New Macbook Pro! (2012, Retina Display) Review, Thoughts.

The new MacBook Pro announced during the Apple WWDC 2012 is a whole new breakthrough.

Here's a couple of reasons:

1. Retina display for a laptop
I don't know how many of you would appreciate the 'retina' display, but it certainly marks the point where the future of Retina Display begins. Also, this is very crucial to Photo and Video editing, with the big screen AND high resolution! If you're thinking, well I don't do any Photo or Video editing, you should be better off with other laptops at the moment as this is kind of the 'prototype' and only photo/video editors would buy a laptop with this steep price tag at this point. But again, it's going to change in the near future.

2. Double Thunderbolt port
Thunderbolt definitely beats USB 3.0 hands-down. The only problem it has is that the Thunderbolt hardwares seems to be expensive (due to its difficult software controls). But many are coming out and low priced Thunderbolt products are coming out (especially the external drives) such as Elgato Thunderbolt SSD. Again, this (at this point) is only useful for professional editors (especially video editors) because you normally won't need a dual 10Gbps connection for your everyday tasks. But for video creative editors, this is a godsend. Especially with the Double Thunderbolt ports since they don't need to buy extra hardware adapters of some sort to extend their Thunderbolt connection. These Thunderbolt ports turn this into a mobile Powerhouse!

3. Newly designed efficient fan
These so-called high-efficiency fans cools this mobile workplace. Not much to say about this one, but this definitely would help reducing the noise generated from the fan while increasing air flow efficiency (with the introduction of unbalanced fan gap - yep).

4. Long battery
Of course, it would last barely 1~2 hours when you're topping its max and the fan goes off to its max, but from the experience I get from Macbook Air, 7 hours roughly translates to 5 hours of normal work. Now, I recommend you to plug in the power when you are doing some heavy-duty tasks such as video-editing (it's always video editing, isn't it?) because the battery life will shorten by a bit. But other than that, with all that spec, 7 hours is amazing although I suspect that with switched graphics (to a more powerful one) and/or mid to mid-heavy workload would literally squeeze the juice out of the pack.

5. Thinness and portability
My god, you have no idea why having a thin laptop is important. Own a Macbook Air and you'll know right away. Or this laptop. Now I was able to get my hands on the new Macbook Pro and before I talk about its weight and its feelings, I want to describe my experience with the Macbook Air. My MBA (Macbook Air) is very, very light and I can carry it around with only 1 hand, completely balanced, and it feels like just a book. I wouldn't consider doing this with other hefty laptops, but this was lightweight and portable enough so that I carry this around everywhere, even to my bathroom. *cough. Macbook Pro 15" Retina Display have the weight of the 'normal' 13 inch laptop (something like 2 inch thick, just normal Dell or Samsung laptop) but have the size of 15 inch laptop. Now, the thickness of this laptop is great (although not perfect). But you do need to hold it with 2 hands (both by weight and by size) and the size will feel uncomfortable to carry it around. It is designed to be a powerhouse, so heck, why not just put it in one place and not move it? That's what it's designed to be anyway. Not really portable, I must say.

6. Flash storage
I'm going to say only one thing about flash: I've been using Macbook Air, and I have no idea how you could use a laptop without flash. It's so slow! Fortunately, this Macbook Pro comes with a Flash storage, so you can rest assured that you won't bore yourself right at the loading screen. In fact, it's even faster than the one in Macbook Air and is so fast that you don't even see the spinning wheel on booting (it's probably the same as Macbook Air, by experience). This IS the future. You can't live without it. Period.

That's about it! I would recommend this 'thin' laptop (I'm not too sure as to put this in the 'ultrabook' category or not. Of course, this IS an Ultrabook but since I've got so used to Macbook Air...) to anyone who needs some serious power and/or fast and powerful expansion. Mainly for professionals, I wouldn't recommend this for normal users due to 1. high price tag 2. its big size 3. its overly powerful computing power (it won't be in a couple of years).

If you are a normal user though, I would recommend waiting for a bit until Apple applies the same to the 13-inch Macbook Pro (because this IS the future) or they hugely bump the specs of Macbook Air (which is highly unlikely).

Please like this article on Facebook!

Funniest comments on the web #3

This time on funniest comments on the web, where we cover the funniest comments and other Google and Youtube related stuffs on the web, we got a comment on Kaoma's Lambada official music video that still has the highest rated comment or the top comment page.

Right. Brazil video, a guy saying he's going to Brazil, and a need for Brazil condom!

