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....

With this I have finally caught up with my weeknote backlog. I aspire to be like Nika who (1) has a very snazzy layout for weeknotes that’s styled like a calendar and (2) is very consistent. Fingers crossed that I actually do sit down on Sunday nights from now on. Accompanied someone who was serving as a witness to court (anticlimactic as the fella actually being prosecuted didn’t show up and somehow got hospitalised the night before trial)....

A picture speaks a thousand words, so this will be my longest post yet. This week covered my final 3 days in London and the long trip home. I have learnt that getting film hand-inspected when taking the Eurostar (St Pancras or Gare du Nord) or at Heathrow Airport is a real pain because they say it has to go through the machine as long as your film’s under ISO 800....

Week 24 comprised of many things but mainly the wonders of time with long-distance friends, IKEA hanging trays, quiet museums and watching a bunch of folks play petanque. Listened to a lot of brat. Over the past week and this one, I visited a few of my friends who are based in London/Paris. We rarely get to hang out in the easy and pointless way that most friendships are made as kids/students, so whatever time we have to pointlessly hang out, cook, and wander about is precious to me....

[updated 2 Jul with an additional photo] I got the Raynox ME-606 in a random Hard-Off junk section (more precisely, Hard-Off at Hirata in Matsumoto) for the princely sum of 300 yen, with no real guarantees about whether it would work. This was before I wisened up and started bringing my own batteries for thrifting cameras, so all I knew was that it had corroded battery contacts and a battery flap that wouldn’t shut....