The following shows how Faruq has spent his time in the past few weeks (3 to be exact) :

Time spent doing work: 15%

Amount of work completed: 50%

Time spent solving new problems and hiccups: 35%

Amount of issues faced: at every turn (uncountable)

Amount of time procrastinating: the "other" percents? (excluding eating, prayer, sleeping and the occasional toilet break)

Project due: Wednesday

Amount of time left: two

The project was due on Wednesday, 6 Nov, 2nd and 3rd Nov was spent lazing around and then doing work after much guilt, 4th and 5th were spent, crying and (finally) doing work.

One Weekend Gone *poof*

The Singapore trip was from 6th Nov to 9th Nov, arrived in Shah Alam at 5am on 10th Nov (Sunday). Returned to KL for the day to take care of laundry and other necessities.

Another Weekend Gone *waves goodbye at weekend*

Has group work, forced to stay in Shah Alam.... (with much grief)

Officially a spend thrift when it comes to weekends (and money as well) *labels self*

And that's pretty much why I haven't been updating my blog lately, in all honesty, I really like updating my blog its just I haven't gotten around to doing it, but please bear with me? (shameless begging has commenced)

Shed Some Light: Phone Specifications

So my cousins came over for the weekend and some time while we were talking, I mentioned phones and why they were good and other stuff and that's when I found out they don't really know much about what I was talking about. Let alone the in-depth features and specifications I later went on to mentioning. Which brings us to today's post, I shall try my very best to explain them as simple as possible. Just to highlight a few things, I plan to make more "shed some light" because I had to learn about aspects of the phone from scratch and one of the ways I did it was trying to find the simplest explanation for each feature. LET'S GET STARTED~

Here are the phones we will be comparing, the Sony Xperia Sola (because its my phone so I know it well) and the Apple iPhone 5 (because everyone knows about it thanks to advertising)

This image was taken from GSMARENA, you should check them out if you're looking for a phone archive, here

Because I am no expert in this, I'll just tell you enough so you'll be able to read it, and then understand and later make your own judgements. If you're looking for more in-depth explanations on each individual feature, I'm sorry but you'll have to look else where =(

If you go to the GSMArena website and check a phone for its specifications, like what processor it has, how many megapixels does its camera hold and so on, you'd be greeted with something like this

I know, its far from reader friendly

Don't be discouraged, its easy when you know what you're looking for, and that's what we're going to talk about, not every single word that essay-of-a-list is showing you. The features we will be talking about is also usually shown on the box of a phone so it will really help when you're browsing phones.

I had a cousin who was almost cheated in getting a slightly weaker phone for the price of the phone he was originally offered, luckily for him, he saw the phone he was offered had an 8 megapixel camera and the one the shop showed him (which was supposedly supposed to be the same) had a 5 megapixel camera, now the sad part here was, other than the megapixels, the 8 megapixel camera one had a better processor and better everything, in fact. SO IF YOU DON'T WANT TO GET CHEATED, READ THIS POST! (shameless self-advertising)

(Not to sound like a broken record or anything but we did kinda get a little off topic here so...) LET'S GET STARTED!

First one I'll walk you through is this

Now don't worry you don't have to look and understand everything, although that would be the best, I've even put a red box there to show you what you should be focusing on (you're welcome ;)

The chipset is what kind of chip its using, this usually means brand and such so you don't really have to consider that, but just in case you're wondering, the really good ones are Qualcomm Snapdragon and Apple of course have very good chips, most Samsung devices now have their own processors and such. Some chips are of the same speed and cores but a better chipset would work more efficiently translating to a smoother, faster experience. 

The one you should be paying more attention to are the CPU and GPU. Each standing for Central Processing Unit and Graphics Processing Unit respectively. Although its not always the case, you can initially tell how fast the processor is by two things, the number of cores and the clock speed. Just look at the picture up there, the Sola has a dual core (2 cores) processor that is clocked at 1GHz, and the iPhone has a dual core processor clocked at 1.3GHz. So you can roughly assume that the iPhone would be faster than the Sola. Now I do want to stress on how this is not necessarily true but it is useful to get a rough estimation on how fast the phone would perform. A good example of this is the iPhone 5 has a dual core 1.3GHz processor but the Samsung Galaxy S4 has a octa core 1.9 processor (it means it has 8 cores). But they both run smoothly nevertheless. 

How do you imagine cores, well, a good example is imagine the storage of the phone as a library, and the processor with cores are people reading books to operate the system. To operate, they need to learn how to operate the phone by reading. So more cores means you have more people to read and that would make operating the phone much smoother and faster. But how come some phones with less cores can still run smoothly? Well, that comes down to software optimization, take it this way, remember when you're doing assignments and you'll have to look for information, browsing page after page after page just to get suitable information about something, wouldn't it be easier if all that information was just in one single page? It's the same concept, an optimized operating system would be just one book with labels but an operating system that isn't optimized would probably take several books.

