I realized that my Nexus One uses a lot of data. Although I do have a data plan, but sadly, it’s not unlimited, I only have the 500mb data plan and unlimited data plan is rather expensive for Maxis.I turned of Gmail syncing and now it only auto sync Calendar and Contact.

I need to test use for another month to see whether 500mb is enough for me or not. The only thing I must not do to make sure that I won’t use a lot of data is Youtube, as you know Youtube sucks a lot of data.

Unlike my old Nokia N95, there’s no data counter on the Android. But after some searching in the Market, I found an application that can shows how much data you have used and auto resets every month. It’s called NetSentry, better than NetCounter IMO.

I set 500MB data limit, so I assume there will be a notification when reaching the limit. Hopefully, 500MB is enough for me or Maxis must revise their data plan rate.

Scan the QR code with your Android barcode reader or click here to download.

Some people have their PS3 at home, they only use it for games and Bluray movie. But have you think of you are capable of playing HD video via the PS3? I have plenty of MKV format video in my computer (don’t ask me how do I obtain them), but then I only watch it on my PC. Now I realised that PS3 is a actually a media player too but unfortunately, it doesn’t support MKV file format. That’s the suckest thing to me.

Though, things don’t come to an end so fast. I have actually found guide on the net on how to watch MKV video on PS3. It’s pretty simple, convert it to a PS3 compatible format then transfer it to the PS3 then you are ready to go.

Some people are worried of video quality would be downgraded during the conversion but if you use the right software, it won’t. So the software is called mkv2vob, it’s a freeware, download it, convert it, transfer it.

Browse for your MKV file and select your destination directory which is also the output folder.

If your PS3 doesn’t connect to a amplifier via S/PDIF digital cable, you may not hear DTS surround sound, so you have to CHECK “Always Transcode DTS”.

On the other hand, if you want to transfer your file via a flash drive or portable HDD, you need to split your file. Sucks right? It’s because that PS3 only recognizes FAT32 format and the problem is you can’t transfer any file larger than 4GB into a FAT32 formatted HDD.

Unless that you have your PS3 connected into your network, you need not split it, you can just stream directly or just copy from your network.

As for me, my PS3 is not connected into my home network, my house runs wireless and it’s not capable for HD streaming. My method of watching MKV video without splitting is by burning the converted video into a dual layer 8.5GB DVD+/-R.

I went around PC Fair and I saw a lot of netbook at there. I am so not interested in netbook right not because I have got my lovely Aspire One, which I bought it last year when it first release. Buying a netbook right now is a headache because there’s so many brands are offering it, it’s not like last time when netbook, the word first came to us, it’s only Asus and Acer. Later then company compete to release their netbook and this competition sucks because everyone offers almost the same thing.

I thought Dell Mini 9 has discontinued? If you are looking for Dell, Dell Mini 12 is good, but the battery life not so good.

These are the new Lenovo S10 2.

Touch screen Asus EEE PC which doesn’t fancy me. I don’t like touch tablet unless the screen is very sensitive.

The one on the far right seems good.

Have to say sorry because I didn’t really hands-on and test drive all the netbook around, I just went around, look and take photos. Anyway, I got some guide for you for choosing netbook, do take note about these:

• Battery life (at least 6 hours)
• HDD Capacity (at least 120GB)
• RAM (at least 1.5GB)
• Screen size (at least 10.1 inch)
• Weight (less than 1.2kg)
• Preferably with 3G slot built in even if you don’t have 3G data, you may have one in the future.
• Bluetooth and card reader.

After looking around, Acer and Lenovo seem to have some nice model.

I am not sure any of you who uses Live Messenger (or more likely known as MSN Messenger) in Windows 7 have this problem but I am having it. I don’t know whether is the setting screw it up or is it just a bug.

I have my Live Messenger on as usual, everything is up, the contact windows and conversation windows are all hide nicely in the icon on Windows 7 start bar. Because of the integration of Live Messenger with Windows 7, there’s no more notification icon on your start bar at the clock area like in Vista or XP. So the problem is when I close all the Live Messenger windows, include the contact list, I can’t bring it back on. Assuming it’s fully closed, and logged out and everything, but it’s not. My friend still saw me online on their contact list but with “busy” status while on my side, I did not see any IM activity notification. I clicked on the Live Messenger icon, but it just nothing turned up and I had to end the process and restart the program.

