Tatoru Yuki's Rantings

Reviews

KODENSHI® Fiber Heat-retention Aulora Pants - My Unbiased Study & Research

October 15, 2018
By Tatoru Yuki
15 Comments

Daily Rantings

Journey to Endless Patience - Freelancing

January 24, 2018
By Tatoru Yuki
2 Comments

Daily Rantings

3 Things Freelancers Should Note

January 16, 2018
By Tatoru Yuki
0 Comments

Reviews

Huawei Honor 6A Pro - A Short Review

November 22, 2017
By Tatoru Yuki
0 Comments

Reviews

Lenovo P70-A | A Short Review

November 20, 2017
By Tatoru Yuki
0 Comments

Tatoru Yuki's Rantings: Lenovo P70-A | Short Review

On the 12^th of November, just barely one week ago, I dropped my Lenovo P-70A which has been with me for over 2 years, down the kitchen counter when my hands slipped. It was a good phone. I bought it somewhen in July 2015 when my man was with me (although he wasn’t my man yet at that time) for around RM700.

The main reason I bought that phone was for its battery capacity. At around 4000mAh and me actively playing mobile games and downloading an average of one new app every two or three days, using it for several hours at any given point, the battery dealt with the power demands quite well. You can read up on other of its specs here on this link.

Things I loved About This Phone Model

Battery capacity is relatively huge compared to other phone models
That green security icon thing that gives you a very, very efficient clear-your-apps function that you can’t get from any other apps
Optional app clearing that lets you lock down some apps while clearing all the others
Dual SIM cards & still a space for an external memory card although you don’t really need that with the 16 GB internal storage.

2GB RAM wasn’t too bad either; I just needed to keep the habits of clearing my apps off before playing a RAM-consuming one. The controls were simple, efficient, and if anything, there were only a couple of things that I didn’t really like.

Things That Could Be Improved

The brightness goes all the way to the highest settings when you enter the gallery, regardless of your settings. Imagine opening up your photo gallery at night and getting blinded. Mhmm.
You can’t adjust the brightness settings in the notification bar area when you are using your phone in horizontal mode, so if you have entered a video full-screen mode and it’s too dark, you need to exit the full-screen mode, adjust the brightness, then go back to full-screen again.
No matter how high-resolution your photos are, the moment you set it to your desktop/lockscreen wallpaper, it will get blurry in a pixel-ish way.
It can overheat quite a bit sometimes.
The camera is just okay-ish.

If there’s one piece of advice I can offer to this phone’s users: Do NOT upgrade your OS to Lollipop 5.1 if you are using KitKat. I was a fool and I upgraded my phone to that version for a couple of weeks, and it resulted in such a downgrade of everything:

Why I'm So Against The Phone OS Upgrade

The battery consumption rate was so high even at low usage that I needed to charge it up to 3 times a day.
The app-clearing function was pretty much gone, replaced by an incompetent piece-of-shit button.
I can have only Messenger, Facebook & WhatsApp running (with background apps cleared up to 5 times just in case), and the phone would still lag so hard that if a call comes in, I can’t press anything on the screen. The incoming-calls screen wouldn’t even show up.
I can’t stress enough about the lag. If there were incoming video calls, I need to wait for up to 5 seconds after tapping the ‘answer’ button before that click actually registers.
The photo quality became a pile of shit too. Good luck taking photos with actual faces that aren’t smoothened out & blurred so much that you might as well pretend you actually did a bad Photoshop job with a good photo.
The screen gestures option was no longer available. My phone’s power button has become a bit hard to press after some time using it, so it can be slightly difficult to unlock it at times. Screen gestures enabled me to just tap the screen a few times to activate it, but this feature was gone too.
If there was overheat at the previous OS, this version made it worse and more often.

I referred to this link here to downgrade my phone back to KitKat one day at work, and thankfully it worked. *Disclaimer: If you were to try follow the instructions on this link and something fucks up, neither I nor the writer of that blog holds any responsibilities for it.