The clock speed is how fast the person (core) can read, so logically a faster processor would work faster (duh!).

A graphics processor is a processor made specifically to handle graphic heavy tasks like games. So having a graphics processor would always be better as your games run more smoothly. This does have an impact on your battery life as you're running two different processors.

Now, you know what the processor cores and clock speed mean but what exactly is enough, well, based on the verge I think, the minimum standard for 2013 is a dual core 1GHz processor.

Next is RAM (Random Access Memory),

Dig a little bit into the picture, you see the 512MB RAM under internal, well, as I have explained before the processor works by digging through a library and then reading to operate the phone, now having to dig through the library all the time would be a little too inefficient right? So that's why you have RAM, RAM is the amount of books the people (collectively) can hold, meaning the readers don't have to walk back to the bookshelves to learn to operate something they have just read about. One of the reasons your phone lags is that the RAM is full, and those poor people have to walk back to the bookshelves to return the books. So, evidently, more RAM would save those people from having to go back to return the books, which ALL translates to (the same) a smoother and faster experience.

The 8GB is how much of storage the phone has and the card slot above that, means you can expand the phone's storage via microSD. As you can see, the iPhone's storage cannot be expanded.

The last is Display, other features are pretty easy to understand and those features would also be pointed out to you by those people at the shop who like to follow you around.

Yea, THOSE people

The key things you should look into for a display would be the type of display, like LCD and AMOLED, the size, 3.7 inches, 4.0 inches, and the pixel density. These all sound very "technical" but they're actually very easy to understand once you know what they actually mean.

Don't worry I'll walk you through it, ok, first is LCD and AMOLED, there are other kinds of displays, the subcategories of them actually, but if you know about these two in general, you kinda already get the picture. Both these phones use LED-backlit LCD screens, the only difference is that the iPhone uses an IPS display. LED backlit means, the phone has a layer of white LEDs that is covered by an RGB (red, green, blue) filter, like so

If you look at your display using a microscope, it should look like this,

Looking at the picture above, you'll see three different coloured squares that repeat themselves, red green and blue, those are called subpixels that cover one white LED. These make one pixel, and if you've learned science before, you'll know the human eye senses the red, blue and green in different shades and combinations to form every colour you look at.

So the difference between LCD and AMOLED are, LCD screens use a backlight to produce the three colours, because white light is made up of seven colours, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and indigo. The subpixels filter out the red, green and blue from that white light to recreate colour. AMOLED screens, however, do not have a backlight, but instead each subpixel is an LED itself.

AMOLED screen pixel arrangement

But because the AMOLED screen uses real LEDs for each colour, they would have to be arranged in this way as LEDs are bigger than filters. What does this mean? An AMOLED display will never be as sharp as an LCD display, because it only has two subpixels per pixel compared to three subpixels on the LCD display.

The reason AMOLED screens are used is because AMOLED screens produce more punchy and vivid colours compared to the realistic colours on the LCD display. That's why Samsung phones have very punchy colours. AMOLED screens also reproduce perfect blacks. Okay, so bottom line is, if you want bright, punchy, deep blacks and vivid colours, go for an AMOLED display, but if you like looking at a more realistic, paper-like display and a sharper screen, go for LCD displays instead.

Also if you're wondering what does IPS means, its a higher quality display that is supposed to have better viewing angles, meaning colours won't fade or shift when the screen is viewed from the side and not head on. SUPERLCD is another higher quality display which is found on the HTC One, both the iPhone and HTC One have great viewing angles and paper-like displays.

The next thing you should consider is the screen size, I'm not sure about smaller hands, but the screen size appreciated by many ranges between 4.3 to 4.7 inches, so if you frequently type on your phone, you should opt for a screen size within that range. There are of course phones with bigger screens, like the 5 inch Xperia Z, Samsung S4 and even bigger screens of the Z Ultra (6.4 inches) and Note (5.7 inches). These would of course be easier to type on but this size does not aid one handed use.

iPhone 5 (4 inch), Samsung S4 (5 inch) and HTC One (4.7 inch)

The last is pixel density, pixel density is the amount of pixels the screen has, the more pixels on the screen, the sharper the images on the screen would look. So if you want to have more information displayed on one page on your phone, a sharper screen would make all the fine details visible on your screen, the fewer the amount of pixels, the less sharp things would look and you won't be able to read small font on webpages without zooming in.

More pixels per inch

More pixels make the image sharper

Like so

Now, Apple has coined Retina Display, and this means that your eyes won't be able to make out each individual pixel anymore. The retina display has a pixel density of 326 ppi (pixels per inch). The rough estimation of pixel density is as follows, WVGA resolution has 200++ ppi, 720p or HD screens have around 300++ ppi, and 1080p or Full HD screens have 400++ppi. Depending on your needs, you should be able to gauge how sharp you want your screen to be based on these numbers.

If you want to browse webpages without having to zoom in all the time, then get a higher resolution screen, but you you just want to handle simple tasks on your phone, a lower density screen wouldn't matter, the same goes for movies and media.

