In these days and ages of sophisticated technologies, it is disappointing to see people emailing and uploading their 10-megapixel photos in full size, just to be displayed on computer screens. The problem is that it takes forever to email or upload all those huge photos, several megabytes each, to your friends, not to mention that it will also take forever for them to download these huge images. This is an unacceptably inefficient way to transfer images over the internet.

Now if we think about it, there are over a zillion programs already made for resizing and making images smaller, yet people still share their photos in full size. What gives? Having tried a handful of such programs that can resize images, I think the inherent problem is in the usability. I mean, why did I have to go through a hundred steps before I could resize my images? Why did these app developers make it so difficult to just make images smaller?

Believing that everybody should not have to put up with that, I took the liberty to make this program Quick Image Resize which like the name suggests resizes images as fast as possible in just ONE step. The user interface in my opinion is relatively simple and easy to use (if it is not, I do welcome constructive feedback). The default setting will resize images in various formats and save as JPEG about 40KB each in the 'Small' subfolder.

Give it a try. Download Quick Image Resize 1.0 (FREE) below.

Download Link:

QuickImageResizeSetup.msi (545KB)

Disclaimer: The programs are provided as is without any guarantees or warranty. Although the author has attempted to find and correct any bugs in the free software programs, the author is not responsible for any damage or losses of any kind caused by the use or misuse of the programs. The author is under no obligation to provide support, service, corrections, or upgrades to the free software programs.

Just finished half way through Ren Ng's thesis on Light Field Camera--Ren Ng is the CEO of Lytro.

If I understand it correctly, these are the characteristics of his LF camera:

• An array of micro lenses is fitted in front of the image sensor. A micro lens will cover a group of pixels on the sensor, so basically a micro lens will represent a pixel in the output image.
• Image resolution will be reduced. How much it is depends entirely on the number and size of the micro lenses. The minimal size of a micro lens is limited to the lens optics. Optimal resolution appears to be reduced to 1/16th (16MP to 1MP).
• The purpose of a micro lens is to capture the directions of the light. Conventionally, a pixel records photons from all directions. A micro lens would directionalize the light hitting the pixels (forcing a pixel to record photons only from one direction). One direction each, a group of pixels under the micro lens will record light from all directions. I use "directionalize" here because technically it isn't the same as "polarize".
• To digitally refocus and to get the final image, the software program simply ray traces the light, one pixel at a time. Ray tracing is normally a computationally intensive task in 3D but for LF data, this should be extremely fast since the RGB values of the pixels are already there; it's just a matter of picking the right pixels on the sensor to produce the final image. Per-color-channel ray tracing could be used to completely eliminate chromatic aberration from the image.
• Show Stopper: I'm not too sure about this but I believe such LF camera will not make the depth of field shallower beyond the lens'. The way it works, we should be seeing only LF cameras equipped with a large sensor at least APS-C size and with standard DSLR lenses. If you put the array of micro lenses on top of a P&S sensor, it wouldn't make a difference anyway since the DoF is already too deep; it would be pointless. Besides, it's probably extremely difficult to produce smaller micro lenses for P&S sensor. So my speculation is we will only seeing LF cameras in DSLR, ILC or Fixed Lens Camera instead of LF P&S.
• So yes, if you want shallow DoF, you'll need to get a lens that gives shallow DoF. 
• While can't get shallower DoF, it can however extend DoF to get everything in focus. Again, it's just a matter of picking the right pixels.
• Ren Ng talks about producing a 160MP sensor so that the final image will get around 10MP. Such LF DSLR however will greatly reduce the low light performance. It would be like losing 4 stops of light.

The promise of a LF DSLR is to allow you to refocus after the fact. Make no mistake, it can be a paradigm shift in photography. It could probably be the age of point-and-shoot APS-C Mirrorless Compacts!

Dear Mr. Nice Guy,

Since the dawn of time, you have been puzzled by this question: Why do good girls love bad boys? "I'm the good guy," you say. "I do nice stuff, so I am the one who deserves the girl, but why did she choose that bad boy over me?"

