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I've heard about the massive jam during public holidays between Tanah Rata to Brinchang, two main towns in Cameron Highlands. This long holiday weekend, we experienced it ourselves. We can be stuck in a stand still jam for almost an hour just moving from one town to the other. At any hour. It's just not worth your time. I wouldn't want to come back on a public holidays.

What just happened? My tracks in Apple Music randomly is not available for play, as per screen shot above. I'm not sure if it was due to the transition to Malaysia Ringgit. But it seemed to happen to another friend as well. But not the same track though and so it seemed pretty random. I've tweeted to Apple Music as well. Hope it's a technical glitch that they can resolve asap.

Wow, that was fast. Just a few days after informing us that iTunes Store, App Store will be transacted in Malaysian Ringgit, the change goes live now!! A n d it looks like they are using $1 USD to RM3.90! Apple Music is $14.90/month for individual and $22.90/month for family. Interesting times ahead!

According to Tim Cook , that is, Apple Watch Series 2 is selling like hot cakes. He's trying to correct IDC who is saying that's Apple Watch sales is in declined! I believe Tim Cook simply because I just had lunch with a buddy, who bought a pair of Apple Watch, one for himself and another for his wife. He's pretty careful about his purchases and for him to buy two watches - that must mean something. I secretly wish for an Apple Watch myself and I realize there are so many different prices. Unlike iPhone which is just two models there is the Apple Watch Sport which has aluminum case and the Apple Watch Stainless Steel which has stainless steel case and sapphire crystal glass. The price is almost 3x more in the Stainless Steel. Most watch wearer know that stainless steel and sapphire crystal is the way to go. I wouldn't want a watch that gets dent easily, like an iPad, iPhone and Mac - that aluminum unibody is not able to withstand daily torture a watch goes ...

In case you did not receive the memo from Apple, there is plan for all transactions of App Store, iTunes and Apple Music to be conducted in local currency. That's good news to me, depending how they priced it finally, as we are not in the mercy of USD fluctuations. No dates set yet though. Coming soon.

TL;DR   Matias Quiet Pro is a mechanical keyboard for PC and Mac based on customised alps mechanical switch technology. It's more tactile than Cherry MX Blue but as quiet as the MX Black. Can order online and shipping cost to Malaysia is just US$15! We have many threads in lowyat.net on mechanical keyboard club. I think it is version 15 now. So, I think there is a vibrant community here who loves mechanical keyboard. I have also spoken to a few people here. Many have heard of Matias keyboard but there are not much discussion about the keyboard here. Most of the popular discussions centered around popular brands that are readily available here such as Razer, SteelSeries, Filco, Ducky, Rosewill. And most of these are Cherry MX switches. Matias has been around for years - I believe all the way back in 90s, so it is an established company. Yet it is still relatively unknown here maybe because their main target market, in the earlier years (and even now, I guess) are the App...

Received this nice Christmas package today. Wishing my readers a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Somehow the mood is not here yet. Perhaps after I opened a bottle or two. Cheers!

Welcome to the all new, sexy Ringgit! Loving Wordpress very much. So much flexibility, the support from the engineers was excellent and the themes, omg! So many beautiful themes. Highly recommended blogger platform!

After almost 13 years with Blogger, I decided that I would like to look for another sexy host. Wordpress come to mind and I have good experience with Wordpress. As such, Ringgit will be moving soon. I also have a sexy domain: ringgit.me Easy to remember. This move will happen in the next 24 hours or so.... See you in Wordpress!

Last Friday I received a SMS from maxis, largest telco in Malaysia. They will be cancelling the free Spotify Premium subsidy from next month onwards. This was a perk for those who signed up MaxisOne 98 and above and is one of the reasons I stick with MaxisOne. In a time when telco are competing to retain clients, its puzzling why maxis would want to do this. The only reason I could think of was that Apple had a hand in this. Apple need to urgently increase their Apple Music subscriber. They have only 17M world wide paying subscribers vs Spotify's 40M. Now that Apple Music is also available on Android, there is no excuse from the telco not to offer or subsidise Apple Music anymore in Malaysia. Oh yeah, if you don't do it, maxis, maybe you will be the last to launch iPhone 7. This underhanded way of twisting the telco's arm is not new to Apple. Remember how they twisted AT&T to follow their terms during the initial launch of iPhone 10 years ago? I'm not s...

