Teluk Pulai Ba Kut Teh (Klang Branch)

I try not to miss this place whenever I visited my sister at Subang or my brother-in-law at Klang. I found the Ba Kut Teh soup here is thick and taste very nice. The pork meat is cooked to perfection and very soft in texture. The rice here is served with oily rice, rather than plain rice in Penang. Lunch time is very crowded, my advice try to reach here before 12pm.



















Address:
32, Jalan Batai Laut 5,
Kawasan 16 Taman Intan,
41300, Klang.
Tel: 03-33445196
Opening hours: 7 am – 3 pm

Passion Fruit

Yesterday my friend brought me few Passion fruits. The size is about 7cm-8cm in diameter, very round and purplish colour. Actually, this is the first time I'm encountered this type of fruit. Perhaps I've been living in the cave for a very long time already.

From the outside, hardly smell anything. Luckily I asked my friend how to eat it, otherwise I will just cut through it and causing a mess. Once I cut open the top portion, immediately I can smell the great aroma. The juice is sweet but with a little sour trace. The seeds are crunchy. To my surprise, my two kids like it. A simple Google search, found out the Passion fruits, leaves and flowers can be used for medical treatment purposes. Below are some extracts from the Internet.

• The juice but mainly the leaves of passion fruit contain the alkaloids, including Harman, which has blood pressure lowering, sedative and antispasmodic action. The passion fruit leaves are used in many countries as medicines.
• The flower of passion fruit has a mild sedative and can help to induce sleep. Passion flower has been used in the treatment of nervous and easily excited children, bronchial asthma, insomnia, nervous gastrointestinal disorders and menopausal problems. Passion flower is sometimes used as a mild hallucinogen.

Calibration, calibration, calibration ...

To me, no point of owning a Ferrari if the car did not get a proper engine tuning. Same goes to HT, without a proper calibration (colour & sound) you will not able to maximize the full potential of your system. Recently I bought a colorimeter from Amazon. X-Rite i1 is a small and compact colorimeter, very affordable for a beginner like me. The setup is very simple, just attach the meter to the tripod and point the sensor to the projector or TV screen and hook up the meter's USB cable to the Notebook or PC. You need a proper software to interpret the data from the meter. I am using ColorHCFR software. More details about Greyscale and Colour Calibration can be found here.

Hardwares needed:

• Colorimeter
• Notebook or PC
• Tripod
  

Software needed:

• ColorHCFR or other calibration softwares
• Video test patterns
  

Click here on my previous sharing about sound calibration.

















Greyscale Calibration results:

• Top - after calibration
• Bottom - before calibration

My humble Home Theater/Hi Fi setup

After painstaking effort and moolah (i.e. $$$), here is my current HT and Hi Fi setup. This is where me and my family spend the good quality time together at home. My kids simply love to watch the high definition animations like Bolt, Kungfu Panda, Monster Inc. , Ice Age, Ratatouille, Up, Wall-E etc on the big screen, again and again and again. Kids just don't get bored on something that they like. The DIY acoustic panels really help to enhance the cinema and Hi Fi experience. The next DIY projects are Class A stereo amplifier and DAC. Trust me, the audiophile journey never end here ...

HT setup:

• Optoma HD-65 720p projector
• DIY 90" matte white projector screen
• DIY acoustic panels
• Marantz SR6003 receiver
• Panasonic DMP-BD60 Blu Ray player
• Xtreamer HD media player with 2x1TB Dlink NAS
  
• Monitor Audio Bronze BR2 LCR speakers
• Mordaunt Short 902i surround speakers
• Velodyne CHT-12Q subwoofer with Auralex GRAMMA Isolation Riser
  

Hi Fi setup:

• Marantz CD5001 CDP
• Marantz PM4001 Integrated Amplifier
• DIY silver plated RCA interconnect
• Monitor Audio Bronze BR2 speakers
• Chord SilverPlus speaker cables
  

Dim Sum @ Sungai Petani - 大優賓香港點心

For the Dim Sum lovers, you must try this one. 大優賓 Restaurant is located at Taman Intan, Sungai Petani, Kedah. According to my Bro, this restaurant is very packed during weekend. One thing for sure, the ingredients they used very fresh, especially the prawns are big and QQ. Not something you can get outside hotel or big restaurants. To me, you can enjoy the 5 stars food at 2 stars price.

D-Link DIR655

Time really flies... It is time for my 5 year-old Netgear WGR614 wireless G router to make way for the tailo D-Link DIR655, wireless N gigabit router.

Unboxing DIR655, the box is about half of WGR614.
















Time to test the new beast. With my notebook next to the router, not problem to get full 300Mbps speed.




Move to 1st floor, still can get full 300Mbps with a little drop in signal strength, sui...



Next, install Cat6 patch cable for my desktop PC and NAS to the new router. I manage to get 24.4 MB/s transfer speed for a 700+ MB file from the Dlink DNS-323 NAS to my PC (both Gigabit setup) versus 10.0MB/s using Cat5e patch cable and old WGR614 100mbps router. Still Google around if further tweaks on the XP and NAS can further boost the transfer speed, pls stay tuned. Below test results are done by SmallNetBuilder on various NAS.



For the record, here is my PC configuration;

• CPU - Intel Q6600 Quadcore @ 2.40GHz, 8MB L2 Cache
• Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 Rev2.0
• RAM - 4GB DDR2
  
• HDD -320GB WD SATA
• NIC - Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet
• O/S - XP SP2