The Personal Blog of Benny Ong – bennyong.com » Technology
Feb 08
Greetings everyone,
Apologies once again for the lack of recent updates. Well, this morning I was sent an invitation to join a flickr group whereby during my random surf, I stumbled upon a site called dumpr.net. What it does is that it allows you to mess around with the pictures you have in flickr.
There is roughly about 6-8 tools that ranges from effects of aging your picture, changing it to sketch and placing it in a gallery like below. Don’t you come and tell me that this can all be done in Photoshop or some fancy picture editing tool. The reason that I am mentioning it is because it is online based and it automatically extracts your flickr collection.
Everyone is looking
By the way, if you do not know what flickr is, it is basically a place where you can upload and share your photos.
Give it a visit and a go…. I would try the other features later….
Have fun!
Benny Ong
Dec 14
Just got back from Crowne Plaza Mutiara hotel in KL after visiting my dad. If you are curious on what I have been up to lately, I have decided to design my own WordPress template for this website and might be distributing it for free when I am done. As this is my first time undertaking such things on my free time, I believe the template should be ready latest by February next year. You might say that it is too long of a time to get it done but I believe that it is reasonable with the spare time that I have got.
First and foremost I just installed Xampp to get an Apache server with PHP and MySQL running on my Windows machine. This will allow me to work locally without consuming bandwidth from my hostonfire.com servers. The above mentioned program is handy whenever you which to test PHP scripts on your local machine.
After the installation of the server was completed, I proceed to install the latest version WordPress which I am planning to upgrade my blog into.
Well, that’s all for the moment, I hope I have manage to share some valuable tools that you can mess around with. I am planning to come up with a list of recommended free tools in the next upgrade of my blog maybe in mid 2007. We will see how it goes, till then, take care.
Benny Ong XXX
Sep 28
Greetings bunch,
I discovered this nifty tool while trying to edit some pictures on my work laptop that has restriction on installing applications. I believe it will be useful for some that require to do some basic editing (obviously better than Microsoft Paint!) but it can’t match a full fledged image editor (obviously nothing like Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks). However, this is a start of what are to come and can expect from the future. Picture yourself starting all applications from a web site. Cool isn’t it, most probably all will be free as well, even better!
Well, Phixr do have it’s weaknesses but I believe that it will improve over time. You may use it by generating a temporary account that requires no registration but I advise you to register if you are going to use it frequently.
Here are some other cool links to other image editing tools that exists.
1. Flickr Toys
2. List of Image Tools
3. E-Cover Maker
That’s all for now!
Benny Ong XXX
Sep 06
I am currently attending a course called Dynamic Presentation Skills and learned a cool trick today regarding functions in Microsoft Powerpoint. Yup, all you slaves of Microsoft pay close attention and I will guarantee you that your presentation will never be the same again.
First and foremost is turning the slides into a completely blank black or white screen without turning your machine off. This is necessary for various reasons such as you want the audience to pay attention on the presenter instead of the slides or to pause for some other activities. It can be done by a single click of the “B? key for a black screen or “W? for white while your presentation is running in full screen. Simply click any key to bring your presentation back to life.
The other cool trick is to hide your cursor or mouse pointer. Just click on “A? or “=? to hide it and to bring it back. You can also turn it into a pen where you can scribble on your presentation slides and then erase it. This trick will be good for speakers to emphasize on a point or highlight something important. Just click on the CTRL key and P at the same time to get the pen. Click on your mouse and drag to start drawing and scribble on your slides. Click E to erase what you have added on screen or just proceed to the next slide. Please note that no change will be done to your existing slides. Key in CTRL + A to bring back the mouse cursor.
You may also schedule your slides to run on a preset time. This will require more reading and configuration on your part for it. There are simple keys available for you to rehearse your presentation.
For other cool tricks for Microsoft Powerpoint, click F1 and a small window will pop up above your presentation indicating the keys and functions available.
Please do share your tips on other cool tricks in other common applications.
Here is to a better and cooler presentation for everyone!
Benny Ong
Sep 05
There might come a time in your life when you are creating a word document that requires you to have separate headers for different chapters or categories.
It took me the weekend to understand the help file built in on Microsoft Words to do it but finally I did it. That is persistence for you.
Well, first and foremost, you will need to break your pages into categories. This is done by inserting breaks. To do so, click on Insert on your header menu and select Break. A window will pop up and click on Next Page under Section Break Types. You have now successfully created a break between the two pages or sections. You may repeat this process for all your categories and chapters if needed.
Now, click on View and then Header and Footer. Start inserting text into them and you will notice that all pages are still showing the same headers and footers. No worries, this is because they are set as default to be the same as the previous. Simple click a button on the screen to unlink the headers and footers from each breaks.
That’s it! You have successfully created different headers and footers for your pages.
Until next time, take care.
Benny Ong
Sep 02
You would not believe where I am right now, I am in Lim Kok Wing Cyberjaya Campus library writing this post.
Yup, it has come to a time that I am so desperate to get a decent internet connection that I won’t mind travelling that far. If you think that I have enrolled for a Design course here, you are wrong. Story on how I ended up here then? Well, just face it that I am here on a Saturday afternoon.
By the way, yesterday, I uploaded an e-cover maker script over the internet that you can freely use to create the covers for your e-products. This is a good tool for all those budding e-marketers that are working on their first product and do not have much time or money to spare on coming up with the images.
On the sidelines, I will be working on my first major e-product soon that hopefully will be successful. On how much I will profit for it, it is not a major concern of mine yet.
There is all for today and enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Benny Ong XXX
Aug 30
After days on trying to access my Gmail account at my office, I finally made it.
I installed a script called G-mail Lite on my site and now I can happily access my account. The link is http://www.bennyong.com/gm/
This will be a relief to everyone else who’s current access is blocked by surfcontrol. Share this link with your mates before it gets indexed and blocked by Surfcontrol.
Happy checking your mail!
Benny Ong XXX
Aug 17
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Hope it will make it easier for you to plan your holidays.
Benny Ong XXX
Jun 28
Apologies for dull information lately. The thing is that I haven’t managed to get internet connection at my new place and lots have been happening at once.
The TV card (PVR-TV878) that I’ve bought from Low Yat Plaza was installed and is now finally up and running. It was not working at first as every time I start the program, an error message stating that there were problems running honestechTV.exe.
So, I decided to surf to the vendor’s website as stated on the box which was http://www.kworld.com.tw and looked for the driver. I found patch available for my Windows XP Sp2 Operating System. That fixed the issue.
The problem was because the software or driver was not working properly with Windows XP Service Pack 2.
If you are ever facing problems with any newly bought Graphic Cards, Audio Cards, TV Cards and so on, always surf to the vendor’s website and search for the latest drivers. Most vendors release updates and patches on their sites. Just go to Driver Downloads section of their website.
That’s all for the moment. Well, I promise that I will release couple of free downloads soon.
See Ya…
Benny Ong
Jun 27
Well, I thought that it will be cool to list down Streamyx Alternatives. Streamyx is Malaysia leading consumer/household broadband service provider. Here are a couple of other competing providers that you may want to give a go for if you are fed up with streamyx’s service. I am not to sure about their quality though.
– Airzed
– Jaring.my
– Time.net.my
– Eb.net.my
– Nasioncom.com.my
– Macrolynx.com
– PenangFON.com (Penang Only)
Please post other service providers under comments and I will add them gradually onto the list.
Take care.