Well, barely a week later this phone still fell face-first onto the floor and the screen cracked anyways. I took off the tempered glass screen protector a while back since that too was already full of cracks and never got a replacement. After many lucky falls, this one did the job.
The bottom half of the screen was not responsive at all, which means that I could turn on the phone screen but not enter my passcode.
I could long-press the power button to attempt to switch it off since I can no longer turn off the morning alarms, but I can’t press the ‘confirm’ button when the phone asks me, “Confirm switch off?”

That very night around 8p.m. I went out to get myself a new phone, Huawei Honor 6A Pro for RM699. I’ll be writing a review on this phone real soon, so do look forward to it! The next day at lunch time, I sent this Lenovo phone for a screen replacement. I got it for RM250 at One Specialist Mobile in Sunway Pyramid. The person who served me was this guy named Steven. Got it back that same evening after work around 6p.m. There’s a one-month insurance for that LCD screen, so there’s that.

One funny notable thing was that he asked for my passcode, claiming that he needs it to know if the phone screen has been implemented correctly. Umm… No sir, you do not need the passcode to fix an LCD screen. I told him that he could press around the screen and try keying in any random passcode combinations to know if it’s working. Later I further told him that I will check the phone myself when I get it back before I pay him the money. That phone is now back and alive, working well.

I’m letting my man use it for as long as he needs to tomorrow. Guess why? He smashed his phone screen too. Coincidences, coincidence. At least he’ll have no trouble adapting to that phone I guess, since we used the same phone model.

Reviews

Liese - Red Velvet Color Product Review

November 15, 2017
By Tatoru Yuki
0 Comments

Liese - Red Velvet

Okay. To be honest I have been wanting to get my hair properly dyed for a while, but never really had the money nor the chance to. The past 2 years, I have had my mother who worked in a hair salon in her younger days dye my hair for me. Being a regular Asian mother, she wouldn’t ever let me dye the so-called ‘crazy hair colors’. She would dye my hair brown, or at most a lighter shade of brown. Never completely either, so that when my hair grows out the black-brown line in my hair wouldn’t be too distinct.

Meanwhile, I wanted purple, blue, red, a mix of all three in ombre or ashy color…

Basically, the ‘crazy hair colors’.

After moving out from my parents’ house to stay nearer to the university, permission became less of

an issue. Instead, money became the factor. Hair dyeing could be so very expensive when done by those professionals around here, and I didn’t have a proper income while I was studying, so I never dyed my hair while I was in college, nor did I dye it when I was in university.

Then now I’m at work, starting to earn for myself. I realized that I’m now 22 and if I don’t go try out new things now I will look ridiculous as an auntie that dyes her hair in weird colors not suited to her age. I still needed to save money though, RM300+ for a hair dye session was too much for me. So, I bought Liese’s Creamy Bubble Color Red Velvet instead, as recommended by a colleague. There weren’t any reviews of this color online though, so here’s my 2-cents.

My hair was already slightly brown-ish before I tried this product. Under good lighting, it would look like this photo right somewhere right below here:

Before the crazy-hair colors

I did the allergy test, but only for barely an hour and after seeing no signs of itchiness or rashes, I continued with the process. Instructions were pretty straightforward. Pour contents of the first, smaller bottle into the bigger one, tile it upside down gently several times, and put the pink color foamy applicator thing into the bigger bottle. Squeeze a little onto the gloves to see if it’s foamy enough, then proceed to apply it like how you would with hair shampoo or conditioner.

It didn’t give my hair a foamy appearance at first, but halfway through the bottle my hair was already covered in purplish foam and when I finished using the whole bottle’s contents, I was at the peak of foaminess. The ammonia smell wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be, but it sure stings my eyes a little when I dye those pesky little hairs near my eyes! No, they didn’t get into my eyes. The fumes are enough to make you feel that urge to shut your eyes though.

