer !! The quality are as you would expect on a mobile phone screen, but you could still watch the match with enough detail, and there were no lag or pause felt during the whole of first half.
This must have been the most data I ever transferred to my mobile phone ever since I started having the data plan. The good thing is I can now watch Olympics matches LIVE anywhere in Singapore, simply superb !! No more boring bus or MRT trips 
There has been lots of initiatives lately from computing giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, and lots of other smaller companies to let us move our computing and files online. Google Docs was probably one of the first one to allow us to move our documents online. From then, more has followed suit, including Microsoft with Office Workspace Live. Since then, with so many online services, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, more and more people has been having their “life” in Internet, to the point that computers are pretty pointless nowadays without Internet connection.
Another “killer app” that is coming up in the horizon is syncing capabilities across devices. Most of us owns few devices, home PC, office PC, maybe laptop, and mobile phone. The problem most of us face (or at least I face) was to sync simple things like calendars, tasks, emails, to bigger items like documents and files across all those devices.
Until recently, this has been a chore. Even syncing calendar items from Google Calendar to my mobile phone was pretty troublesome. With Google Calendar Sync, that sync Google Calendar with Outlook, which then I use Nokia PC Suite to sync between Outlook and my Nokia E90, at least I have some solution that works for Calendar.
How about files and documents? So far, I have been putting my documents that I want to access anywhere in Google Docs, but there are many other documents that remains in my home PC, and thus inaccessible from anywhere else.
Microsoft has some solutions, that are frankly still quite disjointed. Skydrive is a free 5GB online storage that allows you to store pretty much anything. You can create folders, upload files, share folders, etc.
Think of it as your free online storage. I know some people who uses their Gmail as their online storage, but c’mon, Gmail is email, not a proper online storage. I use Skydrive lately to share and send some big files, and the files will still be there indefinitely, unlike YouSendIt. The problem with Skydrive? I need to remember to upload my recently edited documents into Skydrive, or else what I have in Skydrive and what I have in my desktop will be different.
Second product is Foldershare.
So far, I have used Foldershare to sync documents between my home PC and my Macbook. I can edit any documents in my Macbook while I’m watching TV in the living room, knowing when I switch to my desktop in the study room, the latest file will be there. No need for primitive way of copying to thumbdrive from one machine and putting it to another machine. So far, so good. One limitation though, both devices need to be on in order for sync to happen.
The latest one to enter the fray was Live Mesh.
The idea is simple. You select some folders that you would like to sync with other devices (up to 5GB limit), and that’s it. Live Mesh client will upload all your documents to be sync-ed to Live Desktop, and then sync those files with all other devices that you may have added to the circle. Unlike Foldershare that is only one-to-one, Live Mesh can be many-to-many, including PC, Mac, and mobile phones. Also, using Live Mesh, your files are available online, so you don’t need to have your machine turned on 24×7. As an added bonus, Live Mesh works with Windows Remote Desktop, so let’s say you’re overseas, and so happen need to access your machine at home miles away, you can go to Live Mesh, and view your other machine’s desktop like you’re sitting in front of it. I read an article recently about a guy made us of Live Mesh to share photos from South Africa to his wife back in US. Paul also love Live Mesh.
Now, you may think why on earth are there so many similar products from Microsoft to accomplish similar thing? I wonder too, and how I wished they’d merge all these into one big solution that has everything. That would have been a winner.
Put it simply, if anyone can create a solution that allows us to have our calendars, tasks, to-do-list, emails, latest version of documents, MP3s, photos, and any other files, anywhere in the world, on any device, PC, Mac, mobile phone, PDA, iPhone, and dare I say, for free, that will be Awesome.
Has anyone of you used any of the online services above?
November last year, I was convinced and signed up for Smugmug online photo service. When I paid that 1-year subscription using my credit card, I am sure that I’ve put in the coupon code to get that sign-up discount. I also remembered that I’ve verified the amount. They sent me the confirmation immediately after I paid. I didn’t read that email. This year, I checked my credit card statement and noticed that the subscription amount didn’t seem right. I tried various USD-SGD exchange rates possible between 1.4 and 1.55, but none went close to the amount charged to my credit card. I checked my email, searched for that confirmation email. To my surprise, they have not applied the coupon code correctly, thus genuinely charged more. I immediately emailed Smugmug support telling them their mistake.
As I’ve read in forums around the Internet before I decided to sign up, Smugmug support is simply superb. They are very responsive. I repeat, very. I sent them email at 11.20PM, and I got their reply at 11.27PM. An amazing 7 minutes for them to read my email, checked my account, credited my credit card back the differences, and sent the email reply to me. If that’s not impressive for faceless companies on the net, I don’t know what is. You can’t help but feel that you are treated like you are their only customer. Nothing but praise from me. A couple of days later, my credit card was credited with the right amount (albeit a little bit lower as USD depreciates against SGD since November 07 till January 08) right before my credit card statement was sent.
Footnote, if you happen to like to sign up for a Smugmug account yourself, you can use my referral code and enter it, when you sign up, into Smugmug voucher coupon code: C26cqbAfqMjWs. I’ll earn $10 for my next year’s subscription, and you’ll earn $5 yourself, paying $35 instead of $40. Definitely not much, but with this latest impressive support from them, I would whole-heartedly recommend Smugmug for online photo sharing and backup service.
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