Pan Chen

Author: Pan

  • Borrowing a captioning device at a Canadian movie theatre

    Borrowing a captioning device at a Canadian movie theatre

    Movies in Canadian theatres usually do not have subtitles on the screen. This is a cultural difference that I have noticed for a long time.

    I can understand why. When I watch movies in my first language, if subtitles are there, I almost always read them, even when I do not need them. Sometimes it becomes a distraction.

    But there are also times when I watch a movie in English and I can not fully follow everything. Last Saturday, I went to watch The Odyssey, and I borrowed a captioning device from the theatre. It really improved my understanding of the movie. I think if I did not have the device, I might have fallen asleep halfway through.

    Because there were many people that day, I did not want to affect the people sitting next to me by taking photos during the movie. So I only took a photo outside the auditorium. The device was quite heavy, heavier than it looks.

    This was my third time borrowing a captioning device. The first time was when I watched Barbie, and I still have a photo from that time.

    A movie theatre captioning device displaying captions during Barbie
    The first time I borrowed a captioning device was when I watched Barbie.

    I have two suggestions for this kind of device. I feel that, at least from the technical perspective, they should not be very hard to try.

    1. Add multilingual support. This could help more non-English speakers watch movies in theatres, without forcing subtitles onto the main screen for everyone.
    2. Make the device lighter. The current device already feels heavy to me, so I imagine it may not be very friendly to kids or older people. Maybe theatres could allow phones to act as captioning devices, and only provide a mount, something like a selfie stick, so the phone can be attached to it. I know theatres may worry about people using phones during movies, but maybe a dedicated app or locked mode could solve part of that problem.

    Overall, I am glad that this option exists. It is not something I need every time, but for some movies, it can really change the experience.

  • My misuse of Apple Care+ for my iPhone

    iPhone 15 pro is the first apple device that I subscribe Apple Care+ for, having thought that I could get a free battery replacement after two years (September 2025).

    That’s my only goal of subscribing, and keeping Apple Care+ for two years and four months, spending $13.49 + taxes monthly. I still used cases, Belkin screen protector, every day. I even purchased many different cases, and have exchanged the screen protectors three times or four times.

    I have protected my iPhone 15 pro so well – it is still in pristine condition. No damage or scratches at all. Hence there is no way to make an apple care+ claim under this condition. Anyway, I do not want my device to break, therefore it is a good thing that no claim was made.

    But what about the battery life? It’s been 80% since early last December, so it has been stuck at 80% for two months. So unfortunately, I have to keep the subscriptions until it is finally dropping to 79%!

    Apparently, it is not a wise investment. The out of pocket fee to have the battery replacement is $135 (without apple care+). That is just a little bit more than having AC+ for 10 months! That means that, if I did not have the AC+ at the very beginning, I would have my battery replaced twice – which would give me a much better use experience too (I am now suffering from the reduced battery capacity).

    So if my (and your) goal to have apple care+ just for the battery replacement, then it is a totally wrong reason to have AC+!

    I have made the following changes since last week, to fix the mistakes:

    1. I took off case: this gave me a much lighter phone – similar to iPhone Air if someone puts a case on their Airs. Much better feeling holding it.
    2. I just let it go: without the cognitive thought that I needed to protect my phone from being damaged – it gave me a sense of relief, which I think AC+ is worth for.

    When to stop AC+ now? Under the following two possibilities:

    1. When the battery drops to 79% and my phone is still in a good condition;
    2. When my phone breaks somehow – I will pay to have it repaired/replaced and then stop AC+;
    3. When I lose my patience of keeping AC+ (maybe in 6 months?), I will have my phone express replaced – the genius from the Apple Store told me that I could just go this way to get the battery replaced earlier, no need to actually have a broken phone.

  • Purchased an PS5 Slim for $16 Canadian Dollars

    Today I went to EB Games in Scarborough Town Centre to trade in my old PS5 for the new PS5 Slim. After applying the trade-in credits, I only had to pay $16 for a brand-new console — definitely a great deal.

