Blog Post: Siri and Google Voice

Nowadays we could see a lot of new things coming up in the market, and the most common one would be gadgets. Gadgets now are mostly smartphones, and when we talk about smartphone, the first phone that pop up in my head would be, iPhone! What does iPhone have that others phone doesn't have? Siri ! But notice that 'she' can't always understand what you 're saying, not only Siri, even Google voice doesn't understand sometimes. And now there's an experiment of Google voice and Siri which is, this person he tell Siri to read a short paragraph of texts, and he record it down. After that, he press on the microphone in Google Voice and just play the voice clip that he just recorded from Siri. And now, Google voice would listen and read out the text that she/he heard from the Siri. And of course, Google voice won't show all the exact words that he/she'd heard because, they're not perfect, they're convenient when you want them to do something for you, but reading a paragraph won't work out. This guy had tried this more than 10 times, at the end, its not even a understandable paragraph anymore, basically it doesn't make sense anymore, and when you watch the video, it would be funny because, they both 'smart assistance' also make mistakes! and this mistake is not just a little bit, like I mentioned before, its no longer understandable by human, probably they understand themselves  who knows? 

Major Concept:

Watch the video above, it is just very funny when you see two smart assistance from smart phone and Google are making a lot of mistakes. Even though they're very smart, which is when you order them to do something  they did it for you automatically which you would think its very cool, yes they're coll but they're not always perfect, try to do what this you've done in the video.

          

Advantage & Disadvantages:

Its good to have Siri and Google voice, they can do whatever we want to do without pressing anything but just one button which is very convenient  But they're not good because as what this article is all about, they're not as perfect as human, basically they're just robot, so they do make mistakes which is irritating if you're in the hurry of doing something such as ordering Siri to "open notepad " to write down important things that someone said to you, when Siri doesn't understand, they wouldn't do whatever you want them to do which is very annoying. 

Question:

Siri and Google voices are both cool! but I don't understand how does people come up with these robot ? Didn't the engineer have to insert tons and tons of words and vocab into that robot just for this? Isn't it a waste of time and energy? 

Citation:

Kleinman, Alexis. "Siri vs. Google Voice Experiment: What Happens When Siri And Google Voice Talk To Each Other?" The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 27 Apr. 2013. Web. 30 Apr. 2013. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/27/siri-google-voice_n_3165924.html>.

EARTH DAY 2013

REDUCE

What is reducing? Reducing  means reducing your consumption or buying less. You don’t have to worry if you buy less or ‘use’ ‘less’  because you can reuse them later on! which save a lot of money.

Benefits

Its similar to the benefits or recycling, but the main points are:

•  Prevents pollution caused by reducing the need to harvest new raw materials;
•  Saves energy and especially MONEY.
• Reduces the amount of wastes! If you buy a lot you might throw them when they get older which would end up with tons of garbages either in your cabinet or the corner of your room.
• Allows products to be used to their fullest extent.

For example:

• Buy things that doesn’t use a lot of plastics or things that are not recyclable.
• Buy only things that you think you really need.
•  You can walk with your friends, biking, taking a bus (since many people are in one car) instead of driving a car. You can have fun with your friends too while walking and talking.
• Have a compost bin at home so that things inside would decompose, and you won’t have to throw it but you can use it for soil (fertilizer).
• You can use E-copies instead of hard copies such as books, magazines, etc that needs to use papers from the tree!
• Save energy such as turning off the lights every time you leave your room or unplug plugs that aren’t using at the moment.
• Save water such as  turning off the faucet while you brush your teeth, while you’re washing yourself with soap.
• Save water by keeping the used water for toilet, cleaning the floor, or for plants.

So after you reduce whatever you’re reducing, you’re actually saving them for the next process which is ‘reuse'. By doing this first step, you won’t have to spend a lot of your money and you can also stop yourself from buying too much things!


                                                                         REUSE

What is reuse? To reuse now is s to use an item again after it has been used. Basically whenever you finished using a thing, you would throw it away but these wastes are actually useful in some other ways too, it has its own benefits. By doing this, it helped time and especially “money”. Everything cost money, so why not start reusing things from now on?

Benefits

• You use less energy to reuse things you want to use again.
• Manufacturing in factory is no need for reuse in common.
• It reduce pollution and waste.
• It increase the savings such as money, energy, time.

What are the things that are reusable?

Carrier bags and twist ties.

• Plastic cost a lot of global warming, so reuse for bin bags in the house would be good.
• Paper bags can be use for  wrapping gifts, making cover pages for book etc. (DIY)
• Twist ties can be used to wrap the loose things together such as computer wires.

