Jay And Short Game Competition

Date:  Mar 22, 2015

There is only one medal for this short game competition.

Jay is the one of the youngest in his class.  The rest I think is P4-P6.

So far he has yet to get any medal this year.  The older kids are definitely much better golfer than him.  But he enjoys it.  

Today competition is to hit putting into the hole from all direction (with slopes) and score points.

Not so hard, not so easy either.  The kids needs to learn how to read the green, read the slope and putt so that it goes into the hole.

This is one of the hole that made him proud.  He is the only kid who get the ball in twice in the long putt.  The rest did not get it in.

He still learning how to read the green, so, some holes he is in trouble.

Chip and run.  Not too bad.  And he scores.

He learned the technique and applied it in his golf game.

He has some problem in the sand bunker shots.  He did not score well there.

I think he placed his ball too far right.  That is why the swing did not catch much sands and the ball flies up high.  

Jay likes golf a lot.  Kay expressed his interest in golf too.  So, it will be very happy for us if the whole family can go to Golf Vacation trip together when they gets older.

Next week is a big day for Jay.  he is going to take part in his first every Golf Game Competition.  It will be the monthly Junior Medal game competition with his peers.  Let’s see how it goes.  Anything can happen on the golf course.  HaHaHaHa.  Good luck Jay.

Recording of Reading Books

Date:  Apr 26, 2015

I would love that my kids are good in their Chinese Mandarin.

That is why you can see that I have been doing a lot a lot of special projects and experiment on Jay Jay.

Previous Posts on Learning Chinese Mandarin….

http://miniliew.blogspot.sg/2014/10/learning-chinese.html

http://miniliew.blogspot.sg/2015/01/flash-card-still-best-method.html

http://miniliew.blogspot.sg/2015/04/copy-diary.html

http://miniliew.blogspot.sg/2015/03/learning-chinese-thru-paper-cutting.html

One thing I found it very useful is to make use of the flash card.  The old fashion way.  

Every day, if it is not raining, I would walk about 4KM with him after dinner, and I will bring out the flash cards to ask him to remember the Chinese characters and how to write it.

Jay Jay has changed a new home tutor for his Chinese tuition.  The previous one has to go back to school and work and therefore, cannot have time to teach Jay Jay.

So, I went to Ace Tutor and get him another home tutor.

This home tutor is somewhat unique.  He does not wants Jay to do any assessment book or test paper.  The first few class is just asking him to read the text book.  And the way how he does it, is to record down his own voice and the “correct” pronunciation of reading the text for Jay and he asked Jay to listen to it every day.

So, after 2 weeks, I can see that Jay is more comfortable in his text book chinese characters, etc.  

Jay has a Chinese Oral test coming soon.  So, I decided to record some of the exercise passage and ask him to listen and learn the words and how to read passage.

I used this book.

It is actually a recommendation supplementary book from the previous tutor.

It is suitable for P3 and P4.

Inside the book, there are about 15 passage to read.

So, I am asking Jay to first read once the paragraph.  circle the words that he does not know.

And then, write down the Han Yu Pin Yin on those words.

Then, I will read it and record it using his iPhone.

 

Here is the sample audio files.  Click it (via Google Share).

AUDIO FILE IS HERE…  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_2LIa_dWu8scVBJVnNEeE1JTUU/view?usp=sharing

 

I am asking him to listen to this few times a day.  And after a few times of practice, I can see quite a significant improvement on his Chinese speaking and he knows more Chinese words.

And the tutor Mr. Chung is correct.  There is not much grammar for Chinese.  The key thing is to be able to know more Chinese characters and words and know how and where to use them. 

So, I am asking Jay to read more and more paragraph by listening to how I would read it.

I think this method is actually quite good and it builds on the basis that the more you read the more you will get familiar with the text paragraphs and soon or later, you will know how to write it.

Jay felt that it is quite useful too.  And he himself also found that it helps in correcting some of his pronunciations too.

