I have been playing around with Mobile Phones a lot lately. But I have been playing around with Nokia phones for a lot longer. My first phone was a Nokia phone and I have had three Nokia phones since 2000. So Symbian is really special to me and I think it is a very solid mobile phone operating system. The only problem is the Apple iPhone OS as well as the Google Android mobile operating systems have really surpassed Nokia’s Symbian OS. For the last couple of years Symbian has been talking about releasing their code into the Open Source community. Well they have finally released all of the code as Open Source!
Now I feel as though this is really important for Nokia, but I feel as though it might be a little too late. But if anyone can revitalize the Symbian OS I think it would be the Open Source Community. I was actually a little worried about S60 because Nokia had released a new phone distro called Maemo. The Maemo OS seemed like it was a new attempt for Nokia to look at the mobile phone market and kick Symbian to the curb.
I guess we can only wait and see. But the real question I am wondering is what does this mean for my old Nokia N95?
Btw this wallpaper is from 海派甜心! Rainie is so cute! Even though she is covered up
So I am a newbie when it comes to Ubuntu. I have been playing around with Ubuntu for several years, but 9.04 and 9.10 are the first distros that I have really used. In fact I am now running a HTPC with Ubuntu and a desktop with Ubuntu, then of course I have my Macbook Pro. So anyways I was talking with a friend of mine about Ubuntu. He was telling me about some commands that he thought I would need to know for the terminal. While we were talking he told me about an Easter Egg that he found in Ubuntu. If you open the terminal and type in “sudo apt-get moo” you will be in for a treat. I just love the humor that the open source community has. But on a more serious note Ubuntu 9.10 is a very solid release and I think it is just about as easy to install as Windows and Mac OS X. So I think Microsoft and Apple really need to be paying attention to this sector in the computing world, otherwise they will be in a world of hurt say 2-4 years from now. So anyways if your a Linux user try out this silly little command Have fun!
Oh P.S. If you know any other Easter Eggs in Ubuntu please leave a comment. I would be interested to see some more! Thanks everyone!
Hi everyone! Well I think most of you all that are consistant readers here on my blog know that I am learning Mandarin Chinese! Well I have decided to start a personal little blog on Blogger that I will be writing in Chinese. I still have a long way to go but I will be trying to write something in it every day, a few sentences. So if you speak Chinese I would like to encourage you in helping me! If you see some incorrect grammar or a misused word, please help correct me. I really want to learn. Thank you so much! The URL is http://branhowjournal.blogspot.com/
Well I am finally getting around to uploading this video. I am really enjoying my Acer Aspire. I am posting a link at the end of this post to Best Buy, which is where I bought mine. I sold my MSI Wind U100 *tear* so I could purchase this nettop box. It is running Ubuntu 9.10 beautifully and I have installed all the additional resources I needed. I did purchase another gig stick because I noticed playing back higher quality video was a little lagging even with the Ion chipset. But this little computer can support up to 4 gigabytes of RAM. I was highly impressed. Installing the RAM is almost as easy as installing it on a laptop. The hard drive space is also lacking (160 gigabytes) but I just attached a portable 250 gigabyte USB drive I had lying around. So anyways I hope you enjoy the unboxing! Thanks for watching.
Well I have been looking for a place to get some business cards printed. Actually for what I want them for it would be more of a call card (name, mobile number, email and blog). I heard someone recommend moo.com. They said the print quality was excellent and they were professional looking cards. I am really wondering if anyone else has had any experience with them? I am very interested in purchasing some “minicards” from them. They seem pretty casual to just hand out to someone at a party or something. So if anyone has had any experience with them please leave a comment! Thanks
Well this is the television show that I have been mentioning to write about! I stumbled across it as I was surfing youtube this past week. I had seen a advertisement on http://silentregrets.com but I did not check it out because I did not recognize the main characters! lol Show Luo and Rainie Yang are the two stars in this Taiwanese drama. I am not really a fan of their music but I really enjoyed Show Luo in Corner with Love (轉角*遇到愛) and Rainie Yang in Devil Beside You (惡魔在身邊) and a movie called Spider Lillies. I like some of their songs especially the opening theme song for Hi, My Sweetheart.
