a weblog
Just a brief note on where to buy Danzen (serratiopeptidase). It's not been regulated by HSA as a medicine since 2012 due to what sound like efficacy concerns, but hey, it turns out my GP is still prescribing 10mg three times a day for a throat infection in 2025 so... Guardian online has a box of 10x 10-tablet blister packs of 5mg for $17.85 ($0.36 per 10mg, two tablets) Unity pharmacy has a…
After the " Netlify just sent me a $104K bill for a simple static site " (link goes to r/webdev) incident about three months ago, where someone's site had very many downloads of a 3 MB mp3 file and was hit with the $104k (discounted to $5k) bandwidth overage bill, I've had moving off Netlify on my to-do list. This site is now deployed on Cloudflare Pages. Deploying to Cloudflare…
This is not medical advice, I am just some random user on the internet. Data manually copied from the Health Sciences Authority's Register of Therapeutic Products . Please check that HSA service for the latest information. Antihistamines Common non-drowsy antihistamines with General Sale List (GSL) instances that can be sold anywhere: Cetirizine 10mg Simtec Zyrtec-R Loratadine 10mg Clarityne…
This continues my first impression snippets as I poke around my "Always Free" OCI Ampere A1 instances. Setting up compute instances I was originally going to review the Oracle Linux Cloud Developer 8 image, but all the RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux differences from Ubuntu/Debian-based OS would distract from the OCI aspect, so I spun up another instance using Ubuntu Linux 20.04. Note: In…
Oracle Cloud announced the availability of OCI Ampere A1 Compute , as well as it being part of OCI's "Always Free" offers about three months ago. It sounds like a pretty good choice for experimenting with a decently sized Arm virtual machine, given that AWS is 'only' offering a t4g.micro free trial till end-2021. Here are some first impressions snippets on things that I've run…
I've been lurking on the Shiny Things fan club threads on the HardwareZone Forums for some time. It's been so long that I've forgotten when I started -- must have been late 2018 or early 2019, since it was in "part 2" of the megathread. Josh Giersch aka Shiny Things has basically been explaining and re-explaining his localised-for-Singapore version of the Bogleheads three-fund…
Obligatory post to mark the switch to yet another static site generator, this time from Hugo to Zola . Zola is distributed as a single binary (Rust instead of Go, but as a user, who cares?), seems very focused and tightly scoped (perhaps to a fault, but we'll see...), uses the Tera template engine with Jinja2-style syntax (no more Go templates!!!), and the docs aren't too bad. It's…
This week I ran into an issue upgrading Amazon SSM Agent that was a bit of a head-scratcher. SSM Agent is something that you can run on your EC2 instances, and on-premise systems in some scenarios, that lets AWS Systems Manager do a bunch of handy things . While it is supported and packaged as both a .deb and a snap on Ubuntu 16.04, for whatever unfortunate reason they switched fully to snaps for…
I have an Anova Precision Cooker (the old, bulky, pre-WiFi, pre-Nano edition that launched in 110V in 2014 and eventually appeared in 220V years later) which I don't use too often. Let's talk about water containers, since after circulators and plastic bags, that's probably the next item people have to sort out. There are always some specialised items that will appear in the market…
Portfolio changes I thought it might be useful to record the actual changes again, for my "Core 20% Risk Index" portfolio, which claims "1% chance that my portfolio's value will lose more than 20% of its value in any given year". This is their third re-optimisation event, after Dec 2017 and Aug 2019. Re-optimisation Asset class Before After Equity Sectors (US) 45.00% 41.00% iShares Core S&P…
Recent posts haven't been the usual posts to help people googling for how to do or fix certain things. I don't know if this is to vent, practice writing, or practice thinking (writing to think!) but hey let's just run with it. Today's musing: remote meetings are longer. What? My online meetings feel like they take up more time than in-person meetings, no matter whether video is…
Some quick notes on the past four weeks, including three under the mandatory circuit breaker controls. WFH environment Water bottle at the desk ended up helping with hydration, since it's much lower activation energy to drinking from it, than having to go and wash my coffee mug and get fresh tap water. I vaguely miss the office cold water dispenser, but I'll live... I brought my work…