Hopefully this post will help you understand what the specifications on the phone box means now and will help you decide which phone is better without having to read reviews and opinions online. I hope this was helpful and I shall end the post here~

The Unlucky

When looking for games, I like looking for games that utilize the player's prowess, a game that would make a frequent and more competent player shine more when playing compared to a person that has just started playing the game. Unfortunately now, most games have some sort of luck system integrated into them like looking for loot and items or landing critical hits and other skill effects. While those additions do make for a better and more diverse game experience, it does also effect that person based on how much luck a person has. Whether you like it or not, different people do have levels of luck that differ from one another, its not something you can count or put into numbers but is just something you realize and notice in people. Some have excellent luck while others are just unlucky.

And in my case, I, unfortunately, fall into the latter category. And before I give you the evidence to support such a vague statement, this is pretty much why I prefer games that use the least amount of systems based on luck. And I repeat, although luck isn't something one can quantify, it doesn't mean you can't feel or just know that a person can have bad luck and good luck. Now, the moment you've all been waiting for, I shall now provide the evidence to support my statement from before.

One of the first games I've ever played in my life was Pokemon, and it is one of those games I continue to play and enjoy playing. Although at that time, I think I was 6 or 7, I didn't even realise I had such bad game luck, I did notice that it was relatively harder for me to catch pokemon and it did take me twice as long to find a pikachu in viridian forest. My first Abra was caught after wasting a ton of pokeballs, including that one great ball you get before you can buy them. Now I don't know about you guys but when compared in contrast to my brother, Pikachu was the first pokemon he met in viridian forest, and he did catch Abra on his first try with that great ball, not to mention different pokemon seemed to jump at him every chance they could get, while I was stuck with Zubats greeting me every time I entered a cave. Yes, when compared to my brother, it did seem as though I was that guy smiling at you in the upper right of this post. But this also shows that luck is something one can't calculate directly, but can be estimated comparatively.

The perfect portrayal of my brother, if I say so myself

Unfortunately, there are more pokemon stories that correctly show this, and this story is one I like to tell simply because it is the very best at showing this and proving it to you, if you still don't believe me that is.

My brother and I loved to battle one another so we would build our team of pokemon and then have a battle to see who had the better team, wasn't that why most battles were made for in the first place? So for this one team, I wanted to abuse the power of Honchkrow, being a pokemon with the ability Super Luck which increased the chance of him landing a critical hit. Honchkrow could learn Night Slash, a move that had a relatively high chance of generating critical hits as well. You can see where this is going right? I even had him hold on to a Scope Lens, which, ALSO, raised the probability of performing criticals. I was SO ready for the battle, he would land those criticals like rain drops falling from the sky during a rainy day.

How wrong I was... The battle turned out to be my Honchkrow using Night Slash after Night Slash, not landing a SINGLE critical in any one of those Night Slashes and the worst part was my own Honchkrow getting knocked out by an Ice Beam which was.... CRITICAL. I'll just leave it at that, anymore and I might just cry again. So I did lose the battle and my Honchkrow turned out to be useless. If I remember clearly I used a Clefable with attract as well. But you probably know by now how useless attract was for me.

You had ONE job

Other stories include my pokemon training sessions in viridian, being hit by a poison sting meant getting poisoned, a thundershock would leave my pokemon paralyzed...

AND any oddish I battled just happened to want to inflict all those plus sleeping powder.

Look at them faces

But enough about pokemon, other games gave me similar treatment. Like Maplestory.

Yea, this Maplestory

If you've played maplestory before you'll know that the game relies heavily on luck when it comes to drops from monsters. The skills you use also implement chance but it doesn't really matter as much because you continuously cast them to attack monsters, so chance does not affect you that much, like how a  machine gun works, you shoot so much that one bullet will eventually find its mark. BUT getting a  monster to drop the quest item you're looking for or getting good drops was such a pain. I remember grinding for one specific equipment that this monster was supposed to carry, no matter how many monsters I brutally killed, not a single one dropped the item I was looking for.... that is until I wanted to drink water and so I asked my brother to take over for me. AS SOON AS I LEFT THE ROOM, he called out "Faruq the monster dropped like a clothes or something!", it was that very item I was grinding for. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

Seriously, it does not end there, I'm a casual Dota player, and one of my favorite heroes was Phantom Assasin. (Yes, Faruq, what a wonderful idea, choosing a hero that is so reliant on chance to play with instead of those sure hit heroes) So you might have guessed that I almost never trigger a Coup De Grace? No, its not quite like that, since it has a clearly stated chance under the skill description, I do trigger that wonderful, blood-splattering of a blow to enemies, the game would be broken if it didn't. The thing you have to understand is that my luck is not simply bad, no, my luck is much much worse, its EVIL or psychotic even. You see, I can trigger Coup De Grace on normal units, but when I engage enemy heroes, it would almost never go off. I would throw a dagger, and blink strike them and I would slash away at them, their health slowly depleting, and my slow would wear off, and they would retreat to safety as I try to chase them but fail miserably. Then when I farm jungle creeps,  I would get a mind-blowing amount of criticals, one landing after the other. So, no my luck is not bad, its evil to the point it selects when my important attacks should go off. IT SELECTS WHEN MY IMPORTANT ATTACKS SHOULD GO OFF!!!

