adventures of a blogjunkiereview » adventures of a blogjunkie

[Book Review] The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer

David — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:04:53 +0000

Posted in Blog

I’ve never read any biographies before, but I’m glad that the 1st one I picked up was The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer by Philip Carlo. The book follows the life of Richard Kuklinski, a contract killer for the New York Mafia.

Kuklinski earned the nickname “Iceman” because he experimented disguising the time of death of his victims by freezing their corpses in an industrial freezer. Yep, real life CSI stuff.

According to Kuklinski, he killed over 200 people over his career. He used guns, knives, his bare hands and even cyanide to kill his victims. All the while, his neighbors and even his wife had no idea that he was a serial killer.

Yes, it sounds too crazy to be true but it is! Kuklinski is one of the most famous serial killers in the world (if you’re into that kind of stuff).

The author Philip Carlo wrote the book in a journalistic, documentary style. Although it wasn’t a very exciting or suspenseful book, I couldn’t help reading page after page after page because Kuklinski’s story is just so out of this world. If you’re looking for something different to read, I highly recommend this book.

Unfortunately, searching the websites of MPH, Kinokuniya and Times it seems that the book is not available in Malaysia. I got my copy from the iBookstore on my iPad, and you can also order the paperback or Kindle edition via Amazon. Happy reading!

Quick review of the Proton Persona

David — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 02:27:48 +0000

Posted in Blog

I recently bought a car

It’s the 1st car that I’ve owned and so far I’ve been very happy with it. This is my unsolicited, layman review of the Proton Persona.

The model I have is the High Line 2010 model (Elegance facelift) which costs RM59,499. It comes with:

1.6-litre Campro IAFM engine
Leather interior upholstry
Automatic transmission
Pre-tinted windows
Dual air bags
Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) with Electronic Brake Distribution (EBD)
Disc brake
Bodykit
Fog lamps
Turning lamps on side mirrors
Blaupunkt car stereo with USB port
Stereo controls on steering wheel
Auto cruise
Free Proton-Lokatoo GPS unit

In the past 2 weeks that I’ve been driving the new Persona, I’ve found it to be a very smooth and comfortable ride. It feels responsive and has pretty good pick up when I put my foot on the accelerator. It’s nicer to drive than my mom’s Hyundai Getz and is definitely comparable to a Honda City.

I’ve enjoyed the nice features like auto cruise, remote boot open and have been piling lots of stuff into the spacious boot–it fits 2 baby strollers with space to spare! Fuel consumption seems to be pretty efficient. A full tank is about RM60-70 and can last for almost 600km.

Not so good–dashboard layout is a little weird, the glove compartment seems a little small. The provided GPS unit is also a dud, too difficult to use and feels cheap. Also, I feel that leg room in the back seat is a bit small, but that’s just me.

Overall, I’m super happy with the car. At less than RM60k, it’s superb value for money and has got more features than something like the Toyota Vios J model. If you’re considering buying a sedan, I highly recommend checking out the Proton Persona.

Other reviews:

Book Review: Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields

[REVIEW] P1 W1MAX-1NSiDE 4G devices

David — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:38:48 +0000

Posted in Blog

Back in June, I was lucky enough to be invited to P1 and Intel’s launch of their embedded WiMAX devices at Sunway Lagoon Resort Hotel. The event, officially dubbed the Launch of Malaysia’s First WiMAX-Inside 4G laptops, felt more like a disco than media event.

They dressed up the hotel’s ballroom and had 3 giant laptops in the front, and there were slick, dressed-up hostesses with face paint who were taking pictures with guests.

The two pics above from TianChad.com – see his post from the event.

Why the face paint? Coz that was the campaign creative:

P1 W1MAX-1NSiDE Review

I was also lucky enough to get a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 which had the new embedded WiMAX chip to test out for 2 weeks. I don’t have any pictures of the device itself because the review is more of the WiMAX service (and also because the Dell still had the cling wrap on it).

So how is the performance of P1 WiMAX on the go? Here’s a speedtest I did from The Curve in Mutiara Damansara:

I was impressed at the sustained download speed of nearly 2Mbps. It’s as good as my DSL Streamyx connection at home.

Here’s another one I did from Kota Kemuning (where I live):

Holy frickin’ crap!!! That’s a sustained download speed of more than 9Mbps. I’ve never seen that on any local broadband provider, so that really blew my socks off (No, I haven’t tested out Unifi yet) and live up to their claims that the service can achieve speeds of 10 Mbps.

Granted, the tests are to servers based in Malaysia but it’s still pretty impressive. Many of the popular sites that I visit with a decent CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Yahoo, YouTube and Facebook loaded really quickly.

Who Needs W1MAX-1NSiDE?

I’m not the target market for these embedded WiMAX devices. I work mainly from a single location (my home office) – plus, I’m a Mac

However, I think these WiMAX-inside netbooks and laptops are great if you

1. Spend lots of time in cafes and on the go. If you mainly use your laptop on the go you’ll find that you’re pretty much tethered to places with WiFi. With WiMAX you don’t need to squeeze into crowded cafes and share the WiFi with everyone else. And on the occasion that you are out of WiMAX coverage, you can always fall back to WiFi since the devices are both WiMAX & WiFi capable.

2. You are a minimalist who likes to travel light. I prefer my MacBook but maybe you like something that is half the weight. And you don’t want to carry extra USB dongles to connect to 3G or WiMAX. These additional dongles also drain your battery faster, so another plus point for embedded WiMAX.

3. You are sick of Streamyx. I have a pretty good Streamyx connection but it’s not very reliable. Just 2 days ago, I had problems connecting. Turns out, apparently someone stole TM’s cables.