Show Luo plays a stereotypical nerd/geek/dork that is trying to get away from his overprotective da jie, but in order for him to do this he has to travel to Hangzhou. As he arrives at his new found college he eventually is introduced to Rainie Yang. Rainie is playing the college troublemaker that everyone despises. Well Show Luo and Rainie Yang fall in love and if you ask me it is the weirdest relationship I have ever seen. It is probably weirder than a 5 foot man dating a Scandinavian woman. lol But even though their relationship is extremely weird, it is rather cute and entertaining. Unfortunately as the show progresses Rainie ends up “breaking up” with Show. Show then declares that he will never be fooled by love again and changes everything about him. Three years after they both have graduated from college they meet again. Well I do not want to ruin the plot of the show so I am going to end it there for the description.
There are several reasons that I became attracted to this show. First off as I said I have enjoyed some shows that Show Luo and Rainie Yang have done in the past. I also really enjoy the animated way that the show is filmed and written. Hi, My Sweetheart is the closest thing to an anime but with actual people. The storyline is a little bit far fetched but this drama has really captivated my attention. I probably should of been focusing on my school work this week but I have been blowing it off because of this show. I normally try not to watch a lot of television, but this show is really engaging. So anyways I hope you check it out and enjoy! Until next time!
P.S. The show is still in progress but I think I can safely rate this show a 4 out of 5 stars.
I am sorry I cannot go too much into detail, but you who know me know what I have been doing the past two summers. I have been blessed to serve in certain areas of the world. But I am at a stand still right now. I feel as though two doors are opening and I need to figure out which door He wants me to go through. I have been praying for guidance and then about a day later I had an interesting dream. I am going to share this dream with everyone.
Okay I might need to clarify some things so please just bear with me. The dream started out like this. I was at Northwood Temple Academy (my old high school) in a classroom that I never had class in. It was one of the elementary classrooms. Except this time there were tables lined up in the classroom and a bunch of people were in the classroom. On the tables were articles of clothing, I believe they were going to be donated somewhere. Anyways a friend of mine from Asia (Brandy) she is a woman that was responsible for helping me with a missions trip I did in the past. I see her and we begin talking about a missions conference. I cannot remember the conversation word for word but I do instinctively remember the discussion about a missions conference. Anyways after I finish talking with my friend I go to a white board on one of the walls. This room had four huge whiteboards on all four walls of the room. I begin drawing mountains with a blue marker on all of the boards. After I finished drawing them on the last board I woke up.
So I have been praying about what to do this summer. I have an opportunity to travel to Hong Kong or Beijing. That is why I have been asking for guidance. I believe this dream may be one of many confirmations.
Happy late New Year everyone! It has been a while since I last wrote a blog post. I have been going through a decent amount of stuff. Some of you know that my grandma had a stroke almost a month ago and I have been trying to hold down the house and see my grandma. But she seems to be recovering well all things considered. So thank you for all of your prayers!
The title Kung Fu and Race Cars kind of tells the topic of this blog. I recently purchased a movie called “Thunderbolt”. This is a Jackie Chan film that was released in 1995 and is one of my favorite movies. I had recorded this movie on VHS a long long time ago and used to love watching it all the time. Well once I switched to DVDs and now Bluray this movie had long been lost in the pile of decaying VHS tapes.
The cool thing is that I was browsing Best Buy after the holidays I found another classic Jackie Chan movie that I also loved. Rumble in the Bronx. Best Buy was offering the movie for $3 on DVD, so needless to say I bought it. Well this movie reminded me of this other film Thunderbolt. I found it on Amazon for around $6 on DVD. No bluray, but your player can upconvert it.
Well anyways Thunderbolt is a movie about a guy that works for a tow truck company in Hong Kong. He also helps the police force in Hong Kong with detecting illegally modified cars for street racing. As Jackie is helping the police force one day in capturing a fugitive, he ends up bargaining for more than what he was hoping for. This movie has nice car chase scenes and pretty cool martial arts stunts. I read somewhere on the internet that this film is considered one of the most expensive movies ever in HK. Anyways I really wanted to write a quick post about this movie because it has been such a long time favorite of mine. Hope you check it out! Until next time!
December 15, 2009 So this post arrived a little later than I was hoping. This is the second segment of a three part series discussing my decision to drop my iPhone. Today I am going to discuss some of the positive features that I am enjoying with my new T-Mobile G1.
Feature 1- I unlocked it without having to jailbreak it. I simply called T-Mobile and within 24 hours they emailed me an unlock code. The G1 is a quad-band phone so I can use it with any GSM carrier in the world.
