Month: October 2017

Raffles Hotel Mooncake boxes and Soldering

Mooncake festival falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month. It’s now the 17th day as I write, so the festival is officially over.

Baked mooncakes, snowskin mooncakes, yam mooncakes. Cakes and cakes!

Quite frankly, I had a slice of each type and I’m stuffed. No longer the days where I can eat an entire moon cake by myself. (Double yolk, anyone?)

Snow skin mooncakes from Raffles Hotel do not fail to impress buyers with their high quality standards every year, despite prices increasing from $50 to $75 over the last 5 years. Moon cakes with exotic ingredients – Champagne Truffle & Ganache, Chocolate Pearl Truffle goes well with a pot of hot Chinese tea.

Besides the mooncakes, the packaging containing them is unique. Just one glance, you will know it’s from Raffles Hotel. The pure metal square box is a good size and has the 60s look and colour.

After eating those cakes, what else can I do with the metal box? Yep, the cover can be used as a container for small screws and what nots, while I’m mucking around with the soldering iron.

Setting up Raspberry Pi 3 with Linux

I had a requirement to run a headless Linux device, coupled with a 3G USB dongle for communications. The Raspberry Pi 3 I bought about 9 months back came in handy.

Here are the steps I took to setup Linux on Rpi.

1. Download and copy the Linux image file onto a micro SD card.
2. Insert the micro SD card into the Rpi and start it up with the keyboard and mouse connected.
3. Log in, and run ‘sudo apt-get update’
4. Update gparted to expand the partition space. You will need to apt-get install gparted
5. Run gparted and expand the existing partition space.
6. Reboot
7. Insert the following string into the /boot/cmdline.txt file. ‘usbhid.mousepoll=0’ at the end of the string. This step removes the laggy mouse scroll.
8. Insert the two following lines into /boot/config.txt file ‘dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi’ and ‘dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt’ at the end of the file. Each lines on their own. This step disables the wifi and bluetooth.
9 Reboot
10. Insert 3G Dongle and update the APN configuration in network-manager.
11. APN: hicard, Username: , Password: