morning harvest at kutuh village

I Wayan Wirawan, has been a seaweed farmer for 10 years.

He used to harvest the seaweed in 50 days cycle, but with current weather harvest time has not been very predictable.

Weather swing is now normal in Bali. In a middle of a day with clear sky you can get rains coming out of nowhere.

css: published/style.css title: Project Eden doc_prefix: projecteden

There’s a new startup accelerator in Jakarta called Project Eden:

We are a pre seed investment company designed to enable great people to launch great ideas. We are experienced technology and investment entrepreneurs with passion to support Indonesia local start-up ecosystem. Our start-up and support process accelerate the route from planning, beta, monetization plan to sustainable success.

We are completely transparent and totally committed to helping your startup succeed. To help you get there, we offer:

• We match your current monthly salary on your previous job.
  Worry no more on making your dream come true

• You’re Still The Boss.
  You get to keep majority equity. We take minority.

• Complete Focus.
  All the legal, finance and admin stuff is taken care of, so you can focus on your product.

• Refine And Optimize.
  We provide continuous advice for business, UX, marketing and brand through us or our partners.

• Inspirational Community and Workshop.
  We hold monthly un-conferences so everyone can share and learn.

• Fund raising.
  We will be responsible of matchmaking the love ingredient of your business objectives with our network of investors

• Insightful mentors.
  Startup will have access to network of our mentors and guess mentors from various field ranging from technical, design, UX, marketing, financial and distribution

Great news, but without knowing how much is this small equity they are asking, we can’t really know if this is a great deal. For comparison, ycombinator usually ask 2-10%. I guess we will found out after their first event in 9 July.

css: published/style.css title: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? doc_prefix: why-is-european-broadband-faster-and-cheaper

A nice article from engadget about why is European broadband faster and cheaper (emphasis mine):

Not government spending. The UK’s administration hasn’t invested a penny in broadband infrastructure, and most of the network in the Netherlands has been built with private capital. (The city government in Amsterdam took a minority stake in the fiber network there, but that’s an investment that will pay dividends if the network is profitable – and the private investors who own the majority share of the system plan to make sure that it will be.)

The game-changer in these two European countries has been government regulators who have forced more competition in the market for broadband.

I think our goverment have one a great job pushing the price of mobile call/text down. Time to do the same thing to internet connection.

css: published/style.css title: Why android can’t have smooth UI animation doc_prefix: whycantandroidhavesmoothUI

Last week I had the unfortunate experience of trying out an iOS device. Unfortunate because it leaves a bad aftertaste knowing what I’m missing with my android phone. ¹ The thing is slick. Every animation is buttery smooth and the browsers doesn’t stutter at all when scrolling.

This isn’t the case on android smartphone. If you never try iOS, android animation will be passable, but try playing with an iPhone for a few minutes and it will totally ruin the experience of your perfectly good android. It is guilty of the greatest sin of animation: low framerates. A few minutes of googling revealed the main issue: Android doesn’t use GPU to draw UI to the screen. Instead, all this graphic heavy job is done by the CPU.

This is logged as issue 6914 in android official issue tracker. Last time I checked, 1732 people starred this issue and based on their feedback, even high end smartphone like Galaxy S2 with dual core processor suffer from “laggy and choppy UI”.

A member of android dev team, Romain Guy explained on the thread why android can’t have GPU accelerated animation in the UI and browser:

This is something we’ve investigated a couple of years ago already and that we revisit regularly. Of course we thought of using the GPU, but there are non-trivial issues on many Android devices (a G1-class device for instance supports only one OpenGL context at a time, which would prevent you from using any OpenGL based app like games or augmented reality apps.) In our past experiments we even found many cases in which using the GPU was slower than normal rendering.

New devices might allow us to overcome the past limitations that made GPU support a not-so-good solution.

The “choppiness” and “lagginess” you are mentioning are more often related to heavy garbage collection than drawing performance.

On Jan 26 Romain closed the issue and marked it as released for android 3.0. It still doesnt run perfectly smooth but great progress nonetheless. Knowing how adept the devices manufacturer is on releasing android updates, I don’t expect my phone to ever run this version. The latest version promised for LG Optimus One is Gingerbread, promised to be released on May 2011. Almost 2 months ago. Still no news.

/endrant

The rise of bitcoin, an electronic payment system that touts itself as “the first decentralized digital currency” has been the talk in tech scene in the last few weeks. With the latest market crash the system credibility has been questioned. Today, the guy who took advantage of yesterday crash post his side of story protesting Mt Gox decision to rollback yesterday trades.

I’m Kevin and I’m the guy who bought 259684 BTC for under $3000 yesterday. I really wanted to keep this as quiet as possible, but I don’t feel I can anymore. Here’s my side of what happened.

The whole spectacle is rather amusing. They are learning about why money is handled the way it is. Looks like I’m not building bitcoin mining farm anytime soon.

Afternoon in Blue Lagoon. Nikon F80, Tokina 11-16mm, Kodak Colorplus 200

I’ve been playing with film camera since I bought an old Nikon F80 camera at a local online shop. I thought it would be a cheap and easy way to experience full frame photography. It turns out to be not cheap nor easy.

First the price. The camera itself is a cheapo. I got it for IDR 525K. It looks very cheap if you compare it with a digital full frame camera like Nikon D700 which goes for IDR 19.000K now - 2011. You can get 36 film camera for the price of one digital camera. But once you factor in the film price, processing and scanning, which is 65K per roll (36 exposure), the film camera pay for itself after 11000 exposures. I’m sure that wouldn’t take long if you live in Bali. The place is full of photo opportunity. With my first camera I got to 23K exposure under 1 year.

A walk in the beach. Nikon F80, Tokina 11-16mm, Kodak Colorplus 200

Now about that ‘easy experience’.

I think I might have taking for granted all the convenience of digital photography. Using film you can’t get the instant feedback like digital. If you messed up, you can only know after you have the film processed and scanned.

The hardest part is when you took a picture that you think will turn out to be a great shot, but you still have a few exposure in the roll. In this few last exposure please fight the urge to just shoot random stuff just so you can run to the photolab and scan the film.

Waiting for the lift. Nikon F80, Sigma 24-70mm, Fujifilm Superia 200.

Family bike afternoon. Nikon F80, Sigma 24-70mm, Fujifilm Superia 200.

It may not sound like it, but I actually like the Nikon F80. It teach me some basic exposure knowledge like the sunny 16 rule. Or knowing that to get a nice backlighting effect on a sunset I will need 1/100 at f2.8 exposure. The scanned film result is also hard to simulate on digital. I still can’t get the same tone and texture using lightroom and photoshop. So I guess I’m going to keep shooting film, despite the high price and effort.

Akhir tahun 2010 kemaren cuaca di Bali sangat tidak karuan. Karena jalan-jalan ga mungkin, jadilah hari terakhir di tahun 2010 diisi dengan acara makan- makan.

Cwie Mie Malang

Brunch hari itu dimulai di Cwie Mie Malang, sunset road. Ini restoran yang baru dibuka, sepertinya cabang dari cwiemiemalang.com. Descripsi di situsnya sendiri seperti ini:

Cwie Mie adalah salah satu produk makanan yang aslinya memang dari Malang. Lihat saja dimana-mana, Cwie Mie Malang menjadi satu kesatuan tagline di rumah makan yang menjual Cwie Mie.

Setelah dicoba, ternyata rasanya mirip-mirip dengan mienya Mister Baso, dengan harga yang lebih mahal :P

Cwie Mie Ayam

Cwie Mie Katsu. Iya, katsunya cuma segitu.

Untuk satu porsi Mie seperti di atas, harus ditebus dengan harga 26 ribu rupiah. Lumayan mahal untuk penggemar Indomie seperti saya. Porsinya juga ga bikin kenyang, tapi tempatnya lumayan bagus.

Kondisi Cwie, tempat lumayan.

Banyak dekorasi-dekorasi unik.

Bisa dilihat di foto, tempatnya bagus. Tidak seperti Mister Baso cabang Galeria yang tempatnya polos seperti warung. Di sini ada banyak ornamen /pernak-pernik yang secara tidak langsung membuat makanannya terasa lebih enak dinikmati.