I have shutdown my forum. It was fun while it last. I enjoyed setting it up and playing around as an admin. There were some technical challenges and I learned so much from overcoming it. But, there are no participation. And I did not want to pay USD$10/month for a dead place.. And so it has to go. Too bad.

I thought we would end the year without haze. I guess a haze free Malaysia is now a pipe dream. It’s back this week. Getting worse. Wtf is wrong with Indonesia?

If you hated poking into the glass of your iPad to type, you have two choices. One is to buy a Bluetooth keyboard and wirelessly connects the keyboard to the iPad. This is fine but most of the Bluetooth keyboards are not mechanical keyboard, except the HHKB Bluetooth or the Matias Laptop Pro. Your other choice is to hook up your wired mechanical keyboard to the iPad. But you need to purchase a connector to do so. Apple is selling a USB to Camera Connector kit for RM139 and another newer one which is USB3 and have a additional lightning port to charge your iPad for RM189. It looked like this: I suggest getting the RM189 kit because of the ability to charge the iPad and to also provide some power to the keyboard that you plug in. The issue is Apple limits how much power goes out of the iPad into the USB device. If the keyboard requires more power than what Apple provides, you will get a pop up box saying "the connected device requires too much power". It really mad...

This morning I received this SMS: RM0.00 RHB: MYR 3998.00 was charged on your card num**97 at POH KONG-AMPANG TESCO on 03/08.Call 03-92126568 if you did NOT perform this transaction. Looks totally legit, like something that I will get from my bank when I purchased something. Problem is, I don't have a RHB card. I called the number and there is a telephone automated service as well. These guys really go all the way. But suspecting something is amiss, I did a Google search and sure enough, it is a scam! They used to do it using CIMB Bank but now changed to RHB. Be careful of this scam. Typically I don't do this in my blog. I consider myself scam savvy street smart but I almost fell for this. I imagine many other people would have easily fell for it. The key thing is NEVER call the number in SMS message. ALWAYS, ALWAYS call your bank's official number.

I was a big Apple Music fan. I went for the 3 months trial when it first launched and then continue paying the subscription. Later, I stopped, thinking I don't really have much time for music only to realize that I cannot live without having instant access to songs. I subscribed again. Yes, Spotify is more popular in Malaysia and I think around the world. But I am a huge Apple fan and I have a lot of historical data in iTunes - I started using iTunes when it was just version 4 . And I have stuck with iTunes all these years because it remember the songs I starred, it keep track of my play count and because of these data, I could create Smart Playlist such as "My top songs I have not listened to in the past 3 months" or "Recently played songs that is in my top 20 list" or "Songs in my library which I have not listened to". When Apple Music was introduced, it still uses iTunes library and as such my analytic data are still being kept and updated and it ...

This picture I took in Damansara Jaya is pretty interesting. You see a super expensive Brietling car. I'm not even sure how much it cost but it probably cost as much as a double storey house in a affluent location, meaning extremely expensive. And yet, the society this car is in is just so uncouth and uneducated, with mindless littering everywhere, despite a trash can nearby. Also, the fact that such a beautiful car is also dented at its side, probably while negotiating tight corners, shows how disparate the rich and the poor are. The gap is growing wide. Social unrest is inevitable.

I enjoy Adele's songs. But I must say that her second single from her album 25, is my favourite of all. I'm a nostalgic person and this song capture nostalgia very well. The song is about you attending a party and the attendees are people who was in your life when you were younger - your friends, colleagues, bosses, school mates. And it is about a song about reluctantly growing old. Such a beautiful number sang by someone who is just 25 year old, no where able to reminiscence about old times, and yet, beautifully crafted and delivered. She's simply marvelous!

