Category Archives: Tips & Tricks

iPhone 5 Tips: How to Save and Extend Battery Life

Many complaint their iPhone and iPad battery life has been shorten after upgrade to iOS 6! I have tried on iPad and yes it really not as long as it was before. Are you having the same problem too?

I think it could be one of the bug in iOS 6. Perhaps the next upgrade iOS 6.1 will get this issue resolved. Until then what can we do to extend our iPhone battery life?

There are 5 tips for you to extend the battery life:

1. Turn On Auto Brightness: Auto brightness allow the phone to adjust screen brightness according to current lighting conditions. Further, you may manually reduce the brightness to save battery even more.

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2. Turn Off Location Services: Lots of app acquire location service update. This cause send data over the network and consume power. If you don’t use GPS frequently, turn it off to extend your battery life.

How-to-turn-off-location-data-tracking-on-iPhone-3G-original-iPhone Continue reading →

Windows 8 Tips: Restore Windows 8 Start Button

One of the failure in Windows 8 is it don’t have enough tutorial to guide first time user.

If you are first timer to Windows 8 metro style start menu, you will panic to find classic start button such as Program, Run and Search.

You will never get the desktop experience without knowing the shortcut keys. Yes, there are plenty of shortcut keys you need to remember! Too bad if you have too many things to memorized.

Windows 8 Start Menu

To me, Windows 8 is a good OS. But the start menu and shortcut keys make me mad sometimes. I prefer to have my classic “desktop mode” as my default Windows startup screen.

Further, I want the Run button to appear when I press Windows button. This only can be done by restore back the Windows Start Button.

Windows 8 Start Menu

 How to Restore Windows 8 Start Button ?

Download Start Button for Windows 8 here. It is free and easy to use. Just download, install and the classic start button will be place as normal, the metro start menu will be disable.

Introduction to Excel Formulas Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting is a very powerful and fairly simple to use Excel feature; fairly simple, that is, after the extensive overhaul the user interface received in Excel 2007, which made it much simpler and easy to use.

Conditional Formatting allows you to change the format of a cell: background and foreground colors, fonts, and etcetera.  This makes it much easier to find specific information in a large table; for example, finding the top or bottom percent of a range of values, finding duplicate values, or marking specific dates.

Top Hat Trick

Let’s see what the executives of the (fictitious) XYZ Widget company has dreamed up for us this time. The attached Excel file contains the monthly sales report for a few of the sales persons:

The V.P. want to see at a glance which are the three best sales persons. Reordering the lists is not an option as they should be kept in the same order for good unknown reasons (or so they claim). So, we’ll use conditional formatting to highlight the top three total sales cells. Continue reading →

Easiest Way to Upload Google Video to Youtube

As informed by Google last week, Google Video will come to its end of service in few more days at 29 April 2011.

So sad we are going to less a good video hosting service that served us for years. My first travel video was uploaded to Google Video too, before Youtube.

Anyway this is not a show stopper after Google team make the migration off of Google Video the easy way.

  1. Associate your Youtube account with your Google Video account
  2. Upload “Upload Videos to YouTube” option on the Google Video status page

By the way, this is not a news, Google already announced turning down of upload to Google video nearly 2 years ago.

What if you do not upload Google Video to Youtube? Nor download to your computer? Don’t worry. The team is working now to migrate all Google videos to Youtube automatically! You won’t lose your memorable videos ;)

How to Export MP3 Songs from iTunes?

I’ve bought a MP3 FM modulator to listen music in-car. The problem is the ear jack to iPod is short and not CLEAR, no surround! Suspect the made-in-China FM modulator input line is very low quality.

Instead of ear jack, copy MP3 into USB thumb drive and play on modulator directly much more clear.

iTunes Export Songs to MP3

Export songs in iTunes is just a click away. Select songs that you want to export, right-click choose “Create MP3 version“. Select your export folder and go. Yes, now can copy MP3 to USB thumb drive and play in-car already!

iTune export

In fact, the FM modulator sound quality is not that good. You know China cheap product quality right?

I should get an iPod car dock to play music directly. Any recommendation?

Tips: Can’t Activate Windows XP?

Today my staff reinstall a Windows XP computer, but can’t activate it.

I’m very very sure it is a genuine Windows XP CD with license product key. Wierdest is installation id don’t show up, which is needed to activate Windows OS via telephone. Can’t even login to Windows for the first time!

Thought is installation problem. Reinstall the Windows again and yet, the installation id don’t show up at all. No error, nothing.

Continue reading →

Update MFM Free Garmin GPS Map

It is time to update your Garmin GPS Map. My last update was 7 months ago,too old.

The latest MFM GPS Map (Malfreemaps lite v1.63) comes with more new features:

  1. Link to Navnet map in Kalimantan
  2. Coverage of Southern Thailand
  3. Optional Chinese POI
  4. Improved SG Postal Code & Address map with instant search result
  5. New POI icons
  6. New POI categories with custom icons (soon)
  7. New MFM map generator with option to generate either Full or Lite version
  8. Coloured topo polygons are added into Full-version map
  9. New multi-language installer
  10. No more error when uploading map through Mapsource

I think this lite version is more than enough for me to travel around Malaysia. But sad thing is it don’t have Mac version. Mean you have to download the EXE map file into your Windows. Extract it then transfer to Garmin GPS. Anyway it is not a big problem. Continue reading →