MOE’s ?? website also have some reading passage.  Which we found it useful too. (Need Flash).

http://xuele.moe.edu.sg/xuele/slot/u107/huanlehuoban/MOE_web/main.html#

The New Photo App iPhone Photos

Date:  May 21, 2015

This is a very important and useful tip for all iPhone Photo, new Photo App and Photo Stream users.

Apple latest MacOS updates 10.10.3 came up with the new Photo app.  This new Photo app is fast and it is to replace the old iPhoto app.

However, they also remove a certain important features that will help us tidy and sync the photos on MacOS Photo App and iOS devices. 

Here is the scenario.

1.)  You use your iPhone / iPad to take tons of Photos.  So, on your “Camera Roll” on your iPhone / iPad, you have the new photos you taken.

2.)  On your iPhone / iPad, you enable the “My Photo Stream” option.  What that mean is when you get home, or where you have Wifi connectivity, these photos in your “Camera Roll” will be automatically uploaded into your Photo Stream.  That means, your Mac / PC will have a copy of that photos.

3)  The bad news is, the new Photo App does not have the feature of “Remove Photos from XXX’s iPhone” any more.  This feature was in the old iPhoto App, but was removed from the new Photo App.  This feature is very powerful.  As it check the photos against all the photos in your library.  When you click this option, it actually removed all the duplicated photos you have on your iPhone in the Camera Roll.  If you don’t do this often, you end up with Thousands and thousands of duplicated photos on your iPhone photo app.  And I don’t know, iPhone may get slower when you launch the photo App. 

There is no fast way to delete these photos.  Yeap!  You have to select the photos and delete them manually one by one.

4)  So, there is no way to “clean up” your iPhone or iPad photos which are already been imported into the Photo App on your Mac.

I don’t know about you, but I found it very annoying where, I cleaned up the photos on the new Photo App, and as and when I plug in the iPhone, all these deleted photos are re-downloaded into the Mac again.

So, here is the tip on how you should do it.

Step 1.  Clean up what ever photos in the photo app.

Step 2.  Plug in your iPhone / iPad.

Step 3.  Check “Delete Items after import” and then click “Import All New Photos"

Here is the bigger screen capture for you.  Remember to check “Delete Items after import”.

Step 4.  All the imported photos which included those you have just deleted on your Mac few minutes ago will appear in this “Last Import” album.  

5.  So, select all those photos you really wanted to remove.  And delete them.  There, your iPhone photos are clean, and sync with your Photo library on your Mac.

Important!  You need to do this every time after you done the import, and then immediately after you delete those unwanted photos, you do another import just to make sure you deleted all the photos you don’t want on both iPhone/iPad and Photo App.

Very stupid!  But it works for me.

The New Photo App My Experience So far

Date:  Apr 14, 2015

[Update]  Correction on Item 18.  I was inside “iPhoto Events” album within my Album under the new Photo App.  That is why all the Events are listed there.  Heng ah!

Last week, when you update your MacOS to 10.10.3, the new Photo app is finally available.

Apple has decided to replace iPhoto with the new Photo app.

They promise it will be faster, easier, and more make sense features.

So far, my experience is a bit disappointed.  There are some good features, but the pay off may be too big.

1.  There is this great feature.  You can now “upload” all your originals photos onto the iCloud.  Go to “Systems Preference”, “iCloud”, “Photo” and choose option, you will be given the option “iCloud Photo Library”.  Simply tick it, they will move your Photo Library onto iCloud.

2.  Before you do so, please check how much storage is your iPhoto Library or Photo Library.  If you are using a laptop/Macbook Air, most likely you have very few hard disk space, so you need to a) make sure you have space to migrate the iPhoto Library into Photo Library.  b) make sure you have enough iCloud storage space.  For me, I have to subscribe to the 500Gb iCloud. (You can cancel it any time).  If you are using iMac, you probably may want to check on your hard disk space too.  If you upgrade your iMac to SSD drive or Fusion drive, it is likely you do not have enough hard disk space too.  So, you got to do all these research before you migrate.

