Fenix is well known as flashlight manufacturer and they expanded their product for wider user, bikers.  They sent me their new light for review a few weeks ago. This product was sent to me for free after I was chosen as tester for their global campaign among other applicants.

This new line of product is called Fenix BT20, maximum 750 lumens and powered by two 18650 batteries.

Here are the content of the package:

• 1 Fenix BT20 bike light
• 1 battery box/case
• 1 holster for the battery box/case
• 1 helmet mount/adapter
• 1 cable extension
• 3 O-rings in different diameters.

I didn’t receive any manual book nor warranty card in the box, but there’s a letter from Fenix with some information about this product. 

I was surprised because the light is smaller than I thought, here I put aside an eneloop AA for comparison:

You might noticed that the color of the front part is a bit reddish.  In the letter I mentioned before, it’s said that the color for bike light sample is different compared to the ones for sale.

The build quality is very good. I don’t know what material they use, but I like the strong feeling when I put the light on my hand.

Next part is battery case and its holster:

A decent holster with strong velcro to attach this power supply to my bike and make sure it won’t lost or thrown away on the hard track.

The rest of the package are helmet mount/adapter, cable extension,  and 3 O-ring straps. The ring is used to attach the light to bike’s handlebar:

I use medium ring on my handlebar, you can choose which ring suit to your handlebar diameter.

Now time to give this light a try. I’ll put two 18650 batteries in the box provided.

I can open the box by unscrewing (counter clockwise) the button and tighten the cover by screwing the button clockwise. Make sure to put the batteries in correct polarity order because there’s no reverse polarity protection. But there’s a label to show which side goes positive and which one goes negative.

I asked Fenix if I can use 4 x (R)CR 123 but they say don’t because total voltage will be over the LED limit.

At first I was confused to determine which side of the cover is right until I see this sign printed on the battery box:

Anyway, I can’t close the box when the cover direction is wrong, but the label above will surely help.

Using mid-size ring, I mounted the light on my handlebar. Very tight and sturdy.

Let’s see the face of the light, nice LED:

At the top of the lens, there are some strips. It helps “break” the beam so it won’t disturb people who is driving from the opposite direction.  It gives long-range illumination, not direct beamshot, and pedestrian-friendly.

Battery box can be placed anywhere at your convenience. Its case has strong velcro to attach the box to my bike and hold battery box firmly. I choose to attach battery box on the frame.

The connection plug is very strong and I can feel that it’s water proof. I tied it using cheap velcro strap from hardware store to avoid noise when riding on the rough surfaces:

As alternatives, we can use cable tie for that purpose. I wish Fenix also  included this additional velcro.

And here’s how it look  from the biker’s point of view. The button glowing red, means that the battery almost running out. When the battery is full, the button will be green. The order is green -> red -> blinking red.

Push the button for more than one second and it will turn the light on. Push fast, or like clicking a computer mouse, will change its brightness level.  It starts from low -> medium -> almost bright -> very bright.

The beam color is neutral white, very suitable for outdoor activities and surely will beat the fog better than cool white.  Although maximum brightness is 750 lumens, I feel that the beam didn’t hurt my eyes at all. I like it!

To turn off the light, just push the button for more than one second. Very simple mechanism.

I tried to take some beam shot pictures but failed because my old camera doesn’t work very well in the darkness. I’ll try to get decent camera and will update this review later. Now I’ll write my conclusion about this nice bike light.

Pros:

• Small in size and good material quality
• Using 2 x 18650 battery, more power and  longer runtime
• Very bright (750 lumens) but still eyes-friendly
• Easy to attach and detach
• Great light for dedicated user

Cons:

• I wish there’s some additional velcro strap in the package
• Not very suitable for daily/commuting biker because you’ll have to detach the light and battery box every time you park your bike. Loosing a 90+ bucks bike light will be heart breaking.

At last but not least, here are two pictures of Fenix BT20 in action, taken using my cellphone on my night ride from office to home. Sorry for image quality, my cellphone’s camera can’t really show you how bright it is.

Bottomline:  
If you’re looking for a dedicated bike light, this light is for you. But if you’re a flashlight fan, I think you’d rather choose to attach your favorite EDC flashlight on your bike.

This post is a little out of ordinary because I won’t talk about server, programming language, nor any computer-related stuffs. This time I’ll write a simple review about my current favorite flashlight:

It’s Zebralight SC51, neutral white version. More information and pics after the break.

After some research on the Net, I found that this flashlight is the brightest for single AA flashlight. 200 lumen just by using one AA battery cell (available almost everywhere) is a very good option. A little bit pricey but later I find that it’s worth every penny.

The package arrived in a brown cardboard box, very simple with no logo nor text printed on the cardboard. The flashlight came with a head ban (yes, you can transform this flashlight into a headlamp), manual book, and spare o rings.

The build is very solid, ergonomic, and just fit right in hand of a average Asian man like me.

This flashlight using orange peel reflector, it makes the light reflected smoothly.

It came with no holster, so I carry it on my waist using the handy clip on its body. Another time I can just slip it into my right/left pocket, or insert it inside MOLE strips on my Maxpedition tactile.

Some days ago I attached this flashlight into my helmet using velcro strap for a night ride on my MTB. The light was very bright, and the neutral white color made me see the road better than cool white flashlight.

Actually I bought this flashlight for my wife. She wanted a headlamp, so I bought this flashlight that can be transformed into headlamp easily using provided head ban.  Now I want another SC51 for myself

One of many things that you probably do when managing a VPS is setting up date and time to match your local date and time. Here’s a quick guide to change your VPS’ timezone.

