Thursday, July 28, 2011

QR codes, short for Quick Response codes, are starting to get popular these days.
QR codes are similar to bar codes that we see everyday on consumer products but the difference is that the usual bar codes are only linear one-dimensional codes which can only hold up to 20 numerical digits, while QR codes are two-dimensional (2D) matrix codes that can accommodate thousands of alphanumeric characters or data.
This fact alone proves that QR code has so much potential to do anything :p.

How QR codes work

QR codes are scanned with mobile devices like iPhone, Android, or other camera enabled Smartphones with easily downloadable apps from the Market.
With QR codes, you can link users to your site’s URL, download content, activate phone functions and easily connect the mobile device to the internet. And you can even insert custom texts as well.

So how do you generate QR codes?

There a numerous QR code generators around. I personally use Kaywa just simply because it's simpler :p

Practical applications of QR codes

There are many ways you can use QR codes. Here are some of the most common applications for QR codes these days.
  1. Business cards
  2.  Corporate or product brochures and other marketing
  3. Posters and announcements
  4. Product packaging and tags
  5. Signages and billboard ads
  6. Clothes (QR codes printed on shirts are a big hit these days)
  7. Magazine or newspaper ads
  8. Website, email or any online campaign
  9. Name tags
  10. Books

Designer QR codes

QR codes doesn’t have to look boring. You can design QR codes outside its black and white mazed like box. QR codes are very potential marketing tools, and presenting visually appealing QR codes will surely enhance your branding and appeal to your audiences.

Here are a few short tips on how you can enhance your QR code’s looks and create your own stunning designer QR codes.
  1. Add colors to your QR codes. They don’t always have to be black and white. You can add colors as long as you maintain proper contrast between the dark foreground and light background.
  2. Soften it with rounded corners. Softening the corners will dramatically reduce the visual stiffness of QR codes. Soften it and see the difference.
  3. Use other graphic elements to add dimension to your QR codes. You can add images or any design element like your logo on your QR code. Just make sure you don’t obstruct some of the important boxes that contain data.
  4. Use trial and error. You might ask on the previous tip, how do I know which of my QR code blocks I can mess around without affecting code readability. Well, technically you can do the math to compute which blocks aren’t necessary and can be played around or removed. But doing computations like that is unnecessary, you can just do your design, scan and test it as you go along.
Be sure to try different code readers when you're done. The more reader that can "read" your design, the lower the chances of people having errors reading the QR :)

Below are some samples i got from the web. The sky is the limit when you have imagination & dedication :)



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p/s: credits goes to the reviewers & designers of the QR codes above :P

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

KL Live Comedy - April 2011 Line-up


yay..

My favourite local standup comedian is performing for this April Show in Zouk KL.

Just a brief intro about my hero Harith quoted from the website;

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 Harith is generally acknowledged as Malaysia's premier stand-up comedian. For more than a decade, he has performed ‘live' at countless events and entertained thousands of Malaysians and foreigners with his unique and original material. His comedy performance is in great demand and any company function is never complete without Harith inevitably bringing the house down with his side-splitting performances.

With his huge success in Malaysia, Harith has been invited to perform in many parts of Asia, from Thailand to Hong Kong and even Dubai. In 2002 he wowed his fans in Singapore as the featured highlight in Singapore's Comedy In The Park - a series of outdoor concerts sponsored by the Singapore National Arts Council. He was invited again in 2005 to a concert at Westcoast Park, one of Singapore's biggest parks, and naturally, it was a roaring success.

Apart from being the country's No.1 comedian, Harith is also an accomplished, award winning film Director, actor and writer. His most recent collaboration as Writer/Actor/Director with fellow comedian Afdlin Shauki, resulted in the hugely popular and highly rated comedy TV series called Ah-Ha which was aired on Malaysia's major television station, TV3.

Harith's directorial/acting debut on a TV comedy series called Jangan Ketawa (literally translated: Don't Laugh) was the highest rated programme on Malaysian TV from 1991-1993. During those years the nation's TV viewing audience would literally stop everything to sit down in front of the box every Wednesday night to catch this popular series. With re-runs today on the region's prime cable TV, Astro, Harith's fan base continues to grow immensely.



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The tix is about RM65 if i'm not mistaken, definitely won't miss this one!~


Yeah!~

Friday, April 1, 2011

Song of The Day : Nazareth - Love Hurts (1976)




Lyrics:

Love hurts
love scares
love wounds and mares any heart
Not tough nor strong enough to take a lot of pain
Take a lot of pain
love is like a cloud
holds a lot of rain.
Love hurts
love hurts
I'm young I know but even so
I know a thing or two I've learned from you
I've really learned a lot
really learned a lot.
Love is like a stove
burns you when it's hot.
Love hurts
love hurts
some fools rave of happiness

Blissfulness
togetherness
some fools fool themselves
I guess

But they're not fooling me I know it isn't true

No
it isn't ture. Love is just a lie made to make you blue.
Love hurts
love hurts.