IT IS EVIL BECAUSE THOSE CRITICALS THAT LAND ONE AFTER THE OTHER GIVE YOU HOPE, HOPE I TELL YOU! HOPE THAT ONE DAY, YOU'LL AMBUSH A HERO AND YOU'LL LAND TWO DEADLY CRITICALS, TWO DEADLY CRITICALS THAT DISINTIGRATE THE ENEMY IN HALF A SECOND BUT WHEN YOU TRY TO DO SO, IT JUST HEARTLESSLY TAKES THAT HOPE AWAY AND GIVES IT BACK TO YOU... and that vicious cycle goes on, and on, and on and ON!

Despite ALL that, I've still managed to achieve this *audience applauds*

Although it WAS bots on easy

Now I do want to emphasize that the point of this video was not to go on about how bad my luck is (its evil, not bad, bad's an understatement) but its to show that I can have this level of bad luck, I know there are others like me as well, and I can still enjoy playing games. And because of how hard it was to land hits when I needed them too, I had to work harder, I played around with my item build as well. Following that machinegun theory, I bought items that would increase my attack speed, because when you attack too much, one of them has to be a critical hit. I also used heroes that didn't use chance in their abilities, making my game more enjoyable. I bought more pokeballs and always had a lot around for those impromptu moments (I gave up chasing the legendary dogs and just waited for them to come to me). I would spend more time grinding for equipment. And somehow, I never quit playing any of these games. =) So to those unluckies out there, be PROUD because you had to work harder than anyone else and you still managed to complete the pokedex and still managed to get that Ralts even though you almost made Zigzagoons extinct and just know, there are others out there like you!

And what a different post this had turned out to be =)

Xperia Z1 Thoughts and Impressions

If you follow the mobile industry very closely you'll know that Sony released a new contender a few weeks back, the Xperia Z1!

So why another flagship, in such a short time. Well, for me, it was because when Sony released the Xperia Z, sure it was a nice phone, but it got bashed for having a lower end processor, the S4 instead of the S600 chip, the display was way, way, out of league compared to the other flagships and the camera was not up to par with the other flagships. So I guess this is Sony's answer and proof that it can actually produce a flagship worthy of competing with the other flagships. On paper, this phone does just that, if not excellently, on paper. It has the latest processor, the S800 clocked at 2.2 GHz, its a quad core processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. That's to fire back at the lower end processor claim. For its display, Sony stuffed in its Triluminous display which for reviewers certainly did look nicer than Sony's previous displays but was not up to par with AMOLED or even Super LCD. Display, check. AND for the camera problem, SONY fitted a whopping 20.7M CAMERA!!! I know resolution isn't everything but what resolution does add to, just one example would be lossless zoom. Due to its high resolution, the camera can capture a lot of detail, allowing you to zoom in without losing detail, thus lossless zoom. But all these specs are only great on paper, but does that actually translate to real life performance?

The short answer, NO... disappointingly

Sony did get the processor right though, the phone does run buttery smooth and is always fast and snappy (based on reviews) so YAY PROGRESS!

But the Xperia Z was already fast and snappy to begin with so it did translate to a better phone, but the main attention was to the display and the camera. Both of which we will discuss right now.

Like I said earlier, Sony stuffed in its latest screen technology, the Triluminous Display with its Bravia successor, X-Reality but the screen still lacked the superb viewing angles other phone competitors provided. You could say who cares about looking at your phone from the side, when you will almost always look at your phone head on. Yes, that's true, but often a flagship phone is regarded as the best a company can offer or could offer. People associate the paper-like display of the HTC One and iPhone 5 with the word premium and this is something Sony doesn't seem to be able to provide. It's true it doesn't really matter, or maybe it does, but when other phones are able to pull it off, why not YOU?

Okay, but that 20.7M camera has to be good right? I mean, it's a TWENTY megapixel camera, how could it possibly be bad. Okay, first things first, Sony put in a 20 megapixel sensor that's larger than most sensors, meaning it can capture more light leading to better low light photography. Sony even put in its G-Lens and Bionz image processing into this. HOW COULD IT POSSIBLY BE A BAD CAMERA?!

So the camera is, wait for it, good but could be better. Yeap, you read that right, GOOD... but could be BETTER... HOW? I don't know, maybe Sony should take hints from Samsung, their flagship phones have excellent cameras. In fact, the Samsung S4 beat the Xperia Z1 in terms of picture quality. You can check the photo comparisons right here, if you want to check it out yourself. I'll leave the explaining to the photo comparisons. But trust me, you'll be disappointed.

