Weight Update

Earlier this year I wrote that my weight, for the first time in my life, had crept north of 60 kg, and that I was trying to get it back down. I then neglected to post any updates, no doubt keeping my readers on tenterhooks.

Well, long story short, I got it down to the 59 kg range, then went on a long holiday to Malaysia where I ate out a lot (they have amazing food), and ended up at over 61 kg.

Now it's back under 60 kg, and I plan to keep it that way.

It seems that for me, the most reliable way to reduce weight is to cut down on rice. Just a few days of eating bread, chicken soup and boiled veg for lunch, instead of my usual generous portion of rice, helped me lose around 2 kg. Unfortunately, humans just need rice – or at least, I do.

But that's if I'm trying to lose weight. If I'm just trying to maintain my current weight, it seems I can keep eating rice, as long as I do some light exercise – which I should be doing anyway.

I like sports, but I've never been one for going to a gym or working out for the sake of it. Lately, to help me stick to a light daily exercise routine, habit stacking has been a very useful strategy.

My electric toothbrush has a two-minute cycle with short pauses after every 30 seconds, which is super helpful as an exercise timer. While brushing, I do squats for the first minute, and calf raises for the next minute. This way I'm doing some lower-body exercise at least twice a day.

I shower twice a day, and before each shower, I try to do ten pushups. While boiling water for my coffee, I do some toe-touches. While watching movies or YouTube videos on my computer, I do a few minutes of skipping or light jogging on the spot. And before going to sleep, I do some reclining hip stretches, though I haven't settled on a specific routine yet.

A pretty light regimen, all things considered – but it's better than nothing!

Discovering Music Through Instagram Reels

Instagram reels have proved to be an interesting and unexpected channel for discovering new music.

Last year I did a dance shoot with my friend Jieying. She edited together some of the footage and shared it, set to Blueprint Supreme (大展鸿图) by Chinese rapper Skai Isyourgod.

If you're on Instagram, you can see the dance video here. The music video for Blueprint Supreme is pretty cool too. The song was going viral in China right around this time, but Jieying's reel was my introduction to it.

Another, much older Chinese song – Ye Lai Xiang by Yoshiko Yamaguchi – was also an Instagram discovery, but I can no longer find the reel in question.

My next example is not a discovery but a rediscovery. Like most Bengali kids, I grew up listening to Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, but it's only after watching a reel about Kolkata at night that I truly came to love Olir Kotha Shune (অলির কথা শুনে) – a heartbreakingly lovely evocation of lovers drifting apart. "The bokul flower laughts to hear the bumblebee's song / How come you no longer laugh at the things I say?"

In my last few examples, the songs in question were just background music. But there are some Instagram posts which specifically recommend certain music, and one such post – by a record store in Copenhagen, of all places – is how I discovered Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat by Charanjit Singh. This Guardian interview from 2011, four years before Singh's death, is a fun read.

Rolleiflex Mistake in Nouvelle Vague (2025)

Nouvelle Vague (2025), directed by Richard Linklater, is a movie about a movie, reenacting the making of Jean-Luc Godard's landmark 1960 film, Breathless (French: À bout de souffle, literally: 'out of breath').

Frank Cicurel plays Raymond Cauchetier, who was set photographer for Breathless and many other French New Wave films. You can see some of Cauchetier's original photos here, shot with a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex (TLR) camera.

As this Guardian interview relates:

Later when Henri Cartier-Bresson suggested he work for Magnum, [Cauchetier] refused to buy the required Leica, sticking with his trusty Rollieflex [sic] that had so often survived being dropped in the Mekong river, thus forfeiting his chance to work for the agency.

Linklater's movie is obsessively attentive to period detail, and of course, Cauchetier is shown using a Rolleiflex (the still below – and all others in this post – are from Nouvelle Vague).

We then see the scene he is photographing:

...and also the image through the Rolleiflex's waist-level finder:

But wait! A TLR finder is laterally inverted, and this image is not. Aubry Dullin, playing lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, is on the left – both in the actual scene and in the finder.

Funnily enough, a subsequent scene doesn't have this error.

Here, Belmondo, in the white shirt, is on the right in the scene:

...and on the left in the finder, as it should be.

I'm guessing the TLR finder image was composited in post, but I have no explanation for why it would be correctly oriented in one scene but not in the other. Maybe they left it in just so that pedants like me could discover it and feel smug.

Improvising from Memory

Years ago, Sujaan (my younger brother) and I directed a school play – a dramatization of Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.

Towards the end of the play, we had a dance sequence in the court of the arch-villain, Khattam-Shud. The scene was meant to be dark, scary and chaotic, and for background music, we chose Hans Zimmer's Why So Serious? (Joker's Theme) from The Dark Knight OST.

At the same time, we wanted an Indian or pan-Asian (as opposed to purely western) sound, so Sujaan had the idea of layering classical vocals and tabla over the Zimmer composition.