Well, here is my answer for you, Mr. Nice Guy. Girls don't love you for who you are. They love you for what you do for them. You put their needs in front of yours. You give them emotional support, and you are always be there for them. Ain't nothing wrong about that, of course. Doing nice to others is wonderful, but by doing that, you instill a mindset that you are lovable for what you do for them, not for who you are. You are known for your good deeds not your own merits.

Now take away those nice things you have done to them. What is left? Nothing. Without your little acts of kindness, you would be remembered for nothing at all.

I am not saying doing nice is bad. It is wonderful. Just, please don't expect people to love you for that. Repeat after me, "they love my acts."

Here is my suggestion to you, Mr. Nice Guy. If you want people to love you for who you are, you should present yourself in such a way that do not just involve doing good deeds. Less of doing nice things to please people, more of presenting your trait and personality, in other words, be yourself, show your individuality. 

Good luck!

Oh more useful information, you should listen to what experts say too.

http://www.wikihow.com/Break-the-%22Nice-Guy%22-Stereotype

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_guy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_boy_(archetype)

http://meetyourgreens.com/m/articles/view/Get-the-relationship-you-want-Stop-being-a-nice-guy

http://www.nomoremrniceguy.com/ngs.php

The beautiful isn't a good girl.

The good girl doesn't care.

The caring isn't sophisticated.

The sophisticated isn't beautiful.

They don't come in whole package. Do they?

Two days setting up this beast with 200 apps to download and install, and 2000 GB of data to restore from the old hard disks. More pics later. :) Oh btw, see that disc dropped on the floor? It ain't CD. Hehe... I ripped a hard disk apart, and that disc is a hard disk plate containing like 100 GB of data. :D

I was asked, "What keeps you alive?" and sure enough my answer was, "Foods!" 

WRONG!

It is wrong for me (and for everyone). This epiphany I am having right now, it was the person dearest to the heart who was keeping me alive. Just presence of the person alone made me aware of the directions I should be going to. I had all the motivation in the world to be alive and to pursue the dreams, the goals, short and long. The thought of the future with the person alone made my days. I woke up and I could feel the positive energy in the room. At the end of the all-day work day, I crashed the bed with a smile. The nights were so serene, so peaceful, looking much forward to the day after.

What happens when the person who is everything to you ceases to exist?

Before you read on, Here... 10 seconds for you to pause and answer.

.

.

.

.

.

Everything in your life ceases to exist too.

Slowly you get eaten alive by the mere absence of the person you were living for. You start questioning your day-to-day activities, why doing this, why doing that and for whom. Nothing makes much sense anymore. What you do and what you don't do, don't really matter. You constantly have to remind yourself that you are doing it all for yourself, for the future of a one-man show or perhaps for the many familial others.

You are scrambling to have something to hold on to. You want to hope. You want to be alive and to live.

I think the success to anything does not simply lie on "Failure is okay; just keep doing it till successful." This is wrong. It urges you to blindly risk whatever it takes in hope that success would come at the end. Of course, success will come after a string of failures but at what price you have paid for it? And when? I hope it will come before your life candle runs out. You won't have a clue about the answers because your mantra lies solely on the foundation of hope rather than reality.

Failure is NOT okay. You are constructing a tall building, for instance. When it collapses and kill a bunch of people, it is NOT okay for you to say, "Nah... I'll just buy more cement and build it again. After a few more collapses, one will stand tall." This is not a statement you will hear from a sane person.

Likewise, if you are a doctor performing a life-threatening surgery on this person, it is NOT okay to say, "I'm going to try removing this black-yellow thing out. Here it goes nothing..." And then the person dies, and you say, "Ops! Hehehe another failure. I did it again! But it's okay." This is not from the mouth of a sane doctor.