Lesson learnt here, if you want to play with the big boys, you have to get your game on, enough to match them, and better yet, beat them.

There are up points though, everything does, this phone doesn't really do bad in anything, it just doesn't excel at beating the competition, and being a flagship, it should have been able to do just that. So its not bad, its just good... enough.

Like GLADOS used to say, sigh, I love GLADOS

Favourite Pokemon Part Tsu!

As you all know, I'm currently in my poke-chain, and this will be the last post, I wanted to post more, but a lot of other things came up that I feel like I should post about, so this will be the last of the poke-chain. This doesn't mean I won't be posting about pokemon anymore, it just means I'll be jumping from one subject to the other. I'm a pokemon fan, I've been playing pokemon my whole life, I cried when I found out you can play pokemon on your android phone, I'm playing pokemon on my android phone, the Sony Sola, and lastly, I'm playing Pokemon X!!! Muehehehehehehehe!!!~

Ok, back to the chain, my favourite pokemon, this time, it'll be just random pokemon, those random pokemon I've just taken a liking for. Those kind of pokemon.

Starmie

Starmie was one of those pokemon that appealed to me when I looked at it and made me like it even more when I found out what I could do with it, IT COULD FRIGGIN LEARN THUNDERBOLT!!! If you guys don't know, Thunderbolt and Ice Beam are a very good combination of attacks you can teach one pokemon. This is simply because, if you teach these two moves to one pokemon, you practically cover half of the weakness of all the types of pokemon. Now, add psychic and hydro pump, and you get an all rounded addition to your team, which is something very convenient to have both adventuring and competitive-wise.

Haunter

Haunter appealed to me for two things, it looked awesome, one, and it's a ghost pokemon, two. Have nintendo make Haunter the only ghost pokemon in the first installment of pokemon and you have the perfect recipe for an instant, Faruq-approved pokemon. If you were wondering why Haunter and not Gengar, it was because I played pokemon on my computer when I was small and not the Gameboy so there was no way I could get Gengar. All I had after cheating was a level 100 Haunter, which still destroyed everything in its path, not sure whether Haunter was just strong to begin with or because he was level 100, though. 

I also learned later on that Haunter could also learn a wide variety of moves, and I got a Ghastly 5 minutes after that.

Noctowl

Now Noctowl didn't have anything else to offer me other than that initial good impression it had on me, and it could learn Hypnosis and Dream Eater, one of my favorite combos to have in Pokemon. But that's all it gave me in the end, it didn't have blazingly high stats or an impressive move set to begin with but it's still one of those pokemon I would definitely use in my team. Until I found out how stressful it was to land a Hypnosis and Dream Eater from Noctowl did not dish out as much damage as I would have hoped for, so I got a Pidgeot instead with more accurate and powerful moves.

Ampharos

Electric-type pokemon are one of those hard to find pokemon in the entrie game. The game either gives you a lot of them but none of them are good or few of them but most of them are also not good. Now Ampharos is one happy exception, which is why he is one of my favourite pokemon. To add to all this, he has excellent stats and his move set is quite good as well.

Gardevoir

For me, Gardevoir was the Alakazam for the Hoenn Region and it was a welcome replacement. And add an excellent design to the pokemon, you get an irresistable pokemon attracted by many.

Ludicolo

The third generation was one of the first generations to get a little crazy with the type mixing. For me, Ludicolo was the successful outcomes from those experiments. It really amazed me at how they managed to pull off the grass water design to create one that would actually protray both but also Ludicolo was a good addition to the team due to its bulkiness.

Remember when I said about crazy type mixing, here's another favorite,

Breloom

It's cute, and it is terribly good at punching the lights out of other pokemon. It reminded me of the Yugi-Oh Spell Card with the kangaroo punching out an opponent. It was unique being the first pokemon that was Grass and FIGHTING! Of course it had the weakness to Flying-type pokemon but it overcame that with Sky Uppercut~

Dusclops

I just like Ghost Pokemon, just, like that~

Staraptor

Staraptor earns points for being one of the coolest bird pokemon, one of the earliest additions to your team, one of the strongest early additions to your team, one of the bird pokemon with good movesets AND just a reliable pokemon on a whole.

He has helped me through a lot of battles in Diamond and Pearl, right up to the League and even after. So he shall forever be, one of my favorite pokemon.

I even had to get in Black and White and through breeding and some training, EVs and leveling, I had my good ol' Staraptor back! 

Luxray

Luxray rides alongside Staraptor for being just plainly, RELIABLE! And also cause I thought he was Electric Dark. He wasn't but his moveset suggests otherwise. He was also one of the pokemon I brought over to Black and White.

Chandelure

Did you mention I simply love ghost pokemon? Well, I LOVE GHOST POKEMON!!! And that's why I when I saw Litwick I just... I just threw any pokeball I had at that time at him. And Lampent looked awesome, but Chandelure WAS JUST SHOOOOOOOOWWWW AMAYZINGGGGG!!!! Why have they not thought of a pokemon like this before?! It didn't have much of a moveset but it could learn very good moves and a wide variety of them too =)

And I guess that's it for this post, keep playing pokemon everyone~

Favourite Pokemon!