Envelopes

• Carefully open the envelopes can let you reuse it again by sticking up new information such as names and address on the top of the envelope.
• Reuse as scrap papers.

Jars and pots

• Clean the jars or pots by putting something else into the jar for example:
• Things like candie(s) can be in the jar.
• Its easier to organize them, and it's also saving!
• You don’t need to buy new container for candies.

Newspaper, cardboard and bubble wrap

• Use for packing stuff when you’re moving house.

Old clothes

• can be made into other textile items such as cushion covers or teapot cosies.

Packaging

• Such as foil and egg cartons can be donated to schools and nurseries, where they can be use in art and craft projects.

Scrap paper

• Use for writing notes or calculate math problems.

Used wood

• Can be used as making a house for you animal, a little box, decoration (walls), or even creating fire when you’re going to the camp.

It’s not just reusing it because when you reused already and you think it’s time to throw it away (too old, or damaged enough to throw away), you can still do another step which is recycle it! Isn’t that ‘ two in one’ very helpful to our earth?

RECYCLE

What is recycle? Recycle is a process to change materials (waste) into new products of potentially useful materials; and there are steps that you could follow to recycle things:

Step 1 Collection and Processing

• Collect recyclables including:
• Curbside collection
• Drop-off centers, and deposit
• Refund programs

• After collection, send those recyclables to:
• recovery facility to be 1. sorted 2. cleaned 3.processed into materials that are useable.
• Recyclables’ prices goes up and down depends on the supply and demands, so don’t give up if the price is too low.

Step 2 Manufacturing

• More and more of today's products are being manufactured with recycled content. Common household items that contain recycled materials include:
• A lot of products are being manufactured with recycled content such as the common household items:
• Newspapers and Paper towel
• Aluminum, plastic, and glass soft drink containers
• Steel cans
• Plastic laundry detergent bottles

• Recycled things are also being used with new ways too.

Step 3 Purchasing New Products Made From Recycled Materials:

• Shop for things that are able to be recycled or easily recycled.
• Nowadays we can also see malls using paper bags instead of plastic bags.

Here are some of the terms used:

• Recycled-content product:
• This tells you that, the product is manufactured from the recycled materials
•  Post Consumer content:

• This is similar to recycled-content product, but the materials are collected from consumers or business through the recycling program.
•  Recyclable product:
• This one are the products that can be collected, processed and manufactured into new products after reuse (which is pretty good).
• It doesn't  necessarily have recycled materials included.
• Check local recycling program before you buy the products.

Benefits

·         The amount of waste sent to landfills and incinerators would reduce.

·         It can keep natural sources such as timber, water, minerals, and energy.

·         Reduce the causes of pollution by no need of  collect new materials.

·         Reduces greenhouse gas emissions such as global warming that people are worried nowadays.

·         Help the future generations for good environment.

By recycling, the factories won’t have to collect new materials for their products which won’t cost money and so do energy. So Let’s do this now shall we?

Blog Post: Files and its copyrights in the worldwide internet

           


There are many things that we could see in the internet such as songs, movies, video clips, images, everything that want to have is in the internet. Just like what I do most of the time, sometimes when I want to watch some drama myself, I always watch online or even download it, but I never notice or think about where does the file come from and is it legal to download. I think that it is okay to let internet users download things like music they want to listen, images they want to save, he drama that people like to watch only IF they put credits such as where does the file originally come from, in another word, copy rights. Basically you're 'stealing' if you didn't put the copyrights. Sometimes we could see some videos from different owner, and probably you just don't know who is the one that really owns this file. Its bad for both the owner and the viewer because the owner might not want their video stolen from other people. I always check the video clips like piano tutorials or piano covers, and of course they'll play the same songs but in the description, they always tell the viewer where did they get the sheet music from, and if they transcript the song themselves they wouldn't say its from me but instead they would post a link saying that they got inspired by this user in YouTube and if the viewers want to watch more videos from his 'own' channel then subscribe and he/she does also mentioned to subscribe the user that he/she got the sheet / inspiration from; which is good, they did the copyrights and they put credits and everything .

Major Concept:

Basically the whole article is just about the 'copyrights'. If you didn't have any copyrights when you upload files, it could be illegal. For an example, drama that is categorized in episodes, there must be copyrights from the company of the channel that plays this drama and the company of this drama. Not only videos, and so do the images, musics, etc. 'Copyrights' is just respecting the owner otherwise, the owner could actually sue you for stealing. 

