Lizards in Two Countries

I took this photo a couple of years ago in our backyard in Kolkata:

...and this one at Tampines Eco Green in Singapore:

They look different but I'm pretty sure they are the same species: oriental garden lizard, also known as changeable lizard because they can change colour. Wikipedia says:

The ground-colour is generally a light brownish olive, but the lizard can change it to bright red, to black, and to a mixture of both. This change is sometimes confined to the head, at other times diffused over the whole body and tail.

Jewel-Like Jumping Spiders

Sometime back I posted phone pics of an electric blue jumping spider, and said "someday I hope to get a good macro shot of one of these beauties".

Since then I've been carrying my camera more frequently when I go for walks in the Botanic Gardens, and keeping an eye out for spiders – and you really do need to keep an eye out, because these guys are tiny!

Besides the electric blue jumping spider (Phintella vittata) that I saw earlier, there are at least two other species with a jewel-like blue-green carapace (this post was very helpful for identification).

1. Cosmophasis thalassina (sea green jumping spider)

With their big round eyes, jumping spiders are incredibly cute and photogenic. Wikipedia describes them in more sedate terms:

the large anterior eyes of Salticidae are adapted to detailed, three-dimensional vision for purposes of estimating the range, direction, and nature of potential prey, permitting the spider to direct its attacking leaps with great precision.

2. Cosmophasis umbratica (shiny jumping spider)

3. Phintella vittata (electric blue jumping spider)

Another reason I love jumping spiders is because they are so curious, often gazing up at me and my camera – perhaps sizing us up as potential prey – and even jumping onto my bag (as in the photo above) or my arm (below). That's my forearm hair, in case you needed a reminder of how tiny they are.

Art Galleries and Beverages: London Photos

Some photos from my recent trip to London, as promised. Captions are below each photo.

Looking at art in 2024 (the National Gallery)

Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

One-second exposure resting my camera on the railing. My friend who was with me saw the photo on my LCD and asked for a copy to hang on her wall :)

Camden Art Centre

Phone pic! I hadn't been to Camden Art Centre in all the years I lived in London. This time round, I met a friend here for coffee. I'm glad I went; it's a lovely space.

The Chandos, a pub near the National Gallery

Café in South Kensington

It would have been easy enough to straighten this in post, but I like the Dutch tilt.

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Blog note: The text column of my blogposts is 580px wide. But if images are 580px wide, the image quality suffers on high-pixel-density displays like the one on my Asus Zenbook laptop. One solution is to upload 1500px-wide images, and edit the HTML code so that they are displayed at 580px. I've been doing this manually for a while, but Tommy kindly wrote some code for me which makes the process easier.

Animals in Good Light

Sometimes I think I should post animal photos only if it's (a) a relatively uncommon animal, or (b) a common animal exhibiting some interesting behaviour. But I think there's something to be said for animals in good light, even if – as in this case – they are relatively common animals, just going about their day.

The first animal literally has "common" in its name – the common sun skink. And true to its name, it was sitting in a patch of sunlight.

And this here is a white-crested laughingthrush:

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Blog note: Earlier this month I wrote about moving some inactive or extinct blogs from my blogroll to my CQA page. My subset of friends who blog has dwindled since when I started out, but for the first time in years, I've added two friends' blogs to my blogroll. Say hello to Tomoe and Violet :)

Charizard

My friend's kid, who is into Pokémon, asked for a Charizard drawing, for which I repurposed a page from my UK visa application. I then cut around the drawing and made it into a card, but I think the full page is more amusing.

Balestier Buildings 1: Lam Yeo Coffee Powder Factory

I live just off Balestier Road in Singapore, and I really like the street, and my neighbourhood in general. Among other things, there are quite a few buildings with real character – interesting in a quiet way. The street is eclectic (or chapalang). There are the usual shopping malls, hotels and condominiums, but also Buddhist temples, 90s-style nightclubs, durian stalls, baroque shophouses and a Chinese opera stage.

Most of Singapore is modern – at times it feels almost too modern. But Balestier has several older buildings and establishments. One of those is Lam Yeo Coffee Powder Factory, which sells ground coffee and beans. And which I decided to try and draw.

