Reading Time: 2 minutes airlines miles award chart Complete map of Starwood SPG hotels award map (hotels points and map) British airways avios map Car rental primary insurance PS (09-24-2015): booked Westin Lake Las Vegas via BA Avios points. It cost about 11,000 points for the premium room ($81 + taxes). The room there starts at 7,000 SPG points,

Reading Time: 2 minutes Note this is also available at github. (10-06-2015 Update 2) Came across this one by tutsplus. Also the thoughts by Erica and savyapps. (09-28-2015 Update) Came across this tutorial by madeupbypeople. Looks good. Also, note Xcode 7.1 beta 2 is coming out, along with iOS 9.0.1 (09-19-2015 Original) My Apple TV dev kit arrived. I

Reading Time: 2 minutes With $10000 as spending limit. The prerequisite: iPhone 6, 6+, 6s, 6s+; iOS 9; in store purchase, no giftcard. Stores support Apple Pay Here in St. Louis, Schnucks, Dierbergs, WalGreens, St. Louis Bread Co. (Panera Bread) all supports Apple Pay. Though on Sept. 17 I tried at Schnucks counter, it failed, note this is the

Reading Time: < 1 minute (Update 10-08-2015) The Unlocked version of iPhone 6s and 6s plus started on sale at Apple store and online. via AppleInsider. (Original 09-10-2015) [table id=1 /] Reference: the verge; Apple iPhone Upgrade Plan

Reading Time: < 1 minute One drawback of Fire Phone does not come with Google Play Store pre-installed. It comes with Amazon App Store instead, which has a much smaller collection. For instance, I could not find BoA app, wechat and all the Google apps there. Fortunately there is way to get around it, with the Google Play Store the

Reading Time: 2 minutes or MDM for the abbreviation. If you have read my blog for a while, you know I was a Blackberry fan, Blackberry was also my first Smartphone. The company (used to be Research In Motion) and the Blackberry has been in declining in recent years, and yesterday it announced buying the Good Technology (a rival

Reading Time: 2 minutes Learned the lesson the hard way again. 🙁 🙂 I think nowadays jailbreak is not as popular as the early days of iPhone. And I did that also to my iPhone 3g, reason being I don’t want to stuck in contract with AT&T, so I jailbroke it and put in T-mobile prepaid card, and gave

Reading Time: 2 minutes I learned the “iPhone photo backup lesson” the hard way a few years ago. At the time I was leaving the company (planned exit) and I need to turn in the company iPhone 4s, I did iTunes backup (encrypted, more on this later) on my PC, as well as on iCloud (paid $20 for 10gb

Reading Time: 2 minutes Note I have not talked about Chinese stock market for a long time (this is last time I talked, 2007 when I spent 6 months in China). It gets interesting lately because of its big drop and swing. Keep it a bit in perspective, the Chinese stock index Shanghai composite did not do well in

Reading Time: 2 minutes Fuel Rewards Network offers about 1% for shopping online, e.g., I bought $36 worth of clothes from Load and Taylor via their shopping mall, it gave me 10 cent. The calculation goes like this: $36 * 3 / 1000 = $0.108 rounded down to $0.10 which is 10 cent per gallon gas discount. If I