Getting extra mileage and save fuel cost with Fuel Saver

Ever since the petrol price in Malaysia skyrocketed by 40% from RM1.92 to the historical high of RM2.70 on 5 June 2008, I had been looking for effective fuel saving product to help in saving some fuel expenses. I heard and read that many fuel saving products are in fact non-effective, until I decided to try out this product called Fuel Saver.

The reason I gave Fuel Saver a try was that it is inexpensive at the price of only RM99 including installation. To date, I have installed this Fuel Saver in my car for more than 3 months, and so far it performs pretty well.

Before the installation, I put it near my Ultra Racing Stabilizer Bar and it shown its magnetic nature by sticking onto the steel bar. You might want to visit to Fuel Saver's website to learn more about the theory of how it works, and read about its emission test result and Dynamometers test results to show it really works.

Here are some of my observations after installation:

• I feel that the engine run smoother and a little bit more powerful than before.
• I notice that when the engine is started after resting for quite a while, water will be dripping from the exhaust pipe. This is a sign of complete combustion which produces only carbon dioxide and water. The water will be vapourized when the engine turns hot. In fact, the sign of water dripping already shown after I installed the Zaptor performance voltage stabilizer, but the amount was not as much as now.
• I can get the most extra mileage when travelling long distance (>100 km) at high speed, compared with the same travelling distance and style before installation. This Toyota Avanza 1.5G auto 7-seater (using semi-synthetic engine oil) can run more than 60km further with the same amount of fuel for such a long distance journey, challenging the 600km target before the fuel tank warning light up.
• If the car is frequently travelling in short distance with some traffic lights at speed not more than 90 km/h most of the time, the extra mileage is minimal and there is not much fuel saving. The extra distance could be merely 10km only.

I find this fuel saving gadget a good investment, even though the petrol price in Malaysia has been gradually reduced to RM2.30 now since 15 October 2008 and could be further reduced again in the near future.

Mobile phone screen capturing with the free TOSC utility

My reader asked about how I captured the screen of my mobile phone and paste them in my blog here.

I installed a small open source utility developed by Pal Szasz called The Open Screen Capture (TOSC) into my Sony Ericsson P1i, and that is the tool I used to capture the screen.

TOSC is an open source and free screen capture utility for mobile device running on Symbian UIQ3. Example of such smartphones are Sony Ericsson P1i, P990i, W960i, G700, G900, etc.

TOSC is very simple and easy to use. You just need to set the timer for the screen capture to happen, which can be 0 second (immediately), 10 seconds or 30 seconds. Then, get ready with the screen you want to capture before the timer timeout, and TOSC will capture the screen and save it as PNG file in the root directory of your M2 memory card.

When TOSC is running, you can see a green icon on top of the screen, which will show the timer countdown when a screen capture is initiated. Don't worry, the green icon won't be captured by TOSC.

You can click here to download the SIS installation file for TOSC version 0.3.

PuTTY for mobile devices

PuTTY is an open source SSH client distributed under the MIT licence, originally written for Windows platform. Many system engineers use it as a handy tool to remotely connect to their Linux/Unix machines with the secured SSH protocol to administer the system from their desktop.

Nowadays, PuTTY has also been ported to run on mobile devices such as PDAs and smart mobile phones, so that you can access to your servers for emergency troubleshooting, restarting a service, rebooting the server, and so on. Of course, you need to have Internet access from your mobile device to your server, either using GPRS, 3G, Wifi, etc.

Here are some of the ported PuTTY for various mobile devices:

• PuTTY for Symbian UIQ3 - http://coredump.fi/putty/
  
• PuTTY for Symbian OS - http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/
• PuTTY for Windows Mobile 2003 - http://www.pocketputty.net/
• pssh for Palm OS 5 - http://www.sealiesoftware.com/pssh/
• pTerm for iPhone - http://www.instantcocoa.com/products/pTerm/

And you can see the PuTTY for Symbian UIQ3 in action in my Sony Ericsson P1i here.