I’ve decided to join the crowd of our fellow gadget and tech bloggers, having a weekly round-up of those interesting gadgets and tech stuff that we’ve missed over the past one week. And of course today is the special day for all of you to celebrate with your loved one. So, Happy Valentine’s Day to you all. And take a quick read what we’ve missed here.

1. iPhone developer makes serious cash – Yes, it’s definitely interesting to know that developing iPhone applications can bring you with big cash. Ethan Nicholas, developer of a tank artillery game called iShoot, quit his day job and managed to cash in $600,000 in a single month from his app. Read more: Another iPhone developer making some serious cash

2. Lego Camcorder – We’re crazy for Lego, we have more gadgets made of Lego bricks coming our way. Here we have the Lego camcorder. Read more: Lego camcorder coming

3. Rubik’s Touchcube – A more interesting Rubik’s cube that interacts with your touches. It features a toucscreen. Read more: Rubik’s Touch cube

4. High-octane chess set made from car parts – Perhaps you have some old car parts chucked in one corner, you can make use of them to build a chess set from these old car parts. Read more: High octane chess set

5. Amex Digital SP-7 digital frame with built-in photo printer- Most digital photo frame should come with more or less similar features, excepts the Amex SP-7 which comes with a built-in print which might be handy when you wanna have a quick print of your lovely picture. Read more: Amex Digital SP-7 digital frame with built-in photo printer

That’s it for this week’s quick round-up, I’ll catch up with more interesting gadgets round-up on the following weekend. As for today, it’s time to get ready for the Valentine’s day.

The top 10 posts of TechChee for 2008 are as follows:

Gadgets and tech stuff that we don’t wanna miss:

Geeky and fun gadgets


1. Working Playstation made of Lego. It’s another Lego fever in the year of 2008. Modder Max Maruszewski has made a fully functional playstation, complete with controller ports, using Lego bricks. Source: Gadgetlite

2. Top Space Invaders Gadgets and Designs If you are a big fan of Space Invaders, I’m sure that you’ll be very much interested in a great collection of Space Invaders gadgets and designs collected by Walyou. Other than the Space Invaders headphones that we’ve shown you before, there are more than 20 gadgets and items are in the Space Invaders designs such as lamps, decors, bags, rings etc. Head over to Walyou to open your eyes for this great Space Invaders collection.

3. Mr Robot Head – It’s a electronic toy which uses green power that needs you to wind it up for its power. To play it, you need to move the looped wand from one side to other side without touching the tantalizingly coiled wire. When the wire is touched, the robot head will make strange noise and flash it eyes. Source: Geeky-gadgets

Useful gadgets ?


4. Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds Dual Screen Laptop. Do you expect the year of 2009 to be busier than the 2008 ? If so, then you most probably need a laptop that comes with two screens. Lenovo is going to show off this dual-screen laptop at CES 2009. The main screen is 17-inch in size, and a side screen that can be slided out from the side which has a size of 10.2 inch only, but shall be sufficient for you to monitor your music or movie downloads. Source: Trendygadget

5. Help Lock This Help Lock is useful for the elderly, who may faint in the bathroom. But before getting to help you out, you must set it with a phone number and a timer. If you happen to spend longer time in taking bath than what’s preset in the timer, it’ll then make the call to the phone number set in it, asking for help. It may be useful, if you think you’ve spent too much time in the bathroom every day, and you wanna alert yourself to cut your bath session short, so you could have more time for your work in the year of 2009. Source: Ubergizmo

6. Climbing-up suitcase This suitcase is able to climb up the stairs, saving you lots of effort of having to lift it and carry it up the stair. It can be dragged on flat ground and even up the stairs. The Climbing UP suitcase features a set of free-wheeling rubber belt tracks that cover the entire body of the suitcase. The design not only allows you to easily pull a suitcase up a flight of stairs, but the continuous track means you can also pull the suitcase from the front or back. This design won the designer, Woo Moonhyung the 2008 red dot design concept award. Source: Ohgizmo

