Restaurant City is a popular Facebook flash game. It revolves around the concept of being a restaurant worker, be it a chef, a waiter or even the owner. It is also a social application, it allows the player to invite his/her friends into the game, by having them accept jobs in the restaurant. You can customize your restaurant when you gain profits, by buying decorations, furniture or equipment.

Your Facebook friends can have their own restaurants as well, and you can visit each others’ restaurants. You can even share or trade ingredients and help each other create unique menus.

This game was created by Playfish for Facebook, and here are some tips to help you play better.

Ingredients in Restaurant City

Every day you get a free ingredient. That is, if you log in. So make sure to play Restaurant City once  a day to get your free ingredient. Secondly, answer the quizzes in your inbox. Every day, you get a question that you can opt to answer. If you get the answer correct, you’ll get another free ingredient. And lastly, you get an ingredient when visiting a friend’s restaurant for the first time. So, make a lot of friends on Facebook, get them to join Restaurant City, and you’ll have a steady stream of free ingredients.

Levelling Up in Restaurant City

It’s easy, playing equals levelling up in Restaurant City. Keeping your Restaurant City session open gains you GPs, or gourmet points. These are points for levelling up, so the longer you play, the faster you can level up. If you don’t feel like playing, just don’t log out. You can open another tab to do stuff, just stay inside Restaurant City to get your GPs.

Money

So you need money. Are there any trees around? Try shaking them. Money may not grow on trees but in Restaurant City, money falls off a tree when you shake it. Also, pick up some trash around your place. That’ll get you some dough as well.

Cheats

Haven’t found any, do tell if you have some Restaurant City cheats. :D

Have fun playing Restaurant City! :-)

There are many ways to track your location using a cell phone. The most important thing to note is that you need a GPS tracker on your cell phone. Aside from that you should have a tracker application in your cell phone that uses the GPS chip to access a map and actually show you where you are.

1. Getting a GPS Chip on Your Cellphone. You can buy a GPS tracker and attach it to your cellphone. Or, the better alternative is to find a cellphone that already has a GPS chip in it. A cheap example is the Sony Ericsson K750i. It has a GPS attached to it already, all you have to do is find out how to use it.
2. Downloading GPS  Tracking Software for Your Cellphone. Most good tracking software cost a pretty penny to be able to use. But if you’re nifty with code, you can create your own software to access maps like Google Maps. But I’m sure if you search online, there are a few free options.
3. Synching Your Computer to Your Cellphone. Lastly, it’s important that you can access the location of your cell phone via a remote computer. Or else, if you lose your cellphone, how else are you going to find it?

I created my first website in 1999. That was the year the Internet was introduced to me. The very same year I fell in love with the Internet. I poured my heart out online through static pages. I drafted my HTML through Notepad. I crafted my graphics through downloaded image tools.

The butterfly and the Medusanity mask were pastels on paper, scanned and edited for my Medusanity portal.

I’m so gonna miss this space, these memories. I wish someone could save Geocities. I wish I could. Not just this one. But all of it. All of the world’s first foray into online expression. All of the glitter and the blinking. All the tables and the marquees. All the memories.

Goodbye Geocities. Goodbye.

(Hear my heart break into tiny little frames.)

My First Website

Stumbled upon a new Blogger issue today. I’d rolled out a few posts and my friend Heidee wanted to post a comment. Alas, she could not, because she could not find the word verification input box.

Here is the screenshot she sent:

As you can see, the verification word is visible but the rest of the comment box seems cut off.

I tried to duplicate her issue, but since I was logged in to Blogger, I was not asked for word verification. I logged out and tried commenting on my own blog, and was able to duplicate her issue on Firefox and IE. (My friend tried it in Safari as well and it’s broken as well.)

The cause of the issue is all too clear. Blogger is now showing a preview comment before the verification box, where before it was not. It seems that whomever approved this change did not test it out on the embedded-below-post comment forms, or failed to consider to increase the height of the pop-up word verification form, so that the input field is now inaccessible.

I thought to scour the web for a quick fix, but the issue seems fairly new. I found posts documenting the issue on Blogger Help here and here, logged July 10, 2009. So I doubt there’s already a fix. And since this is a Blogger issue, editing my template won’t help.

