Past Entries...

posted this in: General, Personal, Ramblings, Shopping
453 Words

Previously, on JT’s bought some books…

The Wheel of Time Collection I bought back in 2022 (Blog Post here)

I bought a custom leatherbound set of a favourite book series of mine, The Wheel of Time – and it’s something I’ve taken great joy in reading and keeping with me since 2022. Even around then, I was also looking at finding a set of books that were my other favourite mythos; The Discworld novels by the late Terry Pratchett.

Growing up, I had started reading Terry Pratchett’s novels in junior high school; but exams and life took a turn and I stopped reading them for a while. It wasn’t until I had started my career after university that I stumbled back across the books again, and found them far more poignant now that I was in that very same outlandish rat race that his books are a commentary on at times.

After a lot of umm’ing and aah’ing about and trying to justify buying the series of books and whether to see if I can get them custom made; I came across a few of the books in Dymocks one evening, and they were in a beautiful hard cover, gilded published release. It wasn’t the leatherbound stuff I wanted, but they were colourful, vibrant and nice to the touch and made me want to read them again. It was only a few books of the series however, so I decided to wait it out and see if more of the Discworld collection got released.

That was in 2022.

2 years later, it turns out the majority of the books have now been released, with a few more to come (one as soon as August 5th) and I was still on the fence about owning the series. It even sprung up during a date with my new girlfriend while we were having a post-meal stroll.

Well, that was a couple months ago, and now, I’ve pulled the trigger. More than $1000 AUD was spent on this, and it’s not the full collection, but it’s only missing 2 more books at present that have yet to be released (both are planned to be released in the next couple months).

The first shipment of the books arrived! 36 of the 45 novels are now occupying my dining table…!

Discworld Novels
36 of 45 Discworld Novels, 2 more are expected to arrive tomorrow, and more in the days leading up to August 3rd… I’m so excited to finally own these after reading them from libraries all over the place for years and years!

They’re simply beautiful. And I was gushing about them to friends and family, and it occurs to me that these books bring me a lot of joy 😂

Maybe it’s something to be more retrospect about going forward 🙂

posted this in: General, Servers, Software, Technology
452 Words

The branding & theme was named by my partner, Annie 🙂

I actually started this specific post as an addendum to my previous post; but realised that there’s enough in here that I want to talk about on both a personal and technical level that it should warrant its own entry.

Why “Minty Charmander”?

Well, Annie thought the colour scheme reminded her of a Charmander, and combined with the light green highlights – “Mint” 🙂

The colour scheme uses a number of my favourite colours in a limited palette – purposefully, as I recall from some old design course literally a couple decades ago now, that in UX a small number of colours that can be interchanged and not conflict with each other, was better than a large dynamic swatch of colour for getting information across.

I am using the ol’ trusty Bootstrap framework for the UI and layout of everything. I don’t have any real special rationale for using Bootstrap – it’s just what I’m most familiar with; I think as I ease myself back into coding from a long break, it’s nice to just crawl before I can walk, before I can run 😅

Planetscale?!

Laziness and the idea that I needed a stable service to run a DB for my little projects convinced me to continue with Planetscale – yes, it costs $47 USD a month, but it’s more stable, and more nicely managed than I could ever do with a random self hosted solution.

I decided to continue paying it for the time being, pending further efforts to make things self hosted down the track, but for the time being – it’s nice to have a DB that is:

  • highly available;
  • able to spawn itself into a main, and dev branch

I could probably implement this without a paid system – but I feel like the DB service works as a backend for multiple systems (as it would if I were to self-host) – and that’s a single point of failure that I couldn’t upkeep like a service that is designed to stay online professionally.

End of the day, it’s actually pretty easy to justify the cost of this database for myself; and I’ve spent more on dumber stuff in the past. At least this is a sensible subscription 😜

So, what’s next?

Well, the branding is mostly done, but there’s a few missing things like Search results statistics, and category browsing callouts, to name a couple of things. I’ll be taking my time fixing everything, and eventually hope to start using this blog a lot more to diary more things that I get up to on a more personal level, as opposed to just dumping whatever pseudo-technical stuff comes across my mind!

posted this in: General, Software, Technology
182 Words

We have a new look for the blog! I hope you all like it 🙂

For those that are curious, below is how things used to look (not too long ago!)…

How my blog originally looked

I’ve been using a theme called Independent Publisher now for about 7 years or so. And while I am indeed retired; I didn’t want to let my technical skills (as little as they are) go to waste nowadays. So I updated the look to both jtiong.dev, and jtiong.blog to match similarly in branding now 🙂

It’s been more than a moment since I last touched a WordPress Theme, and so I’ve no doubt that there’s bugs and issues with the new theme you see now (built from scratch lovingly over a day or so, as you’ll be able to see from the Commits on jtiong.dev!). But this change will give me plenty of things to do to fix and maintain for the future with this blog.

And now finally after most of a day’s work, my domains are starting to be a little bit more on-brand! ♥

posted this in: Software, Technology
310 Words

I previously posted about jtiong.dev – keeping my commit logs going and making things presentable for future collaborators and colleagues, as well as my own little bit of self promotion on the internet.