So this guy says he's going to Brazil, connecting his personal experience that is going to happen with the video, which is really inspiring and soul-crying and it just feels like you need to cry and you get so nostalgic and stuff!

But guess who ruins the fun by commenting a totally unexpected comment?

'have fun, but remember to use condoms'

sure it just adds more fun to it.

In fact, it was so funny that I laughed on the floor, and everyone else in my apartment was pretty pissed off that I was screaming and laughing, just rofling.

What is this, use condoms? Brazil condoms?

Wow. The total lol comment and best of all the series!

So that guy thinks the other guy is going to go there and just get a few prostitutes, get laid, and have some sexy time? xD

Even if he does, why are you then telling him to use a condom as if you were his mom or dad?

So funny... :D

Join me next time, where I'll cover even more funny comments.

Previous episode: First episode: 

Be sure to check out my blog often!

I really hope you remember the first video ever and the funniest comment on it...

Share this with your friends! They'll love it!

Apple News - New Mac Pro 2012?

Now that Intel had released their newest line of Xeon processors, all of them designed with 23nm CPU, Ivy Bridge is now targeting the low-end server, also known as microservers, and some for the high and mid range processors.

What this means is that Apple is likely to renew their product line of Mac Pros (for professionals) that hadn't been updated since 2009. Ever since 2009, Mac Pros were using the Intel Xeon 3000 family or the Intel Xeon 5000 family - which is adequate enough and still packs some punch today, but getting behind the technology improvements and breakthroughs.

This might be it. After a long time, Apple might release the new Mac Pro, working closely with Intel behind the scenes, ready to launch as soon as Intel updates their processor line and broadcast it to the world. This has been Apple Inc's strategy and it's just how they roll. This allows for maximum profit, partly by the buzz of Intel Ivy Bridge 23nm architecture.

This would be awesome. After being anticipated for a long time, they are really likely to refresh their Mac Pros. I am definitely looking forward that, and it would mean to the other video/graphic professionals that they could get back to Mac, being ensured the highest performance and lowest electricity consumption, with the connectors designed for future, more long-term improvements and enhancements that would allow for long time use of these Mac Pros. Maybe even a motherboard that could house the next generation CPUs. That would be awesome.

Some of the features expected/wanted:
Even more fully customizable interior
Updated software (OpenCL, OpenGL, etc) that would allow maximum use of the newest CPU and GPU
Intel Ivy Bridge CPU line from variety of ranges (high end to low end)
A Nvidia GPU - this is LARGELY needed due to release of Adobe CS6 and all their applications taking advantage in hardware and software acceleration with the implementation of Adobe Mercury Engine or stuffs like that in basically all of their Master Collection CS6 application suite. Also the newest AutoCAD and Maya would benefit hugely from faster hardware and updated software and firmware to support it!
A Thunderbolt port - this one's a bit too obvious!
Hopefully an addition of Blu-ray disk reader!
Everything else should be the same - similar prices, similar specs of other parts (maybe even more efficient power regulation), same disks, same RAM, and all those other factory parts that comes with the Mac Pro.

Hopefully you get an idea of what the new Mac Pro will be capable of along with its expected specs and features, and when it's going to be released/announced! (hopefully soon)

Add me to your RSS feed!

Funniest comments on the web #2

This is a series of compilation of extremely funny Youtube and Google comments and videos/pictures.
To see all, click here:

As THE first video ever uploaded to Youtube, this video gets many comments, including this one:

This guy claims to be watching this on iStone after some idiot pissed him off by posting one of those 'regular' spam comments.
Hilarity insues.

Click on the image to see full size photo.
The usual spam comment saying 'Like if your watching this in 2012' pisses one guy off, and he becomes sarcastic. Really sarcastic so that it's funny (really funny...I rofl'd for 5 minutes)

To see more funniest youtube comments, subscribe to this blog so you get the post whenever you want.
smalltechtips.blogspot.ca
Leave a comment on what you think!
If you have funnier comments (which I doubt you do), comment with the link to that.

Making Your Post Search-Engine Optimised (SEO) - how to get big on youtube

Sometimes you feel like even if you had a great post/page/Youtube video/review, nobody ever watched/read your stuffs. That is because nobody actually saw it at all in the first place. To make your contents out there more, you need to focus on optimizing your contents for search engines, so that your contents would show up at the top of the search results.

Bing is virtually impossible, and useless to do this as it tries to understand who the searcher is, and makes attempts to get results relevant for only them. This would be useless, again, but you can have a lot of key words, labels, and tags to attract viewers at all times.