Years ago, I still remember watching an Apple keynote where Steve Jobs announced that most of Apple's products at that time, Apple TV, iPod, iTunes and iPhones (I am not sure if iPhones were launched then) are none computer related. So, it doesn't make sense for the company to be called Apple Computers. Instead, he said they are rebranding the company as simple, Apple. 0.02 Ringgit blog was launched in 2003. It's almost 13 years. Our money is worth shit. Inflation for the past 13 years probably have grown 500%. There's GST implemented last year which burden the population even more. We even implemented a rounding scheme such that if your retail bills is $2.56, the retailer is obliged to round it up to $2.60. Similarly, if your bill is $2.52, it will be round down to $2.50. If someone spotted a one sen on the road side, no one bothers to pick it up. The sen is totally worthless. And as such, my 2 sen opinion, if I still keep at insisting it be 2 sen, is worth shit too....

The water in Rio de Janeiro, the city where Olympic Games 2016 is being held, is very dirty. It is actually sewage water and full of virus and bacterias. Athletes have already been strategizing to protect themselves. Some will try to build up immunity by arriving early, while others plan to avoid the water until just before competition in the hopes that the symptoms won't kick in until after the Games are over (the incubation period for viruses can last up to 10 days) via wired What I don't understand is, why did the Olympic Council allow Rio to host the Games? And why do athletes participate and risk their health? The only thing I can think of is that the sportsmen are treating this as a challenge. The challenge of a non-safe environment and how do you win by overcoming these circumstances. If this is the case, then looks like being dumb prevails against common sense.

I have been a big fan of mechanical keyboards all my life. And for the past 3 years, I have made many purchases and tried many switches. Heck, in my forum at loopgit , I even have a dedicated mechanical keyboard category so we can discuss this particular human user interface when using a PC or a Mac. A keyboard is a keyboard, many will tell you. But, the moment you ventured into mechanical keyboard, you are looking at a big onion with many layers that you can peel. Much like mechanical watches or fountain pens, which functions are pretty common but the fact that they are both mechanical in nature, there are many choices and deviation. So, how do you know which keyboard is right for you? Read on for some tips base on my experience of trying out various mechanical keyboards. You might also want to review the different type of switches in this article if you are not familiar with the keyboard switches. Tip #1 - what is your typing style? Before deciding on the type of switches, lo...

I started gaming back in Form 3, at the age of 16, when I joined the school computer club and have access to Apple // for the first time in my life. Back then many people who came to the club played games like Rescue Raiders, Digger, Karateka but my favorite genre has always been role playing game (RPG). I was hooked to games like Might & Magic 1 and 2, Ultima IV, V VI. When I bought my very first PC, the first game I bought in original boxed copy is Ultima Underworld. Underworld was made by this company called Looking Glass Technologies and they are a company that was visionary, talented and ahead of its time. The games they churned out redefine the genre. They impact they made to gaming is out of this world. Games made by them are innovative, technologically advance, replayable and does not conform to the norm. One such game was System Shock. At a time when people were playing using floppy disks, they came out with a fully audio gaming experience on a CD! Instead of reading jou...

Well, recent all guys trip to Cameron Highlands thought me some stuff about what to pack for a trip. For one, an iPhone with Apple Music subscription is really key. During the drive, connect your iPhone to the car Bluetooth and voila, all your playlist are available. And if any of the guys have some special requests, you have millions of songs available at your finger tips. We had a good time reminisence listening to old Canto pop, thinking of the good times at school when these songs were a hit. And it creates lots of conversation topic as well when nostalgia hit. Second, and this is where I made the mistake of not thinking about it, you need an Apple TV! Apple TV is very small and portable. If we were to bring the Apple TV, we can easily connect to the hotel/apartment's TV and you have the whole catalog of YouTube and even Apple movies available to watch!!! Even if you don't own the show, it's worth renting it so that everyone can enjoy! You don't need to have the h...

