Carol’s nephew and niece is visiting us from China. We thought it would be good to take them on a road trip across the HWY 401 stretch and a bit of Quebec.
Attached is our final itinerary, and a video to summarize each day’s events. To play the video, just click on the video link in the Day title. For example:
Approximately three years ago we created a holding a company in Ontario, Canada for the purpose of managing certain real estate investments. After some considerations, we have determined that this holding company is no longer required, so about a month ago, we decided to dissolve this company.
When we sent out an email requesting the dissolution of the company, we received the following response:
On the surface we thought this is excellent news, because we will be able to do this all online. However upon visiting Ontario.ca/BusinessRegistry we were immediately lost after the initial login.
It took many tries to discovered this successful navigation path, so I wanted to document this for other users and for myself in the future.
The menu options on the left is not very helpful (see below). The obvious one is Ontario business registry under Account help, but this only provides a false, old guide to a PDF form that you can download and fill-out but is discouraged and rarely used now. The correct selection is the mysterious Add a service item.
Once you are in the Add a service page, you can then select the Start now of the Ontario business registry process.
This will bring you to a different site, which you can use to select Make Changes, and then further down File Articles of Dissolution.
The entire experience feels like the website was put together by multiple contractors, and totally user unfriendly. Yet another government service experience.
Last year we engaged with Four Seasons Sunrooms to add a sunroom at the back of our house. It took about a year for us to finalize the engineering drawings, pass the Community of Adjust process with the city of Richmond Hill, and finally obtaining the permit.
Today we finally broke ground!
Below is a short video to remember this event.
Today, I found it strange that with a clear, blue, sunny sky, our solar generation is half of what I expected. I then noticed that one of our two SolarEdge inverters was showing a fault.
I followed the instructions on the Verifying Inverter Status web page on SolarEdge’s website.
I was able to get the details of the Error Log:
I did a quick search for 3x9A System Lock Inverter ARC on Google and discovered on Reddit that it was an issue that many people were experiencing.
I then followed these instructions to reset the inverter on YouTube:
After about 5 minutes, the inverter is now generating power! Hurray all fixed so far.
On March 15th, 2025, I decided to restart my photography hobby by purchasing a brand-new A6700 Sony camera suitable for taking photos and videos.
Kalen purchased it from Aden Camera at Pacific Mall with a small discount. The total cost, including taxes, amounted to $2,487.10. The photo of it on the right is with my iPhone 16 Pro.
This is not going to be a review of the product. Others have already done an exhaustive review of this camera. No point for me to duplicate their work. I doubt I will be able to add anything new. I will, however, share some of the photos that I took with this camera. These first batches were with the 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 OSS Sony Kit Lens.
The first photo is of my wife busy with cooking dinner while I just completed my unboxing. The others were taken in a dark bedroom using a light baton that was a Zhou Shen (周深) concert souvenir.
I then supplement the original kit with a few lens purchases:
The new camera can also reuse my old Sony NEX5-N lenses, which are:
For the above lens, some Auto Focus modes do not work, such as continuous AF. This is no big deal; I just switch it to single-shot AF mode.
With the above lenses to play with, I started to take some photos. The first batch is from the recent ice storm that we had.
The next set of photos is of our cat, Darci.
Finally, the next set is a collection of photos taken during my neighbourly walk just 2 days after the ice storm.
I will do a separate post on videos.
On Friday, Carol and I, along with our neighbours, attended the Zhou Shen concert at the Coca Cola Coliseum in downtown Toronto inside the Exhibition Place.
It was really exciting to see Zhou Shen in person. We all enjoyed his heavenly vocals. The three-hour concerts started at 8 pm without any intermissions. Time flew by really fast.
Below is a video of our experience.
I would go to another Zhou Zhen concert again.
In the past, when I got hold of a video that has hdmv_pgs_subtitle subtitle streams, I have always ignored it. Instead I tried to find a compatible subtitle in .srt format on the opensubtitles.org website. Today I came across a video that I am trying to archive that does not have the appropriate subtitles that I wanted. All of this would not have been an issue if my preferred mp4 format actually supports the hdmv_pgs_subtitle format.
I know an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technique for extracting the subtitles from the hdmv_pgs_subtitle stream, but I am always in a hurry. This time, I bit the bullet and went down on this path.
Below are the steps that I had to go through.
First I had to download and install ffmpeg and mkvtoolnix packages on my Linux machine, and then execute the following commands to extract the Chinese subtitles that I wanted.
ffmpeg -y -i archive.mkv -map 0:s:1 -c:s dvdsub -f matroska chi.mkv
mkvextract chi.mkv tracks 0:mysub
After the above commands, I will have mysub.idx and mysub.sup files. The first are the time index codes and the latter are the subtitle images.
On a Windows virtual machine, I had to download Subtitle Edit, a subtitle editor tool that has the OCR functionality, and convert the mysub.idx and mysub.sup into mysub.srt, which I can then later use to re-incorporate back into the archive video file.
Above is a screenshot of the application after the OCR is completed. I found that the engine mode of Tesseract + LSTM worked the best. Of course, I had to select the matching language that is befitting of the subtitle. Once I saved the finished product as mysub.srt I can then use this file to create archive.mp4 using ffmpeg.
ffmpeg -i archive.mkv -i mysub.srt -map 0:v -map 0:a -map 1:s -c copy -c:s mov_text -metadata:s:s:0 language=chi archive.mp4Video file successfully archived!
Update: 2026-06-19
Instead of using the Windows version of Subtitle Edit, we can use a command line version of vobsubocr. This is better for batch based processing. I installed vobsubocr on my NAS Ubuntu server with:
# Install OS dependencies
sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential cmake libtesseract-dev tesseract-ocr-eng libtiff5-dev tesseract-ocr-chi-sim
# First install Rust
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
# We had to install from git
cargo install --git https://github.com/elizagamedev/vobsubocr
# Convert the *.idx and *.sub into srt
# Be sure file.sub is in the same directory as file.idx
vobsubocr -l eng -o output.srt file.idx
In February of this year, I came across this article from The Verge, called: “Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books“.
Effectively, this article reports that after February 26th, you can only download books from the Kindle store to your Kindle device over Wi-Fi. This means that ebooks you purchased can no longer be downloaded and converted into an epub format to be consumed by another e-reader like Apple’s Books.app, which I normally do on my iPad or iPhone.
Of course, this policy change poses an immediate problem for me when consuming or reading my ebooks. However, it also in my view crosses an ethical boundary. Digital media such as ebooks, which you have paid full prices for, is no longer yours. The buyer of such content is at the mercy of the distribution platform, in this case Amazon. This simply does not sit well with me. In the past, Amazon has also been known to remove purchased content due to changes in distribution rights, which is normally outside of the buyer’s control.
I now have to adopt a new process that I will use whenever I buy ebooks from the Kindle platform. I will describe this process in detail below so that in the future should I need to refer to it, it is here.
This process will remove the Digital Rights Management from the ebook that you just purchased and allows us to store a DRM-free ebook in Calibre, an ebook management software. This process will only work on Windows, so I had to spin up a Windows virtual machine for this purpose.
Software required:
Use Kindle for PC to browse and access the ebooks that have been purchased from Amazon, and download the ebook you would like to convert.
Use Calibre and its Add books functionality to import the azw file from the My Kindle Content. See Figure 1 for details.
Once the book has been imported, Calibre should have a KFX format of the book. We need to convert it to the epub format for other reader devices using Calibre’s Convert books functionality.
I then move the epub formatted ebook onto my macOS Calibre version for long term storage and management.