Among our high-school cast, we had a girl named Titas who was a very talented classically-trained singer. We played the Zimmer track for her and asked her to come up with a taan (a Hindustani classical music term for vocal improvisation of rapid melodic passages).

Usually for such a recording, the singer would be wearing headphones and listening to the backing track while improvising into a mic. But that day, it turned out that we had some problem with our barebones audio equipment – we could either play music or record it, but not both at once.

Sujaan and I assumed it was a no-go; we would just have to try another day with working equipment. But Titas, in her unassuming way, said "Let me try, maybe I can sing it without playback."

"Uh, okay. Do you want to listen to the track again?"

"I think I got it."

Sujaan and I were still skeptical. If she improvised with headphone playback as planned, we were pretty sure she would do a good job. But without it, maybe her key or tempo would be off. Or maybe her taan just wouldn't fit with the track.

Still, we figured there was no harm in letting her try.

Titas recorded two takes, improvising to music she could hear only in her memory. Both takes were spot on.

I still remember going home and importing the tracks in our mixing software, and the moment we realised we had a perfect fit.

Shown below are the waveforms for the isolated vocals track, takes 1 and 2. You can see how well they line up – just for take 2, she cut it slightly shorter.

Here are takes 1 and 2 of the vocals:

And here's the final track, slightly shortened for this blogpost – an excerpt from the Zimmer composition, with tabla and vocals (take 1) layered on top.

Music System Update: Visualizers

Earlier this month in my music system "upgrades" post, I talked about equalizers and visualizers. Equalizers then got a separate follow-up post, so it's only fair that visualizers get one too.

I started out, as I said in my first post, with a Rainmeter skin called Monstercat Visualizer. It looks cool, especially with the album art, but since it plays on my desktop, it gets covered up by any active windows. What good is a visualizer if I hardly ever see it?

I often listen to music while doing other things on my computer, so I thought it would be nice to have a visualizer which is always visible, perhaps floating on top of other windows. After a good deal of searching and trying out different programs, I've landed on BeatHUD.

BeatHUD has a variety of visualizations – my favourite is pixel, shown below – with customizable colours and backgrounds. In HUD mode, it does exactly what I want – float wherever I want to place it, while also letting me adjust its size or minimize it if it's in the way. In the pic below, BeatHUD at bottom right is responding to Spotify, while I edit photos in Affinity.

I really like BeatHUD. It's surprisingly well-designed and full-featured for a free app – or by any standards, really.

I use Spotify for streaming audio, but for music that lives on my hard drive, I like to use Winamp. Mainly for nostalgic reasons: Winamp – and Winamp skins – were a big part of my teenage years. So while I was at it, I also downloaded Classic Spectrum Analyzer for Winamp:

Having sorted out the visualizer situation on my computer, I wanted something similar for our living-room system – a custom-built amplifier by Pradip Deb (which supports Bluetooth as well as wired inputs for turntables and such) plus two passive speakers.

Maybe someday I'll get a streamer with a display, like the WiiM Ultra, but until then, I'm just using my phone screen as it streams to the amp via Bluetooth:

On my phone, I use Spectrum Analyzer & Visualizer, which can display various customizable visualizations as well as Spotify album art (in the pic, I'm playing ฟื้น / Athithan by Yellow Fang).

This is a free app, but I like it so much that I'm going to buy it just to support the developer.

If you let the app access your phone mic, it can also respond to external audio, e.g. from a record-player. But when playing records, I like to simply display the record sleeve itself – the ultimate "Now playing" visualization.

Incidentally, I added a new track to my Speaker Test playlist which I mentioned in an earlier post. I thought I should have a track which uses obvious stereo panning, so the playlist now includes Pink Floyd's Money. The cash-register sounds in the intro pan between left and right before transitioning into the bass groove which is in the middle.

Snake in the Box

We have a toy – no one seems to remember how we acquired it – which is a wooden box with a lid. When you slide it open, a snake pops out.

I don't have a pic of how it originally looked, but here are a couple of product photos from Amazon:

I recently painted our box. It now has a coiled snake on one side:

...and a mini snakes-and-ladders board on the other:

I used my recently-acquired set of acrylic markers which, despite being super cheap, are a delight to paint with.

I also painted another box and sent it to Tommy. It's a good gift for him because he's working on the snake-in-the-box problem in higher dimensions. His box has a coiled snake like mine, plus another snake traversing the edges of the box in a manner that respects the constraints of the problem.

When I went to the post office to mail it, they asked me what the box contains. I said it's a wooden toy, but in their customs form, they only had an "electronic toy" category – no "wooden toy" or even just "toy". A sign of the times! In the end, they filed it under "handicrafts".

Speaking of snakes, the other day at the Dhakuria Lakes, we saw an Oriental rat snake's unsuccessful attempt to hunt a rat. The snake climbed halfway up a tree and crept into a hollow in which the rat was hiding. But the rat jumped out just in time and scurried away, seemingly unharmed.