Foamy foamyy

Piled-up foam

The foam stuck easily to my hair, and I combed through the mass of it every now and then while adding more foam. When I was done, I just kind of put my hair in a heap on the top of my head and waited around 20 minutes. There were recommendations of keeping it there for 30 minutes of even 45 minutes, but since it’s my first try I didn’t want to leave the foam in too long. Washing it off took a while, but that extra rinse-off treatment was so good! My hair was softer than any conditioner had helped it to be, tangle-free and smelling flowery.

I dried my hair off to see how it might look in just the simple room lighting, and it turned out to be ... mediocre. I couldn't see any colors. Is it black? Did my hair even change?

Office Lighting

Room Lighting

I couldn’t see much colors or difference from my previous one and I was a little disappointed to be honest. But then, today, the color seemed to show more, perhaps because the lighting was better around here. Under sunlight, you could definitely see the red. Pardon the super bright photo, I was busy reflecting the sunlight off my skin and hair fibers. Under normal lighting, my hair color looks more or less like a darker version of copper-red. I can just hold up some of my hair and see the red in it though, but that’s really hard to photograph.

Yay

Eyebrows' existence sacrificed
for this photo

Overall? I’d rate this product 5/5. I’m actually satisfied with this product, and knowing that the colors can show even when I only left it in for 20 minutes, I’ll try leaving it on a while longer next time. My hair’s quite long but thin, and one bottle was sufficient with quite some to spare. I bought it through Shopee Mall because they had promotions going on and with my Shopee coins, I bought one box for RM29, which isn’t too bad. Definitely worth the price and fun to try!

I wonder if Liese will come up with blue-ish colors in the future. That would definitely be worth a try too.

Freelancing

AdWords – How to Use the Keyword Planner

November 13, 2017
By Tatoru Yuki
0 Comments

The Keyword planner feature is available for any clients that have an up and running AdWords account/ campaign. This tool is extremely useful to find new relevant keyword ideas what may help your ads and business (or whatever it is that you are advertising for) be found more often.

While I have mentioned the importance of keyword selection before, let me show you an example here on how the Keyword planner can help you. This is what you will see when you click on ‘Keyword Planner’ under ‘Tools’ at the top bar. The features that I personally use the most are the first two under ‘Find New Keywords & Get Search Volume’.

If you have been reading my previous posts, you would see that I like using Plumbing Pipers. Co as my go-to example. Let’s say that I have several possible keywords that popped into my mind without any research:

Plumbing service
Broken pipe repair
Plumbers near me

… And I have run out of ideas for plumbing keywords. If I use only these 3 keywords, I will definitely be missing out on so many impressions when people are searching for plumbing services!

This is when I will use the first feature: ‘Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category’. This feature not only will give me new keyword ideas, but gives me the volume trends of the keywords that I had in mind. Volume trend refers to the average number of searches of said keywords within a certain duration – in Google AdWords, the default date range will show the volume trends for the past 12 months in the regions you selected.

I key in the 3 keywords I have in mind, and used Malaysia as my location targeting setting. Although I will be targeting Subang Jaya – one small city – in my ads, I use the country as my targeting option for this so that I can get more ideas for what the Malaysians search for when in need of my services.

Think of it this way, if you want to carry out a survey about what food people like generally, you will get answers of wider variations if you ask a bigger group as compared to asking just your family members. You can try other settings too, such as the keyword filters where you can choose to look for new keyword ideas with average monthly searches more than, say, 200; or new keywords with a suggested bid of equal or less than RM3 as an example.

There’s a lot to experiment and explore on the keyword planner, really. Feel free to ask me about other features on the keyword planner if you’d like.

So, when you click on the ‘Get ideas’ button, you might see something like this:

From the first table on the page, I could see that the ‘plumbers near me’ and ‘plumbing services’ perform quite well at 720 & 1000 average searches a month. However, their suggested bid prices are a little on the expensive side. If my daily budget is only RM25, it wouldn’t make sense for me to bid RM6.50 for a click since that would mean that I can only get about 3 to 4 clicks a day at max. The 3^rd keyword, broken pipe repair, didn’t do too well at only 10 searches a month on average.