    The whole process was quick and easy. There was no line-up, and everything was done in about 15 minutes. I told the staff that my old PS5 was the original 2020 launch model, only to find out it was actually from 2021 and a 1100 model, not the 1000 series. The new PS5 Slim I got is the 2100 model, made in Vietnam.

    I don’t really play much PS5, even during the pandemic, but it’s still nice to have one in the living room. At this point, my nephew probably plays my PS5 more than I do. I really miss the old PSP days.

  • Car was hit-and-run on Tuesday

  • Post from the sky

    I am 9955m in the sky, make this post using Air Canada’s WIFI. The speed is good!

  • Freedom Mobile is good

    I switched to Freedom Mobile yesterday from Fido, at the cost of a hard credit check. I am satisfied so far. I don’t see any issues with the signals in Toronto/Scarborough.

    I will pay $35 for 50GB. In contrast, I paid $43 for 35GB with Fido. Most importantly, Freedom Mobile gives me free US roaming, which means that I do not need to worry about paying expensive roaming fees ($12 per day at Fido), just to trigger the roaming by mistake.

    It is not Black Friday yet. However, the BestBuy worker gave me $100 BestBuy gift card to compensate for the $45 activation fee and said I could get a price match should there be a better deal on the actual Black Friday.

    Use my referral code: https://referme.to/panc-16

  • My website went down for about 12 hours due to a fire alarm in the LA’s data centre

    My website is up again.

    When I woke up this morning I got an email from Jetpack Monitoring saying my site was not responsive. Checking the internet, I learned that there was a fire alarm in my website’s data centre, in LA. The fire alarm forced the power to be shut down.

    Around 12:00PM EST, my site is back running. First such incident in 8 years since I started my first personal website.

  • Agincourt go train station parking lot space availability

    I have been driving to the Agincourt Go station and taking the Go train downtown recently, I have had a good experience overall except for the parking lot space availability. It takes me only five minutes to reach the Agincourt Go station but forever to find a parking spot in the mornings. I don’t commute every day so I don’t want to reserve a parking spot. TTCs are not very reliable so I don’t want to take TTC buses to the Go station either.

    So I started an experiment – how early shall I be there to have a parking spot? I started with 9 AM – no space; 8:30 AM – no space; 8:00 AM – no space; 7:30 AM – yes there’s plenty of space.

    Therefore, I came to the conclusion as follows:

    You need to be at Agincourt go train station around 7:30 AM to grab a parking spot – that’s said, you should aim for the 7:30 AM go.

    But Friday is special, even at 10:00 AM you could find a reasonable number of empty parking spots.

  • Presto in Apple Wallet coming very soon?

    News were saying Presto would be coming to Apple Wallet in July this year. Today I saw this search result in google titled “Presto in Apple Wallet”. They even have a picture to promote it.

    But when I clicked, it said 404 not found. Guess they are testing something. Hopefully it’s a good signal that Presto support will come to Apple Wallet very soon!

  • Migrating from Zoho Mail to iCloud+

    I stopped using Zoho Mail last night after being a Zoho customer for nearly six years, and migrated to iCloud+ custom domain email. Zoho mail is affordable and had been providing me with a stable email hosting solution. I started with the free plan and the moved to paid subscription which only cost me ~15 canadian dollars.

    Why I moved to iCloud+ custom domain email is that it’s basically free to me because I am subscribing to iCloud+. It saves me 15 bucks a year. I don’t recall if Zoho has a cap for the number of domain aliases, but iCloud+ custom domain does, limiting the number of domain aliases to Five Domains in my case (not sure if a higher iCloud+ plan gives more aliases, I am with 2TB plan). As for the email address aliases, I haven’t reached the cap yet.

    I am not running a business, so some features by Zoho are not necessary. For the domains that exceed the maximum number of domain aliases, I used CloudFlare email routing to forward the emails automatically to my now iCloud emails (I have many email aliases for receiving different types of emails but I don’t use them all to send, thus forwarding is sufficient).

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