I'm hoping this can be a series, which is why I optimistically titled this post Balestier Buildings 1. This one is a fineliner sketch, but in future I might try watercolour as well.

For me, the gold standard for this type of drawing is abbillust (no relation to my friend Abbi, mentioned previously). If I could choose between painting like Raphael and drawing like Abby – I kid you not: I would choose drawing like Abby.

Herpetofauna by Night

A few months ago I shared a photo of an oriental whip snake, but that was in the daytime. Now here's one by night, also in Pasir Ris Park:

And a four-lined tree frog (such lovely colours):

We saw a few other snakes that night: dog-faced water snakes (which I've seen before), a bronzeback, and – finally! – a mangrove pit viper. The viper was far away though, so I couldn't get a photo. Maybe one day...

Unfair Contest

My friend Abbi – previously featured on this blog, though not by name, here and here – is in the hospital, and for the past week or so, I've thought of little else. I told her I lost 3 lbs in 3 days, and she said, "Hey, I've lost about 25 the past few months 😅" I said this is an unfair contest.

There's a passage in The Great Gatsby which makes me think of her. In the book, the narrator is talking about Gatsby's smile, but in Abbi's case I'm thinking about her conversation and personality.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. … It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

I don't know if other people who know her feel this way, but I really do.

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Blog note: Many of the blogs that were on my blogroll are no longer active: some have merely gone quiet, while others have been made private or disappeared altogether. I moved the inactive links to the sidebar of my CQA page. I didn't want to remove them altogether because it's nice to have this record – a bittersweet reminder of a time when blogging was more of a community activity.

Friends, Older and Younger

It's fun having friends from different age groups; I think I'm lucky that way.

A few months ago I used the term core memory in a blogpost. Tommy, who is in his 60s and a former software engineer, commented, "I'm old enough to remember when 'core memory' was what computers had before semiconductor RAM."

Last week my friend Wu Chi asked me my MBTI type. I said I did the test five years ago, and can't remember what I got.

"Five years?! MBTI is that old?! Five years ago I was in high school!"

I looked up MBTI on Wikipedia, which said the Briggs Myers Type Indicator Handbook was published in 1944. Wu Chi had to take a few sips of yuzu soda to recover. "1944," she said wonderingly. "That's older than New China."

Adulting

Three things which I do now, which I didn't do, say, 10 years ago (okay I was well into adulthood 10 years ago, but adulting is a work in progress):

• Add birthdays of friends and family into Google Calendar, so that I get a reminder on the day. For a long time I thought I could (or should be able to) just remember birthdays, but eventually I realised that's not happening. There is no shame in taking recourse to technology.
• Give myself treats. To celebrate when something good happens, to console myself when I am sad, or to reward myself for doing an unpleasant but necessary task. The treat itself is usually simple and low-cost, often free – like pizza, or taking some time out of my day to go for a walk in nature. I've done this sort of thing for a while, but these days I do it more intentionally, as a treat. Or self-care, you might say.
• Clean my flat before I go on holiday, to ensure a more pleasant homecoming for future me.

Speaking of holidays, I just got back from a trip to the UK; I'll post some photos soon.

[Edit: Photos are now up.]

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Blog note: Last month I wrote 12 posts, which is a new record for this blog. Granted, some of them were photos with not that much text, but hey it all counts. The previous record was 11 posts in March 2011, and some of those were short extracts.

In my final post of 2023, I wrote that (a minimum of) 24 posts a year is a good number to aim for. With this post, I've already reached that number, and we're only in the first week of June. Time to treat myself, maybe :)

Nobody Home

Ornate sunbird nest, now empty because the chicks have fledged.

The skin (technically exoskeleton) of a cicada. When a nymph matures, it crawls out of its skin which is then discarded.

Bike Friend

Of all the things I've owned or used, a bike, to me, feels most like a person – like a friend, even.

The inscription on this bike, which I saw one night when walking back from Toa Payoh Public Library, made me smile. "Always be with you."

