Jonathan Ong's Blog

Amazon is my favorite online shopping store. It simply has everything you could ever want, the prices aren’t bad, the shipping is free, and there’s no sales tax for Californians. If you have Amazon Prime, you even get free two-day shipping!

A lot of times when you go to Best Buy or something you buy an item that ultimately sucks when you actually want to use it. Instead, let me show you products that you would actually want to keep for a long time and are actually worth their cost. If you want me to recommend anymore items, please let me know.

Gun Safe - Stack – On® 8 – gun Security Cabinet $110. You don’t want to spend too much on a gun safe unless you have kids or think that people are actually going to rob you. I have this at home and it is worth the price. It does what it needs to do although a safe can be much better. If you’re on a budget or don’t need to much safety for your guns, buy this gun safe.

Hammock - Strathwood Portable Folding Hammock with Carry Bag, Chocolate with Champagne Frame $80. I bought this hammock for my beach house and my God is it awesome. For $80 you have a hammock you can fold and take anywhere with you. I used to have a fixed hammock made out of wood, but that eroded thanks to the ocean water. Consider this if you like to go to the beach often.

Wireless Router - Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Simultaneous Dual-Band) (MC340LL/A) $168. The problem with most wireless routers is that they seriously suck. You get disconnected a lot or you can’t even connect. What I love about Apple is that their products seriously just work. I have purchased 4 of these and I haven’t had a single problem. I wouldn’t suggest these in a commercial setting since you can’t set very specific options, but it does perfectly well in a residential setting. Another thing I love about Apple products is the resale value. These won’t depreciate as much as other routers.

Cable Modem - Motorola SB6120 SURFboard DOCSIS 3.0 eXtreme Broadband Cable Modem $120. The problem I had with my cable modem and router leased from Charter is that it would consistently disconnect and I could only plug in 5 devices. With this modem, not only am I able to use any speed Charter or Comcast can offer me, I can plug as many devices as I’d like, and I never get disconnected with a good router like the Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station. Never lease a router or a modem, and buy this modem if you have cable.

Computer Speakers - Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX Certified Computer Speaker System $180. It’s difficult to find good computer speakers, but these are the best 2.1′s. I spent almost $500 on a Logitech Z-5500 Digital 5.1 Speaker System only to replace them with these for less than half the price. Don’t buy Bose speakers, they don’t even compare.

Large Computer Monitor - Dell UltraSharp U2711 27-inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor – Max Resolution 2560 x 1440 (WQHD) $980. This is by far the best computer monitor out there. I only wish that it used LED lighting like Apple does. It has a very good pixel pitch which makes anything look beautiful on the display. It has a 16×9 aspect ratio making it perfect for playing movies. The color gamut is over 100%, making the color reproduction basically perfect out of the box. I have a Dell U2410 24″ Monitor too and this U2711 blows it out of the water.

Headphones - Sennheiser HD-555 Audiophile Headphones $130. These probably aren’t the best headphones ever, but they are the best for the price. You get almost the audio fidelity of expensive headphones at a fraction of the price. The only problem is that there’s no sound insulation; you hear people talking and people can hear your loud music. But for $130, you can’t complain.

SLR Camera - Canon EOS Rebel T2i 18 MP CMOS APS-C Digital SLR Camera with 3.0-Inch LCD and EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Lens $900. I am biased in that I am a Canon user, but right now this is the best valued camera out there. You can record in 1080p and take photos at 18 megapixels. Canons are the most popular SLR format, so you can easily buy, sell, and rent lenses. I recommend these for any non-professional photographer.

Tablet – Apple iPad MB292LL/A Tablet (16GB, Wifi) $600. You want an iPad, but you don’t want to pay the full price or the tax. Simple! Buy it off Amazon! You can buy it brand new for less than $600 shipped. Granted, this iPad should NOT replace your laptop, but it’s nice to have if you have some change laying around. You shouldn’t bother buying the larger capacity iPads or the ones with 3G. They just aren’t worth it. It isn’t an iPod, you shouldn’t be dragging your iTunes library everywhere you go. You only want all the good applications and you want to stream everything. Higher capacity doesn’t add much to the resale value either.

Half the Facebook events I receive are where people try to get everyone’s numbers after losing their phone and somehow people are willing to post their numbers in public. I purposely ignore these invitations as retribution. Here’s a simple guide to setting up your contacts so you never lose your numbers ever again while having the most complete address book possible with minimal effort.

1. If you don’t have one, get a GMail account.
Nothing compares to Google when it comes to integration. I do have Yahoo and Microsoft accounts, but that’s only for Flickr and Bing Shopping respectively. If you refuse to use Gmail, don’t tell me because I will lose respect for you.

