Every week, Play-Asia does some kinda inventory purge and puts out a single non-bargain bin game at bargain bin prices.

This week, it’s Timeshift for the Xbox 360 at approximately SGD$25 (inclusive of shipping).

It scored a rather respectable 70% average on Metacritic. Seeing as it’s a pretty slow quarter for games, I thought I might put this out there. Here’s my affiliate link to the store: Buy Timeshift at Play-Asia.com

Offer ends next Tuesday, the 24th of February.

This is the view I grew up with for about nine years until we moved. The sun rose in the East to the left and set over behind those trees on the right. In the middle between some buildings you can just make out some of Orchard Road, Far East Plaza and the Tangs pagoda, in particular. Every year during the National Day Parade, we’d stand out on the balcony here and try to see the fireworks to the East. As Singapore developed, taller buildings rose and blocked off all but the highest-rising rockets.

This was taken with an iPhone 3G and stitched together (3 photos) with the Pano app. Some exposure enhancement was later applied in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Sitting at the next table over is a group of possibly Russian men drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon, playing cards. They’re using the thin paper stock of an airplane issued deck, or maybe it
came free with a cheap, unrelated purchase. Further along the row of rickety tables is an Indian gentleman with slicked-back hair and an American accent, even further still, a Buddhist monk and a couple of English chavs. The monk is not drinking.

Smoke in the air, with the sounds of so many different tongues it would be pointless to call them foreign (on whose behalf but my own?), it’s a scene romantics and film critics might fall over themselves to
identify as belonging to another time and place, Morocco in the 1940s maybe, Blade Runner’s hybrid America perhaps — given the hide and seek aromas of nearby Asian cooking and the aggressive buzz of neon — but also one that many of us take for granted here in Singapore.

A beggar approaches and manages to fleece a few dollars off those present. I am invisible to him. The monk numbly declines.

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Fake HDR test, originally uploaded by sangsara.

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LaSalle campus, originally uploaded by sangsara.

*Also known as the “I’ll fix it in post” approach.

— Edit:
It’s been a few days with the LX3, and I’m still very pleased with it. The interface is initially complicated, with a two different menus offering to help you change settings, with overlap into each other. One is designated a “Quick-Menu”, and is activated with the little joystick. In practice, it does live up to its name, and most people will probably use it for changing ISO speeds, AF modes, and so on. Many little things that could have been poorly implemented were thankfully well-designed. This is also the first camera I’ve owned that can accept software updates (there’s one out already), so perhaps my one major gripe will be addressed someday: The very handy Multiple Exposure mode is buried in the “Slow Menu”, and can’t be assigned to the shortcut button. Starting it up takes more than a few keypresses.

I did a solid day’s worth of internet research before getting it – the purchase was spurred by another friend’s decision to buy it, and my faith in his own inability to buy something without knowing all the alternatives, so what you’re getting here is effectively two recommendations – this camera outperforms anything in its class & price range so long as you’re interested in a wide-angle lens. It shoots RAW and the built-in noise reduction can be dialed up or down in JPEG mode to suit your preferences. If you’re looking for something with a long zoom, then this probably won’t satisfy you (but the Canon G10 might). The build quality is also fairly solid, with very few plastic parts, and should last for years.

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Lim Seng Lee duck rice, originally uploaded by sangsara.

I ate here last week and it was still as good as when my family used to visit on a regular basis over a decade ago. These days they’re closed on Sunday, inexplicably, which is a bit of a bother as there never used to be anything else of interest nearby to make up for going down on a Saturday night.

The new West Coast Plaza mall has just now opened though, so that’s not too bad. I picked up a copy of Apocalypto on DVD for about $15 and had some coffee from the Seattle-based Tully’s company, which has just opened two outlets here in Singapore. I think the other one is at Far East Square but can’t be sure.

Lim Seng Lee Duck Rice & Porridge
38 South Buona Vista Road
Tel: 6475 9908

HungryGoWhere users have given them a 5.8 score, which I think is ridiculous because they are at least an 8 by hawker food standards.

For a brief period of time, I will be having both Singnet and Starhub broadband services in my home, so I thought it would be fun to run speed tests and see if I’ve made the right decision in switching (I shan’t say from which to which).

Both are 8Mbps plans, with Singnet promising up to 512kbps of upload bandwidth, and Starhub only half of that, at 256kbps up to 768kbps after a recent free upgrade. Their prices are comparable. I connect to both via Wi-Fi, although my Starhub connection uses WEP and my Singnet uses WPA. It’s supposed to make a slight difference, but I don’t expect it will matter much because speedtest.net results tend to vary within a few minutes of each other (I’ve run tests consecutively and seen very different results – generally if it doesn’t make sense [like upload speeds coming very close to download speeds], I’ll run them again and take the higher one). It’s not an exact science but I hope the data will be useful anyway.