7. Symwave to demo USB 3.0 external storage solution at CES. We’ll be seeing more new technologies surfacing in this world in the year of 2009. Symwave is going to show off, the first external USB 3.0-complaint hard drive. Now you can experience the real super high-speed transfer rate of the USB 3.0 or SuperSpeed USB. Source: Engadget

8. World’s full HD file-base broadcast in Japan by Toshiba and SGI. Full HD file base content will be used in Japan broadcasting industry, as Toshiba and SGI Japan have successfully developed full HD file-based TV program broadcasting systems. Source: Fareastgizmos

9. Intel and Ericsson to develop anti-theft mobile broadband in laptop – When loss or theft of a laptop is detected, the Intel processor can lock the entire laptop. The processor will be notified by an SMS message sent by theft management service residing in the network. The notebook has a broadband module that is able to receive the SMS notification and triggers the Intel processor to lock the computer, making it unusable. When the notebook is located or recovered, an unlock message can be sent to the notebook that unlocks the computer, making the data accessible again. Source: Intomobile

Once again, wish you a very happy new year. See you again in 2009 !

This post is the private post just for testing if having created indexes will degrade posting/inserting/updating performance…

Our host has told us that TechChee.com has too many slow SQL queries. In fact these sqls are all from what Wordpress has. Suspected could be the site is growing with more and more content, without proper indexes on certain columns of heavily queried tables will cause those sql queries perform extremely slow, which would have caused many spikes in CPU’s load for our web host, and caused our site suspended….Hope those created indexes help improve the performance of the sql queries……

We hope for a better year in 2008 and all the best to all of you. And I’ll put better effort to cover more gadgetry and tech stuff for 2008. Happy new year and happy holidays!

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I was then searching up and down to find where I could get hold of the LiveChat of Bluehost on Helpdesk.bluehost.com. I never experienced such a long downtime that needed me to use the LiveChat. I was somehow a bit frustrated and then I managed to get the answer from Bluehost Forum that the LiveChat is just a big blue button located on the home page of BlueHost.com. So, I started couple of sessions with the BlueHost support, they were being helpful, kept on apologizing that the server downtime causing some inconveniences and they were in the process of recovering.

In between, the server seemed to be up for a couple of minutes, but a shock to me was all the web pages were gone but the wordpress database still remained intact. So, I again started to go little panicking as I haven’t carried any download of the backup from the Cpanel for about two weeks. (If they were all gone, I still have the backup back in end of Jul, but those lost pictures perhaps need at least two nights of my time to recover. I did experience before with another hosting company that put the responsibility back to the customer if data and web pages lost due to server crashed).

But, I later found out that the BlueHost admin were still in the progress of recovering and ensured me that all my data were all intact and the server would be back online about 2.5 hours later. Anyway, I didn’t keep track if the server was really back online after 2.5 hours later. What I could do was to leave it to them and go to bed to have a good sleep.

And thank God again, TechChee is now back online and no loss of any data or web pages. And I appreciate very much the helpfulness of BlueHost support and I like their kind of support using LiveChat as their reply is instant at least to keep me calm and get rid of my worries. And the most important is no missing files or data, so I don’t have to burn my midnight oil for recovering the web pages or any possible lost pictures. (Of course, from now on, I’ll do my backup as frequent as possible, no excuse of busyness or laziness again). I’d like to apologize to TechChee’s readers for the inconvenience caused and thanks for your support and I’ve gotta catch up with posts for today to keep you guys updated.