2. Take an hour or two and sort your contacts in Gmail.
This isn’t too hard if you never set it up, but I imported all my Facebook contacts information back when FacebookSync was legal and I had more contacts than I ever wanted. This is important because you’ll need proper names to sync your contacts with other services. This is also easy with the suggested contacts feature. And don’t use nicknames, and separate first and last names.

3. Setup Microsoft Exchange on your smartphone and on your PC.
The crucial step: this syncs your contacts, calendars, and email on your smartphone, and syncs your address books and calendars on your PC. It works for both Apple’s Address Book and Microsoft Outlook. Thus, when you set it up, all your contacts and calendars will be synchronized, and iPhones will have push notifications!

4. Download contacts from 3rd party applications.
This includes Facebook and LinkedIn. Whatever information your friends let you see, you can easily transfer it all to your phone using their applications. The only problem with this is when your friends don’t use their real names.

5. Go to your GMail and reorganize your contacts.
Use “merge contacts” since you’ll probably have a lot of duplicate entries. Finally all your contacts will be organized, the same address book will be available to you on all your devices, and you’ll never lose your contacts again.

Even if your smartphone doesn’t have data service, you can use wifi once in a while to sync your contacts.

Unfortunately my laptop screen broke in my luggage while flying to Maryland or driving to Vegas. I’m now stuck without a physical keyboard, which isn’t very productive. This is my experience replacing my iPad with my laptop.

No bittorrenting. I can’t just download True Blood or Mad Men to my iPad and there are no streaming applications for HBO and AMC. I guess I’m missing two weeks worth of TV episodes unless they some how end up on Netflix or Hulu. Hulu and HBO neither stream for free on the iPad, so bittorrent seems to be the only option. These are good shows too… I’m not going to stream them from some crappy website.

I can’t upload pictures to Imgur. This is important since I use it to post pictures for my eBay auctions instead of paying to have eBay post it. I don’t know how I’m going to make good free auctions without a laptop. In fact, I can’t even edit the description section of my eBay listings on my iPad. Safari just won’t let me.

Typing this and any other long post is ridiculous on the iPad and I actually prefer using my iPhone. Typing using two thumbs on the iPad requires way too much hand movement, and using all your fingers blocks the keyboard, making it difficult to type quickly and accurately. I actually prefer typing on my iPhone. The large keyboard also makes my hands tire very quickly.

Most of my work is done using ssh which unlike laptops and PCs isn’t free for the iPad or the iPhone. I had to cough up $10, though I must say that iSSH does everything I needed it to do. The interface is actually quite nice. What I don’t understand is why SSH isn’t included in the iPad or iPhone since they are based off UNIX architectures. Maybe I should’ve jailbroken… But I don’t have a computer to restore my devices if jailbreaking messes it up.

Using an iPad or iPhone for UNIX commands isn’t very friendly though. First of all, the iPad hasn’t gotten multitasking yet, so I can’t look up something on Safari, copy it, then paste it into my SSH. Very annoying. Secondly the keyboard isn’t well suited for UNIX commands. characters like / and | take extra effort to type.

But the best part is that the iPad can do other things more efficiently than laptops. I read a lot of PDFs which is better read on an iPad. Flipboard, HelTweetica, and Bloomberg are amazing applications. However, I still think a laptop is much more valuable than an iPad; iPads are just novelty items. But since I have a desktop at home, I don’t think I’ll be needing a laptop until maybe when I start working full-time, and if I do need one, I’m not spending more than $600.

Old Spice, perhaps the greatest marketing campaign of the decade. The only other campaign that can compare is Dos Equis and the Most Interesting Man in the World. Now perhaps you are not a Redditor, so let me introduce you to the greatest Voicemail Greeting in the world:

• YouTube Link
• Personalized Voicemail Creator
• Reddit Comments

Now the problem is uploading your personalized voicemail greeting to your phone. Sure, you can record it through your speakers, but then the sound quality would be horrible. There are many solutions to this, though I’m only going to introduce two I know for the iPhone.

Solution 1: Mini A/V Cable (Source)

Some cameras come with an A/V cable compatible with the iPhone jack. Connect the obvious jack into your iPhone and the Red jack into your PC audio output. You might need an RCA to audio jack converter, but luckily my sound card has an RCA output. If you’re wondering, the outputs are:

• White: Audio out (L)
• Yellow: Audio out (R)
• Red: Mic level input

The only problem with this cable is that I have no idea where to buy it. I have a few more at home if you’d like to buy them. The input will also only be mono (either left or right), but it doesn’t matter since both left and right output the same audio. You’re going to need the RCA to 3.5mm audio jack input unless your sound card has an RCA output like my HT Omega Claro halo XT.

