Week 7 / 10 Feb 2025 Wikipedia - Rōnin In feudal Japan (1185–1868), a rōnin (/ˈroʊnɪn/ ROH-nin; Japanese: 浪人, IPA: [ɾoːɲiɴ], ‘drifter’ or ‘wandering man’, lit. ‘unrestrained or dissolute person’) was a samurai who had no lord or master and in some cases, had also severed all links with his family or clan. A samurai became a rōnin upon the death of his master, or after the loss of his master’s favor or legal privilege....
16 secondhand items sold an old HDB mailbox lock ancient Crumpler backpack Uniqlo Heattech pants Hello Kitty Police plushie Muji sling bag Crumpler sling bag Macbook Air 2017 A1466 with a broken display (sold to someone who was trying to fix his church friend’s laptop - he was buying this for the logic board) Glossier You rollerball Grey Hudson River Trading t-shirt (not sure why someone bought this, but they paid SGD15 for it) Apple Thunderbolt to Ethernet Adaper Macbook Screwdriver set - Pentalobe and Torx Tension rod clothes rack (had an extra set) Reading Law in Singapore by Tang Hang Wu and Michael Hor (sold to a student presumably thinking about studying law) A Luxury We Must Afford - An Anthology of Singaporean Poetry (sold to someone who turned out to be an alumnus from my university dorm) 7-11 Black Automatic Umbrella Fenty Highlighter (mini), ILIA multi-stick (travel-size), Peripera lipstick Moral of the story: You never know what the market wants....
This camera is the more busted cousin of the Fuji Zoom Cardia Super 115 I’ve talked about previously. The full name of this camera is the Fuji Zoom Cardia Super 115 MR, but I haven’t figured out how it differs from the regular Fuji Super 115 (which seems to be a rebranded Samsung camera), or what “MR” even stands for. If you’d like to learn more about this camera’s features, I recommend that you check out the Fuji Zoom Cardia Super 115 blog post....
While walking around sometime in June, I saw a flyer for All Things Fungi - a festival about, well, all things fungi. At that point in time, I was still in my tomato obsession phase but found it interesting enough to snap a photo to remember. Lucky are those who live in Sussex. This got me thinking about whether I could grow my own mushrooms, and how such a process even happens....
Whenever I fall off a track, I find it hard to get back on. But I’m back and that’s what matters (!!) Would describe the past few weeks as walking a lot, seeing Canadian Geese in real life and embarking on a bunch of experiments. Semi-failed experiments: My abortive attempt at getting WiFi to work on my Samsung Galaxy S II with postmarketOS The real treasure was all the people I met online along the way Being quietly right is satisfying but being loudly wrong might be even better....
I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100) lying around, and decided to try seeing if I can repurpose it and get it to host a blog. I was inspired by compost.party – a very cool server running off a Xiaomi Poco F1 using postmarketOS and a solar panel for charging. The physical nature of computing is usually not a concern, as things are sufficiently abstracted for me to not have to care too much about it....
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....