Random acts of kindness during the coronavirus outbreak in Sri Lanka

We know that times are tough, but there are still reasons to smile.

A huge thanks to Dr. Ayumi Nomura (Department of Nursing, Tokyo Metropolitan University) for supporting families in need under the COVID19 outbreak in Sri Lanka. She has been serving Sri Lanka for many years. 

Even though this is not the first time you support us, I thought to post this, to appreciate your effort to build our community. She has made her contribution to help people in Beruwala (her ongoing research area) through, Ven. Hadigalle Wimalasara thero, Abinawaramaya, Beruwala. We hope that this donation would be able to help at least 200-300 families in Beruwala area. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude and appreciate for the Ven. Hadigalle Wimalasara thero for his guidance throughout the donation process. 

Handing over the donation on behalf of Dr.Nomura (By Mr.Killakulam) to to Ven. Hadigalle Wimalasara thero

Distributing essentials among residence in Beruwala

Mrs.Motoko Takahashi and the family have been able to organize this excellent event on Vesak Poya day

Also, we would like to thank Mrs.Motoko Takahashi and Mr. Buddika Killakulam for arranging all the logistics to make Dr. Nomura’s fund-raising event a success and for organizing another excellent fund-raising event together with a Vesak Poyaday event virtually. It was incredible to see that so many people from Japan were able to join the sermon virtually that was conducted by a Buddhist thero. That was a nice opportunity for all the doners to get blessings for their good deeds. More than 150 donors from Japan have given their contribution to this charity. Some of them might never have been to Sri Lanka. Still, they are helping our people because of your great effort.  

You all are such amazing souls who love Sri Lanka as much as we love our motherland. In times like this, we’re reminded of how interconnected we all are. Thank you for being a part of our community. Most of all thank you for your kindness, care, and love and for being the inspiration the world needs.

Once again, thank you Dr. Ayumi Nomura and Mrs. Motoko Takahashi for the amazing support you have given to our community by donating essentials. To all those who took the time to commit, your support and effort are truly appreciated. 

Dr.Nomura's previous charity works in 2015

PC Build for MRI image processing

PC for preprocessing/tractography

It has been after long time I had the opportunity to build a PC. Actually it was not for me but for my wife who is doing a Phd. She is using following MRI image processing tools,

Freesurfer (https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/)
MRtrix (https://www.mrtrix.org/)
FSL (https://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fslwiki)
Advanced Normalization Tools (https://github.com/ANTsX/ANTs)

These tools uses memory and process heavily and she was struggling to do the process in her laptop(Intel core i7 with 16 GB memory).

So I started doing research what best components I can used to build a powerful PC that can handle neuroimaging processing tools.

Process wise I had 2 choices Intel or AMD, These days AMD is beating Intel in the process market with giving high processing power for less money. After doing some research around I selected AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (8 core) processor with Wraith Prism cooler.

MSI B450M MORTAR Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard

As the motherboard I selected "MSI B450M MORTAR Micro ATX AM4", which support maximum memory of 64 GB and is within my budget. Also got two 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3000 Memory modules after reading some reviews. Hoping to upgrade to 64 GB in future.

As the main hard disk, I got Samsung 860 Evo 1 TB SSD drive. As the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X does not have inbuilt GPU, I went with MSI GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB graphic card.

As for the casing I selected "fractal design focus g mini microatx mini tower case", which has a good build quality for the price. Also it comes with 2 front panel fans which improve the air flow inside the casing.

I used pcpartpicker.com site to build my spec, which is a useful site for anyone who wish to build their own PC. pcpartpicker.com site will highlight if there any incompatible components in your build, which is very useful and free of charge as well.

Use the below link to see my full PC specification,

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/LXVBZf

My wife was happy with the PC build as she manage to run neuroimaging tools without any problem.

But if you have big budget I recommend going for a AMD processor with more cores (such as AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 core or AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 16 core) with memory of 64 GB or more. This will make you run several MRI processing tools parallel.

Enjoy!

Is your email address has been compromised - haveibeenpwned.com

In this fast moving world everyone has an email address that used to communicate and register to the different online services. This give cyber criminal an ideal opportunity to target innocent victims and use the victims email address to access the victims other online services.

In recent years there have been various big company data breaches such as yahoo, Linkedin, Myspace, Adobe, Equifax etc.. with these data breaches hackers and cyber criminals manage to get huge data sets of email addresses and passwords.

A security researcher Troy Hunt have collected all theses data in to a one site so any one can check if their email address or passwords have been leaked due to these major data breaches. The site haveibeenpwned.com is free to use and you can enter email addresses and see which ones have been compromised and what data breach that have caused it as well. 

Also haveibeenpwned.com have the functionality check if the passwords you used also is not matching with any leaked passwords from the data breaches. 

I hope every one don't use same username & passwords combination, and after checking the haveibeenpwned.com site please change the passwords if compromised.

Enjoy!