Otherwise, you’d need a RCA to 3.5mm audio Y splitter adapter, such as this one, to plug into your computer (where my green cable is, which is my speakers). Note that you only need to connect the red RCA jacks together:

Now after plugging in the microphone jack into your computer, you can play the message you’ve created and record it on your iPhone. Make sure you leave the volume on your computer low otherwise you’ll hear a lot of background noise and your voicemail greeting will start clipping; I set my volume to about 10%, whatever that means.

You can do the same over Google Voice, but I didn’t know when to start recording when the jack was plugged in since I can’t hear audio, so I just deactivated Google Voice for now. Expect the quality on Google Voice to be lower since you’ll be recording it over the cell network. If only Google Voice allowed you to upload MP3s as your voicemail greeting… though this may be possible when Gizmo5 returns.

There are other jacks available that would do the same job such as this one, but I don’t know which one is the cheapest and what not. You’ll have to do some research yourself.

Solution 2: SSH into your jailbroken iPhone (Source)

Unfortunately for me, I have an iPhone 4, so I can’t jailbreak it right now. However, suppose you figure out how to jailbreak your phone, you do the following steps:

1. Obviously record/create your voicemail message greeting
2. Convert the message into an .amr file. I’m not sure how to do this, but a quick Google search finds this program.
3. SSH into your phone’s voicemail directory: /private/var/mobile/library/voicemail.
4. Record a quite greeting for a few seconds but don’t hit save yet.
5. Refresh the SSH client, delete that greeting, and copy over the new one.
6. Hit play to make sure that the new one copied over, then save it.

If anyone knows any other ways or how I could improve this tutorial, let me know. I’m not sure about the jailbroken method since I don’t have a jailbroken iPhone, so you should probably consult the source linked in the headline.

Your voicemail is now… DIAMONDS!

I’m sorry fellow BlackBerry users, but I’m moving back to the iPhone again, but this time I’m never returning. I hoped for a worthy competitor to the iPhone, but right now the iPhone is simply a much better phone. I don’t ever plan to test out a Motorola because I’ve had them in the past and grew disdainful of them. I might try Android phones later, but I’m pretty sure an iPhone is better.

The issue with devices nowadays is not of hardware, but of software. Computers and devices are more than powerful enough to do almost anything you want, but software hasn’t been written capable of fully harnessing their power. We have quad-core processors in entry-level desktops but we don’t have much consumer software that actually benefits from having all four cores. The problem with BlackBerries is simply the software: there lacks an abundance of good free software for BlackBerries, and the 3^rd party software available for the BlackBerry are terribly written.

The iPhone has a much better selection of applications than BlackBerries. RIM seems to lack interest from 3^rd party developers since most of their main applications are written by themselves. Facebook is written by RIM which explains why its UI sucks compared to the iPhone’s. Some of their applications aren’t even real applications but just interfaces for their mobile website, for example Bank of America’s. Applications that are actually useful aren’t free for BlackBerries whereas there are free version for iPhone, such as Shazam. BlackBerries would truly be a productive device if there was, say, real Chase Mobile and Bank of America Mobile applications like the iPhone.

My main complaint is that of the few 3^rd party applications I actually use on my BlackBerry, all are very slow, especially Google Maps. It seriously has moments of lag where I’m unable to do anything but watch that black dial spin. Sometimes it seriously takes me one minute to find my current location, other times I have to reset the whole phone by removing the battery before I’m able to transmit any data back and forth from the AT&T server. How am I expected to be productive when I’m waiting for the application to load or think more than half the time?

I think the main reason for BlackBerry’s slow applications is the programming language: Java. Ever try Azureus/Vuze or LimeWire? It’s laggy, huh? It’s because it’s written in Java. Ever get those annoying pop-up errors when browsing websites? Usually it’s due to Javascript, though it’s not exactly Java. All iOS applications are written in Apple’s version of C, which is much faster than Java. Apple banned programmers to use 3^rd party programs to translate their programs to Objective C since it will just make their applications bloated too. This is the main reason applications for the iPhone are much snappier than BlackBerries. iPhone applications never consistently have moments of pure lag.

There are only three things I will miss about my BlackBerry: the ability to make the font size small, the battery life, and BlackBerry Messenger. Small font size is a matter of preference, but the option on the iPhone would be nice. However, the pixel pitch on the iPhone is down right spectacular. However, the long battery life is the main reason I switched from an iPhone to a BlackBerry in the first place, but I bought an external battery to alleviate this problem. I’m not going to miss BlackBerry messenger much though since it’s basically AIM. What would be great is if Facebook made a standalone Facebook Chat application or if it were easy to find your friends on Google Talk.