Craving Tech goes live today! I’ve done a permanent redirection from my old blog’s URL at http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs to here. It’ll be some time before Google notices this change so I’ll sit still and stay tight! Meanwhile at your end, please update all your bookmarks (especially the RSS Feed because I’ve changed the feed address).

So to summarize this post:

• My new RSS Feed address is @ http://feeds.feedburner.com/CravingTech. Subscribe to this great blog if you haven’t If you prefer to get my latest posts via email, subscribe to CravingTech via email.
• My Twitter is still the same: http://twitter.com/michaelaulia. Follow me if you haven’t as I’ve been more active now since I’ve got some real friends in there (thanks, Nuffnang guys & the great bloggers I’ve met in Singapore last month)

If you’ve been my readers for months (or even years), I’d appreciate if you spread this new domain on some social bookmarking sites. So please do stumble, Digg, mixx, tweet, and any other things you can think of to help me spread this great new ‘empire’

And of course, as always, thank you for all of your support to this blog and to myself personally. Looking forward for a greater year ahead!

This is going to be a big big big one. I’ve decided to have a more professional domain for this blog of mine (from http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs to http://www.cravingtech.com). It’s grown into what I call a “Monster”. I’ve never thought that this blog:

• Has become one of the greatest technology blog (hey, some people told me this)
• Finally focusing on Technology (and a bit of blogging guides/tips still..)
• Would ever have a PageRank of 3 and Alexa rank of 56k.
• Got noticed by Darren Rowse and John Chow once (thanks to my “ultimate” blog post about being yourself)
• Has made a good relationship between myself and great technology vendors such as Microsoft, Razer, Logitech, Kingston, HP, Dyson, and many others.
• Now has over 500 RSS subscribers.
• Ranked #20 in Australia.
• Chosen as the finalist of the Best Geek Blog over Asia Pacific! (my recent and biggest surprise).

Its new home will be cravingtech.com/blog.

Honestly speaking, I was a bit scared to take this approach but thanks to Arnold Aranez from MrGadget and the support of my friends (I’m sorry I can’t name you all in here), I’ve decided to make this jump. It’s risky but necessary in the long run. The pain is now to do the re-setup of the new site, backing up/restoring WordPress files & database, doing a 301 redirection for the search engine bots, and of course building up the Alexa Rank from the bottom

Why “Craving Tech”? Well, the other good domain names have already been taken lol, BUT I thought that it’s cool to have a blog that will (hopefully) satisfy your technology cravings

I’m gonna miss “Michael Aulia’s Blog”.. but it’s always exciting to see what future opportunities await me on cravingtech.com/blog! I’ll update you again when it’s being set-up properly so you can re-update your bookmarks and your RSS feed to the new domain name.

Don’t worry, everything will still be the same. I’m still the owner and I’ll still write my posts with my style of writing, etc

Should I keep the “Tech news, Reviews, and a Geek’s ramblings” or change it to “Satisfy your technology cravings” or something?

Comments? Hate this change? Love it?

So I went to Melbourne eGames Expo at the Royal Exhibition Building, Carlton (October 30 – November 1 2009).

The 2009 eGames Expo provided a unique opportunity for visitors to see, try, and buy some of the latest and yet to be released products in the market.

Upcoming games such as Assassins Creed II and Forza 3 were in display where you could actually try the game yourselves ahead of everyone else (assuming you wanted to wait for a while in the queue).

There were also a few other products such as the massive speaker I saw, which was perfect for your entertainment centre at home, to test on.

Here is the massive speaker I was talking about:

I also managed to take a shot with the Rayman Rabbid

Here are some other photos from Melbourn eGames Expo 2009 that I took with my lovely Ricoh CX2 camera:

I honestly found that the Melbourne Game Expo in 2007 was way better though.. It somehow felt bigger and had more attractive events on it: Crysis tournament, Call of Duty Modern Warfare tournament, a short intro on upcoming processor technologies on stage, and more computers +consoles for you to try and play around with. I spent like 4 hours in 2007 with my 2 friends but only about an hour roughly on this one.

I wish one day Australia can have its own expo that is as big as the E3 in the U.S!

I’ve honestly never heard about LeapFish until today. LeapFish is actually a powerful and quick search engine that captures results from multiple sources, such as posts, online shops, yahoo answers, videos, etc. How does this different from Google? Well for a start, LeapFish is lightning fast! Once you type in your queries, you’ll see the results being presented to you right away in front of your nose. The results are also grouped automatically based on the media or type of sites containing the results you might be looking for.

News from the press release, LeapFish plans to unveil “a new multimedia and real-time search, communication and sharing platform.”

With social media sites popping up like crazy nowadays, a good search engine should be able to manage and retrieve the results from these social platforms effectively.

Human conversations (Twitter replies or the Facebook status) sometimes actually give a more accurate and genuine information. When you are searching for a product review, for example, reading a consumer forum might actually give you more feedback compared to a review site. A bunch of people using the same product giving you the pros and cons of the product simultaneously, now that’s a real genuine info!

Okay, so we already have Google, right? So I’m quite excited to find out what LeapFish can offer that Google can’t at the moment. With lots of people still hanging to the might Google search engine (and Bing), it will be a challenge for LeapFish to bring something new on the table. Threaded results for social sites’ conversations perhaps? Or audio-to-text search on videos? Probably expecting too much here but it’s always interesting to hear new technologies being invented.

Do you think Google and Bing already deliver what you want from the search engines today?

Source: LeapFish.com

* LeapFish is conducting private demos prior to the highly anticipated launch, if interested please email demo@leapfish.com

When I logged on to my Twitter on the web a couple of days ago, I noticed a new message on the top of the page (screenshot above) about the new Twitter feature called the Twitter Lists. What are Twitter Lists? How do you use them?

If you’ve been using TweetDeck, DestroyTwitter, Seesmic Desktop, or any other Twitter client, you must have already understood the concept of “Groups”. You add some of your Twitter friends to the group so that you can follow them easier.

The Twitter Lists feature has a similar concept like a group, but this time, you can actually share your group/list to others, if you want to.

For example, I add a Twitter List called nuffnangAwards2009 so I can follow my new friends from the blog awards last week. This way, I can still keep in touch with them by looking at their tweets.

To create a new list, simply click on the “New List” link on your Twitter’s sidebar. Then, go to a friend’s twitter profile page to add him/her to your list.

You can also categorize your Twitter friends to more than just 1 list. So you may have a friend who’s in 2 or 3 Twitter Lists. Your call.

You can also see who have added you to their Twitter Lists (which is quite a cool feature):

It’s simple and I love the fact that you can share your Twitter Lists (if you want to) to the public. If you are following a chocolate lover, for example, there will be a high chance of him/her creating a list of all chocolate lovers

Even if you are already using a Twitter client and using Groups, creating a Twitter List is good too so that you can share it to the others!