Category Archives: Life

đŸŽ„ Ajoomma

We accidentally watched the movie before it even opened, and well, Ajoomma is a good film.

It is paced and written smartly. It is believable and yet, out there enough so that it catches your interest. It is a short movie, and doesn’t take much of you. It is bright and happy, and it is a very likable movie. Auntie Lim would remind many Singaporeans of their mother, and we know where the story eventually goes, but you’re still drawn in, rooting for Auntie Lim, Jung Su, and Kwon Woo. Even the son has a story to tell. (Call me old, but given the subplot, I am surprised the rating is a NC16.)

I find myself watching fewer and fewer movies over the years, and Covid meant a quieter movie industry in more recent years. But if you need a movie to get back into the movie-going mood, this is a good candidate.

Maybe we will learn to appreciate our families more, tolerate differences more. It is certainly not a movie for cynics. I really appreciated the theme of kindness that came out of the Auntie Lim/ Jung Su story, especially when it shows you how compassion sometimes doesn’t help. 💀 (Really, the best move would have been to stay put, or go back to the last place you lost whoever.) (And oh, I didn’t see it as a romance subplot, oops.)

Links from the past weeks

  • Japan’s jazz coffee bars transcend global barriers.
    On the day that it was announced Japan will soon allow tourists back into the country, a flurry of links about Japan were sent around. We Singaporeans seem to have a mad love for this country. But yes, that image of us in a dark room in Tokyo, sipping black coffee and listening to music
 I can’t wait to go back to Japan.



  • Apparently, being wowed is good for you.
    I do like looking at trees, and my phone contains too many photos of “oh I like this big tree” without me being able to recognise its species, but hey, now I know for sure looking at trees is good for me.



  • I have not been keeping track, but there are now many new switches on the market.

    Having used a TKL for many years, my current favourite is a 75% Vortex 3. And why did I end up buying a Varmilo Minilo? Was it for the skin-like texture? Or the Iris switches touted to have a superior typing experience? Why did I end up with a 65% keyboard that does not have the Home and End buttons that I rely on?



  • ‘There’s endless choice, but you’re not listening’: fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music
    This is of course a very familiar feeling, and I too am guilty of passive listening, and taking too utilitarian an approach when I set music to an experience (e.g. for work; for running), instead of what we used to enjoy: music for the sake of music.

    And so I cancelled my Spotify subscription, bought a few albums off Bandcamp, and consoled myself with this page asking whether ripping CD collections to FLAC is worth it. I also popped some CDs into the Denon, and then smiled when I realised I have quite a number of CDs already ripped using iTunes. Apple doesn’t play that well with high quality audio, and some things don’t change, so you need advice on how to play hi-res music on your iPhone.



  • I remembered being pissed off about the way the knotting appeared on a badminton racket that was restrung by a company that offered delivery services and confirmed my bias by reading this forum thread on badmintoncentral. I will be sending my rackets to the shop I like in the east, even though it is a little troublesome and I will have to collect the rackets some days later when they are ready. Racket re-stringing is always such an exercise.

Some notes on personal tech

  • Monterey on Mac OS allows you to use your iPhone apps on your Mac. If you have a M1 or M2 chip. I was excited until I realise our MBP is a 2018 baby.



  • I recently moved my to-do items/ reminders to Apple Reminders. There are now hashtags and the app has improved much over the years. (My last memory was of it in its skeuomorphic days.)

    I have been using the Things app since 2014, and had always wished for a larger font within the app. But even as I developed presbyopia, it remains unlikely that the app makers will ever allow a font size option to corrupt its (beautiful) UI. That gave me the chance to try different things I guess, and I was using Microsoft To Do for a while. It was decent and had desktop functionality but I didn’t like the daily email summary. The email option could not be turned off because the page that allowed this was a 404. Microsoft probably has too many pages to maintain. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



  • The Reeder app on Mac OS is gorgeous.

    I tried using Netnewswire, the OG RSS reader. I have fond memories of it and was curious about the relaunch in 2021. Alas, the world has moved on, even if I did not mind porting myself back to 2009.



