Month: September 2009

Sounds of Hope Charity Gala Night

Have you heard about the Sounds of Hope Charity Gala Night?
“For Families in Poverty Fund”

soh_1200
High Resolution Image

Date: 3rd October 2009
Time: 7:30pm
Venue: Jerudong Amphitheatre
Tickets (one seat in a table of 10): B$50, B$100, B$150, B$250
Tickets (public seating): B$10
Facebook event page

For dining table tickets please contact:

Public seating tickets available at:

  • ranoadidas.com
  • FitnessZone (Tel : +673 223 3338 / +673 223 2338)
  • MVision Cinemas (Empire) (Tel: +673 241 7977 /+673 261 0361)
  • Studio Scene (Tel: Studio 1 +673 245 4528, Studio 2 +673 245 5733)
  • Chill

Catch any of their updates on the Sounds of Hope’s Twitter page. More and other information such as direct contribution to the fund can be found at Brunei.fm’s post here

It’s great to see events such as these and people reaching out the to the community of Brunei. Hope we as people of Brunei will continue to support such events but more importantly try to make a difference in the lives of those around us.

Concept Computer’s Monitor Trade In Promotion

So one day I was flipping through the newspapers and I saw that Concept Computers was doing a trade in offer for old monitors to get a $50 discount on a brand new LCD monitor.

Concepts Monitor Trade-in Promo Advertisement

It’s great that they were taking both working and non-working monitors and this sort of business practise is not common in Brunei at all. So when I went to exchange 3 old non working monitor’s for LCDs I was happy to see a site of old monitors. Photos of the monitors being hauled away are available at AnakBrunei’s post

Pile of old monitors traded in

So I would assume that they were going to recycle the monitors as they accepted both working and non working monitors, but I had to check with them. Actually I wanted to get the contact of the recycling center they were going to send it to. So I asked the staff there and they informed me that I should as their boss Mr Vincent Pao. He happened to be there at the shop so I approached him and asked whether they were going to recycling the monitors. He told me that he was going to throw them away!! He did mention that they would give some away but that the last time they sent quite a lot of computer equipment to be recycled they only got B$200+ from it. So he tried another method. There were recyclers offering to take the monitors from him but he wanted to sell the monitors to them to at least get a better return on investment I guess. But they didn’t want to pay for them so he said they were better off throwing it away.

After hearing that I thought what a bummer. I’ll go hug a tree to make up for it (actually that reminds me about the ISB‘s Million Trees Project and BIBD‘s commitment to match each tree for every 4000 bought). But at least he did mention that they were giving some away. I will try to follow up on this issue as now they are having a printer/scanner trade-in: any printer/scanner for an All-In-One (Print-Copy-Scan) Epson Stylus TX100 for just B$98 available while stocks last and before 30th September. On a lighter note I have to say that Concepts Computer is the only innovating computer store in Brunei (to my knowledge), from organizing seminars on Windows 7, Panda anti-virus and now offering these trade-in offers. Other computer stores in Brunei, I hope you step up your game plan to exceed the things Concepts are doing!

Printer Trade-In

** Note: This information was gathered on the 25 August 2009 from a discussion between myself and Mr Pao. If they did end up sending it to a recycling center do let me know. Thanks

The Unofficial Lite Edition of the Brunei Times’ E-Paper

The Brunei Times has their official E-Paper which is a digital version of their actual daily print edition but it’s based on Flash and it’s pretty cumbersome to navigate and read the papers. So I managed to extract the URLs of the images and create…

The Unofficial Lite Edition of the Brunei Time’s E-Paper

Perfect to load up the Complete version, let it load and have the entire newspaper right in front of you to start off your day.

Update (19/Nov/09): Seems that Brunei Time is blocking direct image loading. While a fix is being worked on, use Brunei Times E-Paper Downloader to get the news.

Using wget to resume downloads that require cookie credentials

I’ve been having an issue recently (not sure if it’s the Mac) but it has indeed become very apparent to me, that I would download things (applications / videos / ISOs / etc) in Firefox and the download would ‘finish’. It shows it as completed in the downloads window but in fact it is a truncated download. As seen in the screenshots below the SDK finished at 1.6GB when in fact the actual full file size is 2.1GB.

Misleading completed Firefox download

I initially tried using wget to download the file but got a ERROR 403: Forbidden error probably due to some cookie credentials. So not wanting to waste my 1.6GB download that took about 12 hours I resorted to looking into getting wget to work with cookies and was happy to see that the folks who created wget indeed had an option to load the cookies file. Sweet! Very sweet indeed. So next task was to get the cookies out of Firefox which was a bit more of an issue.

Export Cookies was known to work but it was not compatible with Firefox 3.5 so I had to download the Nightly Tester Tools to allow Export Cookies to work. Export the cookies (“Tools > Export cookies”) and in Terminal/Command line and enter the wget command to resume the download as follows:
wget --server-response --continue --load-cookies cookies.txt http://location/of/download

Download wget (Windows | Mac)