So, I was browsing the iOS App Store today to look for some new apps to play around with. I went to see the Top Paid category, being curious what my fellow Malaysians are paying their hard earned money for. Imagine my surprise to see a gay boy social networking app, Grindr , being the number 4 top paid app. And ironically, number 2 is a Holy Koran app. Holy Koran being number 2 is not a surprise, Malaysia being a Muslim country and having majority Muslim. Also this is the holy month of Ramadan. But the contradiction between the gay app and the religious app is just too glaring!! What does it mean? We have a lot of gay people in the country? Malaysians are known to be cheap skate. People usually pirate software or they jailbreak their device. And yet, we see people paying for gay app. Perhaps, the Apple owners, known to be owned by more affluent consumers, are majority gay boys(*)? This is interesting! Let's discuss! (*) The reason I said "gay boy...

In my quest of learning to set up a internet forum, I learned a lot of stuff including registering a domain, setting up email servers and of course, being able to install and set up a forum. There are some cost involved: to register a domain, loopgit.com cost a yearly fee, to run the forum software requires an cloud server in Digital Ocean, which cost me RM$40/month (about USD$10). The forum software itself is open sourced and therefore, free, but the hosting server is not. Fortunately, the email service that I subscribed to, mailgun.com, gives me free 10,000 emails every month. So, my actual cost is the Digital Ocean server hosting of USD$10/month. Now that I have set up a forum, I'd like most of the comments from this blog to be channeled over there, as a way to discuss about something I posted. The problem is, after running it for about a month, I have maybe 3 or 4 registered users, which is really pathetic. The root of this issue is the identity of a forum. If I am sellin...

Another old men trip to Cameron Highlands. Very nice and cooling. I’m amaze at many new hotels coming up. There’s this new place called Nova. They have Old Town White Coffee, Teh Tarik Place, Watson and even Hometown Stemsboat. This place is getting more commercialize by the minute. Nova from afar.  Looks very modern. Love the view from our hotel... Fresh air. Very relaxing.

There is going to be a LRT line connecting Bandar Utama to Klang. It's aptly named LRT3. The first station is in Bandar Utama, beside the current MRT station opposite TV3. It then turn into Kayu Ara before the Shell Bandar Utama station along the Damasara river, having a second station to serve Damansara Utama residents. Then it come out of Sprint Highway and supposedly have a 3rd station, called Tropicana station in Merchant Sq. However, recently, they decided to relocate the Tropican station from Merchant Square nearer towards the Lebuh Bandar Utama bridge. This was the original location of Tropicana Station: I am a bit puzzled of the new alignment Tropicana station. It was originally proposed to be put near Merchant Square, which is a commercial area very near Tropicana, BU11, BU12 and Bayu Puteri apartments. If you enter into NKVE using Damansara Toll, Merchant Square is to the left of you as you turn into left towards Subang Jaya/Klang and KLIA. Consider this map, ...

I love to read Stephen King's work. My only of his work started about 10 years ago. Before that, I have always thought Stephen King's story are ghost related. You know, those supernatural beings that haunt old houses. In reality though, his work is not really related to spirits or undead, even though it is always categorize under horror. His stories are just very disturbing and, well, horrifying. For example, look at this synopsis of a short story he wrote. I stumbled upon it today. "Survivor Type" is written as the diary of a disgraced surgeon, Richard Pine (real name Richard Pinzetti), who, while attempting to smuggle a large amount of heroin on a cruise ship, finds himself marooned on a tiny island in the Pacific with very limited supplies and no food. A self-proclaimed "survivor" type, his diary entries documenting his day-to-day activities become more and more disjointed and raving, revealing his slow mental decay and eventual insanity caused by st...

Last evening, a few friends gathered for dinner and the topic of old age and resulting body aches came up. Many claim to have this perpetual neck pain, myself included, and it’s probably caused by too much time spent on a laptop and iPhone which caused our heads to be looking downwards for a long time. And so, the advise was to always keep your head straight up. This morning, I started improvising on my workplace.  What do you think?