  • I love how the iPhone 13 mini feels in hand. I appreciate its lightness when it is in my pocket. But it seems to be the last tiny phone standing. (It does not exist in the iPhone 14 (2022) lineup.)

    I did get a iPhone 11, to see if that would help with reading longer-form material but I found that for me, the 11 was too clunky, and for now, I want to see if I can leave the phone for the quick and easy (quick input of tasks and notes; quick browse of social media, and as little of it as possible). Related to this, I set myself up on a Mac again for the first time in years. I have not been at a personal computer for years. I miss that version of myself
 who browses and reads longer-form things on the internet, writes a bit (to/ for myself) and burrows down rabbit holes here and there.

    (I was to be reading my books off a Kobo, but it died and therefore I am reading on my tiny phone but it is fine. And you can extract all your highlights via the Libby app.)



Some notes from the UK đŸ‡ŹđŸ‡§âœˆïž

  • For some reason, London looks better than we remember it. After some thought, it seems that this is because of (a) better design seen overall e.g. in signages, billboards and in how things work, e.g. transport, supermarkets; and (b) improved cleanliness.
  • Rental bikes come with phone mounts. That is such a kind thing to do for the consumer. [Our country’s rental bikes are not similarly equipped.]
  • We loved that we could be cashless almost all the way on our trip. This streak was broken briefly at Dover Cliffs, where we used cash to pay for the cab ride from the station to the cliffs.
  • Tips can be left by paywave – the shopkeepers rig up a machine on the wall on your way out. Tap to tip.
  • Express travel card on iOS is awesome – I just waved my iPhone for bus and train rides. No need to unlock phone or activate payment page. (For some reason, it didn’t work on my Apple watch. Mobile data sharing also doesn’t work overseas so I could not have used AW without my phone.)
  • The Avanti trains are terribly ventilated. The air was still, and the trains too wobbly. Only on English trains do we suffer travel sickness. Had to go to Boots to get Kwells. We missed the Japanese shinkansen – clean; comfortable; truly fast. (The trains run by other rail providers e.g. ThamesLink aren’t as bad in terms of ventilation.)
  • No. 10 Downing Street is referred to as “No 10” or “No10” in some papers. Very distracting.
  • We watched Single’s Inferno on our Netflix account via a Chromecast that the hotel TV came with.
  • That was a break from my reading material – Crying in H Mart; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Lord of The Rings. [I seem to have become a person who reads several books at once.]
  • Managed to eat gelato in winter: 1) honeycomb; 2) honey & Japanese miso in Cambridge. It was 3°C and windy.
  • We received updates from the pet hotel at 7 or 8 am every morning. It’s nice to wake up to photos and videos of our cat.
  • The Collinson Assistance test clinic at St Pancras gave us our ART results in half an hour.

đŸ“ș Some things I’ve watched – 2021

Pretend It’s A City
Bling Empire
Bridgerton
Tiong Bahru Social Club
Cecil Hotel
Call My Agent
Vincenzo
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WeWork
WandaVision
Friends reruns
Handmaid’s Tale S4
The Practice rerun
Boston Legal
Shang Chi
The Big Leap
Grey’s Anatomy
Squid Game
Sing China
The Royal House of Windsor
Light the Night
Criminal Minds (SS 14 & 15)
Spiderman: No Way Home

I would recommend those in bold. Seems like nostalgia and crime rule this year.

đŸ“» A note on Spotify

I’ve switched back to using Spotify. For the past two years, I was using Apple Music (AM). This was because I wanted to be able to play music on my Apple Watch (AW) while I went on my runs, without having to bring my phone out.

AM has the most beautiful app, and has most of the songs you may want to listen to. But among music apps (I loved Xiami too), AM is simply not good at discovery / recommendation.

If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have expected it to take two years for Apple and Spotify to sort out the AW functionality for music on-the-go. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I was checking for updates on this issue every few months.

PS. There is an iOS app called Songshift that one can use to transfer playlists between different services.