Kang's Thoughts

Decrepit Smoke Alarms

We moved into our current house in the fall of 1999. Today it would be 17 years at this house. The old smoke alarms came with the house and others have kindly reminded me that they are long overdue. These alarms are hardwired into the house’s 120V electrical circuits. With no batteries to replace, I thought they would just last forever. I did not know that they have a limited life span of 10 years.

Newly installed Kidde dual purpose smoke alarm

This fall, I did some research on replacement possibilities and settled for the Kidde brand. Costco also had a convenient 3 pack on sale. One of the three alarms also detect carbon monoxide gas, so that’s great, because I can now get rid of my old plugged in carbon monoxide detector as well. They arrived a long time ago, but it was just today that I had some free time to install them.

The installation process was much easier than I thought. With a Robertson screw driver, it only took me about 5 minutes to take the old one out and installed the new one.

When I tested them, I was also pleasantly surprised that when one trips, the remaining two alarms sound off as well. That’s a feature that I didn’t expect to have. Another feature of these new alarms is that they actually voice out in English that either fire or carbon monoxide gas has been detected. That was pretty cool too.

With these types of devices, I firmly believe in keep it simple and stupid (KISS), so Nest smoke alarms are out, more things to break and diagnose. All in all, a pretty productive morning prior to our Christmas Eve dinner.

Casper Mattress

I heard a lot about the Casper mattresses online, especially from podcasts that I listen to. They were always giving away discount codes and praising how wonderful the mattresses were.

We had our old mattress since 2004, so I think it was time for a change. This was a traditional mattress and certain parts were so worn out that hills and valleys on the mattress were clearly felt and seen.

We finally took the plunge and ordered a King size version of Casper for our master bedroom. It arrived on November 28th, but did not get the chance to open it and sleep on it until the night of the 29th. Why the delay? The mattress came in a tall box and I had a false understanding that it may take some time for the mattress to regain its shape.

Well, this concern turned out to be unwarranted. When I open the box, I found the mattress was folded in half and was rolled up, held together with a white cloth like material. When I tore the material away, the stored potential elasticity of the mattress cause it to unrolled itself. The mattress was also sealed with a plastic bag, and I made short work of that. Once the mattress was freed of its packaging constraints, it just literally sprang into its original King size shape in seconds. Pretty impressive to watch!

A couple of first impressions! Some people may not mind the synthetic smell that was immediately evident once the mattress broke out of its plastic wrappings. It was bearable but not likeable. Luckily it was a pretty good day, so we opened our windows and air out the mattress. Second, when I finally lay on the bed, I thought it may be too soft to my liking. I like my bed nice and firm.

I thought the softness of the bed was disappointing at first, and was concerned whether I would sleep well on it. On the first night as I lay on the bed, it felt different, like sleeping in a hotel room, something new. I toppled and turned until I found a position that finally allow me to enter into a state of slumber. To my amazement, I had a great first night sleep. The mattress is soft, but supports your body comfortably and firmly once you lay on it in a horizontal position. It is much softer than a traditional mattress if you sit on the edge of the mattress. The softness is balanced to conform to the contours of your body, especially when you sleep on your side. There were no uncomfortable pressure points.

It has now been four nights, and each night I slept straight through to the morning. This was not the case with the old mattress. I typically get up in the middle of the night. Maybe we are still in the honeymoon period with the mattress, but so far I like it!

We kept our old mattress just in case, but I think we are now convinced and the old mattress is on its way out. Oh, the smell subsided and I didn’t even notice it last night. Many people asked me about this mattress, so I hope you’ll find this impression useful.

As I finish this article while laying on the very mattress that I’m writing about, I am really enjoying the snuggly feel of it.

An Old Friend

Okay I just got my new MacBook Pro 15″ with Touch Bar. It is working quite well as I type my first post with it. But this post is not about my newest friend, the MacBook Pro, but an old friend, Rajib Roy, who I had the pleasure with catching up tonight over a table filled with maki rolls at a sushi restaurant in Richmond Hill.

Although we keep in touch once a year, typically on my birthday, we never had an opportunity to physically meet and catch up. Tonight he happened to be in town, and I was really looking forward to our discussions. He reminded me that we haven’t seen each other since 1998, so we are talking about 18 years! This is a significant intermission. In that time we’ve been through two financial melt downs, and we went from web page ubiquity, to apps, to machine learning and internet of things.