Music System Update: Equalizer Tweaks

My previous post was about trying to optimize my low-budget music system – Creative A250 speakers plugged directly into my PC – without buying any new gear. This post is a follow-up, specifically about equalizer settings. (Don't worry, I don't intend to write a new post each time I update my EQ profile.)

As I wrote in my earlier post, my speakers, left to their own devices, sound slightly bass-heavy and muddy. Since the Creatives don't have a physical bass knob, I resorted to a software solution: Equalizer APO with Peace GUI.

I started out using an EQ profile recommended by Google's AI mode. But after a bit of tweaking – guided by my own ears and with no AI input – I find that the following EQ profile works best:

It's just a slight cut to the bass, and an even slighter boost to the mids.

On forums, people routinely suggest setting the pre-amp (top left) to a negative value that matches or exceeds the highest slider gain (–1.5 dB in my case, since my highest gain is 1.5 dB). But even with the pre-amp set to zero, the Peak value meter shows no clipping on Spotify – which is what I use for listening to music on my PC – as long as Spotify's "Normalize volume" is enabled. When disabled, it does clip at times – not audibly, but I can see it on the meter.

Normalize volume, introduced to mitigate the worst excesses of the loudness wars, is a controversial setting. Some say it merely reduces the volume if needed, while others say it also compresses and thereby impacts sound quality, and so recommend turning it off. Based on this test shared on Reddit, I am inclined to side with the former faction, and I keep it on.

Spotify also says:

We normalize an entire album at the same time, so gain compensation doesn’t change between tracks. This means the softer tracks are as soft as you intend them to be.

So if you're listening to something like the Interstellar OST, which has some quiet tracks and some loud ones, normalization should in theory preserve that dynamic range.

Equalizer APO has a quirk which I'll document here, in case it helps anyone. At some point, while trying different settings, I found that even with a flat preset – all sliders set to 0 dB – turning Equalizer APO on and off (power button at top right) was inexplicably affecting the sound.

This Reddit thread finally solved the mystery for me. Turns out, if you accidentally right-click one of the EQ presets (bottom left), it becomes "Always active", i.e. applied on top of whatever other presets or settings you might be using. You have to click on the green-headed man (bottom left, next to the presets box) and turn off the "Always active" feature.

In the course of tweaking my equalizer settings, I ended up making a Spotify playlist called Speaker Test. There are many such playlists online, but this is mine :)

What It Sounds Like, from the KPop Demon Hunters OST, has a thumping beat and soaring soprano vocals. I also like how the lyrics – This is what it sounds like – feel fitting for testing speakers and EQ settings.

Last year I was selling my soundbar, and the buyer – a lady probably around my age – came to my condo to pick it up. I played What It Sounds Like as a demo, and she asked, "Do you have kids? Because my kids listen to this all the time." I said "No, I listen to it myself," which amused her greatly.

The live version of Hotel California is a universally popular test track, but I also included it for sentimental reasons. Years ago, when my brother and I were in school, we went to an electronics trade fair where we heard a hi-fi system, possibly for the first time in our lives. My parents now have a pretty good music system, but back then, such a thing was a distant dream. Anyway, the speakers at the trade fair were playing Hotel California, and ever since, when my brother and I buy new speakers or headphones, this is the first track we play.

Anti-Hero features deep bass, densely-layered synth-pop instrumentation and considerable emotional range in the vocals. The version of Here Comes the Sun that I included in my playlist was mixed by Giles Martin – son of George Martin who produced the original stereo mix – sourced directly from the original eight-track session tapes. On my Creatives, with no equalizer settings dialed in, McCartney's bass occasionally overpowers the melody and flirts with distortion, e.g. at 0:33 (just before and after "Little darling"). The EQ profile that I chose takes care of this problem, dialing down the bass just enough.

Yoshiko Yamaguchi's Ye Lai Xiang is in the mix because after all these meticulously produced and mastered tracks, I enjoy the vintage crackle and lo-fi charm of this 1940s recording. Finally, I included Chaiyya Chaiyya simply because I like it, but then I found that it's featured on What Hi-Fi's 9 test tracks you've probably never heard of. Apparently its "infectiously rhythmic, upbeat elements are a true test of a system’s musicality."

Let me know if you have any favourite tracks for testing speakers. It's always nice to get reader recommendations, and potentially discover new music.

Music System "Upgrades"

I recently went down a hi-fi audio rabbit-hole, frequenting r/BudgetAudiophile and Audio Science Review, and watching videos like this fascinating lecture by Floyd Toole.

Long story short, I didn't buy anything in the end, and decided, at least for now, to just stick with my current low-budget setup. And by low-budget I mean truly low-budget: S$20, to be precise – a Creative A250 set which I bought secondhand a few years ago. It consists of a subwoofer and two satellite speakers, and is plugged into my computer's headphone jack.

Someday if I'm settled somewhere – or at least know I'm going to be in the same city for the foreseeable future – I might invest in a pair of nice bookshelf speakers, and an integrated DAC and amplifier. For now, I'm happy with the Creative, not least because I suspect I'm not a very discerning or demanding listener to begin with. For example, my parents have a nice set of speakers and amplifier. I can tell that the sound quality is superior to my Creative, but I'm not sure I would want to pay a significant amount for the upgrade.

If anything, all my research made me appreciate my Creative even more. By audiophile standards, it may not be up to scratch, but lay reviewers rate it highly in its class. It really was amazing value for money.

I then started wondering if there were any upgrades I could make to my setup that didn't involve buying gear.

DAC

The first thing I experimented with was a DAC – a device which converts digital data (e.g. from a computer or phone) to an analogue signal that speakers can play. DAC prices start at just a few dollars, and go up to the thousands. I read online that a DAC should improve sound quality – that is, plugging speakers into the DAC which is in turn plugged into the computer's USB-C port (as opposed to plugging speakers directly into the headphone jack).

As it happens, I already had a DAC – from the 'just a few dollars' end of the spectrum – which I had bought to connect wired headphones to my phone. When I tried this out with my Creatives, I couldn't hear any noticeable improvement. It could be because my DAC is too basic. Or perhaps the limiting factor is my speakers, or Spotify sound quality, or... who knows!

Equalizer APO and Peace GUI

Next, I thought about equalizer settings.

Much as I like my Creatives, I had long suspected that they are a bit bass-heavy. Certain things, like thunder or explosions in movies, sound impressive, but music can feel a bit muddy. My brother, who plays music and probably has a better ear than me, confirmed my suspicions.

The Creatives don't have a bass knob, so I downloaded the highly-regarded Equalizer APO with Peace GUI. Google AI gave me an impressively thorough set of recommendations tailored to my speakers and the kind of music I listen to. It even explained and justified each individual setting. One bit which I found interesting:

Budget 2.1 multimedia systems are inherently "scooped" by default – meaning the small satellite speakers struggle with lower-mid frequencies, and the down-firing subwoofer can quickly become muddy and overpowering.

This video explains subwoofer crossover; the AI response seems to be saying that the Creatives' frequency response likely has a dip, as shown at 4:19 of the video.

The AI-recommended EQ profile, designed to compensate for this shortcoming, does improve the sound. The speakers sound less muffled, more clear and airy – while the bass still packs a punch.

Monstercat Visualizer

The final "upgrade" was cosmetic, in the sense that it has no inherent impact on sound quality. But it looks nice, and thus improves the listening experience, however slightly.

Monstercat Visualizer is a Rainmeter skin – a kind of widget which shows dancing frequency bars on my desktop when I play music, and also fetches album art and track info from Spotify.

You can customize the number of bars, plus various other parameters like their height, width, colour, sensitivity and so on. I made a little demo here.

If you want to install the visualizer on your PC (this is Windows specific; I don't know how it works on other operating systems), the process is a bit complicated.

First off, I recommend using older versions of Rainmeter and Monstercat (I use 4.5.0 and 2.1.0 respectively), because the latest versions apparently cause Rainmeter to crash.

If you want not just the bars but also album art and track info from Spotify, you need to install two more tools – WebNowPlaying and spicetify-cli – as described here and here. Again, you need an older version of WebNowPlaying (I use 1.2.0), because the latest version doesn't work as documented here.

I don't want Rainmeter to launch on startup, so I disabled that option. Instead, using AutoHotKey, I configured my keyboard so that Win+S launches Spotify and Rainmeter simultaneously.

Clearly, Rainmeter and Monstercat are third-party tools, and their functionality is sometimes affected by Windows and Spotify updates. I am not sure how long the visualizer will continue to work, but hey, at least it works for now.

---

Edit: See Part 2 and Part 3.

Wireless Transfers

Quick notes on how I wirelessly transfer or stream data between a few different devices:

1. Windows PC > Android phone, and vice versa
2. Android phone > Kobo e-reader
3. Windows PC > Samsung Smart TV

It's a mundane and technical topic, but each process has its quirks. So I thought I'll put it out there – for my own reference, and on the off chance that it helps someone else.

PC > Android, and vice versa

Sometimes I want to transfer files between my PC and phone, e.g. a video which I edited on my PC but want to share through a mobile app, or a sound recording which I made on my phone but want to edit on my PC.

If you use a Windows PC and Android phone like I do, the integration is not as good as the Apple ecosystem where you can simply AirDrop files between Mac and iPhone. For a while I used to save the file as an attachment in a Gmail draft, then download it from my other device. But a better and faster way is to use dedicated apps – Phone Link on PC, and Link to Windows on phone. Once the apps are installed, the connection and file-transfer are simple enough – just a matter of following on-screen instructions.

One minor (but fixable) annoyance is that the devices then keep wanting to connect. This (and the attendant notifications) is not something I want, because it's only about once a week that I need to make such transfers.

