My Home-Brewed PicBadge

Seems like the latest trend on Facebook lately is to put a PicBadge on one's profile picture. Lots of folks are doing it and I think it's a good way to express the ideology or cause one stands for and supports in a fun way that makes one's profile picture more eye-catching at the same time; a nice double-whammy.

But being the non-conformist, I prefer to use my own creation if I can help it. So today, I did just that. I fired up Photoshop and created my own PicBadge which I named 'The Melody In My Head'.

It took me around 7 minutes or so and I uploaded it on picbadges.com so that I could stick the badge to my profile picture via the website. It's the only way I know how, short of merging the badge with my profile picture via Photoshop and creating a single new picture file that encompasses the 2 merged pics.

But like a horrified teenager in front of the mirror experiencing a breakout of acne for the very first time, I was horrified to find that the final picture produced by the website got scaled down in image quality and size till I could see pixels in the profile pic which weren't there before when I zoomed in to it just to have a decent view of the artwork on the PicBadge.

So it looks fine as a thumbnail but not as a 'full-page' picture.

Needless to say, that sucks and thus, I can no longer see any purpose for a PicBadge because of the drastic loss of image quality other than its thumbnail form. So in the end, I decided not to use it anymore. I ended up using the original unmerged high quality pic of the PicBadge as my profile pic instead just so I don't have to feel like i've wasted it.

Good thing it didn't take me an hour or more to create the PicBage.. Heck, good thing it didn't take me 30 minutes to do so before discovering the awful reality of image quality loss. Still, I'm keeping the produced picture as a keepsake for my little effort:


And nope, I don't think I'll go through the hassle of using Photoshop to merge my PicBadge with my profile picture into one image file every single time I change profile picture. That would be too much of a hassle.

Bummer. I really liked the idea.

In other news, I bought a new set of original iPhone 4 earphones from nubox over at Jurong Point since the left earpiece of the earphones that came with my iPhone became quite muted for some strange reason. So the left side became softer than the right and everything sounded unbalanced. And my replacement earphones which is not an iPhone's went kaput too.

I'm mighty glad that Apple has decided to manufacture the iPhone with a normal standard earphone jack.

I really like the iPhone's earphones. Putting sponges on them makes the music sound better for me and the remote functions for controlling the songs are practical.

But the earphones don't come cheap. I paid SGD48 bucks for them. If you've noticed in the photo, the box makes a sleek decoration piece and that is what I'm using it for in my study. But try not to break yours since they don't come cheap.

And just in case you haven't noticed by now, triple-clicking the remote on the right earpiece rewinds the song. I know about forwarding songs by double-clicking but it took me awhile to realize about rewinding which is not in the manual if I'm not mistaken, tsk.


- De Lion Speaks