Note: Starhub product literature mentions that a “speedboost” is provided when visiting certain partner sites, which accounts for exceptional download speeds in some cases, like the Asian results. I’ve left these in because I chose global test servers at random, so all’s fair. Unless of course Starhub partnered these sites specifically to optimize their speedtest.net results. Just saying.

—

11:30am to 12 noon
(Singnet results before Starhub)

EUROPE

London, UK

Stockholm, Sweden

Dusseldorf, Germany

Singnet vs Starhub: 9251kbps vs 7809kbps
Morning European Winner: Singnet

ASIA

Yokohama, Japan

Taipei, Taiwan

Hong Kong, China

Singnet vs Starhub: 6826 vs 16490
Morning Asian Winner: Starhub

AMERICAS

San Francisco, USA

Washington DC, USA

Denver, USA

Singnet vs Starhub: 9954 vs 10900

Morning American Winner: Starhub (just barely, and only because of a “speedboost”)

LOCAL

Singapore

Morning Local Winner: Starhub
—

Overall Morning Winner: Starhub

——–


2pm

I’m switching to Numion.com for this test. It loads a mix of popular websites in a bunch of inline browser frames to measure your “real-world” browsing speed, as well as a regular download/upload test to gauge maximum speeds.

My custom settings for this are: English language sites only, from Singapore, the UK, and the USA. It runs for 30 seconds instead of the default 15.

Singnet:

Starhub:

Starhub wins at surfing for now, but it’ll be interesting to see what results are like during the peak evening hours. When it comes to overall maximum throughput and latency though, Singnet actually takes this one. That might be of some value to gamers and people using P2P systems.

Edit: I just ran the Numion test again for Singnet and this time it managed 987.87kbps for “Surfspeed inside Singapore”, against the previous 253.82kbps, and beating Starhub’s 627.27kbps. The latency for Singnet jumped to 1000ms though. Once again, it just shows how you can’t rely on these tests too much.

—-

7:00pm-7:30pm

I ran another batch of speedtest.net tests, but decided that their tests are flawed and fluctuate too much. At some points, running the same country’s test will route your data through another ISP/host in their network, leading to dissimilar results (I did not take note of these hosts’ names, so could not be sure that I was comparing Singnet & Starhub on equal ground. Numion’s methodology makes more sense.

9pm Numion Test

Singnet:

Starhub:

Singnet wins again on maximum speed/latency, but loses out in surfing speed. I’m not sure if this has something to do with my Starhub going through a dedicated 3com OfficeConnect router while Singnet goes through the provided 2WIRE brand integrated ADSL modem & wireless router.

Anecdotally, I’m seeing better perceived performance with Singnet, with YouTube and GameTrailers.com videos starting to play almost instantly.

9:20pm

Downloading the demo for Aquaria from Ambrosia SW’s FTP server. Singnet gives me approx 50kb/s, while Starhub is fluctuating between 15-30kb/s, with more time spent between 15-20kb/s.

—

1:00am

I wanted to do a test at 11pm, but couldn’t spare the time. Anyhow 1am isn’t too bad, most people have gone to bed, leaving it the domain of students, gamers, and the unemployed (power users).

Singnet:

Starhub:

I don’t know what’s up with Singnet’s latency calculation, it’s probably faulty or a sign of the 2WIRE modem’s inability to handle opening 40-something http connections at once. Pinging individual servers reveals a much lower number, like 190ms (google.com) or 214ms (twitter.com).

We’re now at the end of the day, and I’m not sure how to read these numbers but I can say Singnet feels as fast as or faster than Starhub for regular surfing. Starhub’s ping times aren’t so great for gaming (but conventional wisdom has always held that DSL is the better choice), but if you visit a lot of Asian/local sites, their speedboost partnerships may be reason enough to put up with high pings and time-of-day-specific slowdowns. Starhub’s recent upgrade to 768kbps upload speeds (on the 8mbps plan) is also very attractive, and I’d like to see Singnet raising their upload caps in the near future.

Your milage will vary, especially since Starhub’s speeds are dependent on location and neighborhood activity. My area isn’t very densely populated, so the Starhub results don’t look too bad at all against the horror stories I’ve heard. If I could choose to keep either one, I’d take Singnet for being more consistent throughout the day and having better response times, but would feel a little sore about having lower upload speeds. I don’t feel that Starhub’s better surfing speeds on paper make a big difference in real world usage. For example, I just loaded the entire front page of the New York Times in about 3 seconds, minus the ads.