The fix is to first go to Apps > Startup on your PC, and deactivate Phone Link. Then open Link to Windows on your phone, go to Settings, and turn it off.

When you want to transfer, you'll need to turn it back on, but I prefer that to leaving it on and have it constantly trying to connect.

Android > Kobo

If I download an e-book to my phone and want to read it on my Kobo (which is a Kindle-like e-reader), the transfer can be accomplished through a third-party utility called send.djazz.se – as explained on this Reddit thread. I also like the redditor's tip to set the Kobo browser homepage to the djazz page. It saves me a bit of time and effort, since this is literally the only thing I use the Kobo browser for.

Windows PC > Samsung Smart TV

My parents have a smart TV (Samsung Series 6), and occasionally I'll want to use the TV to watch a movie file that lives on my hard drive. The first couple of times I took my computer out to the living room, and hooked it up with an HDMI cable. I don't know why it took me a while to explore the possibility of a wireless connection.

Turns out, a wireless connection is not only possible, but pretty straightforward if the TV and PC are on the same wifi network. No extra apps needed, and sound gets streamed too. But since the movie file is technically playing on my computer, I found that if I wanted to pause or resume the movie, I had to leave the comfort of the living-room and run back to my room to operate my computer.

To get around this, I use Unified Remote, an app which lets me use my phone keyboard to control my PC. In VLC Media Player, space bar is the keyboard shortcut for pause/resume, and it also works on the phone app.

On my computer, I also use the Left and Right Arrow keys to jump back or forward. Unfortunately arrow keys don't work on the free version of Unified Remote and other such apps; you need the paid version for that. I even tried reassigning the VLC shortcuts for jump back and forward to other keys; the reassignment works on my PC, but for some reason, not on my phone via Unified Remote.

Oh well, as long as pause/resume works, I guess I can make do without arrow keys. Into each life some rain must fall.

Notes on the Malayan Tiger

When visiting a new country, I like to read books set in that country – like A Room with a View before going to Florence, A Fez of the Heart before my Turkish holiday, and Independent People before visiting Iceland.

On a recent trip to Malaysia, I read The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo – a novel set in the 1930s, when Malaysia (then called Malaya) was a British colony. I took this pic on my night flight to Kuala Lumpur.

I like when airplanes have this little folding table above the main table; it makes life easier for those of us who like to eat while reading. Yangsze Choo's author bio says she too "loves to eat and read (often at the same time)."

* * *

Soon after I moved to Singapore, I read an edited volume of essays called Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene (for which, if I may brag, my friend Xiaoyun wrote the titular chapter). A subsequent chapter called 'Consuming Tigers' has this line which made a deep impression on me:

In 1930, the last wild tiger of Singapore was shot in Choa Chu Kang.

The story was reported in the Straits Times of October 27. Stuff like this is a powerful reminder of how quickly Singapore was transformed from an island which was mostly jungle, to the highly urbanised city-state that we see today.

* * *

Ng Xin, author of 'Consuming Tigers', says:

Since I began writing this chapter, I’ve started to notice tigers everywhere. They’re on beer cans and balm pots, on airplanes and bank facades, in the living room of Crazy Rich Asians and the Singapore state crest.

I had a similar experience after reading The Night Tiger, which features tigers as well as a character who may or may not be a weretiger.

Klang, which is near Kuala Lumpur, has some nice street art. This tiger is painted on a door, but the metal gate makes it look like it's in a cage.

I liked these tiles outside Cheah Kongsi, a temple in Penang:

...and I brought back this fridge magnet which now adorns my whiteboard:

* * *

In a previous post I wrote that I have a 19-inch monitor, but I recently got a 24.5-inch one (Acer EK251Q P6). The first film I watched on my new monitor was a documentary called Malaysia's Last Tigers.

It's on YouTube, but that version has a few minutes missing. You can watch the whole thing on Māori+ if you are in New Zealand (or use a VPN).

One of my favourite bits of the documentary is around 24:00 where they show footage of all the other animals which were captured by the National Tiger Survey's camera traps. They show lesser mouse deer, sunbear, wild dogs, binturong, yellow-throated marten, serow, pig-tailed macaques, Indian civet, crab-eating mongoose, Malayan tapir, Asian elephant, clouded leopard, marbled cat, leopard cat, golden cat, and my favourite, a black panther. And that's just the mammals.

Rainforests are really something.

This Is Going on My Resume

At the seaside temple of Tua Pek Kong at Tanjong Tokong, Penang.

My Court Shoes Saga

My toxic trait is being resistant to buying specialised apparel for activities that I partake in.

Years ago I wrote:

I have trekked in the Himalayas in trainers – one trail took us to over 18,000 ft – and maintained, not without a touch of disdain, that only people who were not surefooted enough needed specialized boots for hiking.