3.  Then, you launch the photo app, and go thru the migration.  After done, you go to Photo app preference.  There, under iCloud, you can select “Optimise Mac Storage”.  Or if you have the hard disk space, you can select “Download Originals to this Mac”.  For me, I am using SSD, so, I have to conserve whatever space I have.  Especially when my iPhoto Library is > 350Gb big.  When you choose this option, only “Thumbnail” photo will be downloaded onto your iPhone, iPad, or iMac.  When you select the photo, there will be a small percentage circle at the bottom right of the photo.  That means the photo is being downloaded, by how many percent.   

4.  My original iPhoto Library is 376.53GB.  After I migrated to Photo Library, it creates another library which is 438Gb big.  And I wonder what are the extra thing that is being created.  After I done that, I left with lesser than 10Gb on my SSD hard disk.  So, I got to get rid of the iPhoto Library.  So, I make a backup and move it to the Trash.  And I empty the Trash.  But after I have done so, my SSD hard disk reported on 75Gb hard disk.  ???? I deleted a 376Gb folder, and I only recovered back 60Gb space?  Something is fishy going on here.  But we will soon find out what is it.  I am still investigating this.

5.  So, I looked into the Photo Library folder.  I found a new “resources” directory that has 100Gb of space.  So, they created a “Moment” thumbnail files here.  That’s the extra 100Gb+ went to.

6.  I did a full scan of my system, and I have yet found where is my missing disk space.  Very mysterious.  At of this stage, I am missing of 300Gb of hard disk space.  Where does it go?  Where does it hide?    

7.  So, I keep using the tools to find what happen?  But It seems perfectly fine.  So, at the first place, how did Photo App converted or migrated my 367Gb photos given that my total space is 1Gb?  I really don’t want to think about it now.  hahaha.  It is so strange.  

8.  I checked again my backup drive, and it does have a full 376Gb old iPhoto Library on it.

Let’s don’t talk about that painful migration thingy… Let’s focus in some other things...

9.  You can add more share options now.  I love the “Evernote” add on.  So that I can now select any photos that I want to keep inside my Evernote.  

10.  I love that you can add Title, Descriptions, and Tag.  This is important, because, once you can do that, you can search for your photos.

11.  To delete photos now seems to be much much slower.  Once you selected the photos and you want to delete them, it usually takes 1-2 seconds to delete them.  Not sure why is it like that.  I am doing this on a SSD, so, I can imagine, doing it on the hard disk may be a bit slower too.

 

12.  After you select photos to delete, a Delete dialog will come up.  

13.  After I have turn on the “iCloud iPhoto Library”, my Photo app trying to upload my entire library onto the iCloud.  And after 2 days, it successfully uploaded about 3000 photos onto the iCloud.  Wait a minute, that is awfully slow!  I have 108K photos to upload, and it only uploaded 3K photos?  Let me calculate, that will takes almost 36 days to upload the entire library.  hahahahaha

14.  After I have turned on the iCloud Library, only iMessage can successfully attached the photos in my photo library without any problem.  That is because iMessage is Apple stock program/app.  Now, I have huge problem with my WhatsApp app.  When I try to sent a photo, it takes almost 1 minute to actually attached that photo into my WhatsApp message.  At first it is not doing anything at all.  You thought it is faulty or buggy.

15.  When you try to DRAG a photo from your Photo App on the iMac into the Desktop, or Finder Windows it works.  That is because it is Apple OS stock program.  Now, it does not work when you try to drag that photo and want to include into Vimeo, Youtube, or even my usual blogging App, i.e. MarsEdit.  It just won’t work.  So, a way to get around it, is to drag the photo onto the Desktop, or any Directory Finder windows, and then, from there, you drag it inside your App or your Web App.  I think it is a bug.

16.  When you plug in your iPhone, and you got new photos to import, you can click on “Delete Items after import”.  That will remove these photos from the iPhone.  If you forgot to click that?  Hmmm… you will have tons of photos on your iPhone and cannot be remove intuitively.