Where To Get W1MAX-1NSiDE

If you want to find out more about these embedded WiMAX netbooks and laptops, head on over to www.wimaxinside.com.my.

On the site, you’ll find out details about the plans and the locations where you can buy the devices. They even have an introductory promotion where you get the first 3-6 months WiMAX subscription free and pay a discounted rate if you continue later.

Finally…

Happy birthday P1! Packet One Networks turns 2 today. They’ve done a great job to push innovation and competition in the broadband industry. Thanks for inviting me to the launch and providing me the review unit, and I wish you all the best.

Malaysia awards WiMAX licenses

Reading on the iPad: iBooks vs Kindle

David — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:05:23 +0000

Posted in Blog

So I’ve had my iPad for a little over a month now. By far the thing that I do the most on it is to read ebooks. In fact that was one of my main motivations of buying the iPad in the first place. In this past month, I’ve read at least 3 whole novels on my iPad and this blog post aims to share my experience of using the iPad as an ebook reader.

Books on the iPad comes in many forms, from PDFs that you read with a PDF reader, to apps that only contain a single book, to library-style apps which allow you to download and manage entire book collections. The reading experience depends a lot on what you use to read the text of the book and my review is based on 2 library style apps – Apple’s iBooks app and Amazon’s Kindle app.

(Click on the images for larger versions)

iBooks

Kindle

iBooks vs Kindle

iBooks is a beautifully designed application which makes reading on the iPad a joy. The Kindle app is good enough. Both have some common features:

Automatic sync reading location and bookmarks across all devices that are reading the same book

Multiple font sizes & colours
Change screen brightness
Search
Table of contents & bookmarks
Highlights & notes

Additional iBook features

More fonts to choose from
Much better highlighting and notes feature
Pretty much a lot better looking

Additional Kindle app features

You can also read your Kindle books on other Kindle platforms – the Kindle reader itself, as well as PC or Mac, Android and Blackberry phones.
You can turn off the page flip (I feel that it’s a bit distracting).

I prefer iBooks’ reading experience over Kindle. In iBooks, the line-height and spacing are a lot better, and it has a helpful ‘X pages left in this chapter’ at the bottom of the page. I can’t understand why the Kindle uses a gray background instead of white. If Kindle switches to a white background I would automatically like it twice as much.

Where to Get Books

Unfortunately, getting books into iBooks and Kindle is a bit tricky.

iBooks & iBookstore

iBooks supports ePub and PDF books. ePub files can be copy protected – meaning you can’t email the files to your friends. ePub is also a popular ebook format that is supported by many online book stores. The bad news is that the iPad can only read copy-protected ePub files from the iBookstore. This isn’t Apple’s fault, it’s a feature that publishers require all ebook readers to have.

Luckily, there are places you can find ePub books that are not copy protected. Manybooks is an example of a directory where you can find legal ePub books for free. I’ll let you figure out how to find illegal ePubs on your own

Finally, iBooks also supports PDF. Unfortunately, PDFs don’t enjoy all the same features like a regular ePub. For example, you can’t take notes and resize the text.

If you download ePub or PDF books from the internet, you can easily transfer them to iBooks by importing them into iTunes and syncing with your iPad.

Kindle & Amazon

Being an Amazon product, the Kindle mainly to help Amazon sell paper-less books, and thus Amazon is the main way to get books for the Kindle app. You simply go to Amazon, find the Kindle version of the book and click the ‘Buy now’ button. Next, launch your Kindle and the newly purchased book will download into your iPad. Pretty magical. The other advantage is that the Kindle boasts the largest ebook library in the world.

The Kindle actually also supports other formats like PDF and copy protection-free ePub files. However, you’ll need to email these files to Amazon and pay them to convert it to Kindle format for you. Bummer. I haven’t tried this feature out myself – I’m not about to pay to get my book converted when I can read it in iBooks!

The difficult part is to create an Amazon account that has access to Kindle books. Amazon only has rights to sell ebooks in certain parts of the world, and Malaysia is not on that list. So if you want to use your Kindle, you need to convince Amazon that you are in a country where they can legally sell you ebooks. It’s a pretty complicated process, so I’m glad that I created my Amazon account long ago before these shenanigans. If you want to create an Amazon account today for use with Kindle, you’ll need to do a little research. Here are 2 articles that may be helpful:

Conclusion

Amazon’s Kindle Store beats Apple’s iBookstore hands down in terms of the breadth of the library. The Amazon website offers more browsing and rating features to help me decide which book to buy.

However, in terms of reading experience and the ease of transferring books to the iPad, iBooks comes out on top.

Personally I prefer reading with iBooks. If I can find an ePub or PDF that is not copy-protected I’ll read it in my iBooks. After all, you don’t buy everything you read right? With real books you can borrow from friends. If not, I’ll buy it from Amazon and put up with the bearable reading experience on Kindle. Hopefully the process of creating ePubs will become easier and more and more independent publishers will release their ebooks in ePub format.

I hope this review helped you in your research!

Gallery

Book Review: Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields

David — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:25:47 +0000

Posted in Blog

Before you say anything, yes I know I wasn’t looking directly into the camera. I was looking at the preview, which was just to the left of the lens and didn’t think it would be so obvious. Besides that, I would love any more feedback you may have about the review.

Book Info

Author: Jonathan Fields – read his blog, or follow @jonathanfields on Twitter

Book Website: CareerRenegade.com

Buy the book from Amazon.com

Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields

When you buy the book with the link above, I get paid a small commission by Amazon–thanks!