Since Windows 7 is capable of running program in different OS mode, so I’ve decided to run my Live Messenger in XP mode and everything is doing fine now. Even if I closed all the windows, I still can access my contact list via the icon near the clock area. Great. Wonder anyone encounter this problem too?

I have been using Windows 7 for quite some times and I am loving it. My external hard disk drive screwed up on me recently, some folder has turned into some stupid 32kb cluster file named File, not accessible at all. Tried to recover some of it but fail. So I need a new hard disk drive to dump whatever files that are still accessible in my external into it. Then I’m gonna do a fresh format of the external HDD.

I bought my 500GB SATA HDD from Gadget Zone at Prangin Mall for RM188 (US$56) and it’s a Western Digital. What do you think about the price? Have been using Western Digital for a long time, the HDD that was in my old PC, in the laptop, my external’s, my brother’s PC are all Western Digital. I don’t really know about how other brands like Maxtor, Seagate perform, but I tend to go for Western Digital.

What you are seeing is the Ikea’s halogen table lamp. I don’t have any torch at home so I took it for my lighting to shine my way around in the chassis because I didn’t want to unplug all the cables from the CPU, so I just  installed into the chassis right where the CPU is.

Slotted it in, plugged in SATA cable and power cable and all set.

It’s now a total of 750GB internal HDD capacity my PC has.

Every fresh install of HDD will not show up straight away in the My Computer because it needed to be format before it’s usable. I’ve forgotten about it but thanks to Google, problem solved in less than 5 minutes.

1. Press Start button, and
2. search Disk Management,
3. you will see “Create and format hard disk partitions“,
4. open it and

from there, you format your new HDD and you are all done.

Feeling bored about your standby screen on your S60 phone? Yeah, it’s very bored and not customizable. Last time I tried Handy Shell, which is a home screen replacement for the S60 phone, the application and how it works looks very cool but one problem for me using N95 is that the Handy Shell seriously lagged my phone and another down side of it is that it’s not a free application.

My previous original home screen.

Recently I found a new application that will replace your standby screen with various customization. Actually it’s out quite some times in Chinese version. It’s actually created by the Chinese and have been ported to English recently.

It added weather, Google search, a big digital clock, and a rotating news feed. The to do notes and memos are still there and it shows the number of to dos you have in your calendar instead of one in the original standby screen. Another thing I didn’t set is that it allows two rows of shortcut instead of one. I don’t really have that many shortcuts, so a row is fine for me. One row that is missing is the Share Online thing that was on the original standby screen, this is a good thing because I don’t use it and I believe many of you don’t too, another is the WLAN scanning, but you can add the WLAN wizard shortcut into the shortcut line. =)

On the original setting, the right key is actually MyFav which shows a list of your frequent used contact. I prefer having Calendar as my right shoutcut key. Pressing the red End Call keys will switch between opened background application. So let’s say you have Gravity on, you hide it, you need not to go can choose from your shortcut but instead, pressing the End Call button brings you straight into unclose app.

For the left shortcut key, it actually opens up a menu which brings to a list of shortcut again. So you actually can get a lot of shortcut with this Voyager Homescreen. One thing that bothers me is that I don’t know why my Start menu is in Chinese, maybe is the install and uninstall of different version causes this. I can read Chinese so it does fine to me. A little big translation on my Start menu, the first *key is Lock Keypad, 1. is News Feeds, 3. is Setting, 3. is More Setting and 4. is Camera.

Clicking on the weather bar brings up this 4 day weather forecast. You need to have a Internet connection for this and the rotating news feed. Setting up the weather was a little bit troublesome at first, I recommend you to use a Wifi or 3G, it just can’t detect the city when I got an EDGE connection.

Another feature that comes with it is vApp which is like a App Store built in with the vHome app. Showing some of the useful free app. This is faster than Ovi, but I didn’t really use it because I have what I want already.

Besides that, you can do smart dialing which is like on the E71. Straight dial a name and the names on the phonebook or app will show on screen. I like this feature a lot.

I also found out that the app has changed my web browser’s home screen, showing a list of shortcuts. That’s pretty good, but if I am allow to change the links of the shortcut will be nice.

One feature that is missing from the Chinese version is the social networking bar, which you can update Facebook and Twitter right from the standby screen, hopefully next update will include this.

Available for Symbian S60 v3 and it’s unsigned. So look way around to install unsigned app in your phone and have fun!

Download here.