One of my readers asked me if I’m going to stop writing in the blog now that I’m spending more time in the forum. Well, I want to say that the blog is still the main point of entry, where the discussion forum serves as a comment section for readers to discuss about the topic I blogged. Having said that though, blog is very much a one way street. I write about what’s on my mind for anyone interested or cared enough to read. And it’s really just a brain or emotional dump. On the contrary, the forum encourages multi way discussions where everyone can chime in and it’s anonymous and safe. Forums can be fun if the right community gathers. Building that community is not easy though. At any rate, I’ll still blog untill the forum grows big. 

Phew, this took a while.. I decided to have a better commenting system as compared to the current stock one provided by Blogger. It allows better conversation among all my readers, provided they still care about commenting. Anyway, I've always wanted to run a forum software. One of the most modern ones, which is mobile ready from ground up, is Discourse. I wanted to share the steps that I did and some of the observations I made when following some of the online documentation. But Blogger is not friendly when sharing code snippets, where as Discourse, the forum that I set up, has great support for codes. So, please click on the comment/discussion below and read on :)

Seriously! Does America ever learned? I remember reading President Obama being really vocal about gun control and then people went mental, saying he's abusing their Second Amendment rights. The President said that during his tenure, there have been the highest number of shooting incidents in the USA. Why are the Aemricans not learning a thing or two? And now, it's a possibility of being Islamic influenced. Donald Trump must be rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of lashing out to the Islamic community!

We have tried the swimming school in One Club Bandar Utama but it wasn’t very effective. The instructors does not seemed to have a proper methodology. They are good swimmers teaching swimming lessons part time. We went with a private instructor who taught 4 kids only and after two full lessons, we felt that the girls didn’t learn anything. We decided that we needed to look for another school.  It so happened that I saw Supersharkz Swim School in the factory area of Kota Damansara when I was around there for a meeting. This is a specialized swimming school and they were from Puchong and they expanded a branch in KD.  We went in to take a look Nice and proper reception counter, with staff in yellow uniform, as compared to One Club’s temporary table manned by some part time school kid.  I love how they have proper program for each level. I think this is similar as One Club except that Supersharkz have a detailed curriculum.  The...

So, the more I work on the layout of this blog and trying to integrate to a forum software, doing sexy web 3.0 stuff, the more I find that Blogger is very limiting, including not enough support or template from people in the 'net. As such, I am seriously thinking of migrating over to Wordpress. I have had this blog for almost 10 years, but I think I needed a fresh start. There are many guides to migration and keeping all the comments and posts, so I don't think I am afraid of losing content. But what about all the post count and site visit? I need to think hard, but for the sake of change and modernization, I might just do it. Regardless, just bookmark ringgit.loopgit.com When I switch, you will be automatically move to the new site.

You might notice the lack of comment buttons. I've removed them in preparation for a forum integration. Should be up by this weekend. Stay tuned!!

So, I have been messing around with domains and very recently bought a domain, loopgit.com for RM5/year. Very cheap! I am not sure exactly what it means but it sounds very open source-y. Strong loop and git hub combined to be loopgit.com. And it turned out you can really buy any domain that you like for maybe around RM60/year. Pretty good, imo. And so, if you type ringgit.loopgit.com , it will redirect you to this blog. I have other plans for loopgit.com - I am thinking of setting up a forum for my readers to collaborate and discuss stuff. Maybe you can even discuss my posts in the front page. I hope I have time to play all these stuff, it is pretty interesting to me.

I read a lot of news. And often I saved or shared those which I find news worthy. If you read this blog on a desktop, the news I shared are shown in a widget on the right. Come join the discussion if the news interest you.

