Scott Savage's Blog

Software runs my life

Year: 2016

7 steps to get your Australian baby onto your Singapore visa

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On October 4, 2016

In Singapore

If you are Australian citizens who just had a baby in Singapore, these steps are for you. The goal is to get your baby an Australian passport and then add them onto your Singaporean employment pass as a dependent, and to do it within the 6 week (42 day) deadline! The Singaporean Government has some steps here, but these are more detailed and Australian specific.

  1. Baby is born!
  2. The hospital will give you a “Notification of Live Birth and Advisory Note“
  3. Make an appointment then take the following documents to a Birth Certificate Registration venue, usually in your hospital lobby. You will pay a small fee (~$18) and get a Birth Certificate on the spot:
    1. Notification of Live Birth and Advisory Note (see step 2)
    2. Parent’s passports and IC Cards
    3. Original marriage certificate of parents (plan for this one in advance!)
  4. Apply for Australian Citizenship by Descent online through the new Australian Department of Immigration website here. You will need to scan a number of documents, including:
    1. Identity documents – usually parent’s passport
    2. Identity declaration form 1195 – signed by a relevant unrelated person
      1. This form also requires a signed/witnessed passport photo of the baby, which you also need to scan separately
  5. Apply for an Australian Passport online through the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs website. You will need a similar set of documents to step 4, with a couple of tricks:
    1. You need the CBD-* number from step 4
    2. You will potentially need a different person to sign the passport photo (so good to have 4 passport photos printed)
  6. Then you will scan the following and send to your employer, who will submit to MOM online on your behalf:
    1. ICA letter (from step 2)
    2. Birth Certificate (from step 3)
    3. Australian Passport for your newborn (from step 5) – or at least notification letter if you haven’t received the passport yet
  7. Finally your employer will schedule a 15 minute appointment for you to visit the ICA Employment Pass Services Centre (EPSC) in Riverwalk. Here your newborn will again have their photo taken for their new dependent pass card and their visa will effectively be finalised, with their new DP card delivered in 4 business days to your office. You will need to bring:
    1. Australian Passport for your newborn (from step 5) – or at least notification letter if you haven’t received the passport yet
    2. Australian In-Principle Approval (IPA) letter (from step 6)
    3. Original and completed Declaration Letter (from step 6) – printed and physically signed by the pass holder parent and the employer (HR representative)

It’s quite a few steps to complete within 42 days, in particular pieces like getting a passport photo of an infant who cannot lift their head up. There are a few photo places like Kodak Express in Tanglin Mall and Kim Tian Colour Centre near Chinatown that you can email a digital photo to, and they will tidy up the background (the wrinkled white sheet you lay them on for the photo) and print the right size for you to collect (get 4 copies minimum).

If you can’t meet the 42 day deadline, you can apply for a Special Pass extension, but you need to prove that you have applied for a passport which is already step 5 of 7.

Good luck!

AsianGut Launched!

By

On June 2, 2016

In Health

3 rice logoAsianGut officially launched today, with a great press release from the University of San Diego!

AsianGut actually started as my MBA major project, partnering up with a surgeon from KK Hospital in Singapore. We wanted to find a way to bring eastern and western approaches to gut health together, leveraging the best of both worlds.

We soon realised that American Gut was at the forefront of western efforts to use DNA sequencing of the gut microbiome to understand exactly what was going on inside us. I loved the citizen science nature of the project, which makes the anonymised data open access so any researcher around the world can work on it for the common good. Open access is a principle I hold very closely.

The launch of AsianGut represents me starting a non-profit distributor of American Gut kits into Singapore initially, and eventually Asia as a whole. There are many logistic, storage and other challenges to overcome, but I’m confident I can scale it up quickly. I’m doing it because I find it an exciting space, and one which can scale to have a really significant impact on humanity. Professionally there’s also a selfish benefit to me, I get the experience of becoming a non-profit director of a health-tech startup.

Now that the project has begun, the focus is on marketing and scaling the volume of samples so we can build the best profile of the multitude of Asian gut microbiomes. This will ensure future researchers can develop treatments and diet plans especially for us. I honestly have no idea what comes once we reach scale and establish strong perspectives on what good gut health even looks like. All I can hope is that we helped, and that we find a further direction that accelerates progress even more. So please sign up for a test today!!

Remove Adware infected YouTube App

By

On January 19, 2016

In Hardware, software, youtube

I recently bought  Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 and Note 3 phones off Lazada in Singapore. Both times the standard ROM was installed, but some modifications had been made. The phones were rooted and some apps had been installed (Kingroot, Google Play Services etc.). The most annoying part however was that if Chrome hadn’t been used for ~10mins and you opened it, then it would open a popup with a full screen advertisement. I started researching how to remove this annoying Adware.

I found one really good article which detailed the debugging process. There are a few pre-steps however:

  1. Root the phone
  2. Install ADB tools on your computer
  3. Plug in the phone via a USB cable

As per the article above, you can then use the ADB logcat to debug what’s going on. Do the following steps from a terminal prompt on your computer:

  1. adb logcat > log.txt
  2. Open Chrome on your Android phone, wait for the ads to load. Take note of the Ad URL that loads (there might be a couple, so try and get the first one)
  3. Ctrl+C to kill logcat
  4. Open the log.txt file in a text editor and search of the URL you noted in step #2

My Ad spam URL was “ymtracking.com” and so I searched for that in log.txt. It came up with this line:

I/ActivityManager(  808): START u0 {act=android.intent.action.VIEW dat=http://global.ymtracking.com/trace?offer_id=111090&aff_id=27742 flg=0x10000000 cmp=com.android.chrome/com.google.android.apps.chrome.Main} from uid 10035 on display 0

This line tells me that a process running under UID 10035 is calling the ad URL. Time to hunt and kill that UID!

  1. adb -d shell
  2. su

Then you need to view the file /data/system/packages.xml. The Xiaomi phones don’t seem to have vi as a text editor installed, so move it to /sdcard/ to download it to your computer, or open it on the phone itself in the browser. Look for the package line that matches the UID you find earlier (10035):

<package name=”<<PACKAGE NAME>>” codePath=”<<DIR>>”  sharedUserId=”10035″>

Now you know the package name and the location. Normally you could enter the following command from the ADB shell as su “pm disable <<PACKAGE NAME>>”, but when I tried that it was not allowed (read only). Trying to reinstall the package didn’t work either. I found I had to actually use the code path and delete the .apk file itself:

  1. cd /system/priv-app/Youtube (what you had as <<DIR>> above)
  2. mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
  3. rm -rf Youtube.apk

That was it! Reboot the phone and the ads are gone. You can then use the Play Store to install YouTube as normal, from the official source.

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