With X and Y coming around the corner, I can't help but think back on the pokemon I had back then and which ones I like the most throughout various games. So here's a list of my favourite pokemon, not according to numbers because each of them has their own uniqueness I can't bear to numerate. To be fair, I'll group up certain pokemon that are in similar categories. (I'm making this as a part of a Poke-Chain, so stay tuned for more pokemon posts, minimum 3, I'll try my best)

Starters

SQUIRTLE!!!

I have to admit, Squitle is one of my favourite pokemon simply because it was the first pokemon I picked when playing Pokemon Blue. That alone can be the reason why, but Squirtle was one of those pokemon that went like, the more I used it and the more I transitioned into the game, there was just more to like about him, and he never let me down when it came to battling.

What I remembered the most was how cool Bubble looked in Red and Blue, and I compared it to Ember and Leech Seed. Ember was okay but there was nothing that made it seem extremely strong with its animation and Leech Seed always missed when I tried to land it. But BUBBLE OHHHHHHH MAN, the bubbles would move towards the enemy and the screen would flash every time it got closer. The next thing would be the enemy fainting, and I don't know it just made Squirtle look so strong!

He was also a joy to use against Gym Leaders, Brock would be decimated just by spamming bubble, Misty was taken care of with bite, I can still remember Starmie flinching with each bite, until it fainted. And since Squirtle was a water type, he just tanked those water attacks. Now remember, at that time, Bite was a normal type move, so when bite got upgraded to a Dark type move, I was all,

What a happy accident!

I didn't even have to use Pikachu! AND IT JUST GOT BETTER!!!! When he evolved into Blastoise, I taught him Ice Beam before I fought Sabrina. AND THE COOLEST THING HAPPENED!!! I USED ICE BEAM AND ALAKAZAM WAS FROZEN!!! Which made that battle a lot easier. Skull Bash just added to this, taking out Blaine's pokemon easy peasy~

I can go on and on about how cool Squirtle was for me, but I think you get the picture. =)

Cyndaquil

Ok, I have to admit, the only reason I picked Cyndaquil over Totodile was that Cyndaquil was SOOOOOOOOOOO CUTE. And also the fact Flame Wheel just looked too cool of a move to pass up. Another thing I came to appreciate was that it was hard to find a reliable Fire Type pokemon so having Cyndaquil on my team made this so much easier for me!

Torchic

There's actually a story behind this, I actually picked Swampert as my first starter but that was a game played with cheat codes using a GBA Emulator. When I tried to enjoy the game without using cheats, meaning starting over, I picked Torchic because, Swampert didn't look so nice, IMO and Blaziken was simply way wayyyyyyyyyy COOOLER! Top that with the fact that he was Fire Fighting (that was the first time so it was a big deal) and Sky Uppercut would destroy Flying pokemon which was what made me prefer Torchic over Mudkip. (Oh, yea, that's what its called)

Piplup

I know most of my choices are based on looks, but hey, human being rely the most on their eyesight so, you know, its... a fact? But yes, I chose Piplup because it looked the nicest among the starter pokemon in generation 4. For me, that was also when pokemon started coming up with bad designs for their pokemon, I hated the fact Yanmega looked nothing like Yanma (aside from the fact they were both dragonflies). Piplup was also the most controversial pokemon for me because Empoleon's sprite didn't exactly look very nice in game, it was drawn nicely in the book though.So yeah, it looked cute but when you got to Empoleon, I was like, WHUT....? 0.o But Empoleon was trustworthy in battle and the fact that he was Steel allowed me to tank normal moves LAIK A BAWS!!!!

Oshawott

Probably by now, you'd realise that I never picked a grass starter, well, to put it simply, WRONGGGGGGGG!!! I did, just that, Grass pokemon were relatively easy to find earlier in the game compared to the other two types and its not like I didn't like any of the starters, contrary to that, I actually liked all the grass starters, just not as much as the ones listed here! =) The story with Oshawott is simple actually, he looked cute, I chose him as my starter, he didn't disappoint in battle and his unique skill was a joy to use!

JUST LOOK AT THOSE, HOW COULD THAT NOT BE COOL?!

And there you have it, my favourite starter pokemon! So for this upcoming X and Y, I'll be partying with Fennekin and me ol' buddy Squirtle! OUR FRIENDSHIP TRANSCENDS TIME I TELL YOU!!!! TIME!!!!!!!!!!!

Pokemon X and Y, Hopes and Dreams

Pokemon X and Y are coming out in two weeks time!!! WOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO!!!