You can find your own timezone at /usr/share/zoneinfo/ and copy it to /etc/localtime. Here’s the magic spell:

[server]# cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Jakarta /etc/localtime

Of course you have to change that Asia/Jakarta thing into your own timezone.

The date command output before I change its timezone:

[server]# date
Wed Apr  4 16:34:20 EDT 2012

And this is after:

[server]# date
Thu Apr  5 03:36:05 WIT 2012

Tic.. tac.. tic.. tac..

If your job is involving social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, surely you’re familiar with websites that provide statistic and tool to analyze your influence and campaign result on social networking sites.

A few days ago I found a website used for social media analytics named Sprout Social. It’s not a free service but we can use their full features for 30 days for free. Didn’t want to waste any time, I gave it a try.

Registration just took a few minutes and I can add my social media profiles easily. After adding my social media profiles (some Facebook pages and Twitter accounts), it took a couple of hours for data gathering.

And here’s the result after a couple of days. I found that I’m not a good social media ‘activist’. LOL.

There are some ‘basic features’ such as Discovery (who to follow, who had mentioned you, whom you spoke to, etc), Feed (your timeline), and the most important is the Report page.

In the Report page, we can see report for all social media accounts. We can also view reports for specific account only. The report also available for specific date range and can be exported as PDF or CSV.

I’m not a social media expert, but I can say thay Sprout Social has a nice interface and easy to use. They also have mobile application for Android and iPhone if you’re bothered to open your laptop just to see the report.

If you’re interested, you can read this Sprout Social review or just visit their website and register yourself and try it for 30 days before you decide to spend some bucks.

I’m using Virtualmin to manage some servers (both physical or VPS) and I’m pretty confidence to say that this is the best freeware for server control panel.

Virtualmin currently provide PHP 5.1 (I’m using CentOS 5.5) and here’s how to upgrade its PHP version to 5.2. This command will activate Bleeding Edge Packages for CentOS/RHEL 5 on Virtualmin:

[root@server01 ~]# rpm -ivh http://software.virtualmin.com/bleed/centos/5/i386/virtualmin-bleed-release-1.0-1.rhel.noarch.rpm

After that, simply run following command to update PHP:

[root@server01 ~]# yum update php

And just answer “yes” when your system ask. Update process will just take a few seconds to complete.

I’m using this script very often, for some customers to redirect their website from domain.com to www.domain.com. So I will put it here for easy access.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Just create or insert above script into your .htaccess. When a visitor visits domain.com he will be forwarded to www.domain.com.

Piece of cake.

After I got my first android phone, I was looking for any ringtone maker which is easy to use. Many ringtone makers provide some basic music instruments and require me to arrange them into a nice melody in ears. The problem is: I’m not a composer nor musician.

After looking around  on Android Market, I found a little app that fit my need from Mobile 17. With this software I just need to select a music file from my phone and “crop” it. Some seconds later it become my ringtone. Very easy to use, even for novice like me.

Here’s step by step to create ringtone using this app.  I’ve captured the to show you how easy the process is:

After I select a song, this app will try to find some kind of ‘preset’ –or they say “popular edit”– that match with selected song. Later, I can crop the song easily by choosing start point and also end point.

To listen the result, I can click play button. I can also adjust the ringtone length in an easy way.

After everything is as I wanted, I just clicked on “Create Ringtone” button.

And voila! I have a new, personalized, and free ringtones from mobile 17 just in seconds!

Well, it may took some minutes if you’re creating your ringtone while cooking

Today someone ask me to check his Moodle installation in his website. He used to add resource(s) easily in any course he made and lately he’s unable to add any resource. In the resource page, Moodle just displays blank page. No error message at all.

After googling around, I found that the problem is (likely) caused by PHP upgrade from 5.2.x to 5.3.x. And thanks to Andrey who posted a script for a quick hack.

The trick is by adding a new function inside HTML_QuickForm_element class in moodle/lib/pear/HTML/QuickForm/element.php.

< ?php
public function __call($name, $args) {
    $name = str_replace('MoodleQuickForm_', '', $name);
    if ($name == 'passwordunmask') {
        $name = 'password';
    }
    return call_user_func_array(array($this, 'HTML_QuickForm_'.$name), $args);
}
?>

It works like a magic!

Just found a video of five girls practicing their dancing and singing skill of a song that sounds like dangdut to my ears.

The video title itself says “Foxy Girl Band (pre-debut)”, and from their Twitter account, FOXYgirls_, they said that this video is a teaser for their future music video.

I won’t let you imagining, so let’s just hit the play button.

A nice teaser, can’t wait for their official music video.

There are a lot of jQuery plugins out there for various purposes. I have seen some plugins for the same purpose, for example is creating sliding page/object. Among other them, for me Slidedeck is the easiest one to use.

On its feature page on their website, said that this jQuery plugin can be customized, has API support, custom skins, SEO ready, mouse control, gallery support, and many more.

If you’re looking for wordpress jquery slider, Slidedeck also suits for that purpose because it has two type of package: as jQuery plugin and WordPress plugin.  As WordPress plugin, we can easily add sliding image to a post or page using easy-to-use (WYSIWYG) editor.

Both plugin (jQuery and WordPress) are available in two kind of license. For basic usage, free version is more than enough to beautify our web pages. But if you’re a bad-ass code writer, you can purchase paid version to get more features to build your super-dupper web pages.

Here are some examples, you can see that it’s awesome. Even for free version.

• Basic example
• Autoplay
• Spineless

And one thing that will make you, web developers, happy is that this plugin will work at any major browsers you currently have.