17.  For example, these are the photos “Already Imported”, in the iPhoto App, I can select an option to “Remove imported photos from iPhone”, but here in the new Photo I cannot find that feature.  That is bad.  And the only way to do it is to go into your iPhone Photo App and select them one by one and delete.  There is also no way to have “Select All” button.  hahahahaha

18.  My Photo Album is now a mix of iPhoto’s Albums & Events.  All those previously events are now placed in the Albums for me.  That is bad too.  Now, I have to one by one delete these extra Albums (Events) that I don’t want.  2609 Albums.  hahahaha.

19.  Some one share photos using photo stream, you can select to “Import” it into your library.

20.  Now, if the person sharing the photo to you is sharing an OLD PHOTO, the import function will place that shared photo into the correct date under Event.  It does not import as “New Photo”.  The problem will occur when you import and you cannot find where the Photo is located inside your Photo Library.

21.  So, what you should do is to go back to the Shared folder and then right click the photo you just imported, and there will be “Show in Library” option appears.  click on it will bring you right to the Moment of that photo.  i.e. the correct date.

After playing around with all these new settings here is my recommendation.

A.  Since Apple decided not to support iPhoto, so the best bet is to use the new Photo App.  Soon or later, you will need to migrate into it.

B.  I am not recommending to use “iCloud Photo Library”.  I am so stupid, at home, I already complaint and not using my iPhoto Library on my Synology.  And I have a Gigabits network at home.  I found it a bit slow, why I so stupid go and turn on the iCloud Photo Library and it has to use the public Internet, to upload all the photos onto the iCloud?  hahaha… everything seems so slow.  I don’t need all the photos in the library to be shared onto the iPhone or iPad.  

So, I finally after 3 days of testing the iCloud Photo Library, I turn off the feature.  And I will downgrade my iCloud back to lower disk space option.  (Yeah, they allow it).  And delete all the photos on my iPhone and iPad.  Turn off the iCloud Photo Library on the iPhone too.  And plug in my iPhone to the iMac and import those that has not been imported to my iMac Photo Library.

As soon as I have done this, my WhatsApp become fast again!  I am happy again!  hahaha

 

Home Made Bread Recipe

Date:  May 6, 2015

In one of the blog entry, I show you the very simply way of making home made bread.

Bread Making Machine:  (click here) http://miniliew.blogspot.sg/2015/04/bread-making-machine.html

Let’s talk more about home made bread.

 

It is usually very healthy.  As you know better what ingredients you put inside.

Look at this bread.  This bread consist of spinach and cheese.

The little dried green dots are the spinach.  The yellowish strips are the cheese.

Very tasty and delicious.

This is another kind of veggie bread.

So, why it is so important to us?  Because Kay Kay don’t like to eat veggies.  So, we have to tell him that this is “Seaweed” bread.  He loves seaweed.  And he eats it every day.

It is delicious.  And guaranteed no preservatives or additives or other chemicals.

This is the recipe.

You can place all kinds of fruits in there.  This is the raisin bread.

Looks great and taste very good with ham and avocado.

Where do I get all these recipe?

Buy it from bookstores lah!

This one is specially using veggies and fruits as ingredients.

Not too expensive.  I bought it just last week as member has 20% off.

This is the table of content page.  Basically you can make bread with spinach, veggie, corn, gobou, beans, mushroom, sweet potato, potato, red capsicum, cauliflower, and so on. 

There are a lot more bread they will teach you to make.

Every day you can make different kind of home made bread.

It is great book to have.

This is the spinach bread recipe.

This is the mushroom bread recipe.

Mushroom bread looks like this.

How about a red capsicum bread.  Have you seen this sort of bread before?

This is another book you can get.

It is also from Kinokuniya.  And I got it for 20% lesser.

This is the sample page from this book.

The different kind of bread you can make from the first book.

Another Table of Content.

This is a third book.

This is the table of content for that book.

This one is interesting.  They add rice into the bread.

See, they make bread using rice + flour.

Yummy.

Eating home made bread will make you healthier.

Your body has lesser addictive and preservatives.

Your kids will eat it as it is tasty without knowing there are so much veggies inside.  (you can lie to them, say it is a seaweed bread)

You can try and make all kinds of bread.