Recently I watched a YouTube video on the China Demographics Crisis. This led me down a rabbit hole reflecting on the issue and ultimately resulted in me writing the attached paper.
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Zhou Shen 周深 9.29Hz World Tour
Both my wife and I are Zhou Shen’s fans. We have been following him since 2019, just when we first started to follow Chinese media content. This is the same time when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. We watched a variety show called Our Song (我们的歌), and he was one of the many talented young singers.
Ever since I have been following his shows as well as listening to his songs. In December 2024 when he concluded his national tour in China, he announced that he would extend his tour to other countries. We were pretty excited but held our excitement in check because Toronto may not be one of the cities.
As it turned out, he will hold an event here in Toronto on March 14, 2025 (𝛑 day) at the Coca-Cola Coliseum!
Today is the actual date when tickets went on sale. Carol found the promotional code ZS929TO so that we can be eligible for presales at 1:00pm EST.
Many days before today I made sure my TicketMaster account was in order with all of my payment information all up to date. Twenty minutes before 1:00pm, I was signed on to the site and ready to order. I don’t know if it is luck or it was standard procedure, but 10 minutes before 1:00pm I decided to refresh the page. After the refresh, I was in the official queue!
We started out in the mid-5000’s and the above screenshot showed that it came down pretty fast, still we were pretty pessimistic about our chances. It took about 15 minutes for us to finally enter ticket sales and seat selections.
The seat selection process was also pretty difficult because every time we chose the seats, they were already taken. I finally just asked the system to give me the most expensive seats and was lucky enough to find two.
And… We Got Them! They were not cheap, but glad that we secured two tickets.
I double-checked that the tickets were recognized on the TicketMaster app on my iPhone, and added the tickets to my Apple Wallet. Can’t wait!
Canadians Going to China
Our China Trip 2024
Below is an attached PDF document that contains a journal of our China Trip. If you are reading the document while we are still on the trip, then this document will be updated on a regular basis to reflect our daily experience, so be sure to bookmark this post and revisit this PDF document.
Retiring the Greenhouse
We have had a greenhouse in our backyard since the summer of 2015 (almost a decade ago). The greenhouse lasted much longer than we thought, given that it is just a thin aluminum structure with transparent plastic wall and roof sidings.
We are planning a sunroom extension and had to remove the greenhouse. This past Saturday, October 19, was the day marked for disassembly. A friend of mine agreed to disassemble the greenhouse and will later attempt to erect and reuse it on his property.
Inadequate Power Causing ZFS Scrub Errors
The Cost of Freedom
Today is a Blessed Day
I wrote this post with 
New Found Love for LaTeX
In a previous post called, Scaled Solar System, I used git.
Traditional word processing tools like Google Docs or Microsoft Word are insufficient because tracking changes with Microsoft Word is simply too difficult to deal with.
Both my wife and I are about to travel to China in November and we had several disparate itineraries from various airlines, tour operators, hotels, and such. In the past, I usually used Microsoft Excel to create a combined itinerary. However, last year I tried to keep the combined itinerary in the iOS Notes App. Both solutions were less than ideal. Excel proved too difficult to edit on the go because I either had to use the mobile Excel app or open up my laptop. Once changes are made it would be difficult to track the changes that I made.
With the iOS Notes App, editing the cells within a table is okay for simple stuff, but for a complicated itinerary, the formatting capabilities simply did not exist. The tracking of changes was also an issue.
This time around, I am going to use
It took me some time to set up my Neovim environment for
The resulting PDF master itinerary has been very satisfactory. It was fulfilling to once again work with
Bedroom Audio Setup
After watching the YouTube video below:
I felt compelled to listen to my Bedroom audio system which I have not done for quite a while. I was pleasantly surprised by the musicality of the playlist that I quickly mustered for the night. I created the playlist on my old Mac mini 2018 using Apple Music configured for lossless music and USB output. On the other end of the USB is a Topping D90 DAC. My Q-Acoustic 3020i bookshelf speakers are powered by the S.M.S.L. DA-9 stereo amplifier.
With the acquisition of the S.M.SL. DA-9 stereo amplifier from my Winnipeg trip last year, and a freed, old Mac mini. I am able to swap out the old Raspberry Pi running Volumio as my streamer, and use the Mac mini instead. This way not only can I take advantage of Apple Music Loseless, but I can also install mpd to play my FLAC library. I still use the Rigelian App on both my Mac and iOS devices to control music from my mpd.
However to get the Mac mini working with my Topping D90 external DAC, I had to configure mpd appropriately. Below is a snippet of the mod configuration for audio_output. The configuration file is stored in ~/.mpd/mpd.conf.
audio_output {
type "osx"
name "D90 "
device "D90 " # optional
mixer_type "disabled"
dop "yes"
}
The following command can be used to obtain the detail of the USB audio devices that my Mac is aware of:
system_profiler SPAudioDataTypeNote the extra trailing space of the D90 name.
Below are the pictures of the equipment and software of my stack.