Advantages & Disadvantages:

It is good that people put copyrights because if you put it, the owner of the file won't be either aggressive or irritating and just by putting the copyrights, we can watch tons and tons of videos online! which is good for those people that YouTube every day.

It is bad because because of that, people start to not buy the real version of either songs, drama, magazine etc... everything that are download-able ! So it would be bad for those singers or actress.

Question:
Why does people still don't do copyrights or credits when they upload things online? Whatever I've downloaded before were mostly like that...

Citation:
Hill, Amelia. "Internet Users Unaware of Illegal Downloading." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 21 Apr. 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2013. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/22/internet-users-unaware-illegal-downloading>.

Blog Post: Apple should have some shortcuts

There are lots of smartphones nowadays from many different brands such as Apple ( the most famous one) then Samsung, Sony, HTC etc. The difference between iPhone and Samsung is that one has wider screen and one has smaller screen but some people prefer to have perfect screen size for their "one-hand" but some want to have big screen in order to see a bigger things in their phone, its up to them and its their choice, but one thing that someone in the internet had concern about is the shortcuts. 

For the shortcuts in Samsung, you can just swipe the screen at the top part of the screen, it'll show every shortcuts such as WiFi, airplane mode, Profile like sounds and more; Not only Samsung have those shortcuts, even Sony has it. Basically only iPhone doesn't and that is the biggest problem for Apple. For iPhone users they have to go to setting and set everything such as profile, sound, airplane mode, WiFi everything, basically there are really less shortcuts. In the video above it shows some concept iOS7 which include more shortcuts (not only iPhone but so do the iPads). In the video it shows many shortcuts on the lock screen basically, without swiping the "slide to unlock", you can just click the shortcut for camera at the bottom right and you could change into other shortcuts, not just camera. And also at the top of the screen. (look at the picture below).

                         

Just by clicking the camera icon, you can change/switch your shortcut to something else too such as phone  calling etc. 

Other than those shortcut in the lock screen, there are also other shortcuts for you to open an app without clicking "Into" the app itself. Example music, when you're playing music, you don't want to click in and click stop or whatever. In the picture below it shows that just by double click the music itself, it'll show up a shortcut for you to either stop, play, next etc to your music. Not only music but also calenders, app store (update apps), and also quick reply. When I say quick reply it means that whenever there's a message popped up on the screen, not sliding to open the app and answer anymore but immediately pop up a place for you to just answer and just send back.  (look a the pictures below).

Another shortcuts will be for the setting. The old style of setting is like, you have to click setting and it'll show a list of stuff that you want to adjust with small icons, but the new one would be what you see in the picture below. The icon became bigger, and you can exit easily. 

Last shortcut would be "double click" the button on the phone. When you double click it, you can view all the apps and album email whatever is opened. Before when you double click it it'll show you all the things you opened too but this time it'll show you with a big picture as you can see in the picture below again. :) These shortcuts are pretty cool, easy and quick ! ;)

Major Concept:
All smartphones should have shortcuts that is easy for the users to adjust whatever they want to change etc. Samsung and all other smartphones can go to the setting place just by swiping the screen, and it'll show those "main" settings that are mostly used such as Profile, sound, airplane, do not disturb, message etc. BUT not iOS. iOS got a shortcut only for camera at the lock screen, so now someone had made a concept of how might the iOS7 change. Probably lots of shortcuts as what you guys can see above (ex: view opened apps, quick reply, quick setting etc). You can set many things even before you swipe the "slide here to unlock". Basically, this article is talking about an idea of how might iOS 7 change in the future "with convenient shortcuts".

Advantages & Disadvantages:
It is good to have lots of shortcuts in the new iOS because all other smartphones or tablets had it already, why not iOS? And yes it is annoying to unlock your phone, click setting an find the icon that has airplane just change your phone to "airplane" mode. So yes it would be quicker and a lot more convenient to have those shortcuts!
Its disadvantage would be messy. When those shortcuts appeared in your iPhone or iPad because everything  would be showing with big images as you can see in the picture or video above. So for those people who don't like big images, or icon they might think it as becoming very messy and not organize.

Question: I still have question for the part that says "quick reply" in the video. When there's a message popped up, it appeared a thing for you to write whatever you want to reply, but the problem is, they didn't even show what message did the other person had send to you; they just let you reply immediately -_- that's very weird.

Citation:
"Here Are Some Changes Apple Should Make To The IPhone's Software." Business Insider. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Apr. 2013. <http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-some-changes-apple-should-make-to-the-iphones-software-2013-4>.

