Not cool at all --- Heroes Charge - Google Play - Ucool

I've been playing quite a bit of this mobile game, Heroes Charge by Ucool.
You gain heroes via various game functions to form a strong roster of heroes which you then send on various missions. The game is rather well designed that different missions tend to call for different types of heroes hence making the mission to gain more heroes even more important.

In all honesty, I've had a lot of fun with the game. A lot of fun.

There is one issue that is causing me a lot of concern and on the off chance that you are facing the same problem as I am, I'm going to write about it.

Apps on Google Play are generally very well behaved. You download the app and you use it.
In the event that there is an update, you generally have to update your app via Google Play. That is the way it should be!

In this age of shrinking data caps on mobile data plans, mine is only 2GB, it is important that users be given a choice to update only when they know they are safely on Wifi. This actually got me wondering. Maybe it is only in Singapore that we have been constrained by 2GB or thereabouts of mobile data plans. Maybe that is why this isn't a concern for users in other parts of the world. Hmmnn...

Heroes Charge for whatever reason, does not follow this protocol.
You still need to update the app via Google Play but I have received nasty shocks after updating my apps before leaving home and the comforts of Wifi.

What kind of shocks?

This kind ...

A 200 MB in app update that triggered when I ran the game.
This was after the game had already been downloaded off Google Play.
These updates vary in sizes and happen regardless of whether you are on Wifi or mobile data.

I've sent 2 or 3 emails to Google Play but I must not be reaching the right persons or they are simply  not concerned about this.
I've written Ucool but received no response.
Ending up in a situation whereby I just have;

1) make sure the app is updated in Google Play
2) open it to make sure there are no further in-app updates
3) when I open the app while I'm outside of home, hope that there's no updates rolling out
4) and if there is, quickly kill the app before the updates download.

It is kind of ludicrous though that updates are now one-tenth of my mobile data cap size and even more ludicrous that I cannot disable such updates from happening till I'm safely in a Wifi zone.

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 17

Passed by a Japanese bbq recently and found this picture to be rather informative.

On the way home, ran into this cat that loves hiding behind these rails.

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 16

Never fancied using digital zoom on my previous smartphones though I may finally have found one in which I don't mind using it once in a while.

The pictures below are all digitally zoomed in but I can't remember how much zoom I used.

No zoom in this pic

Zoomed in ... no idea what that is by the way.

Zoomed in at 2X I think.

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 15

It was a overcast sky, little light to work with so instead of fighting the conditions, I went with it. This pic was taken with a filter aptly titled Moody (if I recall correctly)

Moody

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 14

The camera on the S6 comes with filters ... let's put them through their paces.

Unfiltered

Grayscale

Vintage

There are other filters but I'm partial to Grayscale and Vintage.

How happy is your country?

Today marks the 100th post for this blog.
I have to be honest and say that when I started, I did not imagine reaching 50 posts much less a 100.
Blogging has been surprising therapeutic and the practice of putting my thoughts into words has had the added effect for me of ascertaining how I feel about a subject. It has been pretty liberating.

Anyway the question for today is - How happy is your country?

I was browsing the news on the web as I normally do for an hour or so each day when I came across the World Happiness Report (link). The main aim of the report is to provide an alternate measurement of a country's progress as opposed to merely relying on GDP figures. It is in short, a call for governments all over the world to place their citizen's happiness as a prerequisite for any policy.

Sounds pretty intuitive doesn't it but how often have we seen governments come up with some convoluted scheme to boost productivity or economic growth yet failing to place one iota of concern on how it would impact the happiness of the populace. The exception being when it is election time and the happiness of the populace becomes paramount.

On a personal front with migration looming on the horizon, I was interested to see how well my current home measured up against my future home.

The top three countries in the world all hail from Europe. Switzerland is first, followed by Iceland and then Denmark. It struck me that all three aren't large countries.

Rounding out the top 10, we have
Norway in 4th
Canada in 5th
Finland in 6th
Netherlands in 7th
Swededn in 8th
New Zealand in 9th
Australia in 10th
....
USA in 15th
UK in 21st

Singapore?
Singapore is ranked 24th in the World Happiness Report. Pretty remarkable for a small country especially when in 2012, Gallup published a report stating that Singaporeans where the unhappiest and most emotionless people in the world.

Some of our Asian neighbours in the top 50 were,

Thailand at 34th
Taiwan at 38th
Japan at46th
South Korea at 47th


Does this validate our decision to move? No it doesn't.
Does it mean we will be happier in Australia? No it doesn't.
Everyone approaches happiness differently and sometimes it has to hit you between the eyes before you realise how happy you are, how happy you could've been.

