The last couple of days have been tense.
My 2 month old chick, in a curious peck, snagged a thread from the rafia string securing its feeding box. A thin piece had become entangled around the base of its tongue.
My heart sank. All I could do was carefully snip the thread and hope for the best.
The big question when raising chicks is always: will they be hens or roosters? While I am no expert, I'm thrilled to report that judging by their plumage, both of my young chicks are looking like hens. Their feathers are a identical to their mother's. This is exactly the outcome I was hoping for when I started this incubator journey.
As of today, my flock has grown by two tiny, peeping bantam chicks. One fought its way out of the incubator; the other was delivered under the expert care of a broody hen. This fourth hatch attempt was a rollercoaster of expectation, science, and a little bit of old-fashioned luck - and I learned more than ever before.
Let's address the elephant in the room: my incubator. It has a curious habit of producing one, and only one, perfect chick per hatch. My first, third, and now this fourth attempt have all followed this pattern.
This time, four other eggs showed promising signs during candling - a red glow with a dark shadow indicating development - but they never pipped. By day 24, I had to accept they weren't going to make it. It's a frustrating puzzle. The lone chick that did hatch is now a thriving 29-day-old ball of fluff and energy, which tells me the basics are right, but the fine-tuning is off. Moving the incubator away from drafts (a lesson from hatch #3) seems to have helped the overall environment, but the mystery of the singleton continues. The investigation is still very much open.
I'm now into my third month of incubating bantam chicken eggs, and I just started my fourth attempt. I've already written about my first hatch. My second and third attempts didn't go as planned. Here's what happened and the hard-earned lessons I've picked up along the way.
Out of four eggs, none were fertile - which shocked me, given that my roosters outnumber hens two to one. Was it poor mating, improper egg storage, or just bad luck? I'm still not sure, but it was a frustrating setback. These eggs were place under a table in the hall at Malaysian room temperature, by the way. Ceiling fan was running for 8+ hours everyday.
This time, I set seven eggs. Only one hatched - a tiny triumph - but the chick died after a week due to my mistakes. Three other eggs showed early development but stalled around day 14.
Here's what I learned:
This is an update on my first try with a new egg incubator - and honestly, it didn't go as well as I'd hoped.
Out of the three eggs I placed in the incubator:
I keep bantam chickens in my backyard. I have been keeping them for something like 24 years now.
Recently, I just bought myself an incubator (Note: a Lazada Malaysia affiliate link ). It wasn't an easy decision - I've always preferred letting my hens hatch eggs the natural way. There's something deeply satisfying about watching a broody hen patiently tend to her clutch, the way nature intended. But after losing three hens in the past six months and seeing a steady decline in hatching success, I finally hit panic mode. The uneven rooster-to-hen ratio (around 2:1) didn't help either.
Gone are the days when a single hatch would give me four or five healthy chicks per hen. That was 15 or 20 years ago. These days, I'm lucky if I get two chicks out of five or six eggs. At first, I wondered if something was wrong with my flock - were my hens getting older? Was there a hidden disease? But the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to one glaring change: the heat.
Extreme high temperatures have become much more frequent here, and I can't help but blame that for my hatching woes. Eggs are sensitive; too much heat can kill developing embryos or prevent fertilization altogether. My hens still go broody, but the results just aren't the same.
So, I caved and bought an incubator. It feels like admitting defeat in a way - like I'm stepping in where nature should handle things. But if climate extremes are the new normal, maybe a little backup isn't such a bad idea.
It's very uncommon to find stray cats with long fur in my neighbourhood. In fact, I've never seen one before. Not just here, but in my entire life. So you can imagine my surprise when, on the morning of 28th March 2025, a tiny, long-furred kitten appeared on my front porch as if by magic. My first thought? Could this be Ah Ngiew's offspring?
I have been putting this off for way too long. But last month, I finally gathered enough courage to take the plunge: I installed Linux Mint 21.2 on my trusty (and slightly ancient) refurbished Lenovo M70e desktop.
Rebooting after the installation felt like waiting for the results of a high-stakes exam. Would it work? Would my computer explode into a cloud of smoke? Thankfully, none of the above happened. Everything went smoothly - no hiccups, no drama. I stuck to the default settings suggested by the installer for a dual-boot setup, and Linux Mint played nice with my existing Windows 7 installation.
Fast forward to two weeks ago. With Linux Mint 22.1 released earlier this year, I thought, "Why not? Let's upgrade!" Spoiler alert: things didn't go as smoothly as they did with version 21.2.
My Dell 19" monitor has served me well. Unfortunately after 14 years, delamination is happening and I can see 'bubbles' around the sides of the monitor.
So out I went in search for a new monitor and I finally decided on the budget friendly Phillips 22" LCD monitor. Thanks to Lazada Malaysia (Note: a Lazada Malaysia affiliate link) for the discounts (with Laz coins), I paid Rm225.90 for it. This is the best price that I could find online at that time.
I have been using this 22" Phillips monitor for about a month and a half now, and overall, I am not disappointed. Let's be real. One of the most economical monitors I could find on the market, it delivers solid performance. I can get Full HD at 1920x1080 resolution on Linux Mint (version 21.2) and on Windows XP, all on my 14 year old PC via VGA connection. However, everything looks a little too small in Full HD on Windows XP. So I settled for 1440x900 resolution instead.
Out of the box though, this monitor was *not* kind to my eyes. In fact, the initial experience was so uncomfortable that it took a whopping 12 hours for the eye strain and irritation to finally subside. Twelve hours!! I was starting to wonder if I needed to invest in a pair of blue-light-blocking goggles just to survive!
Thankfully, after some strategic tweaking and adjustments, I managed to find settings that transformed this eye-straining beast into a much more comfortable viewing companion.
It has been three long months since my beloved male cat, Ngiew, went missing on October 18, 2024, a month just shy of his second birthday. Ngiew is a gray Domestic Longhair cat with a bushy tail and stripes on his limbs. The longest he's ever been away before was about a week. So initially I didn't worry too much. He often spent time at the empty house across the street, hanging out with a female cat. It is always comforting to hear his cries from across the street when he is not at home.
But this time, there's no sign of him. I'm not sure if he's been taken in by someone, wandered off with other cats, or if his adventurous genes (his dad - and later his younger brother too - is also a neighbourhood wanderer) led him further than ever before.