Banded Snakes

After banded arthropods, I now bring you banded snakes.

These pictures are from a night walk along Old Upper Thomson Road. I went with a few friends who are amateur herpers.

They are all quite good at spotting snakes, but one of them – a Thai guy who moved to Singapore some years ago – is particularly sharp-eyed. He spotted both snakes pictured in this post – this gold-ringed cat snake:

…as well as this twin-barred tree snake, which – like the paradise tree snake featured earlier – is a "flying" snake.

My friend Kwang Ik and I were sharing a camera – my camera, but with his lens, flash and diffuser. Moreover, one of us typically took the photo while the other held the off-camera flash and diffuser. At this point we don't really know who took which photo, and in any case it doesn't really matter. "Collaboration is the condition of photography in the most basic sense," as this book puts it. We decided to share credit, and also thanked the snakes.

Baby Birds

Large-tailed nightjar with chick, at the Singapore Botanic Gardens:

...and Sunda scops owlets (how cute are they?!)

There are plenty of parks and forests in Singapore, but for reasons best known to the owls, they chose a built-up neighbourhood, right next to a bus stop. In the photo below you can see the tree – and the hollow – where they nested.

Word spread far and wide through social media and news sites, and half of Singapore turned up to see them.

Not that I have any kind of moral high ground; I obviously went to see them too. But I didn't want to add to the crowds any more than I had to, so I just stayed for five minutes, took some photos and went home.

Both the nightjar chick and the owlets have fledged now. I hope they have long and happy lives!

Nothing Left to Read

Outlook shows this message when you have nothing in your inbox:

This is not a state I have ever achieved, by the way. I generally have zero unread emails, but I don't file or delete all my email, so my inbox is never altogether empty.

Once or twice a month, I go to the library and stock up on books – mostly novels. Sometimes I have specific books that I want to borrow, but often I'm just browsing.

When I was a kid, I wanted to read everything. Even in my teens and early twenties, my reading tastes were more varied. And now? I still read a lot, but I feel like my tastes are narrower than before. When I go to the library without specific books in mind, I always worry that this is the day when I finally fail to find any books that interest me. Nothing left to read.

Or rather, the worry is not about running out of books; it's more about running out of interest or curiosity. Of my tastes narrowing to a point where I comb the fiction section of a library but fail to find a book I want to read.

The other day I walked through the fiction section in alphabetical order and, although I was admittedly just skimming and not looking too closely, I almost made it to the end without finding any books I wanted to borrow. Then in the Y–Z shelves, I suddenly found three promising titles: Lion City by Ng Yi-Sheng, The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara and Happiness Is Possible by Oleg Zaionchkovsky.

I didn't enjoy Lion City and gave up partway through. The People in the Trees was really good – like The Lost World (which I loved as a child) but with post-colonial consciousness. And Happiness Is Possible was a cracker – one of those instances when it felt less like me finding a book; more like the book finding me, at a time when I was was ready for it.

I liked it enough that, in keeping with my stated policy, I bought a copy for keeps.

Blue-Banded Creatures

Sunda blue-banded digger bee:

Electric blue jumping spider on my hand:

...and a close-up (sadly I only had my phone, but someday I hope to get a good macro shot of one of these beauties):

Backlit Geckos

I was saying to Tommy that his recent post, featuring a spider on a microwave, reminded me of a photo I have of a gecko.

Me:	Maybe I should post it. But I wonder if I've been posting too many animal pics recently.
Tommy:	No such thing as too many animal pics!

Thus reassured, I bring you, first, gecko on illuminated street-map:

...and second, geckos on restaurant sign:

Idiot

From Eric Hobsbawm's introduction to The Communist Manifesto:

…the original meaning of the Greek term 'idiotes', from which the current meaning of 'idiot' or 'idiocy' is derived: 'a person concerned only with his own private affairs and not with those of the wider community'.

