My Remax CR-3XP Alien series 1-to-5 smart car charger

With more and more electronic gadgets such as air sterilizer, dashcam, GPS, etc. in the car, couple with the occasional need to recharge my phone and/or tablet while driving, the available charging sockets in my car is not sufficient to provide power to so much devices at the same time.

My solution is to have the Remax CR-3XP Alien series 1-to-5 smart car charger that can extend one car charging socket into 2 charging sockets with independent switch and 3 USB charging ports with combined power output of up to 3.4A.

This Remax CR-3XP smart car charger is designed to sit nicely in the car cup holder. It has 2 colour options: black+gold and white. The black+gold one looks nicer and is pretty hot selling, easily got sold out in the online shops.

This Remax CR-3XP smart car charger has an LED display, which will show the car battery voltage when its 3 USB charging ports are not in used. When either one or more of its USB ports is charging some gadget, the LED display will show the charging amperage.

The photo below shows my Remax CR-3XP smart car charger in action, sitting nicely in one of the car cup holders, with one of its charging sockets connected to my MedKlinn Autoplus air sterilizer.

You can notice that there are 2 buttons beside the LED display, one on its right and another on its left, which can be used to switch on/off the power supply to its 2 charging sockets respectively.

Converting video files to be playable from USB drive in Honda 39102-T9A-T8XX-M1 display audio head unit

The Honda 39102-T9A-T8XX-M1 display audio is the stock head unit of Honda City 2017 Facelift 1.5L E/V variants.

It is able to play 4 types of multimedia files in a USB thumb drive: MP3 music, WMA music, JPEG photo, and MP4 video.

When the car parking handbrake is engaged, the video will display on the screen, otherwise, the video will become a blue screen while the music in the MP4 continue playing. This is a safety feature so that the driver will focus on driving instead of watching video on the screen. If you want to bypass this safety feature, you can search for a compatible "bypass cable" for this head unit and install it.

In order for any video to be playable in this Honda 39102-T9A-T8XX-M1 head unit, you need to convert it into MP4 format with the following custom settings:

• Frame size: 640 x 480
• Adjustment: Original
• Video codec: MPEG4
• Frame rate: 15 fps
• Bitrate type: Auto
• Audio codec: MP3
• Channels: Stereo
• Sample rate: 48000 Hz
• Audio Bitrate: 320 Kbps

Conversion can be done using a free software called Freemake Video Converter.

Although the car audio manual claimed that it is able to play video in H.264 Base Line Profile format, I have not succeed to make it work with any H.264 video.

The car audio manual also claimed that it is able to support video frame rate up to 30 fps, but if you set the fps higher than 15, the video might not be playing smoothly on the screen.

As the car audio manual has stated that it supports VGA size video only, the frame size is best to be 640x480. If you set it higher than that, the video will be totally unplayable with the "not supported resolution type" error.

Luckily, this head unit is capable to play MP3 in pretty high sample rate and bitrate. Its music playing capability is quite OK, particularly with the 8 speakers in the V variant, despite its video playing capability is really primitive.

EPF declared 6.9% (conventional) / 6.4% (shariah) dividend for 2017

The Employees Provident Fund (EPF, a.k.a. KWSP) has just declared the dividend rate for financial year 2017.

If you still remember, earlier on, EPF has launched its Simpanan Shariah Islamic saving account beside its conventional saving account. Members can apply to switch their account type from conventional to Shariah at their own will.

Year 2017 was the first year of dividend declaration for Shariah account, while dividend for conventional account has been declared annually since 1952.

For year 2017, the dividend declared for conventional account is 6.9% while for Shariah account is 6.4%. The dividend has already credited into members' account, and you can check for it by login into your EPF i-Account.

The 6.9% dividend for EPF conventional account in 2017 is 21% higher than the 5.7%  dividend declared for 2016 (last year).

Calculation: (6.90-5.70)/5.70 = 1.20/5.70 = 21%

It is also 7.8% higher than the 6.4% Shariah dividend declared for the same year.

Calculation: (6.90-6.40)/6.40 = 0.50/6.40 = 7.8%

It seems that members who had opted to convert their account to Shariah might be upset and regret, due to the lower dividend in 2017.

According to EPF, the Shariah account derived its income solely from its portion of shariah assets while for conventional account, a total of 38% of the income was generated by its share of Shariah assets and 62% from non-Shariah assets.

The returns for conventional account were enhanced by the income generated from non-shariah investments following the outperformance of global banking stocks, while Shariah account does not include conventional banking stocks due to their non-Shariah compliant status.

In addition, equity impairments from shariah-compliant stocks, particularly the oil and gas, and telecommunication counters, has lowered the income of the EPF's shariah portfolio.

Is the 6.9%/6.4% dividend considered good or not? The 6.9% dividend rate is the best since year 1996. However, EPF had been consistently declaring dividends of above 7% from 1976 until 1996! The dividend rate had even been consistently above 8% during 1980-1994. So, you judge yourself!

You can click here to check the historical EPF dividend pay-out rates from 1952 until today to have a clearer picture.