PC Surround Sound
Thinking of setting up a home theatre system with surround sound? Under normal circumstances the easiest way to go about it is to get a packaged home theater system which typically comes with a DVD player. This is usually cheap and hassle free (if you don’t go for high-end stuff that is).
However, if you want to play surround sound content from downloaded video files (e.g. avi or mkv with ac3) then a PC is necessary. Using your PC (assuming you already have one) has the added obvious advantage that you don’t have to spend another dime on getting a DVD player.
Refinancing 602
June 02, the day my housing loan re-pricing was effected. Buried under a pile of letters that i have forgotten to look through was a letter from my bank that says “the interest rate chargeable on your loan account will be revised 2.850000% to 2.018050% per annum on a monthly rest basis”. Finally the savings i have been anticipating have materialized!
Singapore Interest Rates Surge
The Swap Offer Rate (SOR) which i have been tracking has surged to 1.55 and 1.98 respectively for 3 months and 6 months fixing respectively. This is indeed alarming for those who have taken up home loans that are linked to SIBOR or SOR. How are interest rates going to move in the coming year? That is the million dollar question.
I thought i had better do some research to have a sense of bearing. First stop, what do analysts think? There are a few trains of thoughts:
Building a cheap (and decent) Hi-Fi
I want a cheap and decent Hi-Fi. I was wondering, can i get something better with what people normally pay for a Hi-Fi? I know the off-the-shelf home theatre systems can go as low as S$250, but the itch to go the DIY way was just too hard to overcome. So, without actually evaluating any ready-made home theatre system, i decided to go ahead and build one!
Building a cheap (and decent) home media PC
Objective: cheap, excellent sound quality, quiet, decent looking, cheap. One option is to go for the small form factor barebone pc which can be cheap (~S$160) but it will probably mean you have to use the onboard sound which is not going to satisfy my criteria for excellence in sound quality. The solution is to use standard form factor components housed in a compact casing.
Refinancing 101
Having in mind that i was approaching the end of 3 years with my current home loan package, i set off to check what was available in the market before the much higher 4th year rate kicks in. Now my loan package had no lock-in period at all, so i really should have done some investigation earlier to take advantage of lower home loan rates, if there was any. I looked, and lo and behold, home loan rates have indeed come down quite a bit. My original 3rd year rate was 2.85% which i thought was not a bad deal, but i found new home loan rates at 2.30% – 2.40% with 2 years lock-in.
My first post, again
So here i am, almost two years since my last blog entry, starting to write again. Intending to continue posting where i left off, i discovered, to my horror, that my blog has been hijacked. It was probably during the time when google took over blogspot that someone with a google account was somehow able to pretend to own my blog. It is interesting to note that the blog entries that were added later probably came from some kind of bot.