Ryan's World of Nonsense

This post contains strong language. Viewer discretion is advised. Hi. Let me tell you a story. It's my first year in university and as an international student I'm required to live on campus resident halls until my second year. In each "house" within the halls, there's around 2 cleaners (at least for my house). The cleaners in charge of my "house" include one British 66-year-old bloke (Which I'll just refer to as "cleaner" below) and a Women.  Cleaner is in charge of cleaning mine and my roommate's room for 90% of the time. We always had a chat when he comes in and cleans my room, my kitchen and toilet etc. He normally comes on Wednesdays or Thursdays, which in normal school period, I'm probably away in a lecture. But during holidays or exam periods (when I'm writing this blog), I'm more likely to be in my room and this morning was no exception.  I was talking with cleaner this morning while he's cleaning my room, and he...

Ryan in Wales - Part 1 Wales. A country that nobody seemed to care about. When we talk about the UK, we instantly think of England, Scotland, Northen Ireland (Not so much) but not Wales... Well, unless you're from there.  Since I'm studying in the "partially beautiful" city of Exeter, I'm able to hop on a 2hr and 30m train ride to the capital of Wales: Cardiff. Now why would I want to visit Wales? It all started from January, when I was in my dorm, bored and doesn't want to do any schoolwork. I started a course on Duolingo, and I went for the most popular language of them all... Welsh. Yep. I'm learning Welsh on Duolingo.  Why? Why not?  Anyway, I hopped on the train on a cloudy afternoon on the 1st of April and embarked on my 2-and-a-half-hour journey to Cardiff, Wales. (There are faster options if you change at Bristol, but my train is cheaper and it's a direct train.) The train was pretty busy. A lovely woman was sitting on my reserved seat, asleep....

             Recently a laptop called 'Pinebook' has caught my attention. This laptop costs only $99 USD and It's running Linux. A laptop this cheap usually won't be 'user-friendly' because many corners were cut for lowering the expenses. But $99 dollars? This is really unheard of. So let's take a look of this $99 dollar laptop's specs.  This is the Pinebook's specs shown in Pine64's website. As you can see, It's armed with an 1.2 GHz Allwinner A64 quad core processor. This processor might not be familiar with some of you so let me tell you a little bit about it. The Allwinner A64 is a 64-bit tablet processor developed by Allwinner which is a Chinese company. It's got Quad core Arm Cortex-A53 processors and a Mali-400 GPU. No wonder it's running Linux. I'm not sure it'll got enough power to run Windows.  So the specs isn't the best, in fact it's pretty poor. But again, It's $99 dollars. What do you expect? This pro...

  Recently I read news about the nuclear diamond battery. Basically, it is a battery developed by NDB in the United States, made from nuclear waste and can last over 10 years without one single charge. Let me explain to you all how it worked:   The nano-diamond battery will absorb carbon-14 from the graphite which is a recycled nuclear waste. When the graphite decays it will produce a small current to power things up.  Can you ever imagine that if this battery is used in modern-day smartphones or laptops or electric cars that will last longer than a decade without one single charge? You can read your Instagram or twitter tweets for a whole day without worrying to charge again. Or you can drive all night long in your electric car all over the world enjoying some breathtaking views outside the window without worrying where's the next charging spot. Isn't that amazing? All of these will happen in the future someday if NDB manages to successfully develop the battery. Yes...

A HP Chromebook.   Are Chromebooks the future of laptop computers? Chromebooks, marketed as a cheap alternative to traditional laptops, especially for students, are rising up in popularity. These lightweight and affordable laptops run on ChromeOS, a cloud-centric operating system where the user's data will be stored in the cloud instead of local storage devices, which Windows and MacOS rely on. Recently my secondary school has purchased a number of ASUS Chromebooks for students. They are rugged, splashproof and touchscreen. Yes, you read that right, there's touchscreen on that thing. Normally, a lightweight laptop with touchscreen support or a "2-in-1" laptop is much more expensive than a traditional laptop. But when I look online, most Chromebooks cost around $1000-4000 HKD which a regular "2-in-1" windows laptop costs well over $10000 HKD. So, what's so special about Chromebooks that made them much cheaper and more importantly, are Chromebooks going to...