Well, don't get me wrong. I am not an expert in this success and failure things. At least I know what works for me and what not. Now I am struggling to be successful myself. In finance and business, I think I have done a pretty good job, having gone from a kid waiting for dollars from his parents to a financial-independent adult running a company in another country. In education, I think I have done a pretty good job too, having transformed myself from a kid who "believes everything people say because he doesn't know much" to an adult who "questions things around him and finds out the truth and what not."

My mantra on success is that, to be successful, one has to understand and manage the risk (and reward) very well. There is no excuse, and there is no easy way to cheat your way around it.

For every business venture, you must pen your ways to achieving the objectives. You are selling clothes, for instance. One of your objectives would be to maximize your profits. Ask yourself how you would do it, what tools you will need, whose expertises you will hire, how much money you will need to keep the cash flow healthy, and last but not least how much time you will consume. You absolutely must not try your ideas out blindly because you think it's cool and that failure is acceptable. If you do that, you will fail, period. 

For risk management, you should be aware of the obstacles, big and small, that you may face, and then plan out how you would absorb such impacts on your project. You are buying and selling properties or stocks, for instance. One of the prominent risks is that the prices could fall. What if it falls by 20%, what would you do? Would you sell it as soon as possible? Or would you hold on to it until the prices fall by 50% or even more? Or would you need certain data to make decision? You should never wait for problems to arise first to plan out the solutions later, or you could be too late to solve it.

To conclude, there are three outcomes when people do stuff. One, failed. Two, successful. Three, neither failed nor successful. It is common for people to make mistakes and to fail; however, one should try his best to minimize the chance of failure by managing the risk accordingly. If it does fail, allow it to fail gracefully and controllably. In case of doubt, he should all together avoid the risks that do not suit his risk profile. If the opportunity is too risky, just pass it. Only play on what you can afford to lose, 'cause if you screw it up big time, that one big time, you might end up living on the street screaming why heaven did not help.

There are those rich people out there who write books and do seminars, and they spread lies just to pimp money from your pocket. Are you sure that people like Donald Trump tells you his business secrets in a $19.99 book so that you would become a better competitor who would then bring down his billion-dollar empire? Think about it. Well, I hope you find this article helpful one way or another.

About The Author: Neo Lee is a financial analyst and software developer at FxFisherman.com, a website dedicated to providing resources on foreign exchange trading. He is known for creating the 'Super S/R' technical indicator which automatically identifies the support/resistance levels of security prices.

Internet banking offers the convenient new ways to checking the account balance, transferring fund and even pay bills through your own internet-connected computer. There is no line to wait, no dirty note to count, and there is no need to drive out anywhere. Everything is all done at home.

I did some research and found four banks in Cambodia that provide the internet banking service to the customers. (There could be more since Cambodia's banking industry grows so rapidly.)

FTB - http://www.ftbbank.com/

You can request the internet banking service applied to your savings account for $10. You will be given an One-Time-Password device (OTP) and a password to log in to your account. This OTP device offers another layer of protection in a way that even if somebody else knows your password, the person will not be able to compromise your account without the OTP device given to you.

Services:

• Check account balance and transactions
• Fund transfer
• ATM
• Pay electricity bills

ANZ Bank - http://anzroyal.com/en/Personal/

ANZ provides everything FTB does except the OTP device. They rely entirely on your password to protect your account. They do however employ a basic protection against attacks. Basically, if somebody attempts to log in to your account with the wrong password three times, your internet banking account will be locked out, and that you would have to pay a visit to ANZ to reactivate your internet banking access.

Services:

• Check account balance and transactions
• Fund transfer
• ATM

ABA Bank - http://ababank.net/

Advanced Bank of Asia, or ABA, really do offers a set of advanced products and services to its customers. Internet banking with secured OTP device and CryptoCard is provided to all account holders. You may check all the transactions at your convenience through your computer. On top of that, you may sign up for a VISA debit card and have it linked to your bank account, and that allows you to make purchases on the internet and at credit-card POS nationwide. What is more advanced is that, through the internet banking system, you may issue your own virtual credit cards with a custom maximum balance you set for temporary uses. This allows you to limit how much a merchant may charge you for the purchases. Once the transactions are completed, you could just cancel the card to ensure that you will never get recharged. You will never have to worry that the credit card number is compromised.

