I heard a kid sing the Alphabet song the other day. I think we have not kept up with times when it comes to alphabets. Seriously, don’t we type more compared to writing. My wrists start hurting if I try to write something more than two pages. And going forward I feel kids would be typing more. So here is what I have devised. We need to fill in some of the gaps. Also should it be Y for Yahoo! or YouTube. OR W for Wikipedia or Windows? And as June san says, we need a Qwerty song. F for Flickr or Firefox.

Some twitter responses to this and my responses.

natthefatcat: @preetamrai If we have to teach them in QWERTY order, that means we – the teachers- gotta learn in in QWERTY order as well. LAZYYYY. about 4 hours ago from web

Preetam: Yes, so I made this chart above.

?theurbanrant: Qwerty was solvg a probm with manual typewriters RT @preetamrai: Why don’t we teach kids alphabets in QWERTY order.no reason2 do ABC order.

Preetam: Yes, but I think Qwerty is here to stay until the keyboard (both on screen and physical) are around.

misscalamity: @preetamrai then what would become of the alphabet song?!

Preetam: Lets make a Qwerty song

?kengggg: @preetamrai what about DVORAK?

Preetam: I think Qwerty is the most popular one.

nhklein: @preetamrai You mean those under the British imperial history & the USA? The French, Germans, Spanish & other ABC users to not use QWERTY

Preetam: But don’t the French and the Germans have their own alphabet charts anyway. The French can have an Azerty chart.

Last weekend I was in Singapore for the Neotony-Mozilla event. Mozilla has this Drumbeat series of event where they are looking for ideas on making the web better. I presented an idea to reward free content producers. We want to build a system where we have a sort of currency that we can award to people who create freely accessible content.

I consume a lot of creative commons licensed material (photos on Flickr, music on Jamendo). I learn things from the videos that people upload on YouTube. I wish I was able to buy them beer or coffee or tea or ice cream, but I can’t as I am not in their city. We did build a similar system last year where we enabled one to buy drinks for friends and kind people who helped us out. The system died as we could not expand it beyond a city and various other reasons.

It is something akin to Hatena’s star system in Japan. You buy these starts and you can plug it on the content (one people’s blog) you like. The stars are decorative only and provides no physical value for the recipient, which may not be a bad thing. Someone spent some money to give you a colored star.

Our system is in the similar spirit. What we are trying to do is find a currency that does not translate to real cash but something yet may provide say some percentage of a Flickr pro account or some Skype credits. These things are universal and can be utilized by any internet user. Lets call them Free Content Dollars or FCDs. These FCDs can be bought by internet users from a FCD exchange. A part of these FCDs can be sponsored by internet companies say Yahoo! as Flickr pro credits.

So how does it work. You find someone has written a good post on say shopping in Bangkok. I can give the FCDs to this person. We are still discussing the mechanism of how this can be done. Once the blogger has accumulated enough FCDs she can re-deem it for say a Flickr Pro account or some Skype credits.I will post more as the idea develops.

Justin showed me this Sony Viao demo unit at Hackerspace.sg. Runs windows 7 and cost around 2000 SGD.

Thin

Has one more USB compared to Macbook Air.

It is small and thin and very light with 64GB SSD drive

The keys are small, the size of early eepcs. Otherwise looks like a nifty portable computer.

Nani sore!! This is you flagship phone for the season, with awesome screen and unique form factor. And you put up a plastic dummy for customers to play with??

Meanwhile, in another corner of the same shop iPhone is inviting people to play.

I was at the Creative Crew’s monthly meet last week, talking about mobile photography.

It is said that the best camera is the one that is always with you.

Some photography related iPhone apps that I use

Some pictures below from CameraKit

The original was messy, the cemented floor was rough. But Camerakit’s processing makes it look smoother and the cat came out looking nice. This cat always comes to my house and then disappears over the roof and its owner will come looking for it.

Another Camerakit shot, really enhances colors.

This one is with the Polaroid feature in the Camerabag app on iPhone

This one using Oldcamera

This app is called Camera Genius and it add some features over the regular bare iPhone camera. You can make the whole screen a button with the Big Button feature. The Anti Shake uses the built in motion detector in the iPhone to take a picture when the camera is not shaking.

Couple of other useful apps

This one above of my favorite app on the iPhone. I always have to scan documents for my travels. This app is called Jotnot and you can use it to take photographs of printed stuff. Once you have the photo, you can set the four corners and the app will process the page to look like a scan.

This one is called Pano. It lets you take multiple pictures and stitch then together to create a panorama

I was sitting right upfront at this concert and couldn’t take a wide shot. With the Pano software I took four picture and it combined all the images to create this wide image.

What if I don’t have iPhone?

Nani sore!! must get iPhone. Other phones don’t have this amount of choice yet when it come to photo apps.

What if I don’t like Apperu or love Nokia and Android etc. of stuck with another phone with contract etc.

Ok fair enough, let me show you some apps on other mobile platforms. If you are using one of these phones please suggest some apps in the comments.

For Nokia S60, try PhotoRite SP

For the Android, try Camera Pro

Stuff

The title of this post was partly inspired by Best Camera ecosystem by Chase Jarvis

Also, remember that your mobile phone is also your album. Keep your best photos on it. When you are traveling you can show it to people and make friends.

The new 5th Generation Nano looks good.

I was playing with the video recording feature.

Some very short sample videos clips for your perusal.

Indoors

Outdoors

And here is a 30 second clip shot with the grainy film filter on.

Night outdoors shot

Indoors fluorescent light

Once at a Japanese meetup, I demoed couple of Japan themed islands in Second Life urging Japanese language learners to explore these islands and make friends with the Japanese people there. One of the advantages of virtual worlds is that they provide an environment where you can interact with real people and objects.

This morning I got an email from the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon inviting people interested in Chinese language to participate in the Virtual China Immersion Camp.

If you speak some Chinese, know how to use Second Life and have two hours to spare every weekday from August 3 to August 28, you can apply for this camp. You will be paired with a Chinese student to work on a virtual ecological park and in the process improve your Chinese skills.

More details and application form at the CASLS MyChina Village Virtual Chinese Immersion Camp 2009 page. They will be selecting 15 participants from the applicants.

So now that OS 3.0 is publicly released, I can post some pictures of tethering and how it works.

ACHTUNG, Xiao Xin, Abunai !!!!
Please check your mobile company on data rates and your allowance before you use this feature. You don’t want to end up paying a huge data fee.

PART A – On the iPhone Enable tethering on your iPhone (running os 3.0)

1. Go to Settings on your iPhone. tap on GENERAL button

2.Under General, tap on NETWORK button

3. tap on INTERNET TETHERING

4.Turn it ON

5.Select BLUETOOTH or USB. I am using the USB as the phone gets charged too while you are using it.

PART B (using USB cable)
Just connect the iPhone to your Mac via the USB cable.

And you should be able to use the internet.