I have unfortunately lagged behind yet again, and am actually writing this in the beginning of Week 36. Week 34 felt a lot like receiving tons of tiny paper cuts. The Elusive Form 99 for applying for a Community Courts and Tribunals Friend For the small claims case I’m assisting on, I needed to find a form for one of the volunteer interpreters to sign up as a Community Courts and Tribunals Friend (“CCT Friend”) in order to allow them to attend consultations/hearings at the Small Claims Tribunal with a worker who speaks Bengali....
I didn’t know that tomatoes were tropical plants until I looked it up recently. If tomatoes are tropical plants, then why do the tomatoes I get at the supermarket here look so sad and anemic compared to, let’s say, a random tomato from ASDA in the UK? Little Farms here sells heirloom tomatoes for SGD31.98 per kg, so I refuse to buy tomatoes from them on principle. Now that I’m very free, I spent a lot of time this week learning about tomatoes and also started attempting to pirate a supermarket tomato (“Sweet Cherry Tomatoes on Vine” by Meadows, which is Cold Storage’s house brand)....
Grifters seem to be very fond of getting money from migrant workers and then ghosting them in the hopes that they aren’t savvy enough to seek recourse from the authorities or take legal action. For example: Migrant workers in S’pore left in limbo after paying large sums to agency promising jobs in Poland; MOM investigating Employment agency-related stuff Checking a company’s status + whether it has an Employment Agency Licence Check whether they are still live, or if they have been struck off the register: ACRA Bizfile...
I spent most of this week reading about Bangladesh’s internet shutdown, internet shutdowns in general and looking at Tor metrics. This will probably have its own standalone post. I also spent a lot of the week reading about how to enforce Small Claims Tribunal orders as I’m working on helping a worker (who has no access to a laptop and also doesn’t have a strong command of English) with his claim....
Every month, I try to spend the last Sunday repairing things with a bunch of other people (mostly retirees or engineers in their late 20s), barring any kind of calamity (like oversleeping). Members of the public bring their appliances and we help them diagnose and guide them through the repair process. Given that business is often unpredictable, I’ve started bringing my own items to repair during lull periods. The power switch for my portable charger broke off its board, so I soldered it back on and also added a bit of superglue to secure it more....
Trying to pirate plants (i.e. propagate my pothos/money plant) involves a lot of patience. My pothos cuttings took a few weeks to root via water propagation. After that, I tried to move one of the cuttings to soil. This cutting started yellowing and drooping really fast. The “soil” I was using didn’t have good drainage – it was some soil I had from some tomato gardening kit I got years ago (no tomatoes grew, btw)....
In the past month (I forget the exact time frame), Reddit introduced Streaks - as if I needed more reminders that I’m chronically online. I realised that behind this is probably a product person that had to write a PRD, do A/B testing and then release this feature into the wild. Inspired by this, I’ve decided to keep a running list of odd ideas. Someone older and wiser said to me: “If you keep throwing things at a wall, there’ll be something that sticks....
The universe of things that I look at and think: “I could probably fix that” is a slowly but surely expanding one. This week, please welcome a Macbook battery replacement and a countertop dishwasher leak fix. Macbook Pro 2020 - Intel, 2 Thunderbolt Ports (or the A2289 for short) I got this laptop around October 2020 with the back-to-school promotion. That was probably also the time where my luck ran out, as Apple launched the M1 Macbooks soon afterwards....
juliaplaysgroove has me convinced that any song can be improved by adding bass. This week I finally got around to making my site-search shortcut CLI tool more usable. I can use a shortcut to search specific sites instead of having to type stuff like site:forums.developer.nvidia.com into the search bar. I haven’t touched code in ages, and I’m glad to finally be back at it. I was reading a piece lately about Why it feels like everyone in the world is heading to Japan right now and would like to recommend not going to Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto (or rather, not staying there for too long)....
The Olympus AF-1 Twin gives off the vibe of a slightly austere older sibling – built to withstand all sorts of conditions (supposedly weatherproof), and not the type to give you a lot of choices. You get to choose between a 35mm or 70mm lens with the biaxial system (i.e. no zoom), and there are two separate buttons for flash and continuous/self-timer controls. I take note of this because some cameras have incredibly convoluted steps for disabling flash – the Fuji Zoom Cardia Super 115 requires you to press the flash button 6 times before you can take a photo without flash....