Search: “kuwait”

A friend and colleague of mine who’s attending the Cannes Lions right now tweeted some pictures of Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa (Creator of The99) on stage presenting. I believe he’s the only Kuwaiti to ever take the stage at the Cannes Lions yet alone present.

The Cannes Lions is one of the largest and most prestigious advertising festivals in the world.

Marzouq over at Z District has just posted a full account on the current internet situation in Kuwait. It’s a pretty long post but a very informative one. You can read it [Here]

The Lebanese store Lama recently opened a new and much larger store near my house in Salmiya. They’re mostly known for importing and supplying the local supermarkets with Lebanon fruits, but if you visit their store you’ll also find other interesting food products. Most of the products don’t mean much to anyone except the Lebanese in the same way strangers to Kuwait won’t understand the obsession with Sunkist and KDD Gold for example. But, if you’re Lebanese you’ll be interested to know that Lama carries some of our favorites including Gandour products like Tarboush, Unica, Pik-One Safari, dry biscuits and more. They also carry BonJus, SMEDS, Picon, Lebanese bread from the Wooden Bakery as well as Taanayel dairy products.

If you’re interested in passing by they’re located in the street that’s parallel to Baghdad Street. Just take a right after Dodo and head down until you reach the main road, the store should be in front of you.

For other In Focus posts click [Here]

This is like the 3rd or 4th one this year. According to Al Watan breaking news they say the fire is in a garage. A reader sent in the picture above which he took from his office at Abyat. Looks like the fire is in the Behbehani warehouse and it looks huge. More pictures [Here]

Thanks urmania

According to an article on KuwaitNews.com, the ministry after receiving many complaints from internet subscribers has sent an official letter to the internet providers telling them to remove the bandwidth limits or else they would have to take appropriate measure. I hope this is true and if it is then it’s great news. Here is the link to the article, it’s in Arabic. [Link]

Thanks BerserkKW

Me Blogging just posted about this new place that’s opening up in Kuwait City called Pick. From what I understood the place will have sandwiches in a similar style to Pret A Manger in London. They’re located in Kuwait City near the stock market so if you’re close to it then it should be easy to pop in for a quick bite. Right now they’re open from 4pm to 11pm until the end of the month and then they start opening for breakfast. Hopefully by breakfast they also mean lunch. [Link]

I was checking twitter when I noticed Sheikh Majed had posted a link to an article in Wallpaper magazine of a beautifully designed house in Kuwait called the “Secret House”. You really need to check out the pictures it looks amazing. [Link]

The download cap issue was raised again by another member or parliament this time by MP Faisal Al-Mislem. According to an article in Al Watan, Al-Mislem met the minister of communication and discussed the case with him. He told the minister how Internet subscribers had subscribed to unlimited internet only to later be told that their connection is now limited. According to Al-Mislem as long as subscribers have a valid subscription then the internet providers don’t have a right to suspend or slowdown the service.

Here is the article on Al-Watan [English] [Arabic]

Thanks Salem and unim

I spend all week on a very strict diet that includes the likes of grilled chicken, tuna, lots of salad and boiled eggs, but when the weekend comes, the fat person inside me takes over and it’s not a pretty sight. Yesterday I had lunch at Elevation Burger as I said I would last week. But this time, instead of the double patty I went for the triple patty which I realized is the right way to do it and would highly recommend going that route over the double.

Today on the other hand I passed by Cocoa Room to test out their new burger. Every time I fall asleep and dream of burgers and unicorns, the burgers always have one thing in common, they’re thick and juicy. Ever since I’ve know Basil I’ve been asking him to make a thick burger and it seems my wish has finally come true. It’s still in the concept stage but he’s got the most important ingredient perfect right now which is the patty and what a patty… I already told him it’s magical. He’s going to end up having only one burger on the Cocoa Room menu but he’s still deciding between two different kinds although I think he’s leaning towards my favorite which is the one in the picture at the very top of this post. It’s a super thick wagyu patty with aged cheddar cheese and charred onion brought together with a hard crust bun. The second burger above has a similar patty but contains Swiss cheese, onion marmalade and a soft bun instead. When the burger is complete, it’s easily going to be the holy grail of all burgers.

There’s so much good burgers in Kuwait right now that someone needs to officially slap the Burger Land moniker on us. AHT are you listening?

This is a completely random post but does anyone remember the old Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) we had in Kuwait before the internet took off? I am talking about the mid 90’s. I remember there was one I was a member of where the owner had a computer shop in the the mezzanine floor of Behbehani Building in Kuwait CIty. I think I was part of 2 or 3 different BBS’s not really sure since my memory isn’t that great. I originally had a 2400 modem but used to get kicked out of BBS’s until I splurged on a 28.8k Modem. If anyone here knows someone who used to run a BBS or if you participated in one please leave a comment below.

