Lots Of Data

My Internet Service Provider (ISP) Yes has gone generous recently. Instead of 15GB previously, I get 50GB worth of data now after a plan upgrade on 31st December 2020. That's an extra 35GB here. Lots of data now, all at no extra charge. I still pay RM47.40 (sales tax included) per month as before.

Now, the problem is I only use about 14GB of data per month all this while. I am wondering now on what am I going to do with all this available data. 36GB in all? It would have been better if they lower the monthly fee, I think. But beggars can't be choosers.

Cow's Milk As Cat Laxative?

The hairball control medication did work for awhile initially for my 8 year old cat.

A fews weeks later though, its effectiveness seems to have waned to the extent that my cat was going minimal on water and zero on food intake for about a week. All the signs for cat constipation (lethargy, irritable when touched, always in the crouching position, straining to defecate with nothing produce) were there, except for vomiting. I was obviously very concern. Very, very concern seeing that my cat was losing a lot of weight too.

So, as a last resort, I took the very unconventional approach, hoping to relieve my cat's agony: I gave my cat some cow's milk. Just half a tablespoon though, at about 3 cc. I was quite sure that things will turn terminal if I were to do nothing. I was desperate. It's a chance that I have to take, even though I knew beforehand that some cats may suffer from complications with lactose intolerance because of milk.

NTFS Corruption No More

Those pesky NTFS corruption that I've had regularly since 2013, they have gone they way of the Dodo now. Thank goodness. And all I've did was to upgrade from a HDD to an SSD back in August 2020. Looks like it was a hardware problem all along, and I have been wrongly blaming things on software by mistake. Symptoms of a dying hard disk. Wish I knew that earlier. Lesson learnt.

It's scary now looking back at things during these last 7 years. My hard disk could have failed at any time during those years and I could have lost everything since I do not do regular backups then.

Now of late, I have been actively monitoring the health of my SSD regularly via a freeware called CrystalDiskInfo. Any sign of trouble and off I go and do another migration to a new.

Blue Eyed Snake

One regular visitor to my backyard this Golden Tree Snake. I have taken numerous pictures of this snake species before in the past. But never have I taken one with a blue covering over its eyes.

Bought Another Camera, The Olympus Pen EPL-9

I already own two cameras: a Canon EOS 800D/T7i and a Canon Powershot SX530HS. And it all started with me searching for a Canon telephoto lens a few months ago. It ended though with something quite unexpected. I did get my telephoto lens (a 40-150mm) and, believe it or not, I actually bought myself another camera - an entry level mirrorless camera from Olympus, the PEN EPL-9. Hey! This decision made financial sense, to me at least - see below.

It actually took me some 2 months to finally own this camera. I did face some hurdles along the way. It first caught my eye (which was bundled with a 40-150mm lens) quite unexpectedly towards the end of June 2020. I did my maths and realised that the listed selling price was a great bargain. Clever me thought that since the Lazada 7.7 sale was coming up on July 7 2020, why not wait and enjoy an even greater discount.

Big mistake. On that very fateful day, the price for the camera was revised upwards by some RM500, The bargain was no more. I was obviously disappointed. The 7.7 sale did give a RM20 discount coupon though. But trading in RM500 to receive a RM20 coupon? Who would do that?

I persevered.

From Hard Disk To SSD

Maybe this is something that I should have done a few months back. But then again, Solid State Drive (SSD) were very expensive then. My WinXP partition now boots up super fast in under 10 seconds after my upgrade to a SSD. Previously, it took about 2 minutes. It has been almost a month since I upgraded my PC internal hard disk drive (HDD) to a SSD. So far everything looks good. I would have loved getting a Samsung SSD with its reputation and reliability and all. But Samsung SSDs were way beyond my budget. In the end I settled for a Crucial 500GB MX500 2.5" drive by Micron. Not too bad at a price of RM293.

I wouldn't have migrated to an SSD if not for the ever increasing bad blocks at various partitions within my HDD over the last couple of months. One file even become inaccessible just a few weeks ago because of bad blocks. The HDD is still spinning and booting up alright but experience told me that the HDD is reaching its end of life.

Counterfeit Kingston DataTraveller 100 Flashdrive

Man, I almost got fooled. I have bought so many pendrives online before (all genuine until now) that I didn't think I would fall for one. A scam, a fake, a counterfeit.

I didn't suspect anything when I first received this 'Kingston' pendrive. As a matter of fact, I gave this seller a 5 Star rating and quite a good review for this purchase.

But one evening, Windows bombed out while I was copying a large number of files, totalling about 2 GB in size. This pendrive was still detectable but the files and folders were not viewable in Windows Explorer. I panicked. What has gone wrong? And what's this with Windows Device Manager detecting this pendrive as 'SMI USB DISK USB Device' and not as 'Kingston DataTraveler 3.0 USB Device'?

Good For Only 14 Months

Guess what. My refurbished Lenovo PC has died. It died a week ago. Problems with the power supply unit (PSU), I think.

But all is not lost. I could always salvage the parts as spares. The hard disk drive, for example. And beside, the total cost of ownership is now zero, based on my calculation. So I don't actually lose much.

No More WD External USB HDD From Now On

This is really disappointing. My hardly used Western Digital Elements 500MB external USB hard drive is showing signs of failing. It can still be detected by Windows XP and Ubuntu but this takes ages, something like 5 minutes or more. It was working fine when I had in plugged into Ubuntu, but Ubuntu, after stuttering for some 5 to 10 minutes, suddenly says that it will take 4 hours to copy 3 GB of files onto the drive. And the sluggishness began from then on.

Aomei Backupper To The Rescue Again

I don't believe it. My boot partition on my WinXP computer got corrupted again yesterday morning. Upon startup, Windows did a chkdsk (because it says the C: partition is corrupted), deleted some index entries and it failed to successfully boot after that. The last time this similar thing happened was just some 3 months ago. Why?

But luckily Aomei Backupper came to my rescue ... again.