For now, I have disabled word verification on my comments. It makes me vulnerable to spam, but I have no other choice. If I revert to the default pop-up window comment form placement, my template might get messed up because I edited it before to get the embedded comment form to work.

For others encountering the same issue, you can do what I did, disable word verification. And if your blog is inundated with spam, then turn on comment moderation. The alternative is to switch from embedded comment form placement to full-page or pop-up comment form placement.

Hopefully Blogger fixes this issue fast.

P.S. Thanks for the heads up, Heids!

“Why, don’t you know? They’re twitterpated.” whispered the owl.

My Twitter page looks so glum. It’s just one of the default Twitter backgrounds. My page looks so boring that even a couple of area rugs would spice it up.

My friends Jotie and Heidee haven’t been on Twitter that long but they’ve already updated their backgrounds!

And here I thought I was the twitterpated one! Hahaha. Wanna know what that means? Learn with Bambi!

Here’s a clip of when Bambi learns what twitterpated means. And if you don’t know, it means confused by affection or infatuation.

And we all know, Bambi got all twitterpated over Faline anyways. :) Here’s a cute mix I found on Youtube. Cheesy? Hahah. Oh but I love Bambi! :)

Anyway, back to Twitter. I am so glad I am starting to see friends on Twitter! I see Heidee, I see Chu. I see Raul, I see Jotie. And of course, don’t forget to follow me too! :)

So. My HP Pavilion DV2000 (DV2315nr to be exact) is finally unresponsive. Again. After a full year since its motherboard was fully replaced by HP after I brought it in for repair because the video display would freeze or my computer would hang or it would not boot up – a myriad of problems!

Last year they said my motherboard was the problem so it had to be replaced. They didn’t get into specifics. But I’d done my research and I knew exactly what the problem was. My laptop was overheating.

At the time I thought I could cure it by purchasing a laptop cooler. And for the past year, my HP Pavilion laptop has been used with utmost care. Never runs without the laptop cooler, never lies on my lap but always on a cool, flat desk. And still, after one year, it’s right back where it was in May of 2008. Overheating, freezing, and finally, not booting up.

It even introduced new problems this time around! My wifi no longer works, my CD/DVD drive won’t burn or read any discs, and it won’t read any of my compact flash memory cards!

Worst of all, it is out of warranty. So I am tearing my hair out. I am writing this blog post on my mom’s mini laptop. And by mini I mean the screen seems to be about only 5 inches in width and the keyboard is stressfully cramped. This sucks. Majorly sucks.

Last year, when I was researching about my HP problem, there were very few resources on the Internet. Very few people had the same problems as I did, and it was a good thing my laptop was still under warranty or else I would have had to buy a new one because replacing the motherboard of your laptop costs almost as much as buying a new laptop!

Now, though, do a search for “HP Pavilion problem” and no doubt you will find a whole lot of posts on video display and overheating problems – all the stuff I mentioned above! And it seems that it doesn’t even just cover the DV2000 line. It also affects DV6000 and DV9000 units.

Scouring for help on the web, it seems that there is a defective line of NVidia chips that are the reason for the overheating. Apparently they gave HP the wrong specs for the chip. So not only does HP suck, NVidia sucks too. (I have a GeForce 6150. If you do, you are in trouble too.) And Dell has the same chips, so they suck too.

This problem is so widespread that it seems HP is promising an extra year of warranty for the affected laptops. I will be taking my dead laptop to HP in June. It remains to be seen whether they will honor the warranty. But if they don’t, I have no idea what to do.

Commence despair.

P.S. Check here if your Dell is affected, here for your HP.

Just discovered a new way to use Twitter*: automatically posting a link to my every new blog post.

All you need is an RSS feed (like this) and an account in Twitterfeed. Log in, and click on create a new feed. Choose your destination as Twitter, enter your Twitter login details, and then your RSS feed URL.

You can set how often Twitterfeed checks for new blog posts (least being once a day, at most 5 times every 30 minutes). You can deactivate the service anytime.

Twitterfeed can also post to identi.ca, custom laconica installations, HelloTxt and Ping.fm.

Follow me on Twitter!

*Or annoy your Twitter followers, depending on how you look at it.

