UniFi goodies: Switch to HyppTV Ruby Pack at no additional cost and get RM30 AEON Shopping Voucher

Today, I've received an email from TM Takeout with their HyppTV Mooncake Festival Ruby Pack Migration Campaign 2016 promotion as follow:

I have carefully checked the sender's email. It is not a scam and is really sent out from TM email server.

I clicked on the link and checked the URL of the webpage opened by the link. It is an HTTPS secured webpage, with valid SSL certificate issued by Entrust CA.

So, it is real!

I then checked on the Terms and Conditions that I need to agree in order to accept the offer.

The Terms and Conditions states that:

• The Campaign starts from 1 September 2016 until 15 September 2016.
• Only eligible to existing HyppTV subscribers of Aneka or Varnam Pack.
• The migration to Ruby Pack is free of charge, and there will be no additional monthly charge as long as the migration was done within this campaign period.
• Subscribers who have done the migration within this campaign period are eligible to receive a HyppTV Moon Cake Festival AEON shopping voucher worth RM30.

Its too good to be true as there is nothing to lose for the subscriber to accept the migration offer, and at the same time can get a RM30 voucher too.

Normally, the Ruby pack is RM10/month more expensive than the Aneka and Varnam pack for TM UniFi subscribers.

The Ruby pack consists of Chinese channels including tvN HD, Channel [V] Taiwan, now Baugu Movies, now Chinese Drama, now Jelli HD, Red by HBO, SCM, SCM Legend HD, SETI, Star Chinese Channel and TVB8.

So, if you also received this offer email from TM Takeout, think carefully first before trash it away. If you haven't received it, you might probably want to find it in your spam folder, or call 100 to find out from TM about your eligibility.

MEGA cloud storage with 50GB free quota and secured RSA-2048 encryption

Nowadays there are at least twenty over cloud storage service providers. Some of them provides free quota usage, such as the famous Dropbox (2GB), Google Drive (15GB), Microsoft OneDrive (15GB), pCloud (10GB), etc. while some other don't.

If you are looking for large amount of free storage, probably to store your precious videas, photos, disc images, etc., you should take a look at MEGA which generously provides 50GB free quota.

MEGA was founded in New Zealand by Kim DotCom in 2013, who was also the founder of the famous file-hosting website Megaupload. Megaupload was shut down by US government after being accused for copyright infringement. Anyhow, MEGA says Kim DotCom has already resigned as director since August 2013.

MEGA has on 23 August 2016 announced that they've reached a milestone of 50 million registered users with more than 20 billion files stored in their cloud service.

There is an article in Cloudwards posted in 18 September 2015 comparing MEGA with Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, SugarSync and SpiderOak, and concluded with the following comparison table:

(Comparison table from Cloudwards website)

MEGA can be accessed with any one of the following medium:

• MEGA Sync client for Windows, Mac or Linux
• MEGA mobile app for Android, iOS, Windows Phone or Blackberry
• MEGA web browser extension for Chrome or Firefox

Its usage experience is similar to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. Its upload/download speed for free users is OK, I can get about 2 Mbps speed as shown below.

With its generous 50GB storage for free users, I find MEGA pretty attractive as a cloud storage for my videos, photos, disc images and other big files.

Note that users of Microsoft Office 365 are getting 1024GB bundled quota in OneDrive, which is much more larger than this 50GB. So, if you are genuine user of MS Office 365, you can make good use of your bundled 1TB space in OneDrive too.

HTC flagship smartphone users can also claim for 2 years usage of 100GB free additional storage in Google Drive through the pre-installed Google Drive app in the new phone. Beware that after 2 years, this 100GB additional storage quota will be revoked, unless you buy another new HTC flagship smartphone, and provided this offer is still available by then.

BC-01 multimedia bluetooth speaker with alarm clock and FM radio

I have purchased a BC-01 multimedia bluetooth speaker with alarm clock and FM radio for my kid. This made-in-China gadget is pretty cheap, with the price of around RM60 only, and its quality is not too bad.

The BC-01 has 2 colour options: white and black. It is pretty small, with surface about the size of the palm of an adult. This small footprint, together with its built-in 1,500 mAh Li-ion rechargeable battery, makes it very portable and easy to carry long, especially when travelling.

With a low power consumption of around 3W, the battery is good enough to support for many hours of continuous music playback. It can operate in clock display and alarm mode for a few days at a single charge cycle.

It has a pair of stereo speakers, which is pretty decent with sufficient loudness in volume. Do not unfairly compete it with Hi-Fi speakers, but its sound quality can really beat the speakers of most of the smartphones and tablets nowadays. However, probably due to the use of internal antenna, you'll probably be disturbed with some hissing sound when using it as a radio.

So, what can this small gadget do?

First of all, it is an alarm clock with pretty large LED time display, as you can see from its photo above.

Then, it is a Bluetooth wireless speaker for any multimedia devices that support Bluetooth pairing. It also has a built-in microphone and can act as Bluetooth hands free speaker for mobile phone, able to pick up calls and have phone conversation with it.

The phone recognizes it for phone audio (to handle phone calls) as well as media audio (to play music streaming from the phone).

It also has a micro SD slot that supports micro SD up to 32GB. You can store music files of MP3, WAV, APE or WMA format in a micro SD card, slot in the card into its slot, and use it as a music player.

It comes with a special USB cable with 2 split connectors. One of it is the USB connector used as external power source and for battery charging, another is an audio jack which you can plug into another music device, computer, handphone, etc. and use it as an external speaker for such device.

Lastly, it is also an FM radio with internal antenna. It is able to automatically search for radio stations and remember their frequency.

Despite its multiple functions and features, it only has 6 control buttons, as shown in its photo above. Therefore, it takes some time to figure out how to use it. It comes with a paper User Manual and I highly recommend you to RTFM before you start using it.

One thing I dislike about this device is that, it only uses a single button to sequentially rotate and switch among its functions as Bluetooth speaker, micro SD card multimedia player, FM radio, AUX line-in speaker, and alarm clock. So you need to keep on pressing its right button until you reach your desired function.

All in all, this is a pretty cool device for bedroom radio and alarm. It is a good candidate as Christmas or birthday present too.