This morning, I had a choice of 3 coffee shops to go to for my breakfast. Typically people would choose the one with good food but I have an entirely different preference which annoyed my wife.  I choose a restaurant with good air circulation as my priority. I hate eating and sweating.  Second priority goes to a restaurant with good tea. Not may restaurant make the same tea and some are very consistent.  If both were met, then I’ll think what I want to eat or whether that coffee shop has great char kuay teow or wantan mee.  This morning though, 2 of the 3 restaurants met my criteria or having great air circulation and serving great tea. I went to one yesterday, and so I thought I should go to the other one, which served very good curry noodles. Surprisingly though, I decided to skip curry noodles and went back to the coffee shop which I ate in yesterday. The reason? The curry noodle shop have very lousy phone reception, which means no internet at all!...

What is unchanging and true? I don’t know. But I’m beginning to think that life is all about the connections we create – the relationships we make with people great and small. We have been given so much. What did we do with it? Were we merciful? Were we kind? Did we love enough? Money and power will mean nothing at the last breath. The only thing that’ll count was how we treated one another. That keeps me awake at night. Perhaps it should. via waiter rant Great retrospective article in waiter rant. I think as we age, inevitably, these are thoughts that pop into our mind. But are we going to do anything about it? Or are we just going to be idle and pass time at our home, watching TV, playing a game of chess or just waiting for time to pass?

One of the charms of instant messaging like WhatsApp, iMessage and Skype is that you don’t need to talk to someone when you want to communicate something. It works well for many of us who are anti- social, in fact, even the social guys who loves to talk still use WhatsApp to communicate. It makes one wonder if people are just being lazy to talk or they prefer to just drop a line and two, go about their way and then come back to attend to the response.  In WhatsApp, on the right side, there is a microphone icon. Pressing and holding it allow you to record short messages and sent it over. On the other end, they see it as a playable link.  I find it awkward to use that feature. It’s like talking on the phone and what’s worse is that you can playback your own voice. And most often than note, we are uncomfortable with how we sound.  But lately, I do value the usefulness of the voice message especially in Malaysia when you have to send messages to people who does not read...

You know how sometimes you think back to your past and you came across certain incidents in your life, and the decision you made at that point in time? And how, in retrospect, you feel you made one of the best decisions ever because you see the benefits now? I have a few life changing decisions that, in retrospect, were the best I’ve made: marrying my wife, choosing to bite the bullet and bought our current house vs looking for houses in other areas. But what I really want to talk about today was choosing SKTM was perhaps the best decision I didn’t know I was making.  Jane was not an easy child to bring up. She was extremely fearful of people, things and change of environment. She expressed her fear through tantrums and screams and inconsolable crying. She was afraid of her kindy, and so we suffered her fear and screams for the first two years while she get used to the kindy. She only enjoyed her kindy in her this (and final) year. That was a relief for one short year. Even that...

I went and see this show unit and found this particular design very tastefully done. They really maximize the floor space making the house very spacious and bright. Really liking it a lot. 

I have started taking Uber when visiting clients. It is so convenient especially when going down town to Kuala Lumpur. Uber is comfortable and I could do my email, WhatsApp, Twitter, phone calls or reading while in the car, stuck in the jam, without needing to worry about tapping and driving. But the more important feature for me is that it accepts American Express corporate card. At the end of the month, when I sit down to do my expense claim, I could automatically pull these expense from Amex into my system without needing to key-in each trip! Uber also conveniently provide me email receipts and all I need is just to print them and attach to my claim. Super duper easy. What is your Uber story?

IBM failed in its true identity years ago when management started making more than their top technical staff. It was not unusual for top rated staff making more than their management chain in the early Watson years. Matter of fact it is the core issue for most US based companies, management seems to thing their job is more difficult than the high end engineer developing the next generation of products. via Cringely Oh my, this statement is so direct, to the point, of the whole issue with tech MNC companies. It’s actually kinda sad. It is happening in IBM, hp, Microsoft, Oracle. Even Dell or Lenovo. And it is the reason why tech startup is becoming successful such as Google, Facebook, etc. The money should go where the skills are. Not where management, project managers who just know how to track progress.