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Other than TechChee, I did start another development blog earlier on, which is supposed to be under a sub-domain of TechChee, i.e dev.TechChee.com. Due to my overly busy schedule, this blog didn’t get frequently updated. In order to fulfill this overdue request, I’ve decided not to continue on the development blog, but to include two more categories on TechChee here, they are “Web Development” and also “Opensource Tips”. In such a case, it’ll be less taxing and very much easier for the maintainance for me, who is handling this blog single-handedly both for the posts and design. This decision shouldn’t be too much affecting the current theme of TechChee, which still makes it topics center around “technology” and “gadgets”. The main topics of TechChee still remain the same, i.e shop online and gadgets. The posts for these two new categories will only be in the ratio of one out of five of those gadgetry posts as usual. Which means, if I post about 5-6 posts about gadgetry a day, then, perhaps, I’ll write one post either in the category of web development or opensource tips. So, TechChee’s readers, hope you won’t get too surprised if you’re seeing posts about more technical stuff such as programming and web development in the coming blog posts. The topics that will be covered under the two new categories, “web development” and “opensource”, will be as follows:

1. Linux or General opensource stuff

2. PHP

3. Java

4. AJAX/DHTML/JavaScript

5. Apache

6. MySQL

7. Oracle or more to be decided later.

There will be no sub-categories for the time being to differentiate further which of the above for any posts that fall under the two new categories. I’ll only tag them to differentiate it.

Web development,PHP,MySQL,Apache,Linux,Java,Programming,Ajax

Technorati Tags: Web development, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux, Java, Programming, Ajax

How does it work?
The concept is by getting more blog owners to make your blog their favorites and also link to your blogs, which will give your blog a boost for its Technorati’s ranking. In short this means driving more traffic and popularity to your blog.

How to participate?1. It’s pretty straight forward, what you need to do is adding TechChee as your Technorati’s favorite, by clicking this button

2. Then come back here and leave a comment with your blog name and also your Technorati’s username. I’ll then move on to favorite your blog as well. This experiment was started Doshdosh. You can visit her blog for more details. By the way, my Technorati’s username is ketyung.

3. Other than using the favorite exchange method, we can also make use of link exchange to boost your blog’s ranking. If you’d like to link exchange with TechChee.com, just add a link to TechChee.com on your blog and I’ll link you back.

The followings are those bloggers who have participated in the exchange, you can also go to each of them and add them as your Technorati’s favorite or you wanna have link exchange with them, then just copy the links as follows and paste on a blog post similar to this.

Technorati,Technorati favorite exchange,Technorati link exchange,Boost blog traffic

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As I have the intention to expand TechChee along the way, one of the options will be looking into what Digg API can help to turn TechChee into a stickier and more useful sites other than just a blog.

Anyway, according to TechCrunch, Digg is having a massive party tonight in San Francisco to celebrate their one million registered user milestone and they are now at 1.2 million registered users.

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Tech Chee,TechChee with new look and feel,blog template,blogging

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TechChee.com was hosted at CWIHosting.com but got suspended just a few hours ago. I was shocked when I tried to access for adding few new posts for today, it showed a suspended page as the above-attached screenshot (Click here to view larger size). There was no reason given and I was not informed earlier on. My payment is up to date, which I had made a payment for 1 year on early of February, 2007. I’ve posted my ticket for support to CWISupport, till now the ticket is still hanging there with no answer yet (Look at the attached screen below, click here for larger size)! A big thanks to OhGizmo again for having leaded me to BlueHost. I’d registered my BlueHost early last week, but due to my busy schedule, I did not bother to transfer over yet. Even though CWIHosting.com has been giving my site on and off downtime lately without any good explanation.

Once I spotted the suspension, without any delay, I gotta have full swing with all my technical skills, get into cheap-domainnames.com and changed my DNS settings for TechChee.com to point to BlueHost and also thank god that I managed to get a full site backup from the CWIHosting account last night, even though it does not contain the latest posts of yesterday’s work. The backup was done right after the first post of yesterday, and I did continue for about another 4 posts after the backup, which I’m short here now. To my surprise, these days, the domain name propagation over the Internet is really speedy, which it used to take at least 2 days. I guess some of you would still see the suspended page due to some name servers are not updated yet.

Anyway, once CWIHosting has given me an answer and the old site resumes, I’ll recover the 4 posts and also few valuable comments from readers. CWIHosting.com really sucks! They don’t deserve a link here.

cwihosting.com,bluehost.com,CWIHosting sucks!,My new web host

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