Thoughts that cross my mind
Recently, I’ve been thinking about upcoming technologies and especially human interaction with these technologies. The technology is deemed a success if it addresses the needs of the majority.
But what about the minority’s successes? More importantly, whether can the minority disrupt the success reaped by the majority?
I’ll be placing these thoughts and discussions under the futurology tag, with a nod to Reddit’s thread of the same name.
I had a friend who called out for car battery replacement assistance via WhatsApp this morning. Unfortunately, regulars in the chatgroup aren’t available to assist.
Thought that a roadside service (common repairs or replacements) provided by Grab/Uber would make most sense, like Massage on delivery by GoJek in Indonesia.
Let’s what can Grab/Uber Roadside provide?
What do you think? Leave your comments below.
Wiped and reinstalled OS X on the MBP, thus lost the shortcut to invoke Sublime Text on command line.
Thought I should document this so I won’t have to go through Sublime Text directories in Applications.
Open up Terminal and run the following (assuming 1. Sublime Text is installed 2. /usr/local/bin is in your PATH)
Step 1: Go to Terminal; Check whether /usr/local/bin in in your PATH
echo $PATH
Terminal should return the following
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/bin is located at the end of the string. You’re set!
Step 2: Run the following on Terminal
ln -s /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin
Step 3: Test the setup by running the following:
subl .
This will kick in Sublime on the current directory.
Blue color can be extracted from the Blue Pea Flower, and is commonly used in South East Asian dessert and foods. What’s even better, the extract is wholly natural.
What is required:
Place the blue pea flowers and 200ml of water into the metal container and simmer over low heat. The blue color from the flower will dissolve into the water.
Add more blue pea flowers or water to regulate the color.
I woke up one morning to find the Malaysian state of Malacca renamed as Melaka. Is that going to increase the number of visitors? – oh well, nvm.
I was in Malacca for a quick getaway and thought to document the worth-goings vs skip-where-possibles.
Food
1. Teo Soon Loong Seafood Restaurant (Teochew fare)
Address: No. 42 & 44,Jalan KPKS 1,Kompleks Perniagaan Kota Syahbandar, 75200 Melaka, 75200 Malacca, Malaysia
Phone: +60 6-288 0209
This restaurant moved from its old premises in 2nd Cross Street into new digs at Jalan KPKS 1. The new place is bright and bigger than its old premises and more importantly doesn’t have that musty old building smell. The new premises has ample parking space for cars and chartered buses.
Make a reservation at least one day in advance for weekdays and one week in advance for weekends. Order one whole suckling pig (RM268) when making reservations for more than 8 pax, it’s well worth the money!
Not to miss
Oyster noodles, Signature braised duck, Steamed pomfret, Suckling pig, Bitter gourd with pork, Orh Nee
Skip
Yam ring, Sweet and sour pork, Oyster omelette
Desserts
1. East & West Rendevous (60, Lorong Hang Jebat, 75200 Melaka, Malaysia)
Skip
Durian chendol. Wasted my time for this.
Interesting
Dried Blue Pea Flower. The deep blue color from the petals can be extracted from the flower and is used in the making of the Pulut Tai Tai (Nonya Steamed Blue Glutinous Rice) dessert.
Idea
The blue extract from the pea flower could be used for a drink of sorts.
C’mon Apple!
(Or How To Read From A Slow Booting WD My Passport Ultra portable hard drive)
Recently, El Capitan and Sierra had stopped recognizing a WD Passport Ultra external USB portable hard drive that I have.
I had some really important data held inside which made me quite anxious about it. After scouring the intertubes [here], I had an assumption that a major surgery needs to take place before I can extract the data ever again.
The WD Passport Ultra has a PCB with a proprietary interface and I wasn’t able to attach a SATA to USB adapter to the hard drive. Also, the Passport Ultra comes with built-in AES256 encryption which meant I can’t read it directly when plugged into a SATA to USB adapter anyway.
I had even chucked the WD Passport Ultra into the freezer (freezing trick) that had worked before, all to no avail. Furthermore, the video above was quite telling about the recovery requirements, with the need for a PCB of the same version etc. Thus I had almost given up on the WD Passport Ultra.
Right before I decided to open up the hard drive, I had a job that required to forensically image a client’s data. A spark went off and I tried using a linux based recovery tool to read the portable hard drive.
Voila!
I was able to mount the portable hard drive in readonly mode and was able to copy out the data. Of course, there is a need to sudo apt-get install hfsprogs as the drive was formatted in OS X, before mounting the drive in readonly mode.
Q: Why did a Iinux-based recovery tool managed to read the drive while full featured OS X couldn’t?
A: I suspect OS X will assume the hard drive as dead if it does not respond in an acceptable time.
Q: Why did the portable hard drive work previously?
A: Beats me. But since I was able to extract the data, I’ll leave it to the WD Quality Assurance division to give an answer.
Back online after a hiatus of 4+ months. I had a problem with the previous webhosting provider which made me just want to switch to another.
Nonetheless, I’ll be posting my thoughts (again).