I've heard too much talk about active noise-cancelling headphones. The Wirecutter currently says you probably want the Bose 700, I think you should look at the Bose QC35 II, Sony WH-1000XM3, or Sony WH-H900N... but let's talk about earmuffs in a non-occupational safety and health (OS&H) context instead. Well, I really just mean earmuffs for survival in the stereotypical evil open-plan…
These are strange times we live in. Maybe someday we will find it useful to look back at what we were thinking back in early 2020! I'll count the past week as the first week that I've spent mostly working from home, since I only spent about 1.5 work-days in the office. Productivity expectations This week feels rather different from the usual "oh I'm feeling under the weather or…
The short answer: The 2% additional MSO contribution to your Medisave counts towards your CPF Annual Limit, as it's a mandatory contribution for public sector employees. You must factor it in when deciding how much in voluntary contributions you can make to your CPF acounts for the calendar year. The long answer: well... MSO The Medisave-cum-Subsidised Outpatient (MSO) scheme is one of the…
This was an interesting problem that isn't too environment-specific, so I thought it might be interesting to write up. tl;dr -- if you are using apt-cacher-ng and getting corrupt Release/Packages files that contain a mix of stale and fresh data, check if the upstream server fully supports HTTP/1.1 range requests, and if it doesn't, set VfileUseRangeOps:0 on apt-cacher-ng.…
I always thought it was interesting that the Go project always uses "vanity" URL redirectors to link to things like GitHub issues and GitHub wiki pages and CLs, which I thought would be pretty static things. Can we figure out what these redirectors do, and what they're meant to do? Is there something more to it than vanity? Within commit messages, issues and PRs, you'll see humans and…
StashAway has always talked up their proprietary ERAA asset allocation framework/investment strategy which is supposed to respond to macroeconomic indicators and valuation of asset classes, but we're seeing this first major "re-optimisation" now after over 2 years into their existence, and slightly over 1.5 years since I started dollar cost averaging into an account there. In the…
I got distracted into yak-shaving about TLS cipher suites today when I noticed that Mozilla's Server Side TLS document had been updated -- just 10 days ago, it turns out -- so I figured I'd try and write down some of what I learnt. TLS has this negotiation between the server and client about which set of ciphers should be used for the connection. Picking what ought to be on this list,…
I recently spent 12 days on a road trip through Utah and Arizona. More details on that in another post, but here's a brain dump of what I learnt (or was surprised by!) about road tripping in the U.S. It's just the one trip so it's not exactly distilled wisdom, and I don't know if anyone will ever find this useful, but I know I will want to remind myself about some of these…
If you use S3 buckets and the AWS Systems Manager agent with the suggested AWS-managed SSM IAM policy for EC2 instances, you should take a careful look at the effective S3 permissions on your SSM-managed instances. Depending on how you're managing your S3 bucket/object permissions, your instances may have more access than expected. I've been testing out AWS Systems Manager (SSM),…
tl;dr – this is Hugo published on Netlify. From Anchor Couple years down the road, it's time for a new CMS! I last wrote about moving from Anchor to Bolt in 2015 . The motivation? I have to go around patching things at work, I really do not want to spend my weekend patching my own services as far as possible, especially when it's not as simple as bumping the version on a Docker image…
2021 note : this post is very old. If you have a M1 fibre connection that is not at all ancient, and M1 is fairly good at making you recontract to avoid your monthly rate spiking (and thereby pushing you to the newer network and ONT), you should have an untagged internet port, and this post is not relevant to you. The post is left up for posterity and in case it's helpful for some other ISP…
This is a quick post to let Google pick it up. You know how the MikroTik wiki and forums are, plus how Stack Overflow is.. very confusing. This was tested on RouterOS v6.27 (mipsbe) and v6.28 (smips), but it should work mostly the same everywhere. I was using Windows 7 (64-bit) and Wireshark 1.12.6, on a Thinkpad X220 using the onboard gigabit ethernet port and Intel 6205 802.11n card. How do I…
(This is a very old post that's ported over just for kicks.) If you're wondering why things look different, I've switched from Anchor to Bolt , and didn't want to move the old template over. (I might still do that at some point; I quite liked it.) I've had trying Bolt out on my very long Trello backlog for nearly 6 months; have been looking for a CMS that's not…