And here are some hopes and dreams I have for the new pokemon game, just as the title suggests~

Just as a post starter~

Now, if you've been a fan of Ghost Pokemon, you'd probably know that there hasn't been any significant changes to ghost pokemon. And I mean in almost every aspect, first of all, ghost pokemon receive very few additions per new game released. I'll just make a list to show this,

First Generation

Ghastly
Haunter
Gengar

Second Generation
Misdreavus

Third Generation
Shedinja
Sableye
Shuppet
Banette
Duskull
Dusclops

Fourth Generation
Drifloon
Drifblim
Spiritomb
Mismagius
Dusknoir
Froslass
Rotom
Giratina

Firth Generation
Yamask
Confagrigus
Frillish
Jellicent
Litwick
Lampent
Chandelure
Golett
Golurk

If you count out the evolutions and legendary pokemon, you only get 1 pokemon in the 1st and 2nd gen, you get 4 in the third, fourth and fifth. It's sad once you think about how rich and diverse the ghost stories are with each culture and have only THIS many ghost pokemon.

To make things worse, ghost pokemon don't actually have a wide skill set for their type. I remember during the first generation ghost pokemon only had like 3 moves, Lick, Night Shade and Confuse Ray... To top it all off, none of those moves allowed ghost pokemon to showoff their prowess. They managed to remedy that by allowing ghost pokemon to learn a myriad of skills, like electric and psychic but when you use a skill that matches your type, your power is increased by 1.5 which makes it SO SAD to be ghost pokemon.

Things did lighten up with Gold and Silver where they introduced (FINALLY) a special attack that was also strong enough to be a nuke, Shadow Ball. They also added Curse which did stand out from the usual attacks, Spite and Nightmare.

But entering a new generation opened up other flaws Ghost pokemon had. Remember Banette? That pokemon had a high attack stat but the only physical ghost move available were Shadow Punch and Shadow Claw, with 60 power and 70 power, they weren't weak but they definitely lacked usability against higher leveled opponents, you know, with higher defense and hit points.

The fourth generation did bring a new physical move, Shadow Force but only Giratina had that ability. So the fourth generation had very little impact on ghost pokemon usabilty in this matter.

The fifth generation brought some nice type mixing to ghost pokemon, supplying you with a ghost fire, ghost water and ghost ground pokemon, but again their skill set didn't undergo any major changes.

I know not everyone uses ghost pokemon but it would be nice to have more options when you want to use them.

So I hope when X and Y come out, ghost pokemon would have a wider skill set and a larger variety! =) Let's keep our hopes up!

Shed Some Light: Smartphone Cameras Features

Okay, today I'm going to shed some light on smartphone camera tech and I'll be getting help from Nokia to provide me with some visual aid, so watch this video first and it'll help with the explaining later on =)

2 minutes should be too long, so please watch it, I'm not working for Nokia, if that's what you're thinking but they advertise their camera tech a lot and they just so happened to release this video~ It will seriously help later on, trust me. =)

If you're done watching the video, keep it open so you can easily refer to it should you need to, and I'll try to explain as much as I know about each feature they show you!

Starting with.... THE FLASH

Just to satiate those who thought of this when I mentioned flash (you're welcome =D)

Okay, I'm sure if you are one to compare specs or the company just likes promoting their product, you've probably heard of Xenon flash, and LED flash and also with the new iPhone out, Dual LED?

That's exactly what they showed you at the start of the video when the flash went off before capturing the picture. At just around 0.03 secs to be exact.

The phone in the video is equipped with a Xenon Flash, whilst other phone manufacturers would usually opt for the LED flash. Just to give you a heads up, Xenon Flash is better, but why? Let's get to it~

LED Flash speaks for itself, it's an LED (Light Emitting Diode) that's supposed to provide some sort of lighting when light is absent. The thing is, LED's don't emit light that travel very far. A Xenon flash is capable of emitting light 3 times farther than the regular LED. And that's just one of its upsides, the light emitted is also stronger so it can illuminate the object better and the fact it travels farther means you get more even lighting to a picture than something the LED flash would cook up.This also means more noise can be reduced and this all translates to a better photo overall.

Here's some photos to demonstrate the difference:

LED Flash

Xenon Flash

photos are taken from black phoebe, check it out here

Now dual LED flash is something different. Dual LED flash fires off a flash and then another following the previous flash. This translates to better lighting overall but at a cost of colour. The flash can often wash out the colours because of the immense light it releases. And it doesn't really help with providing even lighting because it is still LEDs so the light doesn't really travel farther.

Apple has introduced a Dual LED flash but this time, they've put two different LEDs, one white and one amber to prevent the washed out colours I've talked about before, does it really do well? Well, honestly I still don't know yet so we'll see.

Now don't go smashing every camera that doesn't provide a Xenon flash just yet, first of all, manufacturers don't opt for it because its more expensive, takes up more space (the phone would have to be thicker) and also it uses more battery power. There are also other ways to help a camera perform in low-light conditions.