Technology is utterly amazing. These days I’m playing around with ShoZu, a mobile phone app that I’ve had on my Sony Ericsson W960i since last year, but I only got around to exploring it last week.

Basically, it finds images and videos in your phone and allows you to send them to different destinations like Facebook, Blogger, Twitpic, Multiply, Friendster, LiveJournal, Youtube, a random email address or wherever, really. (Maybe even your Slingbox one day.) ShoZu supports most blog and social networking sites in the Internet, so it’s really convenient to upload stuff from your phone to the web – instantly.

Let me show you how it works on my phone.

Once installed, the icon shows up in your Control Panel or your list of applications. Here I just made a shortcut to it on my desktop. (It’s the orange O.)

Open up ShoZu, and you’ll see this. It can save your phonebook to your ShoZu account so if ever your phone gets lost, you still have a backup of your contacts on the web. You can ZuCasts, which are feeds from your friends, meaning you can see what they have uploaded. To upload stuff yourself, select Share-It.

I see I have 40 files and 10 destinations. My files can be photos or videos, anything that I’ve taken using my camphone will show up here. Destinations means the places I can send my media to (set when I created my ShoZu account). For some reason, the Commens tab shows only comments I get from Flickr, but not the ones from Facebook or Twitpic. So, anyway, to upload something, I select All Files.

Now I can see all my latest photos and videos. I see I’ve already sent my Bulb of Garlic photo awhile ago. It has the orange ShoZu logo which means it’s been uploaded at least once already. (You can upload again, especially if you want to send to other destinations.) I can upload one photo at a time, or many at a time. I check the boxes of the photos I want to upload.

Of course, I don’t want my photos sent uncaptioned or untitled. So I select a photo, click on More >> Add Details. And I get to this spot, where I can add a title for my photo, and below, a description, and even tags.

Time to upload my Bananas photo. As you can see, the first button says Send to Twitpic. Since I love to use Twitpic, which automatically updates my Twitter, which then automatically updates my Plurk and Facebook accounts, I set it as my One-click photo site. (You can set this in your ShoZu account. Best to do it on a laptop instead of a mobile phone.) Anyways, this time I think I want to send this photo straight to my blog. So I click on More >> Send to other >> destination >> Google Blogger.

After some time… ta da!!! Here is my bananas post!

There it is up on my blog! :-) ShoZu adds the posted by ShoZu graphic, which I don’t like, so when I have the time later on, I edit it out of my blog post. I didn’t add a description awhile ago, so this photo only has a title. But if I had, it would have been placed below my photo. Here is an example of my post of the Astoria Regency Pool.

And it’s that easy! Cool, huh?

P.S. ShoZu connects to Internet (duh) so you have to make sure you have Internet access on your phone. At home, I connect to my wifi router. And when I am outside, I make sure to visit wifi hotspots so I can upload my photos on the go.

Hot on the heels of the Globe Visibility rebranding comes the newly minted “Smart Big Bro”, previously named Smart Bro Prepaid.

It has been repriced from P2500 to the lower price of P1995. It comes with free P100 worth of load (5 hours of Internet usage).

The device uses a 3G or HSDPA (high speed data packet access, if I remember my Network class lol) signal, whichever is available.

HSDPA speed is up to 2Mbps, but HSDPA is very limited in the Philippines. I don’t think it is even available outside of Manila (and even in Manila it is spotty at best), so other cities will probably just get 3G with a top speed of 384Kbps (or worse, GPRS).

Of course, published speed is never the same as actual speed. Actual speed depends on how strong the signal is in your area and how many users are tapping on that signal. If you want to know how fast 3G in your area is, try surfing the web using your cellphone (make sure it is on 3G and not GPRS). That’s the speed you get. If you want to know how fast GPRS is… well, I think dial-up is comparable to that.

Internet surfing on Smart Big Bro costs P10 for every 30 minutes. The kit comes with the USB wifi device and a Smart SIM which you can load up like regular SIMs, except this one will pay your Internet charges and not your phone bill.

Smart Big Bro is not available for international roaming so if you’re on your Sydney or Paris or Orlando vacations, you’re out of luck.

Remember dNeero? It pays you to complete surveys and post them on your blog. Well now they’re on Twitter (link) and you can earn even more by answering their Twitter questions.