Blog Post: Creating a fun "Frozen people in ice" icon by "yourself" PART TWO

This is the second part of the article last week; click HERE to view part one if you haven't seen it yet. So same thing as the one that we did last week with the ice cube, we're still going to make icons with Illustrator CS3 from Adobe. And this time we'll be making the person inside the ice cube by our-self, not by Google-ing the picture because, there are a lot of icons of person in internet, you probably just need to search icons about MSN and you can get it. BUT AGAIN, we're just going to make our own and so that it would looks like the person is really in the ice cube (we have to highlight etc.) Lets get started!

Step 1. First step we just need to create the outline (as usual) for the head which is round and just a rough shape of the body is good enough. (You can go online and look at the example shape of the body if you want to). 

Step 2. Then you fill the color for the head (solid color first) then remove the outline. Then, fill the color for its body just by using the gradient color. 

Step 3.  Now you draw a collar with a tie and fill with solid colors first as usual and gradient colors later/ after. And after that, group the collar and tie together and make it into just one object. To group those two things together, you can just right click and select group. Other than the collar and the tie you also have to group the head and the body together as one thing. 

Step 4. So now select the body and the head (they're already one thing) and we want to make this 1D person into a 3D person. So after we selected, click effect, 3D and Extrude & Bevel.

Step 5. Now we're in the option that we can choose how it'll look like after we make it 3D. So we have to rotate it and see the changes and do the blending to 1 (remember to have a bit shadow).

Step 6. Now we want to make that 3D shape into bunch of grouped shapes because we want to delete some of the unwanted shapes. So now we right click on the selected group and select ungroup.

Step. 7 When we now take a close look to our layers, we'll find many groups that contain clipping paths inside them plus the blue gradient color became a rasterized image basically we're in a very messy state; So now we have to delete all the clipping paths, and shapes hidden underneath and also group the blue gradient and clean up a little bit with your layers.

Step 8. There might be too many anchor points and you wanna clean it out so now you go to object, path and simplify and also you might wanna fill the gaps that are needed to be fill by just adding extra anchor points.

Step 9. When we're done lets get our tie back, you might see it as not on the body of the person because we already rotate the person so now we hide it again because we're not yet done with the colors of our person.



Step 10. So now select the person and reduce its transparency to 75% (frontal shape). and make its outline to white color.


Step 11. For the head now we fill it with gradient color (radical) like a bit yellowish and duplicate the layer and reduce its transparency to 80%. The color would show very perfect!!

Step 12. Now we want to make the head glossy, so now we'll use pen tool and draw a shape like what you can see in the picture. And then select it and use pathfinder tool intersect the shape areas to extract that much area from the shapes. Press Expand and we can see the desired shape.

Step 13. Screen the layer with Opacity 65% and cut another shape as you can see in the picture below and then gradient as well with 60% Opacity.  (Make another one with similar shape to the lower part of the face)

                   


                                       


Step 14. Lastly bring the tie back and make sure you do step 13 for the tie too and then highlight the parts that you think you need to highlight them (if you dont know how to highlight scroll up to the first paragraph you saw in this article and click "HERE" to view Part I that shows you how to highlight as well).

THEN YOU"RE DONE. (MAKE sure you put the person in the ice cube that you made with shadow effect (simply draw a rectangle shape with dark blue color and make its opacity as 35% with the amount of 25 blur)

                   

Major Concept:

Create your own people in ice Cube is very fun, its not only the person in ice cube, you can use this technique and create other different kinds of person. It again seems like it has a lot of steps but if you're used to it you can do it very easily. So it is better to practice yourself by creating things like this when you want a picture of cartoon etc. 

Advantage & Disadvantage:

The advantage of creating your own person is because you'll know how to create other kinds of person too in the future, not only the person like this (MSN style) but also you can do girl version, or person with eyes nose and mouth etc since you already know the technique from this article. 

The bad thing about this is that again IT TAKES time to do, and if its not good you might end up giving up and just Google the picture. 

Question:

Isn't it better if they don't use person in the frozen ice? Because you had to highlight so much.... Why don't they just create like something else that normally people do. (COMMON) :3

Citation:

"Create a Fun Icon of Frozen People on Ice – Part II." Vectortuts RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2013. <http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/icon-design/create-a-fun-icon-of-frozen-people-on-ice-part-ii/>.

