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Alexa Wall Clock

I did some Home Improvement lately. One of the additions to my Alexa-enabled household is the Alexa Wall Clock, made by Amazon. There is also a Citizen branded Alexa powered wall clock at double the price if that’s your fancy. 
It's a simple wall clock that is powered by 4-AA batteries. I am not sure how long these battery will last. Hopefully it will last more than one year. The wall clock connects to Alexa via Bluetooth. When you asked Alexa to set a timer for 10 minutes, the minute notches of the Wall Clock will light up for 10 minutes. These are LED lights and should be using very little power. 
Setting a second timer (or a third one) will light up another notch in the watch face. As illustrated below, the second timer was set at15 minutes.


This is really useful when you are in the kitchen and have multiple timers going on and have no way to know until the timer is up and Alexa starts to chime. With the Wall Clock, you can see your timer visually counting down, every minu…
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Online everything

I read somewhere recently that one blessing in disguise is that our internet infrastructure have become so essential and matured to enable us to have a life during the Covid-19 lockdown. Imagine that we can still get in touch with friends and families (Facetime, WhatsApp video call, Skype), we can do online shopping for our groceries, we have Netflix and Spotify for TV and entertainment. And for the offices, we have VPN, Webex and ability to work from home. Can you imagine life without a strong internet infrastructure? What a depressing thought this is!

Even the kids are learning online - schools give homework to the girls via Google Classroom. And, really I am impressed with SKTM and MOE in general. The teachers are sending homework every day and some teachers are doing video of themselves teaching! Such dedication in the name of education.

Their Taekwondo Master is doing Taekwondo lessons online via Zoom where it is a two way video of watching their Master executing the moves and al…
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Covid-19

Twenty Twenty didn't start well. Covid-19 cases are all over the world and in Malaysia, the government imposed a Movement Control Order. Schools are closed and we are all asked to #StayAtHome and work from home. As an introvert, I should feel joy and happiness. In a way, I am enjoying my time at home in front of a PC and spending more times with the family. But after 4 weeks of being cooked inside a house and two more weeks to go, I think even an introvert needed a break from this solitary! Let's see how this goes.

My only consolation is that I have recently changed role and do not have sales pressure on my shoulder. So, that lifted some stress off my back, amidst the stress caused by Covid-19 uncertainties.
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Twenty twenty

Happy New Year! It's 2020, the start of a new decade. It is a clean slate for everyone of us to chart what is our next decade going to be!

I think I would like to go independent in this coming decade. I am not sure what I will be doing, but I probably do not forsee myself being in a 9-5 job anymore. Maybe it will take me additional 5 more years as a salaried worker while I prepare myself.. but, I think after working for almost 24 years non-stop, it's about time I think of something I would like to do, simply because I LIKE doing it. So, I am also re-looking at my family's expenses and hopefully, able to adjust the spending while still considering the kids college funds, the mortgage, the car loan and looking to extending the life of my current computer gears.

More importantly for me is to reflect on my strength and also sharpening the saw on areas I am lacking - reeducating myself so that I can be independent.

However, let's talk about what gear I am going into the ne…
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I reversed and knocked into a reversing Mercedes

And I was saved by my tire! It was my front tire which hit his rear left bumper, thus stopping the car from banging into my front door. There’s no way to explain this except protection from shoten zhenjin!

Saturday morning, I took the girls for breakfast in our usual joint around Aman Suria. You know how at times things just don’t go your way - and in these moments, you are careless and reckless.

Early this week, after piano lesson on Tuesday evening, I turned out of CentrePoint and was very close to getting my front left bumper to scratch the sharp corner. My front sensor was in red and the alarm was blaring very loudly. I told myself I have to be careful. And the following morning while parking near Taman SEA, I got too close to the curb. It’s like this is a bad week for driving as I was not careful and was always gambling.

And it’s almost the same this morning. I was driving along the Pet shop and Restoran 747. I passed by an empty parking slot on my left. Then I stopped and deci…
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New MacBook Pro 16" announced but all I hear is KEYBOARD!

Apple announced a new MacBook Pro 16" a couple of days ago. They had a small event for reporters to show off the new MacBook. It replaced the 15" model, so there are only two MacBook Pro models for sale starting today - the 13" and the 15". There are a lot of enhancements to this model but all I read from the tons of news coverage are the new scissor-switch keyboard!

As a mechanical keyboards aficionado, my head was nodding at every review talking about the importance of keyboard to the overall user experience. There's a podcast over at Upgrade where Jason Snell interviewed the product manager of MacBook Pro and they discussed about the research work which went into designing the new keyboard. The topic covers area like the feel when typing, getting your fingers oriented by feeling the layout of the keys, the sound that typing made and how it sound to you and people around you. They also discussed why the gap between keys are wider in this new keyboard and this…
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Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM.

But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time.

I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko?

The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to their authorized dealer and service center, it wi…
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