Bloglook and Blogname

The other day I was reading a post by photographer Hannah Yoon, and thinking that Substack's design looks rather sophisticated and nice – whitespace, serif font, occasionally (in this case) broken up with an understated photograph. And I found myself wondering if I should give this blog another makeover to make it look more like Substack, or perhaps even start a new blog on Substack. (A parallel blog I mean; I wouldn't abandon this one.)

The new blog, if I were to start one, would be about photography. In 2020 I started writing regularly for a couple of photography websites, whereupon I decided I would reserve this blog mostly for non-photography topics. But I've recently been wondering if, rather than writing for other photography blogs, I should just start my own. Just an idle thought; I most likely won't act on it. In any case, changing this blog's design to make it more Substack-like was still an option.

Then I saw this tweet asking what people miss about the "good old days" of the web, to which @jeesun replied:

i miss blogs with a unique look. it seems like everyone uses substack nowadays.

I think I'll keep my old design for now :)

What I would like to change is how it looks on mobile devices. But that involves messing with the CSS template and implementing responsive design, which I currently don't (perhaps never will) have the energy for.

* * *

In hindsight, I would have liked to have chosen a blog name and URL that don't have my own name – but that ship has sailed.

Last year I wrote that one of the blog names I considered was The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I think Planting Cabbages would have been a good name too. It's from a quote by Michel de Montaigne:

Let death find me planting my cabbages, indifferent to death, and still more to my unfinished garden.

Planting Cabbages is my username on WeChat, which I use to communicate with some of my Chinese friends. One time they asked me why I picked this name, and I told them about the Montaigne quote. They found it very interesting, and on the taxi ride home, we ended up having a long discussion about it. One of them also speaks French, so she looked up the original quote and proposed various possible translations. Another mentioned a Chinese philosopher who said something similar.

They later told me that the discussion continued after they dropped me off. The taxi-driver was silent throughout, but right at the end, as they were getting off, he asked, "But why cabbages?"

Two Beetles

A rhinoceros beetle we found on a night walk in Pasir Ris Park, sitting on a wooden bench.

I had to get quite close to the beetle, with my camera in one hand, and a flash (with small softbox) in the other. But the beetle was unbothered.

The next beetle (rose chafer) was sadly past being bothered; I found it in my room when it was already dead. It was lying on the floor, but I placed it on this book for the photo op.

The Lamb Lies Down on Balestier

Remember the dangerous sheep from last year?

Now the lamb is lying down.

Balestier is just the name of my street; the post title references a Genesis album.

Spiders with Prey

From the Singapore Botanic Gardens, a black wood spider (Nephila kuhlii) eating a bee:

Our Goth friend is an orb-weaving spider, same genus as the golden orb weaver featured last year.

I took the photo with a Fuji 50-230mm f/4.5-6.7 zoom lens (purchased secondhand for only SGD 130) coupled with a Raynox DCR-250 macro attachment. This combination does the job, but I'm thinking about upgrading to a dedicated macro lens for my Fuji, specifically the Laowa 65mm f/2.8. So I'm monitoring Carousell as one does, waiting for a good deal on a used copy.

The Laowa, borrowed from a friend, is what I used for the photo below, taken in Thomson Nature Park. A jumping spider (not sure what species) eating a moth:

Finally, a spider not with prey but with an egg sac. Heteropoda lunula, also known as the Lightning Huntsman, in Pasir Ris Park.

The last photo is from a night walk in Pasir Ris Park. In my last post I said I have a 100% (2 out of 2) record of spotting snakes at Pasir Ris. On last week's night walk, I saw an oriental whip snake (which I've seen before) and also a few dog-faced water snakes, which are apparently pretty common but I hadn't seen them before. I didn't get a good photo though, as they were in turbid waters.

Two Snakes

Pasir Ris Park in Singapore is a good place to see snakes. On my very first visit, I saw an Oriental whip snake (reported here), and on my next trip, we saw a paradise tree snake. It was chilling on a wooden railing – hard to miss, really.

Paradise tree snakes are also known as flying snakes, because they can flatten their bodies and glide from tree to tree. I was hoping to see it glide, but this particular snake eventually crawled onto a tree and disappeared into the bushes.

