All about Hong Kong 7's 2013

The Hong Kong Rugby 7's is an annual event that is held in Hong Kong stadium as part of a world 7's tournament. It is held in Hong Kong stadium and draws huge crowds from abroad and within Hong Kong. It is a three day event lasting from Friday to Sunday.

It is truly a spectacle and something not to be missed if in Hong Kong while it's on (Not the you could miss it with all the advertisement). I myself will be attending (with pictures to follow).

The Hong Kong stadium is a short walk from 'Causway bay station' and is very well signed. Walking directions from the station are as follows.

Causeway Bay Station Hong Kong

	1. Head west on Hennessy Rd towardPercival St
		150 m
	2. Turn left onto Percival St
		260 m
	3. Turn left onto Leighton Rd
		180 m
	4. Turn right onto Caroline Hill Rd
		450 m
	5. Sharp right onto Stadium Path
		230 m

Hong Kong Stadium Stadium 55 Hospital Road So Kon Po,, Central, Hong Kong

The stadium is split up into four wings including the infamous 'South stand' , this stand is especially lively as everyone in the stand is dressed up in some form of costume from North Korean leaders to the Teletubbies. 2 hours queues for this stand are to be expected. 

In progress...

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

So I'm back. Hopefully I'll keep this going this time. Since my exams last year it's been a bit crazy during the summer I really couldn't be bothered to blog let alone do much and this first term in sixth form has been a bit of a shock to the system.

Long story short since my last visit to the Apple store I now am the proud owner of a Macbook pro retina and have also since done a couple minor upgrades to my desktop and aquired a nexus 7 (More blog entries about such topics to follow). So my aim is to keep this going and hopefully people are actally reading it (Although I don't mind writing to myself feel free to comment!) or at least I hope that the google website  trawlers find this interesting :D

Cheers

Andrew

P.s The title is a quote by Mark Twain

Macbook Pro Retina Hands On

Today I made a trip to the HK Apple flagship store. It was my first time in the store and being a weekend I assumed it would be fairly empty, in reality the store was packed even on a working day at 3pm. The very friendly Genius talked me through all the key details of the new model as was thoroughly helpful and I really felt like I was treated to the coveted 'Apple experience'.

Now onto the main point.

The Hardware

Owning a Macbook Pro 15" I've become accustomed to the weight and size of the laptop. Weight never really bothered me and it is only recently that I've started to notice as I'm carrying it around a lot more. The new Macbook Retina is definitely tangibly lighter and I noticed the difference immediately. The laptop is still not feather weight but it is a marked improvement. The footprint is almost identical with the Retina model being ever so slightly less wide and less tall. It is about as think closed as the non-Retina model is without the screen closed. The keyboard and trackpad feel exactly the same which is a good thing as I'm a big fan of the Apple keyboards that I believe are some of the best (Just behind some lenovo keyboards.) Some people complained about cut wrists as a result of sharp edges on previous MBP however I did not have this issue with the Retina as its lower profile reduced the angle at which my wrists rested.

The Screen

The 'up to 75%' reduction is noticeable and even in the brightly lit Apple store the screen was very usable. Black levels are much improved and the brightness seems to be ever so slightly brighter than my 2009 model. The retina display is incredible and even though under normal use I can't discern the pixels on my 2009 model the Retina display just looked sharper especially the text on websites. The bezels also seem to be reduced and gone is the 'Macbook Pro' branding under the screen, instead it has been relocated to the bottom.

The Problems?


When I switched the display to emulate the 1920 x 1200 setting really (3840 x 2400 downscaled) I did notice some choppy scrolling on websites, hopefully this is a driver issue that will be fixed in an update. The lack of ethernet does concern me as sometimes ethernet is much more reliable than wifi, the thunderbolt adapter in my mind should be included at least to compensate for this. Also the fact that Apple still only include 2 usb ports is annoying, but at least they are spread on either side this time.

Hands on Summary


The HK apple store genius told me that the initial wave of Retina MBP had sold out within hours and that new stock was arriving soon. I hope to get hold of one of the 2.6ghz models with 8gb of RAM and I'll post a review as soon as get it and have time to do one. The Retina Macbook Pro is a pretty incredible feat of engineering and I can't wait to own one.

Macbook Pro Retina

The slight dilema :D

So I've done some thinking, I am hopefully going to recieve an upgrade for my macbook pro if my iGCSE results come out good (Fingers crossed). Since I'm a student and spend around a 60/40 split between school and home my previous plan of a laptop + desktop starts to make less sense. In light of that I've 80% decided to splash out and by the high end MBPR. I have considered other laptops however all of them seem to have compromises of weight or sheer size.

The other laptops I've considered so far are:

Dell XPS 15 - Not Ivy bridge yet and the graphics will probably turn out to be slower

M14x R2 - Too big and heavy

Asus Timeline X - Much slower 768p screen

HP Envy 15 - Heavy, and has a reputation for problems

Asus N55SF - Not ivy bridge yet, heavy

The MBPR specs will be:

2.6ghz Quad Core i7-3720qm
650m GDDR5 Graphics
512gb SSD
8gb RAM

So my question to you (If anyone even reads my blog :P ) is do you guys have any opinion on this. I will be paying $20,000HKD or around $2600. I plan to use this machine for occasional gaming, photography, student work and hopefully some pretty heavy video editing (Once I learn!)

New Computer Build

Previously I posted that I was going to upgrade an old dell dimension. I realised that it would turn out to be too expensive to be worth my money with all the over inflated prices on AGP cards and Rambus memory.

I now have acces to a new computer (My brothers old one). This has given me acces to a case and a hard drive to re-use in my new build. At the moment the computer has the following specs inside it. 

Pentium Dual core E5300 @3.3ghz

9500 GT DDR2 @ 775/1715/345

2GB DDR2 Ram @ 1066mhz

MP G31-M Motherboard

500GB Seagate Blue 

2x Noctua NF-R8 PWM Fans 

Random Foxconn Case :) 

Right, now onto the main point of this article. The computer I plan to build in the next month or so will be around $7000 HKD or $900. I'll be keeping the HDD and case from the current build so I'm saving money there. New specs:

GPU: Radeon 7850

CPU: i5 3570K

RAM: 8GB Any decent brand

PSU: 700w Modular power supply

Motherboard: Asus P8z77-M Pro

Cooler: Corsair H80

Fans: x2 Cougar CF-V12 HP

I plan to get a new case when I have a little more money as the the case I'm using at the moment is quite cramped and cabling (As you can see) is a bit of a problem. Also further down the line I plan to buy an SSD as a boot drive when the prices come down.

OC3D Madness 2012 UPDATE!!!!

Hey guys sorry about this. This was going to be a placeholder for the competition results but apparently I run the risk of being banned for posting them here. Good luck to everyone!

Edit 20/04/2012 5pm HK time: Well the results are out! Congratulations to the winners :D (Not me sadly)

Project Glass - Google+

Project Glass - Google+:

'via Blog this'

This is pretty cool :)