B-Rhymes Pro iPhone App: Rhymes and Slant Rhymes

By Mike Lin

I recently published a new app: B-Rhymes Pro iPhone app. The most frequent request I get from users of the standard B-Rhymes iPhone app is to make it not require internet access so that you can find rhymes on your iPod Touch, or when you have no service etc. So I did that and also threw in full rhymes as well as slant rhymes. Putting the full rhyme database in there was a bit tricky, but I managed to fit it in <50MB. Price is $2.99.

Toronto Transit Directions on Google Maps!

By Mike Lin

Check it out! No more lame TTC site for me. This will be so great for newcomers. Anyway click to bigify the screen shot, or try it out on google maps directly

Unlocking Phones

By Mike Lin

Canada finally (well, since September or something) has cell phone providers with interchangeable networks (for newer phones)! Incredible. It’s taken forever, but you can now not only take your number with you to a different provider, but also your phone… provided you can unlock it.

Cell providers don’t want to make it easier for you to leave than they legally have to, so they apply a ‘lock’ on phones you get from them which prevents their use on other providers’ networks.

Fortunately with many (most?) phones you can get a code that unlocks them for a small fee. I’ve done this on my last two phones. The first being a Rogers Blackberry 8900, and my new one, which is a Telus Motorola Milestone, an Android phone.  I unlocked both to use on Fido.

Steps (for Motorola and Blackberry):

1. Buy phone from store like BestBuy.
2. Get imei number (a phone id number) by typing *#06# into the phone.
3. Send imei to unlocking service like mobileincanada.ca
4. Pay $20, receive unlock code.
5. When you put in your sim from a different provider, type in the unlock code and you’re done!

Pretty easy.

Kanji-lish

By Mike Lin

This is an hilarious/genius Firefox plugin for people learning kanji. It replaces the first letter of English words in your browser with the corresponding Japanese character. Unexpected and funny, but I can kind of see this working. I’ll try it out. BTW I’ve been learning kanji through Remembering the Kanji and Reviewing the Kanji for the last 5 months. I’m up to 1532 characters! It’s an amazing system.

Shock Game

By Mike Lin

So Pat got this ridiculous and awesome game where, get this, you test your reaction time against others by pushing a button when a light goes off, and if you’re the slowest, and here is it straight up, you get electrocuted! Check it out: Lightning Reactions

Of course we had to get some suckers… I mean friends over to try it out. So we had a party at me and Kerry’s place.

Read more »