So I have a 100% success rate at Pasir Ris Park so far – two trips, two snakes. But what I was really hoping to see was a mangrove pit viper. Oh well, maybe next time.

I did however see a viper last weekend at Thomson Nature Park – a male Wagler's pit viper which had just had a meal.

A close-up of the eye. Vipers are so cool.

Shunbun no Hi: Giant Leaf

I'm almost a month late with my annual Spring Equinox post (it completely slipped my mind), but I've been wanting to share these photos for a while.

The Singapore Botanic Gardens have these palms – Vanuatu fan palm, I think, but I could be wrong – with absolutely humungous leaves. Here's one such leaf, with my forearm for scale.

There's a little depression at the base of the leaf, where rotting leaves and other natural debris can accumulate.

Seeds land there too, and if the conditions are right, little saplings can sprout on the leaf itself. You can just about see this in the top photo too, but here's a close-up.

Stay Out of Trouble

I like reading, so I often get books as gifts, and some of them come with inscriptions. My all-time favourite inscription is from my college friend Darshana, in a book she gave me after I finished college and just before I left for London.

I like the choice of book too – The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories. I love trains, and Darshana and I had a really nice overnight train ride together. But the inscription is just perfect. It's a quote from Stay Out of Trouble by the Kings of Convenience, a band which she introduced me to.

Darshana and I got in trouble a few times. Science City in Kolkata had (perhaps still has?) life-size animatronic dinosaurs. At one point, some of them were discarded and dumped in an off-limits area of the park. I saw them from the highway, on the other side of a fence. In this untended and overgrown corner of the park, they looked much more real and in their element than among the fake trees and landscaping of the Evolution Park.

I asked Darshana if she wanted to scale the fence with me and get up close to the dinosaurs, perhaps even climb on them. She said "Let's do it."

So one day we scaled the fence and entered this off-limits area of Science City. We were making our way through the undergrowth, approaching the dinosaurs, but before we could get too close, a guard saw us. He gave us a firm talking-to, threatened to fine us for trespass, but eventually let us go with a warning.

We didn't get to climb on the dinosaurs, but before the guard appeared, I did get a photo.

Mechanical Keyboards, Part 1: Choosing a Keyboard

I had never seriously looked into mechanical keyboards until about a month ago, but it turns out that I now have a lot to say on the subject. So much so that I'm going to split it into two posts:

Part 1 (this post): Why I decided to get a S$35* mechanical keyboard, and how I chose it.

Part 2: Software customisation (creating hotkeys, shortcuts and macros using Autohotkey which is a free, open-source program) and hardware customisation (keycaps and switches).

* S$35 = US$26.

I realise that this is a niche topic, probably of interest to about 0.1% of my readers (what is 0.1% of 5 readers?) It's also rather dry and technical. Nevertheless, I'm writing it all down, partly for my own future reference, and on the off chance that it helps someone who is actually interested in MKs and facing some of the same choices that confronted me.

MK: What

So what is a mechanical keyboard? Mechanical keyboards (MKs for short) have individual mechanical switches under each key, whereas membrane keyboards – which are cheaper and more common – have a rubber or silicone membrane beneath the keys. Many people find MKs more tactile and satisfying to type on.

My mechanical keyboard, with some keycaps removed to show the red switches

On r/mechanicalkeyboards, MKs are promoted (and membrane keyboards correspondingly lampooned) with religious zeal – like this comment describing membrane keyboards and their "mushy uncomfortable feeling we've all come to despise."

Despise! But hey, this is reddit.

MK: Why

A good MK is obviously satisfying, but I think other keyboards are fine too. My laptop keyboard has chiclet keys, and I was fine with it. My work keyboard, on the other hand, really does not spark joy; I think it's below par even by membrane keyboard standards. I put up with it for over a year, but eventually decided that I had had enough.

A few other factors contributed to my decision. Two of my friends (one is a co-worker, the other an ex-co-worker) have MKs. I tried them and liked the look and feel. Around the same time, Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer wrote a series of posts about keyboards, which also contributed to luring me down the MK rabbit-hole.

