Jakob Montrasio’s Net.

8GB iPhone in China much cheaper!

// March 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // China, Technology

Quite a surprise, the price of the 8 gigabyte model of Apple’s iPhone dropped a whopping 125 dollars since the last time we asked! Back in December we were running around in that big electronics store at the Hong Kong plaza and back then the price was almost 650 dollars. Now the 16 GB version is available for 690 dollar and thus the 8 GB version dropped down to 530 dollars.

That’s quite a jump for just three months. The iPhones I’m talking about are unlocked and running the newest version, 1.1.4 if I’m not mistaken. One of the sellers said though, that ‘within 6 months you will be able to buy legal iPhones from China Mobile’. I wonder if he is just kidding around or if he really has inside information. As far is I know, Apple is in negotiations with China Mobile but wants too much?

Well, let’s see how things are in September 2008, when the 32 GB iPhone or even 64 GB iPhone is available…

iPhone Wallpaper: My Contribution.

// February 28th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Photography, Technology

I took personal favorites out of my 200 most popular flickr pictures and converted them into the iPhone accepted wallpaper size of 320 to 480 pixels.

Feel free to modify them or whatever, they are all with a creative commons license.

Enjoy these free iPhone wallpapers:

That’s it for now. If I can ever afford an iPhone myself, I’ll probably make more.

I can’t even test them… *cry*

CSS Text Shadow added.

// February 26th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Internet, Technology

I tweaked around the blog some more and decided to add a nice text-shadow to the headlines. If you’re using a 3rd-world browser, you probably wont see it though, it’s a Safari only supported CSS thing.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been using FireFox myself for quite some years, hell, we even organized a release party for it back in, uhm, 2003? for the very first release in Heidelberg, Germany.

But when digital friend Ben introduced me the Safari plugin Saft, I tried it out and sticked with it, never looking back. Safari & Saft together kick the Fox really in the nuts. It has so many features, check it out here. It costs near to nothing for all the brilliant features offered and is a must-have for serious bloggers and surfers.

The thing is that Safari makes websites look so much better by using some kind of anti-aliasing on the text. If you surf a lot and read a lot it’s so much more comfortable.

Anyway, back to the CSS. So how do you use the CSS declaration in your style sheet?

Here are some examples.

You can only read this with Safari.

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #000 0px 0px 3px; color:#fff;.

How about a red shadow?

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #f00 2px 2px 2px;.

Elegant headline shadow needed?

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #aaa 1px 1px 1px;.

Here’s some shadow above the text…

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #666 0px -5px 1px;.

Blue shadow far off? No problem!

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #00f 15px 15px 3px;.

Last example: Extreme blurred shadow!

Above paragraph uses the following text-shadow settings: text-shadow: #6f0 3px 3px 5px;.

Nice, right?

It’s quite easy to apply, generally you have four values to set up your shadow:

1. First you set the color of the shadow. #f00 for red, #0f0 for green and so on. Any hex color is possible.

2. Now you set the horizontal space to the text (the x-axis), 5 pixels for example (5px). Can be any number, I suggest using px here.

3. Then the vertical space relative to the text (the y-axis), 3 pixels for example (3px).

4. The last setting is the amount of blur that the shadow should have. A value of 0px gives the shadow no blur at all while any setting over 5px makes the shadow completely unreadable. I suggest a setting between 1px and 3px.

Oh, and Safari is also available for Windows now, if you want to give it a try… Download the beta here!

As you can see (if you use Safari), this is quite a cool declaration and quite useful for styling headlines and such without having to use images. If only other browsers would support it, too…

Let’s see what the future brings!

Genius: Adam’s Apple.

// February 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Internet, Technology

Josef Lee’s biblical story featuring Adam, Eve and Steve is hilarious, well designed and simply genius. Look at it now!

iPhone soon cheaper?

// February 15th, 2008 // No Comments » // China, Technology

Good news, I hope - maybe I’ll get it soon in Shanghai for less than 640 dollar?
Chinese Theft o’ the Day: Stolen iPhones, Plans

Another headline that made me smile while going through Google reader:
Fireworks warehouse explodes in Guangdong

I actually saw scenes from that explosion on some chinese news channel earlier. Hilarious!

Now on my desktop.

// February 14th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Technology

Si, Super Mario! Thanks to Time Machine, reinstalling a oversized OS X is as easy as never before. Just restore everything from Time Machine except the applications, and you’ll get rid of all the caches and stuff that gets summed up in your hidden libraries. Awesome! And I got a neat new external 500 gigabyte big FireWire 400 hard disk for future video projects. It costed me almost 145 Euro, but compared to the 250 Euro I paid in 2005 for a 250 gigabyte big Maxtor drive it’s almost nothing…

Perian: Awesome FLV QuickTime plugin.

// February 12th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Technology

I just realized, while downloading the update for Perian 1.1, that I had never recommended it before: It calls itself the “swiss-army knife for QuickTime” and it has all the reasons to do so! Perian enables QuickTime application support for additional Media Types like FLV (used by YouTube) or HuffYUV, FFVHuff and other codecs you will never ever use in your entire life. But still, it opens Flash video in QuickTime and that is nowadays getting more and more important. So grab the newly updated Perian 1.1 here. Mac only, harrr.

WARNING! Do not buy The Sims 2: Pets (if you have a wife)!