We discussed many things, which Rajib was kind enough to jot down in great detail on his blog, where he so eloquently recount our dinner, and certainly made me look much wiser than I really am. Thanks for the kind words Rajib.

We exchanged many ideas, but two major take aways that really made an impression on me were:

His technique of trying to keep in touch with his friends by calling them up on their birthdays. I am really lucky to have myself to be a member of this lucky group. It is always a pleasure to hear Rajib’s voice either on or close to my birthday. I thought, what an ingenious way to ensure that all of us keep in touch. In the age of instant messages and social media, a real, rare, and most definitely welcome voice, can sometimes make all the difference to liven things up for the day. I applaud him for making the effort to keep in touch with so many, when I learned from a recent book that I read, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, that we humans are only capable of forging a limited number of relationships.

His work ethics of work hard for several years, and then take a whole year off, is a great way to maximize your time with your friends and family and appreciate the things in life that you can enjoy by giving them due and full attention without the day to day distractions of work. This is the best work-life-balance technique that I have heard to date. I only wish I can some how make this work for myself. Only if I could rationalize my personal economics. He poignantly recalls a book he read about an Australian nurse, Bronnie Ware, working in palliative care, that those on their death beds wished that they didn’t work so hard.

It would have been good to have other past coworkers along this evening, but at the same time, our concentrated exchanges, reminiscing about past colleagues, and contemplating on our outlooks on life was really — in a word — enjoyable.

Until next time Rajib, and this time let’s keep our intermission in months instead of years.

Maker Encouragement

My kids wanted to build a gaming computer. I thought this is a wonderful exercise in which they can learn how computer hardware works. Also, there is a little bit of project planning skills involved as well. They will need to decide on a list of required parts, be able to research the advantages and disadvantages of each part while they go through a selection process for each part. The final assembly process will also teach them the essential parts of a physical computer.

To encourage them, I told them that I will subsidize 50% of the cost of the computer up to $1000 CAD. If they decide to take this offer, then this is also their Christmas present.

Since these are gaming computers, there are certain conditions for these boxes:

These computers must only be used for games only.
For regular school work, video editing, research, and other day-to-day consumption of the Internet, this must be done with their regular computers today, which are Macs.
These gaming boxes will be powered off when not in use.
There should be no personal information, emails, photos, and family contacts stored on these computers.
These computers will also not have access to other family computers.

Of course, I’ll help them with the parts selection as well as the process of building the computer. I look forward to seeing what they are going to build!

Richmond Hill’s Santa Clause Parade!

Tonight we hurried our dinner to catch our city’s annual Santa Clause Parade. We have the good fortune of having the parade right by our street, so it was only a 5 minutes walk from our house to a good spectating area on Leslie Street.

Seeing the cadets marching by and then escorting Santa at the end of the parade brought back some old memories when I was an Air Cadet back in the 80’s.

Aside from the brisk 3℃ windy evening, the parade definitely brought a dose of warm holiday spirit to our neighbourhood. Thank you Richmond Hill for organizing such a fun event. I hope you hold it again next year using the same route. I definitely did not envy those who had to drive and park at the event.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Note: All pictures were taken with my new iPhone 7.

500GB SSD Upgrade

Over the course of last week, we found this great SATA III SSD drive at NCIX, an ADATA SU800 512GB SATA III SSD drive for the $159 CAD. As of this writing, I checked the price again and it has gone up by $10. This drive offer similar performance to the Samsung 850 EVO drives, but cost significantly less.

In my previous post, I indicated that I had upgraded our media server with a new motherboard and CPU. I replaced the old hard drive with another old hard drive as a place holder until I can get something a bit more modern. The SU800 fit the bill nicely, and is now my new boot drive.

I’m super happy with the update. The machine boots super fast now! Check this drive out if you are in the market.

The Crowd Has Spoken

Democracy has entered into an interesting experiment. The frustrated irrational populace of the United States of America influenced by a temperamental candidate, Donald Trump, have their say tonight and will have their say for four years. Republican (may or may not be Trump’s) agenda will rule the day. One thing is for sure volatility and more surprises are on the horizon now. Unfortunately this is not just a US affair, as last night’s election result will impact the whole world.

The unrestricted consumption of free flowing information of any kind from ubiquitous media, universally accessible by a temperamental and frustrated crowd is a really bad formula. This gives the saying, “The Wisdom of the Crowd”, a whole new interpretation. Perhaps in hindsight this is the most optimal solution, but it is certainly not immediately evident.