My main reasons for wanting a mechanical keyboard (in no particular order):

1. They are pleasing to type on.

2. Depending on the size/layout that you choose, MKs can be small, cute and minimalist – and I'm a sucker for small, cute and minimalist things.

3. If your MK is hot-swappable, its look and feel can be customised (by swapping out the switches and keycaps, for example).

4. They are supposedly more durable, and also, if an individual key stops functioning, it can be replaced without compromising the keyboard.

Some MK users also say that MKs improve their typing speed and accuracy, but for me, they're about the same. I did this speed test on my laptop keyboard, before I got my MK. Not bad, huh?

With the MK, my speed initially dropped by about 20 wpm, but after a few days I got used to the new keys and was back up to speed.

Choices, choices

If you're thinking about getting a MK, these are some of the main decisions that will confront you. I've explained my own choices, but of course your preferences and priorities may be different.

1. Budget: High-end MKs can get really expensive, running into hundreds of dollars – and that's before you get to artisanal keycaps and 24-karat gold plating. Mine was just S$35 (US$26), and I'm perfectly happy with it (more on that below). If you want to personalise your MK, a decent set of keycaps costs about the same.

2. Split or monoblock: Split keyboards – like Corne or Dygma – look cool, and I was (am) curious to see if they are more comfortable to use. But they are way above my budget, so I went for a plain-Jane monoblock (one-piece) keyboard.

3. Ergonomic or regular: Ergonomic keyboards tend to be bigger and – let's not mince words – a bit ugly. Besides, I'm used to regular keyboards, so I saw no reason to change.

Stagger refers to how the rows or columns of keys are offset to one another. Some MK enthusiasts find vertical or orthogonal stagger more ergonomic, but budget keyboards all have "normal stagger", and again, that's what I am used to. It would take me a while to get used to a different layout and learn to type as fast as I do now, and I'm not convinced that the ergonomic benefits (if any) will be worth it.

4. Size: Or in other words, how many keys. This article has a good overview of the most common sizes, but in short, a full-size (100%) keyboard has 104 keys, while a 40% keyboard may have as few as 42.

I wanted to get the smallest size that would not be actively inconvenient to use, and ended up choosing the 65% (68-key) configuration. Compared to a full-size keyboard, it lacks the numpad, F keys and some of the navigation and pause/lock keys (instead of F1, for example, you press Fn+1). The next smallest size, which is 60%, also loses the arrow keys – but I like my arrow keys, thank you very much.

If you're interested in 65% keyboards, this site (archived), while not exhaustive, is still a great list. The original reddit post also lists a small subset of 60% keyboards which are unusual in that they have arrow keys.

6. Hot-swappable: Most MKs are hot-swappable, but it's best to check. I wanted a hot swappable keyboard, for the reasons given here (except the last reason; I don't think mechanical switches make me any more precise, probably about the same). Speaking of which, that's another choice to be made – what kind of switch you want. But I'll cover this in the next post when I talk about hardware customisation.

7. Other features: I wanted a wired keyboard, because wireless keyboards need batteries, and I feel like I already have too many rechargeable batteries and devices in my life. Some keyboards have RGB backlight. I thought I didn't care about this one way or another (the lights can be switched off, which is what I planned to do). But the keyboard I got happens to be backlit, and it's kind of fun to light it up sometimes.

My mechanical keyboard

This is the keyboard I eventually got: Bow G68S, all-white version with red (linear, silent) switches. Like I said, it was just S$35 (US$26), and I'm perfectly happy with it – so much so that I am considering buying another one to use at home. I like the white keycaps more than I expected, but I'm still playing around with other keycaps (more on that in the next post).

The keyboard is a compact and pleasing shape, and doesn't feel cheap at all. It has little stands which allow for two different levels of inclination. It even came with keycap- and switch-pullers, and three extra switches.

The best thing about it is that it makes typing actively pleasurable, not just a routine chore. Like writing with a good fountain pen. Maybe with time, the magic will wear off, but I've had it for two weeks now, and it still feels as good as ever.

As I said in a previous post, it has literally improved my quality of life.