Oenpao Sunset Road

Karena brunch di Cwie Mie Malang rupanya masih belum cukup untuk perut kuli ini, terpaksa sorenya kembali cari makan lagi. Pilihan kali ini jatuh ke restoran Oenpau yang baru dibuka juga di jalan Sunset Road.

Kondisi Oenpau dengan sofanya yang empuk

Oenpao ini adalah restoran franchise makanan asia, di Bali katanya sudah ada 4 cabang. Cabang sunset road ini sepertinya yang paling baru. Furniturenya masih terlihat baru, pengunjungnya juga masih sepi. Tanggal 31 kemarin cuma terlihat 4 meja yang ada tamunya. Jadi berasa eksklusif :)

Menu di Oenpao ini ada berbagai macam chinese food. Ada dim sum, ayam/bebek charsiu dihidangkan dengan nasi hainan atau mie kuah, dan banyak jenis lain lagi yang saya lupa. Kemarin cuma pesan ayam charsiu dan ayam katsu dengan nasi hainan. Ayam katsu, menu pilihan bagi orang yang lapar dan malas mikir.

Roast Chicken + Nasi Hainan, Oenpau.

Siomay Ayam Oenpau, siomay buat yang ga doyan ikan

Chicken Katsu + Nasi Hainan, Oenpau

Penyajian makanannya bagus. Simple dan elegan. Satu porsinya sekitar 25 ribu rupiah. Jadi masih lebih murah daripada Cwie Mie Malang. Juga lebih mengenyangkan :D

Anggia mejeng di backyard Oenpau, lokasi narsis strategis

Sehabis makan, tidak lupa foto dulu di backyardnya Oenpao. Tempatnya bagus, kalau lokasinya di tepi pantai pasti lebih bagus. Sayang ini di tengah kota.

FlapJaks

Perut sudah kenyang, tapi mengingat malam tahun baru pasti begadang sampai jam 1 malam, tidak ada salahnya asupan gizi ditambah dengan dessert di FlapJaks. Hitung-hitung sebagai asuransi kalau-kalau terjebak hujan di jalan (cuaca memang sedang tidak kondusif).

Kondisi FlapJaks, ga dapat tempat di dalam.

FlapJaks yang disantroni kali ini adalah FlapJaks yang baru dibuka di Mall Bali Galeria. Hattrick! Dalam sehari bisa mengunjungi 3 tempat makan yang baru dibuka. Ending yang lumayan bagus untuk tahun 2010.

Karena sudah agak kenyang, saya pesan makanan yang kelihatan paling murah kecil di menunya. Mushroom Creamy Pancake. 32 ribu rupiah. Dessert yang lebih mahal daripada menu utama.

Mushroom Creamy Pancake, FlapJaks

Mushroom creamy pancake ini krimnya sangat terasa. Mirip-mirip dengan spaghetti panna e fungi di warung italia. Krim kental aroma keju yang lezat.

Waffle Crispy Fruits, FlapJaks

Kalau waffle crispy ini mungkin lebih mengandalkan eskrimnya kali ya? Ga sempat nyicip makanannya Anggia.

Strawberry Capernish + Bokeh

Untuk minuman, sebenarnya saya tidak begitu suka dengan rasa strawberry, tapi setelah dilihat di menu, minuman yang paling bagus buat difoto cuma ini. Alhasil saya pesan Strawberry Capernish ini: soda + strawberry + sirup? + lime? Lumayan juga rasanya. Dengan perut kenyang begini, hari terakhir tahun 2010 saya lewati. Mudah-mudahan 2011 bisa lebih kenyang :P

Buku Ini Aku Pinjam.

Nothing interesting lately, & so I just took pictures of the mundane stuff in my room.

The book is “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. Its a science book - winner of the Aventis prize for science books 2004 - but Bill manage to write it with a witty and engaging style that your curiosity will force you to keep on reading, at least until you finished the chapter you’re on.

Brahminy Kite - Elang Bondol

Named for the river Indus and distributed from India (where it is held sacred) to Australia. A bird of coastal areas and a scavenger, feeding mostly on carrion. Mews like a cat.