We don't know what the future holds but we're surely going to try and if recognizing that we're going to be moving from a country ranked 24th to a country ranked 10th, calms some of our nerves, even better.

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 13

Had the opportunity to visit Singapore Sports School recently and snapped some shots.

Enroute

The competition pool at Singapore Sports School

Track surrounding a very nice football pitch

Ares Lodge - a dormitory

dsadsadsad

Air pollution shrinking brains!

Just came from reading an interesting article which tried to establish a link between breathing polluted air and cognitive impairment. You can find the article here.

The researchers basically observed that breathing in an increase in fine-article pollution could be linked to a reduction in brain volume. They even go further to note that such a reduction is of greater magnitude than the amount of brain volume loss that is caused by the loss of neurons that come from aging.

A further point to note is that breathing in polluted air lead to an increased risk of 'silent strokes' which have been associated with poorer cognitive function and dementia.

I don't know about you but this is pretty big news.

It opens up a whole new level of eco-warfare if a country is patient.
It does mean it has to be long term in nature.
Imagine smothering your neighbours for decades and then laughing as their intelligence as a populace deteriorates.
It's lucky for us that such thoughts remain in the realm of fiction doesn't it?
I mean this could never happen in real life right?

Oh wait a minute ....

CBD shrouded in haze

Marina Bay Sands shrouded in haze

Merlion shrouded in (you got it) haze

That's the haze that covers Singapore every June. Why is that so?

Forest fires

It is because of forest fires like these.
Didn't think that Singapore had any forests like these to burn? You'd be right then. It is from our neighbours, the ones that 'provide' us with free oxygen the other 11 months of the year.

Thank you for the oxygen?!?!

Food for thought ain't it? I mean we ought to think about it before the capacity to do so is smoked out of us.

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 12

Here's the pictures for today ... a little bit of sunset ...

Sunset - landscape view

Sunset - portrait view

Focus was somewhere in the middle ...

A week plus into the S6 Edge's battery life ...

I've been reading for the past week or so complaints about battery life on the S6/S6 Edge line of smartphones from Samsung. I had also been documenting my own usage on the device and I have to say my experiences have contrasted widely with what I've been reading online. Perhaps the online reviews have been overly concerned with screen on time (SOT), I really don't know.

I bought the phone on the 11th of April but only started checking out battery life on the 15th, after I had had some hands on time with the phone.

Day 1: Nigh 13 hours of usage with 2 hours more to go ...

Day 2: Pushed the phone harder but still received 11h of usage with an hour more to spare

Day 3: Spotting a pattern here, close to 12h of usage with almost nothing to spare

Day 4, weekend, slept in! No work and a lot more phone time - a lot more gaming, a lot more music - battery still held up pretty well.

Day 4: 11h of usage with an hour to spare

Skipped Sunday ... can't remember what it was I was doing but whatever it was, it was good enough to forget to document battery usage.

Day 5, Monday was when the wireless charging or the phone started acting up. On the previous occasions, the phone was placed on the charger before I went to bed and the charger kept the phone charged all the way till I picked it up at 6.40ish in the morning. Not this time though. See how it starts draining right before 3am?

Picking it up at the same 640ish time that I did on the previous mornings yielded a battery life of  85+%. Not happy about this but at the same time it can be see that the phone generally sips power when the screen is not on.

Day 5: 17h with about an hour more to go and no, I did not top it up in midday.

Same problem causing the phone to run out of battery at about 4pm as I had placed it on the charger even earlier the previous night.

Day 6: 16h of battery life means nuts when most of it is happening when you're asleep!

Hmmnn ... took ill, was home so spent quite a bit of time on the phone. Weird thing was the battery stayed charged all the way till it was taken off the charging pad.

Day 7: 12h of battery life with an hour to spare

And just like that, the problem came back again. Wireless charging turned off at 1 or 2 am in the morning.

Day 8: Nigh 17h of battery life with 40 mins to spare

Battery charged all the way till morning this time round.

Day 9: Roughly 16h of battery life.

I'm genuinely curious if this is a software or hardware issue that is causing the wireless charging to cease once the battery hits 100%. Is it a safety feature?
I can vouch though that charging off the usb cable does not present such a problem.

At the end of the day, I'm pretty satisfied with the battery life on the S6 Edge - bearing in mind that takes into account my usage pattern.

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 11

Food porn ... if you're someone who loves snapping your food before you eat it ... is the S6/S6 Edge the right phone for you?

Home-cooked meal of olive rice, broccoli, fries and a chicken wing!