Shutter and Aperture

MOVING ON! After the flash goes off and the light bounces off and moves towards the phone, you see, the rays entering the camera, right? When it is about to enter the lens, you see it opening, that's the shutter. The shutter limits the amount of light that enters the lens to generate the image. So often when you want to capture low light photos, the camera often prolongs how long the shutter remains open so more light can enter.

Another part worth noting is how big the hole or the more fancy term, "aperture" is, the bigger the aperture, the more light can be captured without affecting how long the shutter remains open. This also allows for the pictures generated to have a greater depth of field. A good example would be, the new iPhone 5S, which has a greater aperture than the previous iPhones. So, to cut it short, the smaller the aperture value, the more light can be captured and your pictures will have a greater depth of field. The iPhone 5 has an aperture value of f/2.4 whereas the new one has the aperture value of f/2.2. See, the smaller the number, the bigger the size of the aperture. Like I said, there are other ways to get good photos in low light and it involves these elements, hardware and software, working together, harmoniously, courtesy of Jony Ive (hatechu)

Image Stabilization

Following the video, after that, the light travels through a series of lens and then there's like a bearing moving around, right? Well, that bearing right there, is used to stabilize the lens because when it comes to taking photos, our hands are our worse enemy. They shake and move around and make it hard for you to produce a better picture. Ever so often when taking photos, they shutter speed is fast enough that your hand moving will not effect the quality of the picture taken. Much like how when they want to freeze a fast moving object in a picture, they use a very high shutter speed to capture the image, in the camera's point of view, at the point of time when the picture is taken, your hand is as though it was frozen in place.

But I did mention that when in low-light or when its dark, the shutter has to remain open longer to get more light. But doing this opens the picture to shake and to cut things short, the image turns out blurry. To counter this, you can use a tripod but carrying a tripod everywhere isn't the easiest of tasks to carry. Well, manufacturers have introduced Image Stabilization. The two common ones are DIS (Digital Image Stabilization) and OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) which is also sometimes known as Mechanical Image Stabilization.

DIS is done completely through programming, hence the name. By reducing the actual Field of View captured by the camera, they reduce the shake affecting the camera. Other methods also include increasing the sensitivity of the sensor (we'll get to that later) at the time when the shutter is closed and etcetra. However, this is not the best of image stabilization technology and sometimes can be buggy. Some also don't like the fact is reduces the camera's field of view.

This is where OIS comes in. Optical Image Stabilization is where the lens is physically mounted on a motor that will move the lens in the opposite direction the camera shakes to, leading to a better image. And because it does this much more effectively than DIS, having OIS in a camera also means better low-light performance. DIS is usually used because its cheap and OIS often makes the camera more bulky.

Sensor

Letting the video move once more, you'll see the light passing through a series of lens and then the light hits like a panel that has tiny squares on it, igniting each square the rays hit right? Well, what you're looking at there is the camera sensor. Notable keywords you should have in mind are CMOS, BSI, BI, and if you like more fancy names, Exmor R, Exmor RS. Those are all camera sensors. The typical camera sensor would be a CMOS Sensor, simply because its smaller and that right there has led to cameras being mounted on smartphones. So almost all smartphones use CMOS Sensors. Now how about BSI? Well, first of all, BSI and BI are the same thing, they stand for Backside Illuminated and Back Illuminated respectively. Are they different than CMOS sensors? They are CMOS sensors, to begin with, its just that BSI Sensors have their circuitry moved around a bit. To actually show why this is relevant, I'll have to explain how CMOS sensors work. (Don't worry, I'll make it short as possible)

CMOS Sensors have three layers, the first layer is are filters, Red, Blue and Green, the next layer is metal wiring and the last layer is the photodiode where light is converted into data to produce the picture. Here's the diagram.

photo is courtesy from Sony Global

The orange lines represent the light rays, and if you look carefully, you'll see that the metal wiring reflects some of the light back through the filter making it less efficient. That's where BSI comes in, one that Sony calls the Exmor R Sensor.

Sony shifted the photodiode layer with the metal wiring, but to doing so, see the green line indicating the front side of the substrate, yes, doing so, also point the front side downwards, so now the photodiode is illuminated from the back, hence the term Backside Illuminated. This is done so that the light won't reflect off the metal wiring thus making the sensor more efficient at capturing light. With the conventional CMOS sensor, the light capturing rate would be between 30-80% but with the BSI sensor, the capture rate would be 100%.

But what does this all mean for picture quality? The cameras would be better at low-light photography, which is why in Sony's Advertisements, they would say "great pictures in any light". Also, it would better picture quality in terms of noise and color reproduction as well as depth of field and contrast. Most high end devices come with BSI sensors so now you know what that implies.

Also courtesy of Sony, this can all be found on their Sony Global Page

Exmor RS, is simply the Exmor R that has been reduced in size so that the sensor wouldn't take as much space.

Okay, that's all I would be able to explain with my understanding based on that video, the rest of the video simply explains how all that light is shown on the phone's screen.

Hopefully, now you'll be able to understand more when manufacturers market their smartphone camera technology =)