For those of you who don’t know what a BBS is, basically that was our internet before the internet. You can read more on it [Here]

They started putting up a fence around Safat Square today in preparation for the construction of the new large fountain project that will take it’s place. [Link]

A couple of readers emailed asking on more information about VPN’s so I figured I would do quick write up about it. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and to understand how it can be of use to you I will give you a quick example. There are some sites (mostly media) that require you to be a US resident to be able to either watch videos or listen to music. A quick example is Hulu.com. If you want to watch a video on Hulu you would get the message (screenshot above) that videos can only be streamed to US residents. A VPN would help you get around that restriction.

How VPN works is you sign up to a VPN service (I use StrongVPN) and then you access the internet through their servers. So instead of you visiting Hulu directly from your computer in Kuwait and getting the error I mentioned earlier, with a VPN based in the US you end up accessing Hulu through them so Hulu thinks it’s you in the US. I did a quick illustration above to better visualize this.

With VPN active all the websites you visit will think you’re based in the US. It’s that simple really. It also doesn’t require you to change your browsing habits and unlike proxy websites you don’t have to access the web through a website. Once you setup VPN on your computer you connect to it from your desktop and then just browse the web like you would usually do. The above screen shot is from my Mac, I just click on Connect VPN and that’s it.

I know it sounds a bit complicated at first and maybe hard to grasp but really all you need to know is that VPN allows you to access sites that are restricted to just the US (like Hulu, Netflix, Pandora etc..). As I mentioned earlier my VPN account is from the company StrongVPN. I’ve been using them for over a year now and haven’t had any problems. I’ve also got their cheapest package. Here is the [Link]

If you have any questions just ask below.

There is a shop next to my office that has a discount on everything including Maglite flashlights. They’re selling the 3-D cell version for KD6.250 which is nearly the same price as Amazon and the cheapest I’ve seen in Kuwait. The place is located right next to the NBK branch on Fahad Al Salem Street, opposite the park.

I got a lot of emails regarding the political activist Salwa al Mutairi’s recent comments on how men should be allowed to have sex slaves. She even took the extra mile and brainstormed ideas on where the sex slaves could come from. Personally I think that is a terrible idea obviously and she probably lost a lot of credibility because of her statements but, it is her opinion and she is entitled to it. Freedom of the speech means even people with wacky ideas are allowed to share them. Anyway here is the link with the story in case you missed it. [Link]

I’ve got a ton of TV shows and documentaries on my server and for the longest time ever I had been using XBMC to watch them all. XBMC is basically a software that allows you to stream videos from another computer or hard drive. Originally I used to use XBMC installed onto the old original xbox, then I installed it on a hacked AppleTV but since XBMC on AppleTV couldn’t play 720p video I finally I ended up purchasing the small Acer Revo and was using that to run XBMC until Boxee.

Boxee is the name of another media center software that was actually built using XBMC. But unlike XBMC, Boxee was more focused on providing content (TV Shows/Movies) from the internet primarily and from a local home server secondary. Boxee never really interested me much until the end of 2010 when they did something I always wanted XBMC to do… release a set-top device that was dedicated to just running the media center software. The Boxee Box (pictured above) is a beautifully designed tiny angular cube that runs the Boxee software. Everything about it from the package to the interface is very tastefully designed and that really sets it apart from XBMC. Where XBMC looks like it was put together by geeks, Boxee looks like it was put together by Apple. They even paid attention to the little details like how the Boxee logo lights up in a nice green glow when the device is powered on.

It might not show in the pictures above but the Boxee Box is pretty small, maybe around the same height as the iPhone. It comes with a double sided remote control that has a very simple minimal amount of buttons on one side and a QWERTY keyboard on the other. The remote uses radio instead of infrared to send signals which is great because you can hide the Boxee Box anywhere in the room and still be able to control it. It also comes with a power adapter that works in Kuwait (110-240v) as well as a HDMI cable.

The interface is very easy to use. You can easily browse the available online TV Shows and Movies all nicely organized but you need to have a VPN account (I use StrongVPN) to actually watch the shows online since they don’t allow non-US residents to stream stuff. Watching your local media files is also easy, you can either plug in a hard drive into one of the Boxee USB ports or connect to your home server over Ethernet or Wifi. Once you add the media it will scan IMDB for information on the shows or movies and then download the DVD cover and all the other information and store them on Boxee. It’s really very easy to use, much easier than XBMC since Boxee is trying to be fairly mainstream.

There are some minor downsides but it’s really just nitpicking. I don’t like how the remote control feels and I can never tell which side is up or down without looking at the remote. The remote keyboard buttons on the rear also need to be pressed hard but I guess that’s better than no keyboard at all. Boxee is also not as easily customizable as XBMC.

Price wise it’s fairly decent costing around KD50 on Amazon plus around KD13 to ship it with Aramex to Kuwait. I think this is probably the best media center option available right now until Plex (another XBMC clone) starts working properly on the Roku. Boxee doesn’t have any trouble playing 1080p video files and most importantly it doesn’t take much shelf space while still managing to look very cool. If you have a lot of media files and are looking for an easy way to watch them on your TV screen then I highly recommend the Boxee Box. It’s only available on Amazon and here is the link if you’re interested [Amazon Link]

Update: Forgot to mention you can install Apps in Boxee and my favorite is Pandora.