Blog Post: Creating a fun "Frozen people in ice" icon by "yourself" PART ONE

There are many programs that you can create objects that looks realistic, and in this article, we'll be showing the readers a very interesting thing! Normally when people are looking for icons or pictures of the cartoons that they want,. Of course people would just Google online the pictures and use it, but there are some picture that they have in their mind and they couldn't find it in the internet, so what to do now? When you don't know how to do now you can look at an example icon that this article is teaching which is "Frozen people in the ice". This is part one, which is just only the ice cube, later in the next article (you can click the word "HERE" down the end of this article and view part two. 

Step 1. We need to find a program for creating this and it would be Illustrator CS3 from Adobe then we'll start creating an ice cube by sketching a 3D rectangle shape. Notice that a 3D rectangular has 6 sides, so we need to draw each of the side in different layers so that we could edit them separately later on.  

Step 2. After that, we want to start edit just one or two side of the rectangle so we have to hide all the sides that we don't want to edit at this moment by clicking the "eye" icon in the place where you can see all your layers. 

Step 3.  Since we know that, a realistic ice cube does not have a sharp edge, its not perfectly a rectangle shape, so now we want to make the edges curvy by using Convert Anchor Point Tool. (Don't worry if its overlapping each other).

 

Step 4.  Now we'll start to fill in some colors! We first just need to select one of the side and fill with gradient. Don't worry when you see the color black, it is the default color, all we need to do is just change the color to blue. After you've succeed one side, do the rest sides of the rectangle.

 

Step 5. Now change the angel to align the gradient and so that it'll look darker in the center. (high-lighting)

Step 6. Make the faces a little bit transparent color by change the "transparency" into 60% and for the bottom one, 80% is enough (we know that we're highlighting, so the bottom is darker).




Step 7. Un-hide the top part, same thing as what we did before, curve the edges, fill it with gradient color, and make the transparency into 50% since is at the top! After we un-hide it, we can Toggle the outline colors into none so that it look more like a ice cube.

Step 8. Even though it look like an ice cube already, but it looks a little bit fake because it doesn't look watery (an ice cube should be looking watery since its made from water). So now, we'll have to select the parts that we want to make it look watery.

Step 9. Draw like an Y shape at the edges of the front sides. After that, we want to fill it with color "white" again we're highlighting. But we don't want the white color to be too solid so now we'll make its transparency to 75%. and select "screen" for the color effects.

Step 10. For the top part we'll make some highlight also but since its at the top, its far away from our sight, so we want to make the color not just transparent but also to add at least a little bit of blue by filling in the gradient color (make sure you're in the blending mode so that the color would blend.

Step 11. Now our ice cube is looking pretty realistic, but we still need to add more at the front side by using the same step that we did before. For the last highlight that we're going to do would be a drop of water at the front side of the ice cube so that it looks like its melting.

Step 11a. Our first step for making the water drop is to create a oval shape by using the tool that we used to draw those highlights.



Step 11b. Then fill in the gradient color (white faded with blue + 60% transparency).

Step 11c. Make a smaller oval shape in the oval shape that we just created and give it a gradient of white to cyan color + 30% transparency.

Step 11d. Even though we made the smaller oval shape a transparency of 30% already but still it won't look like is a part of the bigger oval. So we need to blend the colors together, this time we would select the smaller oval's layer and click on effect and select blur > Gaussian Blur. When you select that, there will be a window pop up and ask you to enter a value of how much blur you want, and the best one is 5.

Step 11e. Even though they're now looking like "a" drop of water, we still have to add some highlight since we did add a lot of highlight for the sides. So now create some highlights at the top and the bottom of the oval shape AND also a little dot of highlight that makes this drop more 3D looking.

FINAL: Make sure you do transparency + blend + Screen. Do the same thing to the other drop at the top of the ice cube, and finally you'll get this! Its a realistic Ice cube!

This is a picture of the icon of frozen people in ice cube. If you want to know how to do the frozen people in the ice click HERE to view the next article on April 1st.

                                    

Major Concept:
The reason why this article is interesting is because normally people might just go get ice cube or whatever picture/icon at Google but here you can learn how to make it with your own hands! And the result looks very realistic too. It seemed like there's a lot of steps, but they're just repeating and they're very simple.

Advantage & Disadvantage:
By reading this article, you can learn how to make your own realistic things/object in computer by highlighting and blending etc. Not just ice that needs highlights, all the other realistic object does required this, so after you read this article, I'm sure you could do for other things too!
It takes a bit time instead of just Google it, and if you didn't do well, it might not look as realistic as it is in real life.

Question:
Is it better if we look at a a real life photo of an ice cube and make it according to that photo or a not real life picture such as cartoon? Which one is better? Because the real life picture might be too hard to make and a cartoon picture might be too easy (since some of them doesn't even have any highlights).

