Thursday, December 30, 2010

Angry Birds iPhone 4 Case

The heat for Angry Birds is still ongoing.. Now with the latest geek from Gear4..
The Angry Birds iPhone 4 snap on case!
















It comes with 3 colours at the moment, the red and yellow birds as well as the green piggy!
It is selling for £24.99 per piece.



Monday, December 20, 2010

TSA Luggage Lock

Heard of such kind of luggage lock?
I stumbled into one when I wanted to get myself a luggage lock. TSA stands for Transport Security Administration.

There are 2 main TSA approved suppliers: 



Travel Sentry














 Safe Skies














In some cases, most likely always happen in airport, screeners will open your luggage bags for further checking. If your bag has the TSA certified lock, then it would not be a problem. The screeners will be able to open the lock with a special tool and inspect the content of the luggage without damaging the locks.
If you do not have a TSA recognized locks, then the locks may have to be broken. The worst part is that you will not be allowed to claim for damage of your locks or zippers on the bag.
There are also some TSA locks which has indicators that the security officer had open the lock. Usually it's marked in red near the body of the lock.

Example of a TSA accepted luggage lock.

Friday, December 17, 2010

iPhone Apps Review: Infinity Blade

This is a new sword fighting action type of game.
Best part about this game is definitely the graphics. On the retina display of the iPhone 4, the graphics are just perfect.


The game is priced at $5.99
by Chair Entertainment Group, LLC







It starts off with a short clip of what had happened earlier.

































Notice that there is this "Start Bloodline 6". Each time you succeed/fail, the number increases. More like telling you that you are currently playing the 6th round in this game itself.

Baseline of the gameplay:
For untold ages, the God King has ruled with an iron fist - his power is incalculable; his followers, legion. Now you must journey to the Dark Citadel to battle his Titans, one by one, until you face the tyrant himself. As it has been for all in your bloodline, this is your birthright - to free your people from an endless legacy of darkness. The immortal can be vanquished - but only if heart, mind, and steel are one.




















The story is pretty much simple, a man with extensive armors, swords, shields, body armors and many more trying to fight his way till the end.

Navigation is also very simple. Tap to move, slide to the left, slide to right to dodge and so on. You will get a hang out of it soon. Moreover, there is a tutorial during the 1st time play of the game.


















Tapping on the opponent will show you the level and whatever specialty he has. Notice on the left there is this purple potion. It is suppose to restore your life. Life is on the top left of the screen. Scout around by swiping left and right during gameplay to seek for potion (life) and also gold.


















Some gameplay..
















































The blue bar represents your life while the red represents the opponent's.
Small round with a sword symbol actually triggers special power to distract the opponent while you can take the advantage to attack.
The round symbol on the right summons special powers like fire, lightning, healing.
These two items regenerates while you play.
















































When you win, your experience in the battle will add onto your items (armor, sword, shield, ring, etc).
As you keep winning battles, your experience will keep increasing. Picture below shows the stats of your current character.

































In your inventory, you will see what items you are currently having and to what extend your experience is on that particular item. The "Iron Claw" below has already been mastered which means if you still carry on battling with this sword, your level will not increase for this sword anymore. So be sure that you always have items which are not yet fully mastered or this will slow down your level up status.
It is also possible to purchase items from the store. This is where your collection of money comes to be important.


















Continuation of gameplay..


































If you are ever defeated, you can always choose to start from the last save checkpoint.















































Sunday, December 12, 2010

Guide to OpenSSH iPhone/iPad

This would serve as a comprehensive guide to enable you to successfully SSH your devices.
I am going to consolidate all the steps in this short post.

Before we proceed, you will need to ensure that your iPhone/iPad had been jailbroken and Cydia had been installed. Once this is done, we can proceed as below.

Step 1: Install MobileTerminal 426 for iOS 4.1 and above. Apparently the older version of MobileTerminal does not work with iOS 4. Use the search feature in Cydia to look for MobileTerminal 426. Once installed, you should see an icon similar to the one shown below on your springboard.








Step 2: This is where we change the standard "alpine" password. This is to prevent the likes of ikee virus on the iPhone which was said to be compromised because of the standard password.

Launch MobileTerminal.
You will be see something like below:
(your-iPhone-name):~ mobile$
Type in su root
(your-iPhone-name):~ mobile$ su root

It will then prompt for password like below:
Password:
This is where you type in alpine as the password and press enter.

Now, type in passwd like below:
(your-iPhone-name):/var/mobile root# passwd
It will then prompt you to enter new password.
Changing password for root.
New password:


Now type in the new password and again when it prompts to
Re-type new password:

With this, you have successfully changed the password of your device.