With my recent break in work and taking the time to both sharpen and upskill myself – I thought I’d bring this into the new future with the site pulling from my Github account instead of a now defunct GitLab installation.

In the current “1.0” version:

  • Commits are automatically fed through via CURL request
  • There’s no censorship for any potentially sensitive information
  • There’s no authentication for management of commits/repos
  • There’s no filtering you can do
  • The date/commit times are inconsistent

Not to mention it’s GitLab powered and as I’m currently working through some property changes – I’m bouncing between two properties and the server hardware hosting GitLab is currently turned off.

Queue, my move to using Planetscale as my core DB service for my personal online stuff, and moving my code to Github where possible (because it’s where everyone else is).

For version 1.1 which upgrades this, I’d like to add:

  • A system with Auth that lets me hide a repo, or a given commit hash for any potentially sensitive info from being revealed
  • A filtering system by repo so you can see, per repo, the commits to that repository
  • More accurate representation of the commits/date/timeline

Implementation Logic

Just a couple of loops to go through Repos → Commits is all I really need for my personal scale. Below is a very simplified diagram:

This’ll all be included into some cron tasks that run maybe hourly or so to avoid spamming GitHub.

It’s just simple little pleasurable busywork to be honest, but after about 6 months of not really touching any code and taking my time with stuff, it’s nice to get back into the groove!

posted this in: General, Personal, Ramblings
298 Words

This post was from after the move to the new house, and at the start of 2024 – at this point I had not recovered the 2023 posts to the blog from the old server that was no longer plugged in. This has since been restored, but I’ve included the post here for full context anyway!

JT

So, I’ve been pretty crazy busy, even with the idea of “Retirement” being bandied about in my life.

I’ve added a couple more 2023 posts, and hope to increase/improve the amount of content I can restore, but it’s not looking all that promising to be honest…! To restore it all, I’ll have to pull out one of the old Dell R330 servers and spin ‘er up so I can extract all the info as needed, etc.

Easier said than done considering it’s in a storage crate under the house right now 🙁

It’s definitely sitting in the back of my mind though, as it’s a year of tech upgrades and updates where I had finally configured a lot of my server stuff to a level that I was really happy with…!

For now though, I just wanted to post here and make sure the site’s staying alive…!

Some technical challenges!

My site currently uses the hobby plan of Planetscale – my preferred sort of “cloud” hosted MySQL DB instance; unfortunately this is going away and they’re forcing everyone onto a minimum $47 USD/month plan. I can understand the need for sustainability though, and it’ll reduce the amount of “exploiters” that have taken advantage of such a free plan.

Sadly, it’s an expense I am not really willing to pay either, not for my small hobbyist needs. So it’s time to migrate back to the ol’ self hosted MySQL instance on my own VPS somewhere.

posted this in: General
131 Words

This post was from after the move to the new house, and at the start of 2024 – at this point I had not recovered the 2023 posts to the blog from the old server that was no longer plugged in. This has since been restored, but I’ve included the post here for full context anyway!

JT

We start the year with some technical issues!

I’ve had some migration problems with moving my sites and servers around from my old house to my new house, and as such, I’ve lost most of the 2023 entries! 😢

The highlight of the year was my Japan 2023 trip in May with everyone, so I’ll try and put up at least the photos to keep things going 🙂

For now at least, the site is once again working, and online!

posted this in: General, Personal
220 Words

Still a whole lot of stuff to move and organise; and admittedly I’ve been busy trying to figure out the next steps while I enjoy a career break.

There’s so much to do and setup. Moving house has been a pretty pricey exercise, but I took the opportunity to build nicer furniture than my old cobbled together setup that I had back at my old house.

Now I’m just mass purchasing IKEA’s Lagkapten (heh) tabletops and Alex drawer sets!

It’s not quite the final setup, but I have set up one room as my office now for full time Day Trading and some development/upskilling…

Yes, you’re seeing that right – 6 monitors, and they’re all arranged from left to right like the madman that I am. That’s across 2 PCs however haha! 🤣

My bedroom is a mess because I’ve moved my main PC out of there so that I can build this office, while I’ll resort to using my Macbook Air in the bedroom for smaller moments, like personal admin stuff or updating some journaling (like this blog, Obsidian, and my bullet journal!)

I’ll spare you the pics of the bedroom at least 😏

Anyway, as our first inspection fast approaches, I’m finally getting things tidy enough that I think there’ll be no issues. And that’s really the August update for now!

posted this in: Ramblings, Software
146 Words

Very recently my time at MindArc sadly came to an end; so I’ve been working to skill up with some of the things I’ve gleaned from my time there. Even though it was a short time, it was a great learning experience coming into an eCommerce agency.

I’m looking at using the following tech stack to resurrect my currently dead jtiong.com site!