Citation:
"Create a Fun Icon of Frozen People on Ice – Part I." Vectortuts RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/icon-design/create-a-fun-icon-of-frozen-people-on-ice-part-i/>.

Blog Post: Tackk, a good and simple way of presenting and displaying your information!

There are many different kinds of ways to communicate information and display information. Power point presentations might be the one that everybody knows, but nowadays in the internet, it is no longer just Microsoft Presentation. Microsoft presentation is like basically an old style of doing presentation and displaying your information; You have to do everything inside there and later you have to click save also, what if you forgot to save it? and you just accidently closed it? All your work would disappeared and we don't want that to happen. So now, there's many other ways to display your information such as Google presentation, Prezi, Glogster and etc. The good thing about them is that they're online, you could just log into your Gmail, and start doing it online without losing the contents because it saved every time you make a new edition. Aside from "online", it is also stylish. Prezi and Glogster can be a way to display your information too but it is more stylish, you have free spaces to create  many things you want. And now, people had found a new online system that you can create presentation online which is called the Tackk. Tackk does not have a traditional-like presentation of displaying your work, it's not as formal as Microsoft and Google presentation, and also it is not that free and stylish as Prezi  and Glogster basically is in between. For me, I would call it a more formal form of Glogster. Tackk provide you things you need in order to write your contents like bullet points, change the font color, add media, proper text-box (the position is fixed so that it wont look not formal), and some themes. Other than that, you actually don't need to sign up for it too. Most of the online system requires log in system but not this one. Another good thing about Tackk is that, bascially if you sign up for this online presentation, you can get something better than not signing up and logging in and again, the good thing about this is that, even though you create an account, it is still free! Lastly, if you want to see other people of how they create their Tackk, you could just click "Tackkboard" and check out theirs, probably it suits whatever you're doing/displaying! ;)

 Major concept:

Basically this online presentation of displaying your information of whatever you want to display like I just mentioned those presentations, posters, etc., you can just use Tackk. It is very good because there's no log-in required, and if you do sign up for it, you can get things that normal users can't get (ITS FREE). Also another thing that all online tools have which is "auto save" is required in Tackk too. Anyways, this online tool is beautiful and simple and easy to use too. 

Advantage:

The advantage of using Tackk is again, you can display your information perfectly, not too mess and not too formal. It is very stylish to use Tackk plus is very simple to use it. Other than that, You also have "no log in required" and FREE to sign up (Optional). Compare to others, it probably would make you do the pavement if there's something special but not Tackk :)

Disadvantage:

It is very good online tool to create things that you want to display but the bad thing about this is that, it is not really a tool for "presentation" is good for "presenting things in one page" but not like what we normally do at school (have slides and animations). Since it is an online system, of course when the time comes that the internet is down, you would feel annoying because you have to make that either poster or anything done by the end of the day etc. But if you use offline system, you wouldn't have problem like this. 

Question: 

Isn't this another version of Glogster? They're so the same... 

Citation:

"Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom." : Communicate Differently With Tackk. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2013.

Blog Post: What is happening to the Internet every second, minutes, hours, and a day?

Nowadays, people uses internet every single day, even though you're not using, but there must be someone using  at that time somewhere in the world. There are 2.4 billion internet users around the world, and that's one-third of the entire global population and all these users use internet a lot in just one day. and from these 2.4 billion  in just a second, there are 2.8 million emails are sent, 333 new tumbler posts are made, and 1,633 tweets are published. In one minute, 694,445 Google searches are searched at the same time, 600 videos are uploaded to YouTube  and 320 new twitter accounts are made.  In one hour now, there are 10.5 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook, and 78,000 iPhone apps are uploaded which is $116,220 dollars in apps. As you can see, only in a second, a minutes, and an hour, there are already many things that people are doing in the internet, can you imagine now for what happened to the internet in a day now? 98 years worth of YouTube videos are uploaded, 172 million different people visit Facebook. The whole world basically spends the equivalent of 133,333 years ONLINE, isn't that amazing?

Major Concepts:
Basically, Internet is used every single second, minutes, hours, and day. A lot of things happened just in one second. Every little time, there's something happen in the internet especially YouTube, twitter, tumbler, and of course Facebook. The whole world uses a lot of internet in a short period of time, not only we're the one that are using the internet.

Advantage:
It is good that people use a lot of internet, people can talk oversea to each other just by clicking "comment" in Facebook, or "send" in G-mail and people could share how they feel, what they want to say in one click in a second. Other than this, the internet could also provide us good information when we want to do research, we could just "Google" whatever we want to find, and again, 694,445 Google searches are being searched at the same in just one minute, probably every one minute there's new information that are updated in Google too.