So Bing is out, and Google remains. Google is known for its accurate search results, with the reason being that it uses straightforward algorithms to mechanically analyze datas from pages and its servers. So it's unbiased, given that the users turn the setting to 'hide personal results' instead of 'show personal results', because in the first case, it would be the same as Bing if the users did. Crossing our fingers, we get on with our comprehension on the Google's 'The Algorithm', that made Google rise, made Microsoft fail so much, and made Google one of the predominant companies in the world.
Google rates pages/videos(in case of YouTube) in following ways:

Title>Description>Tags

Now on the pages, there is a certain complicated thing called 'page rank' which you probably wouldn't be able to control at all, just because a. It's so complicated and b. It depends hugely on luck.
What Page Rank is that it ranks pages that are more important, more viewed, and more liked and supposedly more people think it's relevant to the search result. The Page Rank system is extremely difficult. All you can do is to keep making creative contents that people would enjoy along with good tags and plenty of descriptions. But make sure the tags are relevant, as irrelevant tags might cause you to lose a couple of people viewing your contents.

On Youtube, there are some extra stuffs that you can control(which is always good)!
The below shows how it ranks videos. As no company can search video by its content, it searches videos by its metadata, so more metadata ensures that more people watch your video. There is an upward limit though.

YouTube ranks videos in following categories:
Spotlight Videos
Most Discussed
Most Viewed
Top Favorited
Popular
Most Responded
Top Rated

One other thing most Youtubers don't do is to add subtitles. Subtitles count hugely when determining the search results, because like I said, no company can rate/search by video's contents, so subtitles is the only way they can know about your video, so it counts highly when rating the video's importance and relevance. By adding subtitles, you get ahead of 99% of the people, because only 1% of people do it.

There is a rumor that comments on videos and pages also count towards search result by a small margin. Don't know if it's true or not, but it is always good to have many comments. There is nothing to lose from it.

Things that are both useful for pages AND Youtube videos:

1. Add as many tags as you can.

2. Google shows results that include the search keywords in the exact order the person searched.

For example, if I look up RFID 2013, results with RFID 2013 will get higher in the search results, compared to RFID...2013 where there are words between RFID and 2013. Also, it means that 2013 RFID won't show up at the top of the search result.

3. LOTS of description. There is no limit on description, so use that wisely. Describe your videos well, along with putting the title across the description and constantly repeating the keywords in the description. Don't spam by putting too much words. Words that are not in sentence and not in order, especially just random array/soup of words and tags, is not gonna work. Instead, you have to be precise yet include all the details and cover a bit broader than your video/content.

4. In tags, try putting very specific terms such as "thunderbolt drive" in double quotation marks. That way, when a person is searching specifically for that term, your contents is the most accurate result.

5. I know this is BS, but you do have to get a lot of views from people to get higher. Yes, this is unfair. But it is better for Google, so just try to stay alive.
6. You need a lot of reference from other sites/videos. Try sending links to your contents to various websites. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. When it gets on Facebook and Google, it gets you so much more viewers! I once got shared on Facebook, and guess what? The guy with 10 subscribers suddenly got 1000 extra views just from Facebook because some whale just shared it! Reddit is also a good place to share it...That is, only if your contents are good.
7. Constantly create contents (alliteration?) for your increased chances on getting higher on search results.

8. More interactions are better!

So those are the many ways you could increase traffics to your contents that not much others tell. Hope it helped you, and if it did, subscribe to me to stay up-to-date!

UPDATE: I added more info and corrected some of this! Check it out here!

Why You Shouldn't Worry About The North Korea Launching A Cruise Missile

The news section is hot with the supposed-to-be imminent launch of North Korea's Long-Range Ballistic Missile that could reach up to the US territory and create another crisis like the 9-11. Right now, they are refueling, with the purpose of missile unclear. While this might put world into the state of fear and alert many people and nations, fear no more, because this is no more than an acting for South Korea's election.