// August 13th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // Technology

After buying the Nintendo Wii the weekend before last, we headed back to the store on friday evening where we bought it, near line 2 station Dongchang road. We wanted a second Wii controller all week badly to play Wii Sports: Tennis and other games against each other, and the game store lady told us she would have new ones in last week. And she did! But damn, a controller costs almost a quarter of the whole console set, a whopping 450 kuai. At least we bargained in some games with that price - one of them being The Sims 2: Pets.

Now after we bought the Wii my wife told me that she’d like to have some ‘real life’ game, and I guess no other game than The Sims comes near that request. I played the very first one a couple of years ago quite heavily for about two weeks, but when I’d realized that there was no ‘end’ of the game in that sense, I got tired of it and never touched it again. You just keep on playing The Sims, there will never be any end-boss or something else - that’s weird and fascinating at the same time.

Saturday afternoon we launched the game - and from the second the game started, my wife was hooked. We (actually: she) didn’t stop playing until the middle of the night! It’s quite more complex than the first Sims game, you have much more choices, but the concept is the same: live. Your Sim needs to eat, sleep, shower and sh*t. At the same time, you have one or more pets to take care of - you can create a family, and then add cats and / or dogs. The pets require attention, too: They also need food, and you can teach them tricks, you can scream at them when they dig around in your garden, and, and, and… What’s completely new is the ‘town center’, where you can go with your pets and get them washed, buy them cakes and meet other Sims.

The game is really great, so why not buy it? Because you (the man) will not be able to touch another game again. I wanted to finally finish Resident Evil 4 so bad, I wanted to continue saving Hyraule with my Zelda hero, I wanted to try out the insanely funny Wario Moves… But that all had to wait. I could have glued the controller to my wife’s hands, it wouldn’t have mattered - she didn’t let go anymore, until late that night.

And I can hardly blame her, having experienced exactly the same with the first part some years ago! So do yourself (and your action game needs) a favor, and never ever buy The Sims 2: Pets (if you have a wife). Trust me on that one…

Is Shenzhen that dangerous?

// August 13th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // China, Technology

Wow, 20.000 cameras with face recognition? They better start another city for the computer-power that kind of control will need…

Buying a Nintendo Wii in Shanghai.

// August 6th, 2007 // 5 Comments » // China, Technology

I wanted a Xbox 360. But then I saw that the prices for HDTV’s didn’t drop that much and that we probably weren’t going to buy one anytime soon. No HDTV, no Xbox 360 necessary. I don’t wanna play Halo 3 on a 21 inch screen TV. Who would? So I thought, this might be a good time to buy something to get rid of all the fat I accumulated during our wedding: A Nintendo Wii! Every time I went into one of these electronic places, I saw people jumping and moving spastically around, must be really good for health that thing. While it doesn’t train every part of your body, your arms will ache rather fast - especially after 3 rounds of ‘Wii Sports - Boxing’. Typing this entry is not very comfortable, let me tell you…

So there are probably hundreds of places where you can buy a Wii. I recommend you to buy one inside a big mall, because the shops there tend to stay open longer than small local shops. You don’t wanna find out that the store closed just a week after you bought your console, believe me… So head over to the Hong Kong Plaza or like us, to the big electronic place near Dongchang Lu in Pudong. Game shops are usually on the second or thrid floor, so head up. There will be at least 10 shops selling exactly the same, and it’s not really important to go to everyone asking for the price - the maximum difference you’ll find is like 50 kuai or something. But you can eventually bargain that away. You will have to buy a japanese Nintendo Wii with japanese menus, so don’t even think about using the internet on your machine. My Wii had also a crack chip installed, called the ‘WiiKey’ or ‘Wii key’. It allows my Wii to run fake games. And you can buy lots of them for 10 kuai each. After some time, we had worked out a fair deal with the game store lady: We got a modified (or cracked) japanese Nintendo Wii, a memory card, 10 games and a adapter (because the japanese Wii runs on 110 volts while we have 220 in China) for a round 2.000 kuai. Just the Wii alone costs in Europe 2.500 kuai, so that seemed like a good deal to us. Of course there a people who read this and argue that you can bargain two more hours to get it another 100 kuai cheaper, but if you have that much free time, you should better start looking for a job.

Back home, after setting the Wii up, connecting it to my amplifier, I got the first shock: The Wii Remote didn’t work. Since the Wii menu was in japanese, I didn’t know what to do. So we called the shop lady (ALWAYS take a business card!!!) and she failed to explain to us that you need to ’sync’ the remote to your console when you start it for the first time. Open the front of the Wii, open the battery case of the remote, and push the two red buttons at the same time. Then it worked fine! After that you need to set the time, the date… It’s all chinese, but easy to understand anyway. After all, this thing was designed for children, I guess.

The first game we tried was ‘Wii Sports’. There’s tennis, baseball, bowling, golf and boxing. It’s spectacular how good the remote understands your movement. I especially liked the baseball and golf modes - they are so much fun. The I tried all the other games, if they worked at all, and they did. The Godfather is sure a cool game, make sure to buy a copy of that. But what kept me away from sleeping all weekend was Resident Evil 4: by far the best title in the series. Not only are the graphics insane, but the feeling is so great, the way you have to play and shoot, it’s almost flawless. So cool. It’s pretty hard, too, and I didn’t manage to finish this game yet. I didn’t even start with Zelda yet, who knows how long that will take…

Anyway, the Wii is a fine console with a great new mode of playing, thanks to the creative new controls. Buying a Wii is heavily recommended, at least until the HDTV’s are cheaper and Halo 3 is out.