The WalkCar

August 9th, 2015

Portable electrical vehicles are all the rage these days. People are getting lazier and lazier, so they don’t want to walk from place to place, they want to ride something, something that will do the work for them. First came Segways now self balancing unicycles and boards. Well Japan has just one-upped us once again. They bring the world the WalkCar. Its a flat board, with 4 motor powered wheels. No need for stabilisation and is powerful enough to go up hills and push loads.

This device is without a doubt going to be very useful for a variety of tasks, however it raises an interesting question: when will convenience start making our life worse and not better. To iterate, sure it may be very convenient to ride this device up hills and when pushing loads, but what is stopping people from using it all the time everywhere. And if we do, won’t we slowly transform into those fat and lazy human blobs that we saw in WALL-E? There is no end to human laziness, and eventually our ingenuity and strive for convenience will be our downfall. Think about that before using one of these boards on a regular basis.

Aussie slang

July 29th, 2015

One thing all my international friends can agree on is that it is hard to understand Aussies speak. They generally speak too fast, don’t pronounce words clearly enough, and shorten everything. And I mean everything!

This video was shown to us at the UTS Accomplish: Adapting to the Australian workplace lecture/ seminar, and over 80% of the students in the room had no idea what they said in the last sentence. Watch it yourself and see how accustomed to Australia you have become.

Beware of flying apples

July 21st, 2015

Flying Apples

You know how much I love Apple and apples. I love the tech and I love eating all sorts of delicious fruit. What I don’t like, is when apples start flying. Now that, my friends, is terrifying.

Las night I was heading back home at around 11pm. Then while walking back home on the empty roads of Rhodes, minding my own business, I hear a whizzing sound of something falling, I thought it was a bird flying by, or maybe a broken tree branch, but I was greatly mistaken. A Granny Smith apple had fallen onto the bonnet of a parked car.

As any normal person, I look up to see,
wether I was walking past an apple tree.
Which I was not,
and where it came from I could not spot.
Leaving it be and proceeding home,
I was bewildered by the apple that’d flown.
A few seconds later, and to my surprise,
another apple had fallen from the skies.
This time much closer to me,
so I couldn’t just … let it be.
Pretty damn shocked I ran for my flat,
away from all these apples that fly and go splat!
Reaching my room and telling Alex the story,
he laughed for a bit, but then he got worried.
Crazy people are crazy indeed,
lets be a bit carful. Agreed!

Hope you liked my little tale. I tried to rhyme the best I could, cause I thought I might be a poet, but didn’t even know it!

Avenue Q Musical

July 17th, 2015

Avenue Q poster

So far I have only been to one musical, that was “Mamma Mia” on Broadway NY in 2009. But yesterday Amy and I went to see Avenue Q at the Enmore Theatre. It was a great show, and I can say, I laughed so hard my cheeks were hurting. Before going in to watch the musical, I had no idea what it was about or anything, aside from Amy’s brief explanation that it has something to do with Sesame Street.

After watching I can give a brief plot summary. The story takes place in New York on, you guessed it, Avenue Q. We are shown the life of all the residents and a new collage graduate struggling to make ends meat. Even though they might seem like a regular bunch of people (and monsters), but they all have something that makes them special. Like Tod, who is gay (even though he doesn’t want to admit it) living together with Nicky, unemployed college graduate; Brian, the jewish ex-baker with an oriental wife – Christmas Eve; Trekkie, the monster, who … utilises the internet to its fullest potential; and others. What else makes them all special, is that they are all just a little bit racist, for now and of course, it sucks to be them, if they were gay.

And now I finally know where the some of the viral songs and memes come from. Overall great show, very happy Amy invited me to go. Her is a link for the playlist of songs, but I would highly recommend that you go watch it yourself if you can.

Das Upgrade

June 28th, 2015

DasKeyboard 4 Mac

Ever since coming back from Japan, I have been upgrading my life. I got a new apartment, a whole lot of great furniture, new job (upgraded version of old job), new clothes, a 5k iMac, and now some more shiny new things. For years now I have been longing for batter typing experience – a mechanical keyboard. But since I was going to Japan and then in Japan, I could never really get one, cause they are heavy and bulky. Fast track to the beginning of the month. My WoW Cataclysm gaming mouse, which served me well for 5 years, has started to show signs of death, it may not be dead yet, but definitely breathing its last breaths, so I started searching for a worthy replacement.