Feature 2: The phone supports microSD cards so I can add bigger storage as they become cheaply available. Found a 16 gigabyte microSD card for $40 on newegg! So now I have all of my music, podcasts, videos and pictures on my phone.
Feature 3- a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus. Now keep in mind I was switching over from an iPhone 3G, which has a 2 megapixel camera with no autofocus.
Feature 4- I can install apps easily that are not in the Google Market store.
Feature 5- The battery life is definitely worst than the iPhone, but at least I can remove the battery and swap it out. I found another battery for around $15 dollars on Amazon. This gives me more than a full days worth of heavy usage.
Feature 6- I can sync my phone with any operating system. Even though I mostly sync my G1 with iTunes on my Macintosh, at least I have the option.
This are the main features that I really enjoy with my new G1. Now with all things there are the pros and cons. In my next blog post I will discuss some of the negative features about the T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream).
Yes you read this title correctly! I have successfully ditched my iPhone 3G. Apple has shown me just how important open software really is. This is why I switched to the HTC Dream (aka T-Mobile G1). Well first off your probably thinking I am crazy for switching from an Apple iPhone. While the Android Market is still lacking in variety I feel as though there is a lot of promise. Allow me to point out some reasons why I switched from the iPhone 3G.
Reason 1: The iPhone is locked to AT&T. Now remember I jailbroke my iPhone 3G and was using the recent update by geohot. The iPhone 3G runs great on T-Mobile. So why would I be complaining about it being locked? Well I have never seen a GSM mobile phone that you could not obtain an unlocked code for and use it on any other GSM carrier (provided it was a tri-band or quad-band phone). I feel as though since I bought the phone I should be able to do with it as I please. It is my property, not AT&T’s or Apple’s iPhone. I have jailbroken iPod Touches in the past so I knew what I was up against, but it really just pisses me off at how Apple tries to prevent people from jailbreaking and unlocking. It really is just becoming a pain. AT&T and Apple say thats just how it is, well I have been to countries to offer the iPhone 3G and 3GS completely unlocked and you can use them on any GSM carrier in the world. So nice try AT&T and Apple. (Hong Kong is one of them)
Reason 2: Apple controls the App Store like a full fledge dictatorship. Why is this important? Well one example would be the fact that Apple will not allow Adobe to release their Flash player for the iPhone. They have a working program, but Apple will not approve it. While Adobe Flash is releasing their software across multiple smart phones in the first half of 2010. The point is there is no open development with the Apple SDK. A developer can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and succesfully develop an app ready for release, but Apple could still choose not to allow it to have access to the App Store. Ultimately I think that the open development in the Android Market will surpass the iTunes App Store.
Reason 3: The last and most important reason I left the iPhone is merely a political statement. I recently have been more and more supportive of open source software. Even though the Android operating system is not completely open source, most of it is. All of the Google apps are of course closed source. I am also hoping that others will make this stand against Apple. We need to send Apple a message so maybe they will reconsider their agenda and the rights that we have as consumers.
Well tomorrow I will do another post that will list all of the positives with the T-Mobile G1 and the Android OS.
But on a more serious note Ubuntu 9.10 is a very solid release and I think it is just about as easy to install as Windows and Mac OS X. So I think Microsoft and Apple really need to be paying attention to this sector in the computing world, otherwise they will be in a world of hurt say 2-4 years from now. So anyways if your a Linux user try out this silly little command 
If you see some incorrect grammar or a misused word, please help correct me. I really want to learn. Thank you so much! The URL is 
December 15, 2009 So this post arrived a little later than I was hoping. This is the second segment of a three part series discussing my decision to drop my iPhone. Today I am going to discuss some of the positive features that I am enjoying with my new T-Mobile G1. 
Reason 2: Apple controls the App Store like a full fledge dictatorship. Why is this important? Well one example would be the fact that Apple will not allow Adobe to release their Flash player for the iPhone. They have a working program, but Apple will not approve it. While Adobe Flash is releasing their software across multiple smart phones in the first half of 2010. The point is there is no open development with the Apple SDK. A developer can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and succesfully develop an app ready for release, but Apple could still choose not to allow it to have access to the App Store. Ultimately I think that the open development in the Android Market will surpass the iTunes App Store. 