When I first got into pickleball, I just wore my regular trainers – an Adidas pair which I got secondhand (but unused) for something like $20.

Because I also used those shoes as daily wear – and because, for reasons unknown, I always seem to wear out my soles much faster than most other people do – I soon ended up with virtually no treads at all.

The treadless shoes were slippery at the best of times, but when it rained, it was like playing on ice. It got to a point where if the court was wet, I would rather play without shoes, because even barefoot I had more grip.

Photo by my friend Li Ling; I like the blurry ball at top left!

I finally accepted what my friends had been telling me for months: I needed new shoes.

After much research, I found a heavily discounted pair of Asics Solution Speed FF 3.

The orange was brighter than I expected, but once I got used to it, I really came to love that pair. They were comfortable and bouncy, they had good traction and support, and best of all, they were extremely light – like running on clouds.

The Solution Speed series are all-surface shoes, so I could wear them on both indoor and outdoor courts. And they are non-marking, so I could wear them for badminton too. I even wore them in non-sports situations, pairing them with jeans.

But once again, as with all my shoes, the treads eventually wore out.

Brand new (left) and after a few months' use (right). In places the blue outer sole

wore out completely, exposing the white inner.

In hindsight, I think that non-marking soles are simply more delicate. Even if they are marketed as all-surface, if you wear them on hard courts, they won't last long.

Recall that I started out not wanting to buy specialized court shoes at all, then acquired an all-surface pair which proved to be not so all-surface after all. Finally, I capitulated completely and ended up buying two separate pairs for indoor and outdoor courts.

My current outdoor court shoes are a pair of Adidas Court Spec 2. I don't love them like I loved my orange Asics, but they do the job.

However, I do love my indoor shoes – badminton shoes, which I also use for indoor pickleball. This Yonex Dominant pair, which I got secondhand but unused:

They have excellent grip, and they really help with quick directional changes which are a key part of badminton. Looks-wise, they are nothing special, but I got colourful laces, and behold!

I stole this idea from Japanese badminton player Tomoka Miyazaki. I don't have a fraction of her badminton skill, but hey, at least I can wear non-matching day-glo laces.

Objects of Daily Use

There should be a word for the delightful feeling of having used something for a while and occasionally wishing that it had a particular feature, only to discover that it had that feature all along.

I have a pair of earbuds – Soundcore R50i NC, a gift from Juliet – and I really like them. The baby blue colour, the rounded pebble-like box with its thin LED indicator, the satisfying way the earbuds snap magnetically into their charging slots, they way they sound, how light they are...

There was only thing I wished I could change. The earbuds, I thought, had only two modes, toggled with a long press: Noise cancelling, which actively suppresses ambient sounds, and Transparency, which magnifies them. My headphones (also Soundcore) have a Normal mode which is in between – they neither suppress nor amplify. Noise-cancellation bothers me, and I often found myself wishing my earbuds had a Normal mode too.

Guess what, they did have it all along. I just needed to activate it through the phone app.

I also discovered that the box doubles as a phone stand, as shown in the image below. This wasn't a feature that I needed or wished for, but it's cute.

It's a great feeling in general when we really like an object that we use daily – I mean really like, beyond just finding it "useful" or "satisfactory". This is currently the case with my earbuds, glasses and computer, among other things.

In This Economy? (Uno Reverse Edition)

I recently posted about the meme phrase, "In this economy?" The meme's implication, as KYM puts it, is that "the state of the economy is too negative to take part in a given task."

While watching this Japanese movie called Thermae Romae, I came across an amusing (unintentional?) reversal of the phrase. The hero, a bath-house architect in ancient Rome, is worried about finding work, and his friend says:

* * *

Two years ago, I pondered starting a new blog, perhaps on Substack. And I said that if I were to do so, it would be a photography blog.

Well, I have indeed started a new blog, and on Substack, but it's about videography – something I hadn't yet gotten into when I wrote that post. I already contribute to 35mmc, which serves as an outlet for my writing about photography, so I don't feel the need for a photography blog. But these days I'm dabbling in videography and video-editing, and I sometimes have things to say about it.

I'll continue to write here as always, but if you want to check out my Substack, here's the link.

Humans Just Need Rice

"Humans just need rice, don’t they? Basically," says Reiko, the protagonist's best friend in Butter – a novel by Asako Yuzuki.

I don't know about all humans, but I certainly do, and many of my Asian friends are the same.

In The Solitary Gourmet (2024), the protagonist, who is Japanese, goes to a restaurant in Paris. He orders onion soup and beef bourguignon, which comes with bread and roasted vegetables. "This is traditional French food," he says, as he eats with relish. "Amazing."

But moments later:

Goro-san, I know exactly how you feel.

I also like this t-shirt from the same movie: "All of sudden [sic], I feel hungry."

I know exactly how he feels too.