Read More

Eurovision 2015

May 28th, 2015

esc2015_logo

The biggest song contest in the world is back for the 60th time, and this year with a special guest participant – Australia! Thats right, this year us Aussies can party together with the cool cats in Europe… at 5am… Yea, when Europe was celebrating Sweden’s outstanding performance and win in the contest, we were just having brekky and getting ready for a long Sunday ahead of us. But it was definitely a fun experience – being able to vote for my favourite European countries from all they way out here, in the middle of nowhere.
Everyone was shocked to find Australia participate, but they quickly agreed that it was a good idea after they heard our Guy Sebastian perform.

I loved his perforce, but my favourite is still that macho from Sweden with those pretty drawn animations in the background. Not only were the animations memorable, but the guitar music in the verse was just outstanding, I still have it stuck in my head. Overall great performance, adding it to my top for sure.

DuckDuckGo

May 12th, 2015

duckduckgo

A few days ago, my sempai Ruben wrote up this little blog post about DuckDuckGo and it got me wondering wether I should give it another go.

DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine similar to Google or Bing, but has one feature that all the others lack – privacy. With Google, Yahoo, Bing and pretty much all the other big name search engines, you get no privacy… at all. Everything you search is saved in some form to either be used for marketing, add targeting, search predictions, etc. But ultimately these companies called data about you, and then sell this data (sell you) to advertisers. Thats how they make money, thats their business model. With DDG, thats not the case, they don’t track you (well at least they say the don’t). But thats not the only good factors about DDG. The site has customisation options, a region switch, ! lookup operators, and other neat features, which I never knew I wanted, but am used to now.

Back when Apple released OSX10.10 Yosemite and iOS8, they added an option to make DuckDuckGo the default search engine in Safari. Thats when I tried it for the first time. It was a good experience I might say, but ultimately I ended up going back to Google as my primary search engine, when DDG failed to find results for relatively simple searches.

Now though after a good year, I think I will give it another shot. I have moved everything of my Gmail, I have pretty much cleared my Google+ and the only things left in GDrive is collaboration folders for uni group work. I am not quite sure wether I am ready to give up Google Search, but I will definitely give DDG a go for the next few weeks, and if it grows on me, I’ll stick to it.

Of course I don’t recommend that you all go out there and change your search engines to DDG and change your habits, but as an innovative and forward thinking person as I believe myself to be, I will seek the new solutions to the problems that we have been facing for years; the alternatives to established concepts; I will rebel against the norm and embrace that which is new and (arguably) superior. Long live the startups, long live the community.

70 Лет Великой Победы!

May 9th, 2015

70

С праздником Победы, славным, легендарным,
Пусть Господь дарует мир на всей земле,
Не затухнет память в сердце благодарном,
Не тускнеет злато на гербовом орле!
Поколение новых гениев, талантов,
Пусть рождает снова гордый отчий край,
И под песни детства и под бой курантов
Согревает душу пусть победный май!

Maldives 2015

April 29th, 2015

Maldives

Ah the crystal clear azure sea, the white sand of the beach and the green trees, so beautiful, so tranquil – these are the Maldives.

Honestly after spending 7 days on the island all I can say is: its bliss. If you are in need a rest and have enough funds to back it up, I say go for it! It will be the time of your life. All you do is lie on the beach, eat delicious fruit and go snorkelling to see all the colourful fish down bellow. So bring your sunnies, snorkelling gear and a good camera (normal and underwater) cause you will see so many beautiful things that you will definitely want to keep these shots forever.

Now its time to get back to my normal life: work and uni here I come.

Photos are right here:

flickr_logo

United Arab Emirates 2015

April 18th, 2015

View of Burj Kulifa

Welcome to another exciting episode of: ‘Vadim goes traveling around the world’. This time he is visiting the land of sand and oil – United Arab Emirates. What did our young traveler find in this distant Arabian land? Find out after the break.

Read More