Swordie Bloggie

If you own an automatic or auto transmission car, you should follow this tips. It will make your auto transmission or gear box live longer and run smoother.

If your car has been in stationary (park) for more than 6 hours (like in the morning), you should exercise your gearbox first before moving.

First start your engine. Normally you will start moving after a few seconds. That is very wrong, don’t do that, including with manual car. You will spoil your engine. You need to warm up your engine.

After warming your engine… I normally do it for 3 or more minutes (in the morning)… How can I wait 3 minutes? Well, I start my car engine first then I go wear my shoe lah…

OK, after that, do these exercise… press your break… so that your car don’t move lah… then move your gear from P to R. OK, for benefits of everyone, the automatic gear is normally arrange from top as P, R, N, D, 2 & 1… some with 3, 2, 1. After 10 seconds, move it to N… and so on until you reach 1. Then you have to move back from 1 to P again by stopping at every gear for 10 seconds like before… that will take you about 100 seconds… emm ngam bah kan? I fail my maths bah…

Not only human need exercise, but your car also need it you know… ok lah, happy exercising…

Do you have photographs taken with megapixels digital camera? I’m sure you do, because digital cameras are compact and reasonably priced nowadays. The pixels are getting higher and higher where even the most compact and cheapest digicam can have resolutions of 5 megapixel or more.

Each photograph will require as much as 1.5MB or more storage space. Of course with the higher pixels and resolutions, the photographs details and colors will be more brilliant. And the large size is not a problem today since storage card are cheap and large in capacity. You can have 1GB storage card and 4GB are getting common. And if you need more space, there are 8GB or 16GB. In fact 32GB are already in the market right now.

The only problem with large size photographs is when we need to transfer it to another medium. The most frustrating will be when we need to email or publish it on the web.

If you don’t have photo editing software, the only option you have is using the PaintBrush which comes with the Windows. You can reduce the size of the photographs to about 20% for instant and save it to another file. You can reduce your 1.5MB photographs to roughly about 50KB, but all subject to your original photographs. This method is not bad, I have been using this trick for sometimes and when I’m on a machine which doesn’t have any photographs tools.

But that trick requires you to do some typing and clicks. Microsoft actually has a tool called Image Resizer. It is available since June 20, 2005 and you can download it for FREE at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx and the manual at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/learnmore/tips/eschelman2.mspx.

The tool is very small, only 521KB and once installed, it will integrate with your file explorer. Using Image Resizer is as easy as right clicking on your photographs file from file explorer and chooses the size you like to have from the popup window. Your photographs will be resized and save on another file. For example, if you resize your image001.jpg file, it will be copied to image001 (small).jpg automatically after it being resized. Just make sure you don’t tick on “Resize the original pictures (don’t create copies)”.

So, go a head… give it a try if you don’t have any photograph editor to resize your super huge photos 🙂