Immigrants

Voja Mitrovic – a darkroom printer who printed for the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka – was born in 1937 in Foča, in the former Yugoslavia. His father was killed in the war when he was only four, and he arrived in Paris in 1974 with one hundred French Francs in his pocket and a backpack full of clothes and sausages.

Photographer Peter Turnley has a great story about how Mitrovic helped him get a job in a Paris photo-lab. Helped is an understatement; if you read the post, you'll know what I mean. Anyway, at the end of the story, Turnley says:

I took Voja aside, and said, "Thank you. I will find a way one day to thank you for this!" He looked at me and said, "I was an immigrant also. I know what it means to need work – we need to help each other!"

I've been an immigrant in various countries for most of my adult life. I was fortunate to have a vastly more comfortable financial cushion than Mitrovic, but I have frequently received help, in many different forms, from fellow immigrants. I like to think I have helped them too, when I could – both friends and strangers.

Last year, I asked my college friend Indro – who, like me, is an Indian immigrant to Singapore – if I could stay with him for about a week. I followed up with something along the lines of "No worries if not, I could stay with one of my other friends too. But I thought I'd ask you first coz you have a spare bedroom."

Indro said, "Even if I had just one room, you're always welcome to stay with me."

The dynamic between us being what it is, I deflected with silly humour: "If you want to sleep with me, you can just say it!" But privately, I almost teared up, and I know I'll remember his reply for a long time to come.

(See also, People on the Corner.)

In This Economy?

One of my favourite xkcd comics is So it has come to this – a phrase which, we are told, "creates instant dramatic tension and is a valid observation in literally any situation".

My brother's friend recently said something similar about the meme phrase "X? In this economy?" – as seen here (live, laugh, AND love? in this economy?) or here (Serotonin? In this economy?)

The more absurd the usage, the more I enjoy it, like a comment on this video from the Orleans Masters badminton final between Pink Opatniputh and Nozomi Okuhara: "A high serve? In this economy?"

For context, Okuhara and many other players generally serve short, as seen at 6:51 of this highlights reel. But Opatniputh often serves high and long – even in this economy.

Syncretism on Dempsey Hill

Like the Rangoon Road situation I posted about earlier, here's another example of Hindu deity Ganesh cohabiting with a Taoist deity (I don't know his name; if you do, please let me know).

This shrine is on Dempsey Hill in Singapore, opposite the Museum of Ice Cream.

Fuji X-E5 Video Settings

When I got into videography two years ago, I had to absorb a lot of technical information in relatively short order. At the same time, there were various other topics which I knew I should know about, but which I put off to a later date because they seemed less interesting, or in some cases, mind-numbingly boring.

One such topic was the question of video settings – the choice of resolution, frame rate, codec, bitrate and so forth. For a while, I got by using my camera's default settings with some tweaks, but this week I finally decided to take matters into my own hands and did a deep-dive.

My goal was to figure out the best video settings for my own needs (emphasis on my own), set up my camera (Fuji X-E5) accordingly, and hopefully leave them largely untouched for the next few years. Set and forget, as they say.

That said, I don't want to completely forget this hard-earned knowledge, so I thought I'd set down what I learned in a blogpost. The topic is frankly rather dry, but as with my mechanical keyboard posts, this post is mainly for my own future reference. If it helps anyone, that's a bonus.

The video settings that I was looking into are resolution, frame rate, codec, chroma subsampling, bit depth, format and bitrate.

The way I went about this was to (a) do a bunch of internet research (the best sources I found are Video Bitrates and Export Myths by Jarle Leirpoll, Pal2Tech's guide to shooting video on the Fuji X-T5, and Understanding Video Formats and Settings by Canon), (b) shoot a series of 6-second test clips of my cat at various settings, and (c) analyse and compare. You can see two of the test clips on my YouTube: Full HD and 4K. And here are thumbnails of all seven clips:

Some caveats: These are short clips, with soft, consistent lighting and relatively little movement. The camera was on a tripod, and the microphone was muted. Results can and do vary when clips are longer and have more going on. Also, my comparison is based on my own camera, display environment, hardware resources and subjective preferences. Your mileage may vary.

As an aside, did you know that you can right-click on a YouTube video and bring up "Stats for nerds"?

Going forward, the settings that I plan to use on my Fuji X-E5 are:

Resolution: 1080p Full HD at 16:9 aspect ratio

Playing back the straight-out-of-camera video files on my monitor (Dell E198WFPf 19-inch 1440×900px widescreen LCD), I actually can't see a difference between FHD and 4K. When uploaded to YouTube, I can see a slight difference – see the clips linked above – but not enough to make me want to shoot 4K for personal projects (as opposed to paid work).

Shooting and editing 4K requires significantly more storage and processing power. For example, my 6-second-long 4K file is 139 MB, whereas my FHD file (other settings being identical) is only 51 MB. 4K also requires faster memory cards, drains the camera battery and increases the risk of overheating. So FHD it is.

As for aspect ratio, the only two choices are 16:9 and 17:9. The former is more common, and anyway if I want a wider ratio, I can always crop.