Disadvantage:
Since the whole world is using the internet so much just in a very short period of time, the internet server might became slow which make people that are doing serious thing in the internet like business letter etc., feel annoyed. And what if the electricity is down? Everybody would be aggressive probably because they're in the middle of the game etc. Basically, when the internet is used by many people, it might become slower which would made people that used a lot of internet have bad feelings such as anxious or depress etc. ^_^

Question:
I don't know why is people so much into internet now? And how can the internet support so many users at the same time...?

citation:
"What Happens On The Internet Every Second, Minute, Hour And Day? [INFOGRAPHIC]." - AllTwitter. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Mar. 2013.

Blog Post: Best arguments against those who hate video games

Normally most of the people that are not gamers or game lovers often think that video games are bad, video games don't provide you any education, it makes your life worse. NO, say no to all these arguments. Sometimes, video games or online games could be in a positive way too. There is a guy name Jason Rowe who has physical disabilities, and of course what normally people would react to a person that look different to them might be walk away, not friendly with them, talk bad about them, scared of them etc., which would make the person feel bad about themselves. But Jason Rowe, even though he had physical disabilities, he plays online games, and it's not bad when he play that because what he said is that, he got friends from there, and he could ride an Imperial speeder bike, fight monsters, or hang out with friends at the bar. The reason why he wanted to play is that, he wanted to interact with other people too like what normally people would do.  And for him, The computer screen is his window to the world, online doesn't matter how does the gammer looks like, everybody is the same so when he plays online games there, he gets treated equally like other people too. Basically not all the video games/game lover or online games are bad, everything is about balancing; everything would be not good when it's too "over", which means it's not balanced. Just like too much water is not good, made your cells explode but not enough water its bad for your health, you couldn't clean anything out from your body. It's all about balancing...

It is not very bad to play online games, it is just that too much wouldn't be good, but Jason gets friends through online games, he enjoyed having friends and chat with them while playing and enjoying online games. Also, he is a physical disability person, so he was glad that he could still ride a speed bike and fight monsters in the online game world.

The advantage of playing online games is that, you don't have to be pretty or handsome or famous to be friends with people in the game. Even though you have physical disabilities like Jason do, you can still enjoy playing online games and interact with friends; people in the game world won't scare you or go away from you too.

If seriously too much on playing online games, there would be a disadvantage. When it's too much, you might be too much into the game that you forgot about the regular time for your breakfast, lunch, dinner, shower, and the worst, sleep. Sleep at the very late time could cause stroke and heart problems. So it is better not to play too much.

I wonder how could he play properly if he is a physical disability person, wouldn't it be hard for him to play? Wouldn't he feel annoyed playing this game if he had a hard time pressing the keyboards...?

Citation:
"Upload Images." Best Argument against Video Game Haters. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Feb. 2013.

Blog Post: Worst Password Ever that You'll have in your LIFE! Don't use them

Is your password safe? Normally people would say Yes, because they are the one that actually created the password... But what normal people would do is to just create easy password such as 123456 or abc123 etc... and it might be because they're lazy to type or something but did you notice that there are a lot of hackers in the world that would actually hack into your account and do something else? It is very dangerous especially if the account that you have is a important thing such as the thing that's more personal. Just like the apps! These kinds of thing may ask for your permission about personal things and if you gave it to them, they would record it, and if some hackers found it, they could hack into yours and buy whatever they want in the app store which is not good. So to avoid from hackers to hack into your account you better create a strong password that is also easy to remember! There're some tips of how to create a strong password. First thing that is recommended to do is to create a password that is mixed, in another word, you might want have a password that mixed with lower case letters, capital letters, numbers, and special characters; the more numbers you have, the more safe password you would have. Also, you can use password checkers to check how strong your password is or you can create one by not using the common words that we've seen before, use something unique. By looking at the chart up there (the orange one), we can actually see how less the people is using 12 characters for their password! most of the people did only 6 characters, which is not quite safe.

Here are some passwords that you might not want to use them.  

The main thing that this author is talking about is that, it is better to create a strong password in order to avoid those hackers or crackers! And for some people that doesn't know how to create good ones, this article provided you good tips of how to create good password such as mixing everything together, capital letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special numbers. The longer the character you have the more safe it is for your account. :)

The advantage of creating a strong password is that you can avoid other people from hacking it into your account. And is good to follow these guidelines because, its really helpful when you're creating one for a very important account.