I am thinking more and more that perhaps a meritocratic autocracy, China being the closest, is a better system for the common soul, may or may not be for the extreme rich or the poor. Of course no system is perfect, so we’ll have to be patient with the evolutionary development here.

It does raise the question whether Hong Kong’s pursuit of universal suffrage is a rational one or not. Perhaps what the people of Hong Kong have now is better than a democratic system driven by divisive popularity, independence movements and the like. Something to consider.

Obama was right. The sun did rise up today, but this inevitable event is largely unrelated to our collective well being. This is a movie that many of us would like to avoid watching, but we must now soldier through, and see what the elected wisdom has installed for all of us.

Updated 2016-11-10: Removed reference of Hitler being elected, because Hitler was not elected, but appointed upon the death of Paul Von Hindenburg who was elected.

Thank you Gigabyte and Western Digital

This morning I upgraded my media server. The server was running on a seven years old motherboard, Gigabyte GA-M61PME-S2P, and an AMD Athlon II X2 245 processor. The hard drive is the oldest, a Western Digital WDC WD800JB-00JJ 80GB hard drive that was released back in 2007. This makes the drive 9 years old! At the time of this update, all systems were nominal and operating without issues. Running Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus), next to my iMac, it was the lowest maintenance box I’ve ever put together.

The real reason for the upgrade is for me to reduce the power footprint of a box that is effectively running 7×24. Even when it was idling, the old components where clocking in at 100+ W of power usage.

I decided to replace the motherboard and cpu with an ASRock AM1H-ITX and a system on a chip AMD Athlon 5350 APU. I was able to get the system down to 55W. I also replaced the old WD800JB with a Seagate BarraCuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB hard drive, along with the existing 4 WD Green EZRX hard drives. A total of 5 traditional mechanical hard drives. Along with new Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB memory, this entire upgrade cost less than $220 CAD with taxes included.

I want to shoutout to Clonezilla. What an amazing job they did in creating a super simple piece of software to clone drives and partitions. Of course Linux is just so wonderful to work with. After changing the CPU and Motherboard, the original Ubuntu installation boot up and run without any major issues. The only wrinkle I had was the ethernet port that came with the new motherboard had a new logical name (enp3s0 vs eth0). Luckily, I know how to fix that. My LVM volume assembled without a hitch. Everything is now running fine with the new hardware and configuration.

My next step in the coming months is to shop for a 500GB SSD. Perhaps I can find one during Cyber Monday or Black Friday sales. This should further reduce my power footprint and also increase my performance.

Student Affirmation

During the school’s BBQ evening, one of my son’s teacher introduced us to their class morning ritual. A recital of an affirmation. I thought the affirmation was
wonderful and really serves as a reminder to all the kids that we can all equally be part of something great. All we need to do is try and give it our best.

The teacher got hold of me and had a great idea of putting a montage of a video having different kids from the same class speaking parts of the affirmation. I thought this was a great idea. The idea intrigued me so much that I drafted my two boys and put an experimental video together.

The creation of the video was much easier than I thought. The whole process took about 15 minutes of taping, followed by about 30 minutes of editing with iMovie. The result was also better than I expected. The entire production was from my iPhone 7 and my iMac.

Since we didn’t remember the statements, I am certain the viewer will notice that we are reading from a cheat sheet. We needed the cue sheet to be higher so that we look like we are looking at the camera. I’m sure the version with the students will be much better. Let me know what you think!

Basement Transition from Halogen to LED

I love Amazon Prime. You’ll see why later.

Our basement were filled with these old Halogen MR16 pot lights that each took up 50W each! I had ten of them, so this ends up to be half a kWh. This means at an average rate of $0.13 / kWh, I’m burning about a quarter every two hours. This may not seem much in the beginning, but it adds up. I’ll let you do the math for a month and a year.

I went to Amazon and found an LED equivalent called PAR16, and found them at Can Lighting Inc. They had a package of ten, so I ordered them. With Amazon Prime, they arrived the day after, which was yesterday, with free shipping.

Now instead of 50W each they are only burning 6W each, 12% of the original cost.

I also learned that the number after MR or PAR is the width of bulb in 1/8 of an inch, so 16 is 2 inches or approximately 50 cm. The screw on base is called E26, instead of the small two prongs called Gu10. Very confusing!