Kent J. Chen's WebLog

a personal journal by an addictive geek

Archive for 2010

[Fun] Learning how Curling works

Posted in Fun stuff on March 18th, 2010 by Kent

image If you are like me who didn’t know a thing about curling and just got into it during the latest Winter Olympics 2010, held in Vancouver, this awesome graphic produced by Ciaran Hughes definitely explains this game in great detail. You should check it out.

And if you still haven’t looked this game…

[Thoughts] Don’t forget to obey the law, stupid

Posted in Stuff in General on March 18th, 2010 by Kent

imageThe story of Google/China spat over Internet censorship doesn’t seem to go end any time soon, even though the ending that Google will get out of the Great Wall eventually seems inevitable. But a sound “After Google dustup, should the US ban Chinese computers?” is just too ridiculous and stupid to me. Yes, not only is it…

A trick that checks if someone is selling your email address

Posted in Tips & Tricks on March 16th, 2010 by Kent

image Email addresses are the gold to many Internet markets. Collecting your email addresses is the key to their success, which is why many of them offer some great stuff to you for free but asking your email address in return. Pretty every one of them are promising they will keep them with their life but the reality is, you…

[Tool] top 10 online resources to encrypt and decrypt plain text message

Posted in Tools on March 10th, 2010 by Kent

image Encryption is complicated so it’s nice that someone out there already make some cool apps that can do all these complex work for us. Thanks to Technical Personal for compiling a nice list of web apps that does this dirty work. Very useful and handy when you need it.

1. Crypo

Migrated my blog from subText to WordPress

Posted in Internet, WordPress on March 4th, 2010 by Kent

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This blog had been running on subText, a .Net powered blog engine, since it’s first launched in 2004. I picked it because being a .Net developer I suppose to run my own blog on the same platform. But it turned out, WordPress won the war in the end, as I finally migrated it to WordPress a few months…

[Tool] sending large email attachments with Outlook and drop.io

Posted in Tools on March 3rd, 2010 by Kent

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Email isn’t a tool that’s designed for file-sharing, but probably is the one that gets used the most. Even though when an email with large attachment gets bounced back with the reason that the attachment is too big, people are still thinking of ways like compress, split, etc to get around it.

Drop.io is one of those web services…

[Firefox] After the Deadline released Firefox add-on that makes spell checking even easier

Posted in Tools on February 5th, 2010 by Kent

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After the deadline is a neat web app that helps you write better by checking your spellings, detecting misused words, checking styles and grammars using its own artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology. It has helped me quite a lot.

Now they released a Firefox add-on that makes life a lot easier to…

[Fun] MJ, the King of Pop, without the crown

Posted in Fun stuff on February 3rd, 2010 by Kent

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Sammy (my 5-year-old daughter) and I were in the superstore last night. The TV in the store usually plays the kids movie most of the time. But it was playing MJ’s latest movie, This is It, yesterday. It was fun to watch actually, so I called up Sammy since she’s quite crazy about dancing lately.…

[Fun] don’t take life so seriously

Posted in Fun stuff on February 1st, 2010 by Kent

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A friend of mine forwarded an email to me this morning with this cute picture and the nice quote in it, which made me laugh pretty hard. Thought to share it out with all of you who come across this site.

Life is short, Break the rules, Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly, Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably, And never regret

[Google Reader] added a new feature that allows you to track changes to any website

Posted in Stuff in General, Tips & Tricks on January 27th, 2010 by Kent

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Most of the websites I follow have the RSS feeds that make me quite easy to subscribe but every so often there are sites and pages I came across that just don’t have the feeds for me to easily follow up. I would have to bookmark them in my Google Bookmark and remember to come back and check…