Archive for 2010

Indoor climbing at Power Up Tandang Sora

Posted by Mikko at 30 December 2010

Category: Personal

Tags:

Wall climbing is one of the things I really missed doing for the past few months. I first fell in love with wall climbing days before Valentine’s Day during the UP Fair 2010. Grip UP and Power Up Tandang Sora put up a climbing wall at the Sunken Garden for the fair.

Since then, I started visiting Power Up Tandang Sora (climbing gym) from time to time, bringing with me random friends. There were even times when I went there almost every other day that I decided to subscribe to two-week gym memberships.

Although strenuous, wall climbing is a very fun activity. It provides a glimpse of outdoor rock climbing in a controlled environment. Not only it will help you develop endurance, strength and power, it may also reinforce your willpower (to reach the top :D ).

How to go to Power Up Tandang Sora

For those who want to give indoor climbing a shot, you may visit Power Up Tandang Sora at 690 Tandang Sora Avenue, Old Balara, Quezon City. From Quezon Memorial Circle, enter Commonwealth, turn right on the street (Tandang Sora Avenue) right after Mercury Drug and KFC then finally turn right on the first street. You should see Power Up there.

Cost of climbing at Power Up Tandang Sora

For first-timers, it should cost you around PHP 220.00 (not sure). Included here is the climbing fee, equipment rental and belay card. For your succeeding climbing sessions, it should cost around PHP 200.00 (still unsure; PHP 150 for climbing fee and PHP 50 for equipment rental). In case you decide to make it a hobby, you may also avail of their 14-day (or two-week) gym membership at PHP 600 or a month membership at PHP 1,300. The membership will only cover for your climbing fee.

Here are some tips for those who want to try it out:

  • Don’t hesitate to try it just because you don’t have any climbing experience. Everyone who’ve tried it had a first time, too! The gym staff will teach you how to use their equipment safely. They will even issue you a belay card that you can brag to your friends!
  • Try to bring a friend with you. You will have to pay an extra for a belayer. Alternatively if you are friendly enough, you may make friends there and ask them to belay you. :D
  • Bring extra clothes. You should be comfortable with your climbing clothes. It should not be too tight nor too loose.

Looking forward to climbing again next year!

4 Comments

[Android How-to] Globe Telecom, Smart, SUN GPRS, 3G Internet

Posted by Mikko at 28 December 2010

Category: Android, How-To, Mobile

Tags: , , , ,

For those who want to know how to setup their Android devices to work with Globe Telecom, Smart or Sun Cellular mobile Internet, you may follow these simple steps.

  1. Press the Menu button.
  2. Then tap Settings.
  3. Choose Wireless & networks (usually the first option unless you have custom UI [e.g. HTC Sense UI, Samsung TouchWiz UI])
  4. Select Mobile networks.
  5. Then go to Access Point Names.
  6. Press the Menu button.
  7. Then tap New APN.
  8. Supply the following settings:
  • For Globe Telecom
    • Name: GLOBE (or anything you want)
    • APN: http.globe.com.ph
    • LEAVE THE REST OF THE FIELDS AS-IS
  • For Smart and Talk and Text
    • Name: SMART (or anything you want)
    • APN: internet
    • LEAVE THE REST OF THE FIELDS AS-IS
  • For SUN PREPAID
    • Name: SUN (or anything you want)
    • APN: minternet
    • Authentication type: PAP
    • LEAVE THE REST OF THE FIELDS AS-IS
  • For SUN POSTPAID or line
    • Name: SUN (or anything you want)
    • APN: fbband
    • Authentication: PAP
    • LEAVE THE REST OF THE FIELDS AS-IS

For SUN Prepaid and Postpaid, you may need to activate mobile internet service. You may request service activation by calling 888.

Enjoy your Internet!

30 Comments

UPCAT Results 2011

Posted by Mikko at 28 December 2010

Category: RSS-

Based on experience, University of the Philippines College Admission Test, or simply UPCAT, results are usually released on the second Friday or Saturday of January. Most probably, it will be on January 7-8 or 14-15.

UPCAT Results will be released on January 3, 2011. Aside from the Internet, other ways to check if you’ve passed UPCAT is by going to the Office of Admissions of the UP Campus nearest you.

2 Comments

Plurk removes karma limit

Posted by Mikko at 22 December 2010

Category: Internet

Earlier today, I read several plurks on my timeline saying that their karmas reached 100.01. I immediately checked my karma and yes, it was 100.01 too. At first I thought that they had a 0.01 karma give-away triggering a bug for those with 100 karma.

Just a few minutes ago, @plurkbuddy officially announced that they are removing the upper bound for the karma. The announcement said “Have you reached 100 Karma and are you bored now? We have a solution – Karma is unlimited now! Enjoy!”

Actually, I didn’t care much about my karma since I reached karma 100. What do you think about the recent change?

Plurk is a social networking and microblogging tool popular mostly in South East Asia, just like Twitter. Users post updates where people can reply. These updates are laid on a scrollable horizontal timeline. Replies are shown in a threaded way, unlike in Twitter. Karma is a measure of user’s activity.