  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Cloudflare Pages
  • PlanetScale DB
  • Remix.js
  • Tailwind CSS

I’m adding on to the PHP skillset (although not abandoning it!) – with a few of my other tools I build still using PHP (such as this repo for one of my Rust game servers)

After my time at Padua learning Angular (which I found really confusing); and struggling for a bit – I think I’m ready to dive into using typescript with Remix to do a lot of stuff. This’ll be interesting…!

posted this in: Events, General, Personal
436 Words

On June 3rd…

2023 seems to be the year of “Moving (On)”

Just got back from 10 days in Tokyo — outstanding stuff with the cuisine and the sights seen; it’ll be like my 5th time in Tokyo – but I’m not overly fussed ,there’s been a lot of changes in the time since I was last there (about 2014).

I’m now in the process of moving over to a new house this weekend, and it’s been extremely cathartic as well as high pressure juggling this while trying to work without being impeded by it.

The new house is about 60 years newer than the other one; so it’s nice to try and fit everything into a nicer “style”. I’m also able to sit down, and gauge exactly what it is I want to take with me. Being a forced “purge” is nice….

Owning the old house means I don’t need to rush the process either, but it’s tempting not to just jump in and buy everything new too >.<


22nd of June…

It’s an opportunity to change things, and grow up a little more.

I funnily, have half a dozen drafts sitting here in the backend, talking about moving and rearranging my stuff within my old house. And I didn’t have a way to articulate them all into a single consolidated post.

Life has a funny way of things – now I’m forced to make that more drastic leap.

This post has been sitting here since June 3rd – I started it the day of moving to the new house. And for the last few weeks – I have slowly been tweaking and adapting my new place to my needs.

Some worries do sit in the back of my mind, but most of all my current room is super clean, and organised 😄 definitely a win!

It’s helped me find some sort of “center” for the time being, and I have a mild gripping terror of going back to my old house to focus on what to throw out, and what to keep 😂

It’s nice though, I moved my main gaming desktop to my new place, and have only the minimum of stationery and possessions.

I have a nice new bed frame, and table that match – and my bed has been changed from a King Single to a Queen sized bed. I used to be a lot more utilitarian in what I had, but comfort and aesthetics are more key nowadays. I’m getting old haha…

Also, I hate IKEA furniture assembly. Wow what a torturous ordeal it’s been building the bed frame, and the work tables I use…

posted this in: Personal, Software, Technology
667 Words

January and the start of February also brought on a look at better brain dumping knowledge from inside my head, into something tangible. Sort of a legacy thing, I think.

Obsidian has been a note taking app that’s based around the markdown plaintext format that’s been around for years. A lot of my friends with a hyper technical background have been huge advocates of Obsidian and in an effort to find something that’ll let me brain dump with an intelligent linking method that is code friendly — Obsidian came up time and time again.

Obsidian’s Graph View links Notes and provides a visual representation of these Notes to show how they relate to each other! It’s really interesting to navigate around!

This blog post is generally just me rationalizing why I’m switching to it, over the two existing services I use (and pay for) – Notion and Clickup – both of which are fantastic apps for people who need something a little more fancy. But up front, I think it’s best to talk about the cost of these apps. Both of these apps are wonderful; they cost money however, at $5 USD and $12 USD respectively, and this adds up to a little over $200 USD per year. More than one might think to affect one’s finances in these trying times!

And so…! In a bid to move towards reducing my overheads, I thought I’d look into DIY solutions that I can integrate or piggy back on more critical services. In this case, Obsidian – which can use iCloud Drive to store itself works well. iCloud isn’t a service I can easily get rid of – my mobile phone, my tablet are both rooted deep in the Apple ecosystem, as there’s health related devices and apps that are better on iOS than in Android or Windows for my situation (your mileage may vary of course). Lucky for me though, that this is still usable across Windows – meaning I technically don’t need to worry about something like the paid Obsidian Sync service.

Security is also another thing I find myself concerned a little bit about. There’s not much I can do about state level bad actors gaining access to my data (and I don’t think anyone’d find use for it) – but your typical cyber criminal is still a concern because they’re on an interpersonal level. Last thing I need is sensitive data (like health records) getting compromised and having them leveraged against me. But to make things worse, it turns out that Notion isn’t encrypted on any level – which kind of explains why it’s so easy to publish something directly to the web.

Scary.

Clickup is also web based and doesn’t do much better. I feel like Notion and Clickup don’t have the resources to build privacy on a level that Apple does with its iCloud services. Having been subject to some very public breaches of customers data (not Apple’s fault – they got socially engineered) – Apple has no doubt more than doubled down to make sure it never gets the blame for any cyber security breaches.

So, all in all – I’ve moved to Obsidian and as of the time of this post, it’s been almost 2 weeks. So far I’ve started to slowly port across the knowledge dumped in Notion into it. It’s a long, slow and tedious process, but the beauty of the way Obsidian draws links between articles (Wiki-esque) means that I don’t have duplicate style documents, unless I make them forcibly within the file structure of the Vault itself.

It’s also nice that I can write SQL-esque “Dataview” queries that can generate lists of pages within things. It feels a lot more like a programmer’s knowledge assistant than a “Note taking” application.

It feels natural using Obsidian now, and I keep improving how I use it as I go along, it’s still got that shiny new “Learning new hacks all the time” feel to a new application.

It feels like The Right Move™