Frame rate: 24fps

Online video content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok is often shot at 30 or even 60 frames per second. Some people feel that faster frame rates look smoother or cleaner. Higher fps video is also more forgiving of camera-shake. But I prefer 24fps for its more cinematic look and smaller file sizes.

One downside is that my phone (Google Pixel 6a) shoots video at 30fps by default, and doesn't offer 24fps. So if I use both phone and camera footage in the same video, I might need to slow down the 30fps phone clips to 80% speed, or risk dropped frames. But such is life.

Codec: H.265 Long GOP

When it comes to codecs (video compression formats), my camera offers a choice between H.264 and the newer H.265 aka HEVC. H.264 is more common and widely supported, while H.265 compresses more efficiently, resulting in smaller file sizes with the same quality. H.265 does require more processing power for playback and editing, but so far, my computer seems to be up to the task. If I subsequently run into problems, e.g. with longer videos or more intensive editing, I might switch back to H.264.

My Fuji X-E5 only offers Long GOP, while some other Fuji models also offer All-Intra. That's okay, because Long GOP would be my choice either way. There's one situation, though, when All-Intra would be nice to have: when I want to shoot at a shutter speed slower than 1/24 sec for a step-printing effect. This can be done with All-Intra, but not Long GOP.

Chroma subsampling: 420

The choices here are 422 and 420 (often written as 4:2:2 and 4:2:0). With 4:2:2, you get slightly better quality – a negligible or perhaps indiscernible improvement for my purposes – at the cost of slightly bigger file sizes. More importantly, the free version of Da Vinci Resolve, which I use for video editing, only supports 4:2:0, so that seals the deal.

Bit depth: 10-bit

H.264 is 8-bit while H.265 (my choice, see above) is 10-bit. Higher bit depth (not to be confused with bitrate, see below) means more tonal detail can be recorded, allowing for smoother gradients and more flexibility in editing. I suspect the difference is negligible for my purposes, but my H.265 file, as I mentioned, turns out to be slightly smaller, so there's no reason not to go with 10-bit.

Format: MOV

The only other option is MP4, which is also fine. But on my camera, H.265 encoding only delivers MOV (H.264 offers both MOV and MP4). For what it's worth, Pal2Tech also favours MOV because it includes slightly better quality audio (LPCM as opposed to AAC), but I'm not sure how much I care about that.

Bitrate: 50 MBPS

With the aforementioned settings, my camera offers bitrates from 8 MBPS to 200 MBPS. Online recommendations vary: Pal2Tech recommends using the highest bitrate available, but many others seem to think that 50 MBPS is plenty for FHD.

My file sizes for 6-second-long clips shot at 8, 50 and 200 MBPS (other settings being kept constant) are 12, 40 and 51 MB respectively. Much to my surprise, I can't actually see a noticeable difference on my monitor between even the highest and lowest bitrates. So I was tempted to just roll with 8 MBPS to save on file size, but it's possible, even likely, that higher bitrates will prove their worth in other shooting environments (e.g. more movement or challenging lighting conditions) and when colour grading. As such, 50 MBPS seems like a safe bet.

It makes sense to have good quality footage to begin with; later I can choose to export the edited video at lower bitrates if I want to save space, and if I can do so without noticeable degradation. On that note, I like this comment from u/CNCcamon1: "Your goal should be for the YouTube encoding to be the bottleneck for visual quality." Jarle Leirpoll says something similar, under Myth #4 about YouTube uploads.

To sum up, the video settings I plan to use in most situations are – say it after me – 1080p Full HD at 16:9 aspect ratio and 24fps, with H.265 Long GOP 10-bit 4:2:0 at 50 MBPS.

* * *

Blog note: A blog like mine should ideally display differently on desktop and mobile (responsive design). I didn't like Blogger's default options for "mobile view", so I left it in "desktop view" for mobile browsers too. But that makes the text-size very small on phone screens. In my mind, this was an interim solution – I thought that someday I would code and set up the mobile view myself. But realistically, I don't know when, if ever, I will do that, so tonight I picked one of Blogger's default mobile themes (Dynamic view). I still think the desktop theme, which I extensively customised, is far better. But if you're reading on your phone, as I often do myself, the blog should now be more readable than before.

Shunbun no Hi: Bird Feeder

My spring equinox post is a bit late this year.

A couple of years ago my friend Abbi installed a bird-feeder in her yard which has a solar-powered video camera. It streams the footage, so I (or anyone with login permission) can view the live feed, wherever in the world we might be. When the camera detects movement, it also uploads a video clip to the cloud, so we can view it after the event.

The photos below are stills from such clips. I enjoy seeing the yard at different times of the year, a bit like my Seasons posts of yore. Sometimes the camera gets activated by squirrels, chipmunks – and children, like at bottom right.

And one time, in the dead of night, it got activated by deer, resulting in some eerily magical footage.