Love hurts
love scares
love wounds and mares any heart

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Classic song, never fails to sooth the heart :)

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all - environment - 30 March 2011 - New Scientist

Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels and we could do as much damage to the climate as greenhouse global warming

WITNESS a howling gale or an ocean storm, and it's hard to believe that humans could make a dent in the awesome natural forces that created them. Yet that is the provocative suggestion of one physicist who has done the sums.

He concludes that it is a mistake to assume that energy sources like wind and waves are truly renewable. Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels, he says, and we could seriously deplete the energy available in the atmosphere, with consequences as dire as severe climate change.

Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, says that efforts to satisfy a large proportion of our energy needs from the wind and waves will sap a significant proportion of the usable energy available from the sun. In effect, he says, we will be depleting green energy sources. His logic rests on the laws of thermodynamics, which point inescapably to the fact that only a fraction of the solar energy reaching Earth can be exploited to generate energy we can use.

When energy from the sun reaches our atmosphere, some of it drives the winds and ocean currents, and evaporates water from the ground, raising it high into the air. Much of the rest is dissipated as heat, which we cannot harness.

At present, humans use only about 1 part in 10,000 of the total energy that comes to Earth from the sun. But this ratio is misleading, Kleidon says. Instead, we should be looking at how much useful energy - called "free" energy in the parlance of thermodynamics - is available from the global system, and our impact on that.

Humans currently use energy at the rate of 47 terawatts (TW) or trillions of watts, mostly by burning fossil fuels and harvesting farmed plants, Kleidon calculates in a paper to be published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This corresponds to roughly 5 to 10 per cent of the free energy generated by the global system.

"It's hard to put a precise number on the fraction," he says, "but we certainly use more of the free energy than [is used by] all geological processes." In other words, we have a greater effect on Earth's energy balance than all the earthquakes, volcanoes and tectonic plate movements put together.

Radical as his thesis sounds, it is being taken seriously. "Kleidon is at the forefront of a new wave of research, and the potential prize is huge," says Peter Cox, who studies climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, UK. "A theory of the thermodynamics of the Earth system could help us understand the constraints on humankind's sustainable use of resources." Indeed, Kleidon's calculations have profound implications for attempts to transform our energy supply.

Of the 47 TW of energy that we use, about 17 TW comes from burning fossil fuels. So to replace this, we would need to build enough sustainable energy installations to generate at least 17 TW. And because no technology can ever be perfectly efficient, some of the free energy harnessed by wind and wave generators will be lost as heat. So by setting up wind and wave farms, we convert part of the sun's useful energy into unusable heat.

"Large-scale exploitation of wind energy will inevitably leave an imprint in the atmosphere," says Kleidon. "Because we use so much free energy, and more every year, we'll deplete the reservoir of energy." He says this would probably show up first in wind farms themselves, where the gains expected from massive facilities just won't pan out as the energy of the Earth system is depleted.

Using a model of global circulation, Kleidon found that the amount of energy which we can expect to harness from the wind is reduced by a factor of 100 if you take into account the depletion of free energy by wind farms. It remains theoretically possible to extract up to 70 TW globally, but doing so would have serious consequences.

Although the winds will not die, sucking that much energy out of the atmosphere in Kleidon's model changed precipitation, turbulence and the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface. The magnitude of the changes was comparable to the changes to the climate caused by doubling atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (Earth System Dynamics, DOI: 10.5194/esd-2-1-2011).

"This is an intriguing point of view and potentially very important," says meteorologist Maarten Ambaum of the University of Reading, UK. "Human consumption of energy is substantial when compared to free energy production in the Earth system. If we don't think in terms of free energy, we may be a bit misled by the potential for using natural energy resources."

This by no means spells the end for renewable energy, however. Photosynthesis also generates free energy, but without producing waste heat. Increasing the fraction of the Earth covered by light-harvesting vegetation - for example, through projects aimed at "greening the deserts" - would mean more free energy would get stored. Photovoltaic solar cells can also increase the amount of free energy gathered from incoming radiation, though there are still major obstacles to doing this sustainably (see "Is solar electricity the answer?").

In any event, says Kleidon, we are going to need to think about these fundamental principles much more clearly than we have in the past. "We have a hard time convincing engineers working on wind power that the ultimate limitation isn't how efficient an engine or wind farm is, but how much useful energy nature can generate." As Kleidon sees it, the idea that we can harvest unlimited amounts of renewable energy from our environment is as much of a fantasy as a perpetual motion machine.


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Kind of changes the way we think about renewable energy doesn't it?



Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Dissected Carl Zeiss Lens!!


Found out a very interesting website from Twitter.
Apparently a guy went to somewhere that shows Carl Zeiss Lenses which were dissected halfway so normal people like you & me could see the inner workings of such gadgets.

Enjoy!!







You can actually see through the glasses..they really mean business!!


My favourite..Looks like a pair of hand begging..




Original Source

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Putrajaya Outing -> Impromptu Shooting

Had an impromptu shooting in Putrajaya today morning.

Met with a friendly uncle with his family as well, too bad i forgot to give him my business card though.
:(

Well, enjoy a glimpse of the photos, for a full gallery can watch it at my Flickr
:)

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What's seem the problem Sir?
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Promote MASIF
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