A Quarantine Hotel in Xiamen, China

This is the quarantine hotel room I am in. Not bad. The bathroom is huge since it is a spa hotel. The bathtub can hold two people.

I will stay here for two weeks plus an extra "self-quarantine" week (I originally planned to stay at someone's apartment for that, but the community worker told me that the apartment did not qualify for self-quarantine. The good news is that the government will pay for the extra week).

The food is not bad. The breakfast is free and the lunch/dinner costs 50 RMB ($7.85) per meal. I can order takeout/mail but they only come in during dinner time.

The room costs 385 RMB (~$60) a day. Pretty standard from what I've heard.

Body temperature is measured twice a day. At the beginning few days, the nurse came by for the measurement, but at some point, she gave me a thermometer and asked me to do it myself and send the results to her by WeChat. Every few days, the nurse comes by for covid tests, and boy, it is not fun. One nurse is gentler than the other but in general, they poke quite deep into your nose. The throat poke is fine though.

The hall way

Comments

Replacing the Capacitors in my DDII

It is time to recap my Sony wm-DDII. The device is more than 30 years old and the electrolytic capacitors need to be replaced. I got some nichicon fine gold audio grade capacitors. They are much bigger than the original. It was tough but I managed to fit in four nichicon. I can not do AB comparison but I think there is a significant improvement in terms of sound. The bass goes deeper and feels more powerful. The high is also improved. It sounds more detailed and dynamic than before. I am thinking if I should replace the remaining three capacitors later. Update: The rest of the capacitors were replaced with some ELNA "audio" capacitors from ebay (they are relatively cheap). ELNA "audio" capacitors

Repair my Sony D3 Walkman

The left channel of my Sony wm-d3 stopped working. At first, the sound just went in and out. It could get back to working with some twisting and shaking. So I thought it was just oxidation building up on switches and headphone jack, but it was not the case. At some point, it just stopped working altogether. After some quick diagnosis, I found that a wire connected to the cassette head was broken. The weird part was that it looked just fine, but my multimeter said it was not connected: it must be broken somewhere along the wire. I needed to replace the whole wire. The problem was that I needed a dual wire with shielding, and the ones I could find were fat. So I made one by myself by ripping the rubber tube off the fat one and adding some heat shrink as a shell. It was still fatter than the original but at least it fitted. It is not perfect, but it works just fine now. The Original Wires (yellow and blue) The New Wires (yellow and white)

Configure Cloud Backup for my RG351M

I just spent almost an afternoon trying to perform cloud backup for my RG351M portable game console. With this, even if the microSD card dies, I should still be able to restore the game save data and the configurations. This is done by rclone. I obviously didn't come up with this. I just follow the tutorial (and fight with the unstable hotel wifi). Rclone is set up to work relatively straightforwardly with major cloud services in the west. Unfortunately, many of them (such as Google and Mega) are censored in China for various reasons. OpenDrive works though (nice). After entering the necessary information into a command window, rclone will spit out the configuration file, which I will put in the right folder in my RG351M. The first run is slow. After that, it has been reasonably fast since the software only uploads the new/modified files. Using the mobile hotspot instead of the hotel wifi also helps speed things up.

cliz305

Search This Blog