The saddest cooking news I’ve heard in a long time: Black plastic products including spatulas are likely being made from recycled electronic waste like computers and televisions, many of which are treated with flame retardants and other chemicals. Flame retardants can dislodge from polymers easily and make their way into the surrounding environment. They are endocrine disruptors, which interfere with the body’s hormonal system and may be associated with thyroid disease, diabetes, and cancer.
These are my mainstay utensils for certain things I cook and I surely have a dozen in my kitchen including spoons, ladles, slotted and unslotted spatulas, etc., because sometimes silicon is too flexible and wood/steel are too hard. I do have blue plastic spatulas, but they are on the large side… Then even if I buy all the right size blue plastic ones to replace the black ones, we’ll find out that they’re made of recycled nuclear Smurf poop or something…
This is in the refurbished (!) restroom of one of my favorite restaurants in town. After careful observation, I have determined that it’s a MacGyvered pressure plate flushing mechanism that stinks of piss. It looked disgusting, so I just straddled it and stepped on the cleanest part when I was done… So weird.
I try to follow cardinal rules of data management that were drilled into me since I got into computers at university by (#1) taking backups often and (#2) keeping stuff organized. Well, the first one caused my site to go down today because I didn’t really follow the second one.
I try to keep on top of things by doing a full site backup at least once a year, on top of doing periodic database and blog backups. When I finished the full backup today, it stored the tarball (a compressed .tar.gz archive) in my hosted account right next to two other huge ones from last year that I forgot to delete, and it put me over the storage limit. This had the effect of returning ERROR 500 when trying to reach my site. However, I could still get into cPanel from my host’s server address, and support advised me to check the error log and replace core WP files.
The error log was full of lines containing the following:
PHP Warning: Use of undefined constant DATABASE_SERVER - assumed 'DATABASE_SERVER' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP)
Then I noticed that the file size of the wp-config.php file was 0 bytes.
So I downloaded the tarball from the backup I had made earlier and extracted wp-config.php. I replaced the one on the server, and everything seems to be working again.
The PHP warning above is not specific to my host or WordPress configuration, but I couldn’t immediately find a search result describing this exact problem. Then again, Google search really sucks these days, so maybe this post won’t help anybody in any case.
Here is a photo of a statue in a downtown Maha Sarakham canal that’s supposed to be the tail of a mythical river monster of ancient Thai legend, but is jokingly called “the asparagus” by everyone and has become a national symbol of corruption (the city supposedly paid over 100 million baht for it):
It has nothing to do with the server problem above; I’d just wanted to post the photo for a long time.
I remember using QR codes for product tracking (with Keyence printers and scanners) as a salaryman around Y2K at an electronics factory on monster island. The only other place I’d ever seen them used was at kaiten (conveyor) sushi, on the bottom rim of the plastic plates. The codes would be scanned as they went by on the conveyor so old plates of sushi could be pulled – this was more than 20 years ago! Things certainly come full circle (although the new system seems to be RFID-based):
There was a boom in QR code usage here in Thailand from around ten years ago specifically for adding friends in the LINE app, and then again a few years ago for cashless payments tied into the evolving PromptPay system.
I’m having intermittent problems with a keyboard that I bought a year ago and it’s driving me crazy. It skips or lags on certain key presses only sometimes, so it’s very aggravating and difficult to diagnose. This keyboard (HyperX Alloy Origins) was not cheap, so it’s especially maddening.
Is the approx. number of media files I have stored locally on my main hard drive backup. The digital photos go back to 1998 or so. I have them mostly arranged by date in the file names so I can look up people and events chronologically. The 3TB HD in question is old and unhealthy, so it’s currently being synced to a new external 12TB one I picked up on amazon for a hundred bucks!
The US remains the low price king for certain consumer goods, PC components being one of them. The same drive in Thailand would cost many times more, but partially because only a few big brands and questionable knockoffs are sold here- there is no reliable middle ground for many items (large capacity external HDs being one of them).
Here’s to hoping this sync completes trouble-free!
If you are planning to visit Japan from Thailand and haven’t been suckered into buying an eSIM yet, I highly recommend buying a roaming package from DTAC/TRUE (AIS also has similar plans, but I haven’t tried them). The main reason is that it’s much cheaper, but also because I saw many travelers struggling with SIM cards/eSIMs purchased from both vending machines in Japan and online. In the space of one week, I saw at least five people complaining about weak coverage or spotty connectivity.
The DTAC package we chose also came with free travel insurance for a week, which is great, but very difficult to actually find on the DTAC site/mobile app. The DTAC site now directs through the TRUE roaming website (because of the merger last year), but I’m leaving this reference here because we have students going to Japan later this month.
This is the package we chose for a ten day trip, which probably has enough data if you’re not addicted to TikTok (hint, hint, daughter):
And this is what you need to click on to begin the process of registration for the free health insurance from Dhipaya Co. The process will include registering your phone number, filling out online forms, and running a special USSD code.
The graphics for the roaming packages also have English translations, but the insurance one does not. I’m not sure if the insurance is intended mainly for Thai nationals or not, but it accepted the ID number from my pink Thai ID card (it did not accept my passport number).
IMPORTANT NOTE #1: One thing to look out for regarding the insurance is that the coverage is only for a week, and it starts on the day you register for it. So you should register it just before you depart from Thailand.
IMPORTANT NOTE #2: You have to apply for the roaming packages within Thailand.
Once you land, the international roaming should activate automatically. If it does not, you can try switching the Roaming setting on your phone on and off. The coverage in Japan is provided by several carriers. In Osaka, it seemed to mostly be the KDDI network. On the train from Nara, I saw it switch to other networks (maybe DoCoMo or SoftBank – I was sleepy and reminiscing on salaryman/bartender train rides between Tenri and Miyakojima).
We picked up an incomplete set of Callaway Warbirds for Mina at the Tsuruya Golf (Japan’s golf Mecca) main branch in Honmachi. It was exactly the kind of deal I like to find in Japan, because any imperfection in a product can result in huge bargains – we scored the set for less than half off because it was missing the hood (removable top of the golf bag) and a putter. Nam’s good friend ended up gifting Mina a really nice putter anyway, so we packaged the set with bubble wrap and brought it on the plane back to Thailand. Tonight was Mina’s first lesson in nearly a month, so we were peeling the plastic off of the heads before trying each club. It was like golf Christmas.
She’s only had a dozen lessons, and she seems to really like it (which is great now that we are invested in it LOL). This range is currently the only one open in Sarakham, and it’s owned by Mina’s schoolmate’s mom: Non Duea Driving Range Maha Sarakham
I rather like smashing balls with a weighted stick (although I have no proper form and employ only brute force – I hope Mina teaches me the form part someday), so I hope we can start actually golfing soon.
“Based on the response you shared from ChatGPT, it does seem that ChatGPT currently has more capability than me when it comes to directly processing information in Thai and Japanese languages.
My abilities are limited to working with English text, while ChatGPT claims it can understand and generate text in Thai and Japanese to some degree. This would potentially give ChatGPT an advantage in being able to directly analyze primary sources or data in those languages.
However, it’s difficult for me to definitively say whether ChatGPT is “better suited” overall, as there may be other factors at play:
ChatGPT’s proficiency in Thai/Japanese could vary based on the complexity of the content. I may still have strengths in other areas like research methodology, academic writing, analysis from an English perspective, etc. The quality and accuracy of our outputs would need to be evaluated for this specific research context. Ultimately, you may want to explore utilizing both AI assistants – leveraging ChatGPT’s multilingual abilities when dealing directly with Thai/Japanese material, while also taking advantage of my skills for aspects that can be conducted in English.”