Happy 50th birthday! As we celebrate this milestone together, I’m reminded of how much I love you. I love your awesome natural wonders, your beautiful people, your colorful celebrations and your delicious food.. mmm, I love me a good nasi lemak.
Of course, things aren’t always great. No country is perfect. I don’t blame you, I blame the twats who have grown thick in the head after staying in power for so long. I’m sure we’ll fix the problem in time.
Malaysia is my home and I’m proud to call myself Malaysian. I love you more each year and I want my children to love you as much as I do.
Happy Malaysia Day, and may you grow ever more beautiful every year.
Recently I’ve started to wake up at 5am to get a head start to my day. I usually rise this early 4-6 times a week. I’ve found that I manage to accomplish a lot more when I wake up so early. Some days I begin the work day at 6am, other days I go for a run first. All in all, waking up at 5am is a real productivity booster.
The problem is that by lunch time, I’ve already been awake for 6-7 hours and I’m tired out. I need a nap to top off my batteries if I want to make it through the day. Afternoon naps FTW! And with all that “practice”, I’ve developed a few tips to make make the most of my naps.
Most important tip: Naps should be 15-20 minutes long only, 30 minutes at most. Any longer and you’re more likely to be groggy the rest of the day. Read More »
Many people go self-employed and gleefully say, “look at all the things I can do.” Self-employment offers the freedom to say YES to all sorts of interesting projects that they wouldn’t have time for with a full-time job.
But the true freedom offered by self-employment is the ability to say NO. Now you can choose to avoid mediocre projects, uninteresting obligations and avoid the drudgery of chores you had no choice but to do when you had a job.
Your time is precious and irreplaceable, so you should absolutely be saying NO more often than YES. Now you can focus your time on the projects that actually excite you, your family and loved ones, your calling – i.e. the stuff that truly matters.
You’ve created your WooCommerce store, uploaded all your products and are ready to accept payments via PayPal. But how would you know if PayPal will play nice with your store?
Most people will make a small purchase with a friend’s PayPal account as a live test. But that costs real money and is annoying if you have to test multiple times. This post explains how to test the payment system using the PayPal Sandbox.
The PayPal Sandbox is a place where you can test your shopping cart and other PayPal integrations in a realistic way, except that no money changes hands. This means you can test your PayPal processes in the Sandbox and know they will behave the same on the when you go live.
Had to figure this out earlier today and figured others might be looking for an answer too. I am assuming that:
You are using MAMP with the default ports (80 for Apache)
You are using Parallels with Windows 7 (although these steps should work for older versions too)
Step 1: Setup your local environment with MAMP
This step is pretty straightforward. If you put your website in /sitename should be able to load it at http://localhost/sitename/.
Here’s a helpful tutorial. Don’t forget to set your Apache and MySQL ports to the default 80 and 3306.
Step 2: Figure out your Mac’s IP address on the network
Go into your Mac’s Network Preferences. You’ll see 2 or more connections on the left and the active one will say Connected. Click on it and you’ll see the IP address on the right side of the pane.
To make sure your Mac’s IP address doesn’t change, click on Advanced → TCP/IP. The options sheet below appears.
Change the IPV4 option to Using DHCP with manual address and type in an unused IP address. In the example above I used 192.168.1.100. Read More »
Google Reader is “retiring” next week. Like many I have been looking for a replacement. Feedly is a service I have been using and quite like. However I also took the opportunity to experiment with a feed reader that I’ve heard about for years called Fever.
Developed by Shaun Inman, Fever is a web app, not a desktop app. I like it so much that its made me enjoy RSS again and relegated Feedly to my backup RSS reader.
Why Fever is awesome
Hot Links
Traditional RSS readers get crowded and overwhelming when you subscribe to a lot of feeds. With Fever, it actually reads your feeds and compiles the most frequently talked about links into a Hot Links page. So the more links you follow, the better Fever gets.
Click to embiggen
I wondered how well this would work. I’m glad to say it works great. Fever constantly shows me the top Apple and WordPress news: exactly the news I want to see. Read More »
I’ve got this relationship with Apple that is unique among all the other brands that I use.
I love Apple. At least 10x more than any other brand.
I honestly believe that they make products with the singular goal of enhancing its users lives. Apple can and usually does things in their own way. But their decisions are based on making my day more productive, my experiences more immersive and my tools more delightful. That’s why they obsess over details.
Apple recently unveiled their Designed by Apple campaign at WWDC 2013. In the video above that explains their reason for being, they say:
We spend a lot of time
On a few great things.
Until every idea we touch
Enhances each life it touches.
Cynics will say that it’s just marketing or hippy bullshit.
I say it’s proof that Apple makes its products for people, not “markets”. Real people like my mom, not numbers who make up sales figures. It’s proof that Apple cares.
I’ve been playing a game on my iPad called Subway Surfers (it’s available for Android too). In the game you control an avatar running along the train track. You have to pick up trains, jump over barriers, and dodge trains! As you progress the speed increases so you’re almost flying past the tracks and trains. Sooner or later the inevitable happens – you smash headlong into a train.
It occurred to me today that running your own business feels like a lot like playing Subway Surfers. You’re constantly chasing your paycheck, you dodge problems after problem, but inevitably you smack into one. In the game, you can simply restart but in your business you’re going to waste time, lose money or worse – your reputation.
Moral of today’s random musing: Practice running your business, not Subway Surfers 😀
Forecast.io is a web-based weather app that tells you the weather in a beautiful, easy to use interface. Every other weather website I use is clunky, slow and full of ugly ads – I’m looking at you Yahoo! Weather. Most weather websites will tell you what the weather is right now, but to see what it will be this afternoon it requires a few clicks and page loads to get there. With Forecast, you scroll down and click on Today and you’ll see the day’s hourly forecast laid out in an easy to understand bar graph.
Forecast.io excels at being fast. It detects your location so you don’t have to type it in. It takes 1 click to view the day’s forecast. And it’s mobile too. Load it up on your mobile and it will prompt you to save it as a home screen app.
My only quibble is that Forecast seems to have a lot of “Light Rain” reports when it’s only cloudy. Either that or it really does know when it’s just sprinkling outside. Either way, Forecast.io is now my go to app for checking the weather. It’s super useful for me to decide when to go running.
Many people (especially Malaysians) love free stuff. Free is good on your wallet but a lot of times there isn’t many other benefits.
Free stuff inevitably goes away. The latest casualty is Google Reader – there wasn’t a business model for it, and Google needed to direct it’s resources elsewhere so they canned it. Via the official Google Reader blog:
There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.
The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.
Free stuff turns you into a product to be sold to advertisers, since you’re not the customer. Bruce Schneier summarized our relationship with Facebook (it’s the same with Google):
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product,” Schneier said. “Its customers are the advertisers.
I always find it strange that people would put up with annoying ads so that they can play games for free. If you like it and it provides value, pay the $0.99 for the game lah! If there are products and services that you use and like, please ensure their continuity by being a paying customer. Or donate if they are a non-profit organization like Wikipedia (donate here).
This is why I subscribe to Basecamp, Hootsuite Pro, Evernote Premium, Fastmail, Gravity Forms Developer License, and too many more to list. Maybe I’m very lucky to have the financial ability to pay for stuff I use, but I don’t smoke, don’t have a Starbucks or drinking habit, and try not to eat out that much. So next time you want to jailbreak your phone so you can install a $0.99 app, consider skipping the pack of smokes instead.