Wow, I’m going to need more keyword ideas at this rate! Something with a lower suggested bid, perhaps, and about 500 searches a month hopefully?

Before I proceed I would like you to know that the suggested bid is mostly for your reference only. You can start off with lower bids and if you see that your ads are at position lower than 2.5 and there’s a remark next to your keyword saying something like ‘Below First Page Bid; estimate: RM5.00’ or whatever. There are times when your ad’s average position is quite healthy at 2.5 or sometimes just 1.0, and it would still show this ‘below first page bid’ message. At times like this, you may ignore the comment. If your ad does perform quite poorly, perhaps at position 4 or even 7 sometimes, you can either change the keyword’s match type or straight out change the keyword if you cannot increase the max CPC bid.

So, back to looking for better keyword alternatives.

I applied the keyword filter to look for keyword ideas with more than 20 monthly searches and a suggested bid of less than RM3, just to be on the safe side. From the table, ‘toilet plumbing’, ‘clogged drain’, ‘plumbing pipe’ and ‘water heater installation’ could be promising since I provide these services and products!

Now, how to we implement the keywords into our account? You can use the slow and manual way of entering the keywords one by one, or you can add the keywords to your plans immediately!

‘toilet plumbing’ and ‘clogged drain’ could be placed into one ad group, ‘toilet drains’
‘plumbing pipe’ could be placed into another ad group ‘plumbing supplies’
‘water heater installation’ could be placed into an ad group called ‘water heater’.

Let’s assume that you do not have any ad groups in your account yet. At the right side of the keyword planner, you might see this:

You can add your ad groups in the ‘or start with an empty ad group’ button, and then add each wanted keywords into the ad group you select.

As an example, I want to put ‘toilet plumbing’ into the ‘toilet drains’ ad group. I click once on the newly added ad group, and click on the arrows under the ‘add to plan’ column in the new keyword ideas table. Keep adding relevant keywords to the relevant ad groups, and you can click on ‘review plan’ and click on the ‘save to account’ button at the top right corner which appears afterwards.

If you don’t already have ad groups in your campaign, you can select ‘add to an existing campaign à add as new ad groups’. You can even add the keywords into an existing ad group as well! If you don’t have a campaign, simply choose ‘create a new campaign’ and put your max CPC bids and your daily budgets before you save and continue! You will see your keywords when you click on ‘campaign’ at the top bar, then ‘keywords’. Remember, you can play around with the match types of your keywords once you add them into your account using this method!

Voila, your keywords are ready to trigger your ads for you!

http://www.searchenginemarketing.com.my/

And remember, you can always come sign up for Google AdWords with us, a Google Premium Partner (AdWords certified!!) to help you create and manage your campaigns! Simply click HERE and submit a form for us to start helping you out :)

Interested to know more?

Here are some relevant links from other blog posts under the 'Google AdWords' tag!

Want more information on other Google AdWords features? Simply leave a comment below this post and I will try to help you :) Meanwhile, I hope that this post has helped you to understand the keyword planner a little bit better.

Pages

KODENSHI® Fiber Heat-retention Aulora Pants - My Unbiased Study & Research

KODENSHI Aulora Pants Review

️KODENSHI® Fiber Heat-retention AULORA Pants

Journey to Endless Patience - Freelancing

3 Things Freelancers Should Note

1) Check their profiles

2. The Price

3. Off-site Communication

Closing Remarks

Huawei Honor 6A Pro - A Short Review

Lenovo P70-A | A Short Review

Things I loved About This Phone Model

Things That Could Be Improved

Why I'm So Against The Phone OS Upgrade

Liese - Red Velvet Color Product Review

AdWords – How to Use the Keyword Planner

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