"What the hell is this guy talking about?" you are probably thinking/saying this as you read. But calm down, I know the situation, this happened many times before, and this is just one more of the example of history repeating itself. North Korea is spending all of its $10 million which they could spend on people's foods and feed thousands and millions of people for a year. But this is only a joke. It is actually the South Korea's political party doing this. The han nara dang, the infamous political party for exploiting people, dominates the government system by assuring people that the world would fall apart without them. Seriously, that's what they are doing. They make up stuffs, lie to you, track and hunt you down, it's basically the 1984, only 18 years late. Research shows that they made up about North Korea's submarine firing missiles at their ships because 1. there was no shrapnel 2. there was no aluminum oxide present anywhere near it. So they are making this up. There are more fishy and suspicious (which obviously they all faked) things going on, but for today we'll focus on the North Korea's Unha 3 missile. It is said to be refueling, which it is. It is said that it could hit the United States' territory, which is a bit skeptical, but plausible at the same time. Purposes are unclear as to why they are doing this. The North Koreans say it's for military practice, the US thinks it's for the long-range ballistic missile, or the ISBM that US feared so much during the cold war. North Korea is actually doing this because the Han Nara dang needs votes for their election. It makes sense - it was election time a couple of days ago, and the results showed that so many idiotic people voted for that same political party over again, which had been screwing up since the creation of the new modern Korea. They - the hannara dang - are behind all this. They are telling the North Koreans to pretend to fire missiles and people would be shocked so that they could win the votes from many people. Some enlightened people (which there are VERY few) protested against this, but the 1% seemed to want to keep its powers, while the 99% are doing nothing.

So, this is a terrible tragedy because it just shows that Koreans are stupid as they are. If they don't change something, it's going to blow up sometime rather soon.

Tip Of The Day: Why Does Word Take So Long To Start Up/Load?

Microsoft Word can be sometimes cumbersome to even load up. Especially if you're on the older machines and older OS, such as the Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.3 Tiger. So, here are a couple of tips on how to speed that process up.
First, delete some stuffs. When the disk is more than half full, it gets slower. That's why the old machines run really slow because it's full.
Second, delete some fonts. If you have loads of fonts, it takes just forever to load them!
Third, delete some templates. In my case, and especially for the newest versions of Word for both Mac and Windows PC, templates takes a really long time to load. Deleting the ones you don't use really help. You can always get them back later from the Microsoft website when you need it.
Fourth, try clearing some processes. Many background processes running at once will slow your computer down, and by a lot. This is especially problem if you have many programs checking in the background such as network.
And lastly, remove some of the unused extensions. Without extensions, the newest version of Word starts up in 4 seconds. Extensions take about 10 seconds for each of them.

This applies for all Microsoft Office components, that is, the Word, Powerpoint, and Excel.
Hopefully you'll find this useful and you speed up your process!
Add me to your RSS feed for more upcoming useful posts and opinions like this!

25 Tips When The Youtube Starts Being Slow

Today for the blog I got ways to prevent Youtube from being slow and stop loading the movie/video you are trying to watch.
So the problem all begins when the red bar starts to catch up with the grey bar.
1. Youtube may not even load at all at the start of a video. In that case, refresh the page by pressing F5.
2. If it's still not loading, try scrolling up to 0:03 or some part of the video instead of letting Youtube load from the beginning.
3. Check your internet settings. Many of the times it is because of the internet connection problem.
4. But will it blend?
5. Many of the other times, it is the fault of Youtube. Close your browser and start again.
6. You should try disconnecting from the internet and connecting again. This clears the problem 90% of time.
7. If it still doesn't work, then try rebooting the internet router. Internet routers are also computers like your laptop, PC, iPad, etc, so sometimes it needs to be rebooted.
8. Oops, the router took an arrow to the knee.
9. Be an adventurer and restart your computer. This step might be horrendous for you if you're running Windows XP. Your computer is now safe to turn off.
10. Try unplugging your router with your Modem.
11. If it's still doesn't work, it is recommended that you contact your ISP!
12. KNIFE!
13. Try updating your system software and/or your browser software. This should have been the step 7.
14. Sometimes it is good to change video resolution lower. Try it.
15. If the red bar is still catching up, you need to scroll it forward instead of backward. The reason for this is that Youtube don't load movies/videos when the black bar is ahead of the red bar. Most of the time.
16. You were expecting something funny in this step.
17. Try smacking the computer like back in the ol' days.
18. If you are willing, replace some parts of the computer with newer parts, such as RAM(really important).
19. Smacking didn't help? Then try smashing! Word of caution: when smashing, only use the bats. Don't throw your sister onto the computer.
20. Clearing the computer might help. Drop it from the top floor.
21. One actually useful tip: delete some stuffs on your computer. It is proven that computer is more likely to malfunction and be slow when the 2/3rds of the disk is full.
22. Now back to the practical tips: ask your parents for some money, regardless of your age.
23. Infiltrate Microsoft and reprogram the whole OS.
24. Blow up the disk, and insert a new one.
25. If you're still having problems with loading a Youtube video, then blame the world because it's clearly their fault.

Hope you enjoyed this and found something useful. Add me to RSS feed and let your friends know about me on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Thanks!