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There’s a saying that is gaining world wide fame now.

“In 7 days, the world was made by the Creator. Everything else after that, is made in China.”

No offense, but the China has been producing clone to almost everything there is. Name it, they’ve cloned it. We have Nokia mobile phone named Nokina, Sony Bravia LCD tv to just Bravia, iPhone to eyePhone and what have you? I admit, I stay from these imitations for obvious reasons – quality is way lower than its genuine counterparts. However, a recent (to my knowledge) clone surfaced that’s making me think of trying it out. It’s China’s clone for iPad… aPad or sometimes called aPad.

A friend of a friend came to my place for a chat and mentioned this clone with a different pitch. Different, since I’ve never heard anyone praising imitations like he did with his recently acquired aPad. So I figured I’d take a look and see if the praises were just a product of his optimism or what he was saying was the real thing. Apparently, he was right.

The aPad sells at around 199$. It’s way cheaper than the iPad. It boasts of a 600 MHz RockChip 2808A processor with 1GB of Memory. It has MicroSD support, 802.11b/g WiFi, HD video playback, 3.5mm jack and one-click access to YouTube with a 7-inch touchscreen display with 800×430 resolution. Pretty neat for a cheap clone.

What caught my attention was that it runs on a Google Android 1.5 OS. Think about it, someone really pulled a rabbit out of the hat here. Cheap machine +  Android = rotten Apple.   Whoaa…

Working online is not new to Filipinos. In fact, there is a steady growth of the number of Pinoy’s rendering services without having to report to offices. Jobs include data entry, content development, software development and the like. The jobs pay pretty well considering that they can be done at home. One famous mode of payment is fund transfer through PayPal.

In a nutshell, PayPal is a payment portal that allows people to do financial transactions over the internet. The technology is relatively new to the Philippines compared to other means like wire transfer. This somehow leads to a little confusion in getting the money from a PayPal account to a bank account.

I had been working online for a few months now and had been withdrawing my PayPal funds to a Banco de Oro ATM/Debit Card. It was just unfortunate that my BDO account was closed and I had to withdraw my funds through an account in the LandBank of the Philippines. I was worried that it might not get through. Luckily, it did. This is a walkthrough intended to guide cyberpinoys in getting hold of their online funds the PayPal-Landbank way.

PRECONDITIONS:

1. Must have an existing Pay

Pal personnal account (I’m not sure how this goes with other account types).

2. Must have an existing bank account in the LandBank of the Philippines.

3. Must not be afraid to surf the internet. 

STEPS:

1. Login to PayPal and add your LandBank account:   MyAccount->Profile->Add/Edit Bank Accounts

(You will need a bank code for this)

Official List of PayPal Philippines Bank Codes

2. Withdraw funds: My Account-> Withdraw -> Withdraw Funds to Bank Account

PayPal will list it as three processes under one transaction.

- Currency conversion (credit) from US Dollars

- Currency conversion (debit) to Philippine Peso

- Fund transfer to the Bank

3. Just be patient and wait. My transactions usually take 2-4 days.

When it’s in. You can check your Landbank iAccess account and you will see that its is registered as transaction from the Domestic Transfer Department.

The iPhone: from weeklyreader.com

Apple has established the iPhone to be on top of almost every consumer’s list of trendy mobile gadgets. Application development in iPhone platform has been one of the recent ins lately. I did a little research (cause I was intrigued by the number of iPhone apps developed) and compiled five good tutorials for iPhone application development beginners. Thank you Google!

Start from the Beginning: iPhone SDK

The iPhone SDK was announced officially on March 6, 2008, the first beta release was on July 11, 2008 which demanded a firmware update for all iPhone and iPod users. The SDK continued to develop with time until the Beta3 update to the 2.1 SDK was released on August 8, 2008. Try it!

Hello iPhone!

Here’s an easy way to make your first iPhone application using Xcode. As they say, Hello iPhone!.

Cocoa Anyone?

Cocoa is one of Apple Inc.’s native object-oriented application program environments for the Mac OS X operating system. It is one of five major APIs available for Mac OS X; the others are Carbon, POSIX (for the BSD environment), X11 and Java. This can also be used to develop iPhone apps.

Sample App: Orientation Aware Clock

Twist and turn but your app in its original orientation with this example.

Sample App: ToDo list using SQLite

Here’s a sample of using a DB along with an iPhone app. Add one to your ToDo list of applications!

How to Code:

How to compile:

1. Download and install the .NET (2.0) SDK from Micrsoft.

2. Access the SDK Command Prompt and type this command:

csc filename.cs  (filename.cs refers to the filename of the files that contains the code above)…

Doing the csc compiles the code and creates an output executable.

3. Run filename.exe using the command prompt and your done!

Hello World!