The disadvantage of creating a strong password by using these guidelines is that, people are actually lazy, and it's wasting time to type such a long password just to log into an account, isn't that annoying? And some people said that, the most dangerous place is the most safe place, so if you create a password with 123, people wont know, they might try a lot of hard passwords, but actually you're having a very easy password.

I'm very very curious about the hackers... How could they hack other people's account? Where did they found those accounts that they want to hack and why didn't they get caught if they hacked other people's account (important account)...

Citation:

"Top 20 Worst Passwords That Can Hack Your Private Accounts?" All Infographics. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Jan. 2013.

  

Blog Post: Adding Windows 8 shutdown/ restart shortcuts on desktop

Many people said that, Windows 8, which is the newest OS, is better than Windows 7 because, the search function had improved with the new Modern UI which is simply beautiful. But the only thing that is annoyed is the shut down icon, basically the way you turn off your PC. And traditionally, in your windows, if you were to shut down your PC or restart and log off your PC, you'll need to go setting and click power button and another thing that's even worst is that, in windows 8, there's no such a alt+f4 (shortcut for turning off the machine). So now, they have a shortcut for shutdown! either on task bar, start screen, desktop, or other locations that you can choose yourself, just simply right-click and go new shortcut. First you need to create a shortcut, you might want to find a location for your new shortcut, and then you right click, new and type in "shutdown /s /t 0" and you're done! see how easy it is? Now if you want to pin it to your task bar, you can right-click new shortcut and pin it to your task bar based on your preference. So after you had done with creating shortcuts for turning off your PC, you can now simply just click on that icon (shortcut) and it would immediately begin. IF you would like to have it even more easy to use and put it on your start screen, you can simply right click again on the shortcut and click on pin to start. Other than shutdown, you can have other switches too such as /r for instance and  /h for hibernation.

Have the "shut down" button on the screen or wherever you think you would like to put is very convenient because you wouldn't have to go many places in your PC in order to just simply "turn off" your computer, and the best thing about this is that, you can pin in on your task bar! Task bar is the place that is the most seen-able in the computer, so it would be very easy for you to turn off your computer if you pin it there. 

The advantage of doing this is that is very convenient, and the steps of making or creating this shortcut is not hard either! So people that want to try would definitely try it! (unlike other things, sometimes in order to have something fancy, it takes long and complicated process to do it). 

The disadvantage of having this is that if someone accidently removed the shortcut that you've pinned, you might forgot how to get to the place where you can turn off your computer in a traditional way. Also by doing this might slows down your computer IF you've already had many shortcuts on your desktop or task bar.

I wonder how would this work so easy that you just right click and create a shortcut for it, how does it work behind these simple steps...

"How To Add Windows 8 Shutdown / Restart Shortcuts To Start Screen, Taskbar And Desktop | Redmond Pie." Redmond Pie RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.

Blog Post: Google's Android coming to a kitchen next to you

Basically in this article it is talking about Google's Android is now appearing in your kitchen. Such as the rice cookers! or even refrigerators. The android from Google (the OS that's added into the rice cooker) would tell you the type of the rice and set everything for you which you don't have to worry whether the rice is going to be too soft or not soft. Other than the rice cookers, this OS system can even connect from a washing machine to your television! And even LG's fridge could connect to LG's smart oven. And because nowadays there are many internet-connected devices plus the one that I'm talking about now (the OS system in rice cookers etc), the International Data Corporation believe that, this kind of device would reach $2 trillion in 2015. And not only Google is doing this, Panasonic had already did this in Japan for its microwave oven and rice cooker. 

Basically main thing that this article is talking about is that, nowadays, there are more and more and more internet-connected devices in this world that make everything become easier, and the one that this article is mentioning all the time is the Google's Android's OS system that would be in the fridge and the rice maker. 

Good thing about this is that, people won't have to worry so much about the rice when they're cooking the rice. And not only this, the rice cooker would determine what kind of rice and what to do the best for this rice. The machine is always the best, because they're not "lazy". The machine would do the best for you, and for this system, you won't have to even look after and set time etc. Basically, very convenient. 

The bad thing about this is that, probably in the future you might have to cook rice at either your husband's house, and what if your husband does not own a lot of money? He might have the old-fashion rice cooker at home, and by that time (since you're using the rice cooker that has the OS system) you won't be able to cook the rice at your husband's house! Basically, you'll become a person that doesn't know how to cook proper rice.

I don't understand how do these people like Google and Panasonic insert OS into a rice-maker...

Citation:

"Mashable." Mashable. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2013.