Services:

• Check account balance and transactions
• Fund transfer
• ATM
• VISA debit card
• Virtual credit cards

CPB Bank - http://www.cpbebank.com/cpeb/index.html

Cambodian Public Bank, Campu, or CPB also provides the internet banking service, ATM and debit card. More details will be added.

So yes, last month I gave my long-lost childhood dream a serious thought. It's about making my own electronics and robots.

As a young kid, I was bombarded with all the tech news. When I was like ten, Honda made a headline with "Honda Humaniod Robot Takes Its First Step," and then more headlines on robots, cool electronic gadgets, and more robots. I was awe-inspired by these kind of technological achievements. I was like, "Gee! I want to make one myself." Hehe.. and I remember I couldn't do anything else besides unscrewing my Chinese-made, remote-controlled toy car and looking at the wires. "Gee! So which wires to connect to turn this toy car into a robot?"

Color me stupid but not yet. And so, still as a little kid, I thought, "here is dad's 10kg video camera. Hmm.... how to put this huge thing on this little toy car so it records the video and send back to the TV?" Well, soon eough I discovered I couldn't make a robot out of a cheap Chinese toy, so yeah I crushed the toy and threw it against the walls to vent my anger. I admit, some smashed pieces of it sure looked like tiny plastic robots.

So I moved on, to something else. I soon fell in love with computers. I think I wrote about this back. You can check them out. Yeah so I moved on to the field of computing. After high school, I taught myself computer programming. Fast forwarding many years, I guess now I can create many different kinds of computer software. Software, yes! You can see a lot of buttons on the computer screen but you can't touch it. So this stuff is pretty much intangible. You can see, you can use, you can hear but you can't touch. (Your phone touch-screen display isn't real touch, nah!)

I want to touch my inventions. I want to move them around here in the real world, and I want them to move in real world. And I wonder what my inventions will smell like. I bet plastics and metals.

So there, my long-lost childhood dream came back. I didn't ignore the call this time. I vowed to make it a reality. Oh yes! I am gonna make some robots for real. Considering that I have zero knowledge on electronics, this is a leap of faith. You say, "confidence" is the right word? Darn right. So all these is based on my life-long motto, "You did it. I can do it too!" I always believe anything is possible if enough effort is put into it.

So now I'm buying a lot of tiny parts to begin with. My original budget was gonna be small like 500 bucks or less, but now, I've thrown in three grands, and I'm only seeing a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. Two weeks of sleepless nights by browsing for the parts, three thousand dollars spent, and it is still asking for more. If the spending goes more out of control, I might have to beg on the streets. If you do see me, just give me a lot of Benjamin Franklins, okie?

Okie...  I'm still waiting for all the parts about four thousand individual parts to arrive here. Well, stay tuned. I'll post unboxing photos when I've got it.

Yes, I want a decent e-book reader that has a large e-paper display. It will save me a lot of money if I read a lot of books, which I do. I have been buying regular paper books at Amazon.com and having them shipped to me here in Cambodia. Each typical paper book ultimately costs me about $35 to reach my hand. This is insanely more expensive than an e-book which will cost me about $10 each, not to mention that there are tons and tons of free e-books on the web. A quick calculation reveals that such device will pay for itself in no-time. Plus, it is not only money that is saved but also trees and the environment. As you know, an e-book is just a digital computer file which could be transferred electronically through the internet in bulk for less than a cent. Thousands of e-books can fit into a small flash memory. On the other hand, if you dissect the actual costs of a paper book, you will see that it costs a lot of harms. Making the papers will need trees cut down for use as raw materials. The machines used for manufacturing, printing and transporting paper books will burn fuel, emit CO2 into the atmosphere, and accelerate the global warming. Now, storing books at home will waste the precious space that you pay in square meters/feet. In all, it is really unnecessary to spend $25 more just to do more harm.More...