Curious about Plurk? Join Plurk now.

2 Comments

Coins, ADHD, etc

Posted by Mikko at 15 December 2010

Category: Personal, Programming, Random

Tags: , , ,

I am the kind of person who really hates sticking into a routine. Everyday, I try to inject something new in my life. I do a lot of different stuff. I also read a lot of random stuff, excluding fiction.

As I was skimming the Top 500 Non-individual Taxpayers of 2009 earlier tonight, I happened to notice Golden Arches Development Corporation at Rank 95. Golden Arches is the corporation behind McDonald’s Philippines. Because of that, my stomach began growling but as far as I knew then I only had 20 pesos in my pocket.

As time passed, my hunger intensified. Hungry, I searched for the room for coins. I found coins on the floor, my bag, the cabinet, among others. I was able to collect 11 5-peso coins, 146 1-peso coins and 8 25-centavo coins (which one of them I later discovered to be a 1964 5-centavo coin).

Crazy as it may sound, even though I can already afford to eat at McDonald’s already I decided to sort the coins according to year before eating. First thing I did was to create a MySQL database for it. Then I wrote the PHP app where I’ll encode the coins. After which I started encoding data for my 1-peso coins. I made sure that the data in the database are correct by checking it on my physical count every ten coins. I failed to encode the year of one 1-peso coin since it was already mutilated to the point the year is not recognizable already.

Here’s the result in coin-graph:

And here’s the dump from MySQL sorted by year and by frequency:

As you may notice, among the 145 1-peso coins I had no 2005 1-peso coin. Oldest coins minted back in 1995 whilst my latest coins in 2010. As expected, 2010 coins took the lead. I can’t seem to understand why I got a lot of 2004 coins. I speculate that the Central Bank over-minted coins in 2004 to the point that they halted production for 2005. Another observation was that all of my coins minted from 2004 onwards were magnetic. I also got 3 magnetic 2003 1-peso coins out of the 10 I have in possession.

Enough of those coin stuff. Way back in high school, some of my classmates and even teachers suspect that I have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). I tried running through the symptoms of ADHD in Wikipedia and now I’m diagnosing myself with ADHD. Hahaha.

Here’s the list of symptoms (those highlighted in blue are the things that apply to me [I think]):

  • Be easily distracted, miss details, forget things, and frequently switch from one activity to another
  • Have difficulty maintaining focus on one task
  • Become bored with a task after only a few minutes, unless doing something enjoyable [sorting coins is enjoyable!!]
  • Have difficulty focusing attention on organizing and completing a task or learning something new or trouble completing or turning in homework assignments, often losing things (e.g., pencils, toys, assignments) needed to complete tasks or activities
  • Not seem to listen when spoken to [rarely]
  • Daydream, become easily confused, and move slowly
  • Have difficulty processing information as quickly and accurately as others
  • Struggle to follow instructions
  • Fidget and squirm in their seats
  • Talk nonstop [do I need to elaborate on this???]
  • Dash around, touching or playing with anything and everything in sight [and everyone, LOL]
  • Have trouble sitting still during dinner, school, and story time
  • Be constantly in motion
  • Have difficulty doing quiet tasks or activities
  • Be very impatient
  • Blurt out inappropriate comments, show their emotions without restraint, and act without regard for consequences
  • Have difficulty waiting for thingI think my friends would agree on me s they want or waiting their turns in games

There you go. If you know me well I think you’ll have to agree with me. On the Wikipedia article, it also says “Untreated adults with ADHD often have chaotic lifestyles, may appear to be disorganized and may rely on non-prescribed drugs and alcohol to get by.” LOL.

11 Comments

How To: Install Adobe Flash Player on 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Posted by Mikko at 6 November 2010

Category: How-To, Linux

Tags: ,

There was a time when Adobe decided to pull out the 64-bit version of Adobe Flash Player from their websites after they discovered a security hole on a certain version. Just recently, they’ve released a Adobe Flash Player 10.2 for 64-bit Linux machines. This one will surely be safer, and better than the previous one.

It’s easy enough to install it on your Debian-based (e.g. Ubuntu 10.10 [Meerkat], Ubuntu 10.04 [Lucid Lynx], etc) machine. Just copy-and-paste the following on your Terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal), press [ENTER] then enter your password and you are good to go!

wget http://conradmiguel.com/flash.sh
chmod +x flash.sh
sudo ./flash.sh

Enjoy your Flash Player!

12 Comments

Graphing my sleep

Posted by Mikko at 26 October 2010

Category: Android, Mobile, Programming

Tags:

Hello guys. I’m finally in General Santos City (GenSan) now for semestral break. Since it’s one of the few moments of the year when I can do pretty much anything I want to do, I did not waste this opportunity to bring back the geek in me.


Sleep Cycle iPhone app. I also have my own sleep graph, as seen way below this one

Before I left Manila for GenSan, I read this article from Lifehacker about the Five Best Mobile Alarm Apps. One alarm caught my attention, the Sleep Cycle. Sadly, there wasn’t an Sleep Cycle for Android; only for iPhone. Being obsessed with data, the only thing I wanted was the raw data in order to make a graph. And so I decided to make a prototype application for it.