Step 3: Install OpenSSH. Launch Cydia, under Section -> Networking -> OpenSSH

 
























That's it, you may now SSH your device with the username root and the password that you have created just now.
You have successfully change the root password of your device and installed OpenSSH. OpenSSH will allow you to access your file system of your iOS devices.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

iPhone Apps Review: Naked Touch

I would like to introduce you to a great Photography app call Naked Touch.
It's almost as powerful as editing from your PC. You could edit, crop, adjust and share your photos directly from your iPhone. No need of expensive picture editor in your PC or Mac.


It is now $6.99 and it's available for both iPhone and iPad.
You can also check out the official website here



Upon launching the app, this is what you will see..
This will be your working space to begin with. You can create new album and so on. To begin, you can either take a new photo or you could import them from the gallery or from your camera roll.



















I will try to demo a picture with this app. Firstly I will import the photo from my Gallery since I had already taken this photo sometime ago.



I know, you can't tell what picture this is.. yet..













Once the picture you selected is loaded, you automatically see several editing options on the right panel. Those features are stated below in full:
  • Focus
  • Noise Reduction
  • Shadows + Highlights
  • Levels
  • Curves
  • Contrast + Brightness
  • White Balance
  • Color Balance
  • Intensity
  • Saturation
  • Color Tune
The above are more that sufficient from amateur people like me.
I will demo the "Curves" feature with this picture. Observe the picture on the left. The picture adjust "live" while you adjust the curve on the right panel. This is cool as you can see how much adjustment is actually needed to avoid over or under-saturation of the picture you intending to edit.
I suppose now you can tell what picture this is right?


















There are several other options to adjust as well. The next one that I'll demo is the Levels. You notice that there is "Auto Levels" at the bottom. This is the recommended auto-adjustment based on the picture you have selected. Sometimes it helps like the one below but sometimes it makes the picture look bad. So, you have to make your own judgement at times.


















Noise adjustment is also possible. Especially useful when you are taking pictures at night. Normally the camera sensor will try to boost internal ISO to capture pictures with more light exposure. With such high ISO, the noise starts to come in.


















Once all the editing are done, you can tap on the "Send" button on the top right to send the picture either to facebook, flickr, tumblr, Mail or to your phone gallery (iPhone).


















Okay, there are plenty more editing possible with this app but I couldn't cover all of them with only 1 picture example. I will just show you the simple outcome of the curve adjustment that we have done earlier. Take a look at the comparison picture below..


Before
























After



























Pls feel free to leave comments.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

iPhone Apps Review: Respring (Jailbreak)

This is not really review as there is actually nothing to review about.
It is more like a tool that makes life a little easier for you whenever you are requested to reboot your phone.










But this only works for jailbroken iPhones. It works with the latest iOS 4.1.
What it does is, it actually respring your springboard or rather refresh your springboard. After installation of certain apps or tweaks, there will be time where it prompts you to reboot your phone. You can then use Respring. It is much faster than having to manually shutdown and reboot the phone.

When you run the app, it should look something like below:



It's free and it's a product of bigboss. Search for this app in Cydia.

iPhone Apps Review: Whatsapp

This app would fall into my hall of must-get-app for the year 2010.
It's simply amazing. It will replace your native SMS and MMS. The best part is, it is now available on iPhone, Blackberry, Android and even on Symbian. This would practically cover all major popular smartphones in the world. That is cross-platform enabled which in layman term would simply mean you can send messages from your iPhone to a Blackberry/Android/Symbian phones.



Current price in AppStore: $0.99
You can get this app from this link








To send and receive messages, WhatsApp utilizes your existing smartphone internet data plan, 3G/EDGE (or Wi-Fi when available) - that is definitely cheaper than sending SMS/MMS
On top of that, you can also send pictures, audio notes and videos.

Pictures extract below are taken from Whatsapp official website.



























The big advantage in Whats app iss that you do not have to enter the username of the contact person individually unlike PingChat. In PingChat, you have to create an ID in which will be used for future communication with your other PingChat buddy (which he/she has to create a new ID as well).

In Whatsapp, it will request for your permission to scan your phonebook. What it does is that it scans your phonebook for numbers which has Whatsapp installed as well. This way, you will have a list of favourites contacts that already have Whatsapp installed. You can start communication straight away. No hassle of creating ID, adding contacts and sort of like that. How cool is that?

Obviously everything has it's negative side. This app depends on the Whatsapp server conditions. If the server is down, this app will be as good as useless. As the app is getting more and more popular, the server condition has much improved since it first launched.