More chicken wings ... this time from IKEA's dining area.

Meatballs, kid-sized pasta and beef goulash

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 10

Continuing with the superhero figurines ...

Not one of my favourite looks for Superman

Batman

Compare the focus on the left fist against the fist in the background

The focus was on his face leaving the sword nicely blurred.

Dialup to ADSL to cable to Fibre and back to ADSL?

It might seem like I have my priorities all wrong but one of the areas I've been reading up on is the state of connectivity in Australia. I was idly wondering what kind of services were offered by the ISPs operating Down Under.

Average Download Speeds in Mbit/s

You can find the complete data set provided by Internet Society at this link. They have data for Internet penetration rates, affordability, 3G coverage and more but I only wanted to focus on the average download speeds.

The map's a little small so I'll post the data for a few countries.

Ranked 1st - Singapore with download speeds of 97.67 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 78.69 Mbit/s

Ranked 2nd - Hong Kong with download speeds of 96.12 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 89.25 Mbit/s

(showing ranks 3 and 4 to show the disparity in speeds from ranks 1 and 2)
Ranked 3rd - Romania with download speeds of 62.53 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 31.85 Mbit/s

Ranked 4th - Sweden with download speeds of 49.25 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 27.66 Mbit/s

(skipping a whole bunch of countries to find a few familiar names)
Ranked 14th - Korea
Ranked 21st - USA
Ranked 23rd - UK
Ranked 31st - Japan (really?)
Ranked 34th - China
Ranked 36th - New Zealand
Ranked 40th - Thailand

Ranked 46th - Australia with download speeds of 15.73 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 3.89 Mbit/s

(for the sake of contrast)
Ranked 144th - Niger with download speeds of 0.6 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 0.2 Mbit/s

Now I realize that even though we're enjoying such high speeds in Singapore, we are most of the time not utilizing such speeds all of the time and neither do we need that kind of extraordinary speeds in our daily lives.

I did not realize though that I would be taking a step back in time. I remember when we had to use dialups to connect to the Internet (the one with that weird scratch connection sound) and the progression to fibre broadband now in Singapore. That's not readily available yet in Australia judging by their rollout map. So when we do go over, I guess it's back to ADSL or Cable broadband then.

The other peculiarity in Australia (or maybe it's Singapore being peculiar) is that even for fixed broadband, there is a data cap. I've been on a unlimited data plan for as long as I can recall - even to the days of dialup connections.

For comparison sake, here are some sample plans from both countries.

Singapore;
1) Singtel - Fibre - 1Gbps with unlimited data - SGD$50
2) M1 - Fibre - 1Gbps with unlimited data - $39.00
3) Starhub - Fibre - 1Gbps with unlimited data - $49.90
4) MyRepublic - Fibre - 1Gbps with unlimited data - $49.90

Australia; (prices seem irrelevant of whether you are signing up for ADSL/Cable/Fibre technology)

1) Optus Yes - NBN (Fibre) - with unlimited data - AUD$100
2) Engin - ADSL2+ - with unlimited daya - AUD$50

Not sure if Australia has state specific plans or the providers provide the same plan to the whole country. Would be great to find out more here.

It looks like some compromises have to be made here, either settle for an older tech - ADSL - I still remember conversations with Singtel technicians about copper wires :p or pay more (double!) for a similar service to what I am getting now. Maybe this is a call to change the way my family consumes data.

Whatever the choice, it's going to be  interesting going forward

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 9

Day 9 ... don't know if I can keep this up but it sure is interesting to try - there's a sort of a push to get out more instead of staying at home.

Green Arrow

T-600

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 8

I used to have problems getting my previous Samsung phones to carry out this kind of focus on the condensation on the cups. Not anymore!

That's some pretty focusing for a smartphone .. was aiming at the center of the glass.

 On a sidenote, some news coming out from Japan that Samsung is going to be selling the S6 and S6 Edge without their branding appearing on the phones. Have a look at the picture below and tell me that isn't an improvement.

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 7

 Just how good or bad is the auto-focus on the S6 Edge?
Went hunting around for some uncooperative targets and ended up with a cat that refused to pose (totally in line with their character)

The second pic is of a decal posted on the interior of a public bus that was captured while the bus was in motion.

Fuzziness around the cat's ears from it's refusal to stay still :)

Exit through the window ...

S6 Edge: A Pic A Day - Day 6

A trip to the supermarket was pretty good for some quick snaps.

I love how sharp the spears of the asparagus look in the front and fade off towards the rear

Red, Green and Orange ...

Avocados ... greens and browns ... with wordings thoughout on the stickers

Clarity