Developing it was pretty easy. I just googled for a sample code in detecting movements using an Android phone’s accelerometer. The one I found was pretty much straightforward but I had to modify some equations most especially the ones described as the speed.

I had to experiment with different movement threshold values for the sensitivity until I found the one I think would suit my needs. I also had to experiment on the time intervals between recording of raw data. In storing the raw data, I had to decide whether to store only the timestamp of the start time then the raw values after each interval OR store the timestamp and the raw value in each time interval. I decided to implement the first one for my first dry-run.

Once I thought everything was alright (I started at 2am and ended by around 7am leaving me with no night sleep), I decided to give it a shot by actually sleeping with the app. When I woke up, I excitedly tried to analyze the data but sadly the phone measured way more data than expected. I decided to just discard the data and debug the app. This was the time I decided to use the latter in storing the data. Store the timestamp plus raw data for each time interval.

So that night (actually last night), I decided to sleep with the app again. Upon waking up earlier today, I tried to check the data and it seemed that it recorded the data the way I expected it to. I immediately tried to learn how to use the RRDtool (Round Robin Database tool) so that I can feed it with the data and finally come up with a graph. In no time, I got a visualization of my sleep, as seen above.

You can see from the graph that I entered sleep at around 12:20am and woke up at 4:50am. Also evident are the parts where my movements were higher than usual, probably the times I was dreaming. For the next few sleeps, I’m planning to feed them the data directly on my laptop instead of having it stored on the phone then later transferred to my laptop. I will make a portal where my sleeping activity is readily available on the Internet in realtime using PHP, a cron job and Dynamic DNS for domain resolution to my network.

I haven’t felt this geek for a while and I’m happy to be one again even just for this project. I am looking forward to making more geek stuff, preferably with Android.

3 Comments

Birthday, WordCamp Philippines 2010, Ubuntu 10.10

Posted by Mikko at 3 October 2010

Category: Events, Linux, Personal, Wordpress Stuff

Tags: , , , ,

Three days ago, I turned a year older. I don’t have much to say about my birthday except for the early birthday gift I got, a system-canceled passport application appointment from the Department of Foreign Affairs. There’s a high probability that my trip to Hong Kong won’t push through. Aside from that, there’s really nothing so special about my birthday.

Yesterday, I attended my first WordCamp ever. I registered for WordCamp for the past two years but due to unseen circumstances I wasn’t able to make it. I arrived there very late, 4pm (it started at 8am). It was fun to see bloggers I last saw a year or two ago. After the event, I went out with some bloggers to socialize.

In a week, Canonical will be releasing yet another version of Ubuntu. It will be Ubuntu 10.10. Just a trivia, Ubuntu does have a unique convention for their version numbers. Ubuntu 10.10 means it will be released on October 2010. They use the YY.MM format instead of the usual version numbers.

I think that would be all for now. Bye.

3 Comments

Chase your dreams

Posted by Mikko at 2 September 2010

Category: Personal

Last month, I wrote a blog post from an Android phone for the first time using my HTC Dream. Just a trivia, the HTC Dream was the first phone in the market that used the Android OS. During the last days of the same month, I bought the twin of my dream phone Nexus One – the HTC Desire.

Two days before August ended, I rewarded myself by buying an airplane ticket to Hong Kong. Since early August, I’ve been obsessed by the idea of going to Hong Kong or Singapore. There were countless nights when I slept late just to read Hong Kong and Singapore online travelogues.

In these two instances lie something common – I chased my dreams. I think it’s safe to assume that everyone of us has a set of dreams and aspirations in life but I believe I dream more compared to an average person, and you can, too. I must admit that my dreams are my motivation. The more I dream (postscript: I think obsess is a better word for me) about something, the more I work hard to attain it.

You don’t have start small. Don’t be afraid to try every opportunity that comes into your way that might help you reach your dream, no matter how big they are. Last July, there was this opportunity to work for the Google Word of Mouth project. At first I was hesitant to try it. I was starting to doubt my capabilities. Eventually, I gave it a try and fortunately I succeeded. Not only did I gain experience but I also got a chance to meet and work with interesting and inspiring people (including Googlers).

Chase your dreams! For those who are still confused on how to do it, here’s an article from eHow: How to Chase your Dream.

4 Comments

First post using WordPress app for Android

Posted by Mikko at 20 August 2010

Category: Google, Mobile, Wordpress Stuff

Tags:

Hey, I’m doing my first post using the WordPress app I just downloaded from the Android Market!

The app is really intuitive. It’s very easy to add a blog, no need to edit WordPress settings or install a plugin on your blog. It works for wordpress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs. Soon when I have access to my laptop I’ll grab a screenshot and post it here.

The physical keyboard of the Android Dev Phone 1 (an HTC Dream variant) makes it easy to write this post. Up to now I’m still not used to the touchscreen on-screen keyboard of this one, unlike the Nexus One. Maybe it’s because of the larger screen.

That’s all I got to say right now. Good night.

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