It finally arrived yesterday, after 2 months stuck in postal limbo dealing with customs issues and imports; I am so thrilled to finally have them here. They’re from a craftsman in the US – Dan at Computer Aided Crafting who put this together for me. He does other books as well; but I’m very, very satisfied with his work on this collection. This series has been a huge part of my life; I grew up reading from the end of high school and right through university, and into early adulthood. So alongside Terry Pratchett, this series by Robert Jordan, finished by Brandon Sanderson, holds a special place in my heart.
Very chuffed 🙂
And they smell great!
My sister and her partner have been on a weekend getaway and I’ve been at home working and looking after Panko.
During such a time I’ve been pretty busy and Panko has been stuck amusing himself and moping outside my home office.
The guilt has finally hit me and I’m going to clean up my office so that Panko can hang out with me and chill in my home office. This means I’ll need to clean up all the computer bits, cable manage everything and make sure the room is doggo safe for him to chill in with me. I won’t proof it tot the point that he has free entry but if I’m in the office (I usually am) he can come in and chill too so he doesn’t let his anxiety get the better of him.
The things I do for this dog.
I’m moving all the blog posts I can from my old custom written blog, to this site. So weird posts might start appearing going backwards in time haha 😛
It’ll be nice to have everything in the one site, though.
Update: After 5 hours, it’s finally all done D:
Chatswood has really changed a lot! There’s a whole new shopping centre along Victoria Ave now called Chatswood Place – which has heaps of great places to eat. A few days ago I got to enjoy an all-you-can-eat Japanese BBQ place called Kuro Sakura.
The pricing was pretty reasonable, and depending on the time of the week you were paying either $55 per person (Monday through Wednesday), or $59.90 per person (Thursday through Sunday, and public holidays).
There were additional bolt-on packages you could get with Seafood/Sashimi and Beef Tongue + Wagyu Karubi (Kalbi to the Korean fans), as well as an All you can Drink package for the soft stuff, and the alcoholic stuff. It should be noted though the packages didn’t include Coke Zero or anything diabetic friendly; so it wasn’t the most worth it for me.
The three of us ended up getting the basic $55 package.
The service was fast and prompt – it was actually really great. We were seated in a weird part near the back of the restaurant; and even then any dishes we ordered took only a couple minutes to be delivered to our table. The grill was nice, hot and powerful and I loved the interesting side-mounted exhaust that took in the smoke around the edges of the cooking area.
All in all, I felt this was a pretty great dinner. We ate copious amounts of food, the company made it way better than I think I’d have enjoyed it myself; and the really bizarre, yet funny mini domestic the front of house lady and husband duo had when I went to pay the bill capped the night off.
Also, the Black Sesame Ice Cream was the best after sitting in front of a grill eating meat for 90 minutes. 👍😋
April and May’s been a busy time for both technically for work, and at home with JT-LAB stuff. Work’s been crazy with me working through 3 consecutive weekends to get a software release out the door, and on top of that working to some pretty crazy requests recently from clients.
I had the opportunity to partially implement a one-node version of my previous plans, and ran some personal tests with one server running as a singular node, and a similarly configured server with just docker instances.
I think I can confidently say that for my personal needs, until I get something incredibly complicated going, sticking to a dockerised format for hosting all my sites is my preferred method to go. I thought I’d write out some of the pros and cons I felt applied here:
The Pros of using HA Proxmox
- Uptime
- Security (everyone is fenced off into their own VM)
The Cons of using HA Proxmox
- Hardware requirements – I need at least 3 nodes or an odd number of nodes to maintain quorum. Otherwise I need a QDevice.
- My servers idle at something between 300 and 500 watts of power;
- this equates to approximately about $150 per quarter on my power bill, per server.
- Speed – it’s just not as responsive as I’d like, and to hop between sites to do maintenance (as I’m a one-man shop) requires me to log out and in to various VMs.
- Backup processes – I can backup the entire image. It’s not as quick as I’d hoped it to be when I backup and restore a VM in case of critical failure.
The Pros of using Docker
- Speed – it’s all on the one machine, nothing required to move between various VMs
- IP range is not eaten up by various VMs
- Containers use as much or as little as they need to operate
- Backup Processes are simple, I literally can just do a directory copy of the docker mount as I see fit
- Hardware requirements – I have the one node, which should be powerful enough to run all the sites;
- I’ve acquired newer Dell R330 servers which idle at around 90 watts of power
- this would literally cut my power bill per server down by 66% per quarter
The Cons of using Docker
- Uptime is not as guaranteed – with a single point of failure, the server going down would take down ALL sites that I host
- Security – yes I can jail users as needed; but if someone breaks out, they’ve got access to all sites and the server itself
All in all, the pros of docker kind of outweigh everything. The cons can be fairly easily mitigated; based off how fast I file copy things or can flick configurations across to another server (of which I will have some spare sitting around)
I’ve been a little bit burnt out from life over May and April, not to mention I caught COVID during the end of April into the start of May; I ended up taking a week unpaid leave, and combined with a fresh PC upgrade – so the finances have been a bit stretched in the budget.
Time to start building up that momentum again and get things rolling. Acquiring dual Dell R330 servers means I have some 1RU newer gen hardware machines to move to; freeing up some of the older hardware, and the new PC build also frees up some other resources.
Exciting Times 😂
For some bizarre reason; WordPress has decided to start hyphenating my posts. I don’t recall it ever doing this originally when I used to use WordPress all those years ago, but it’s ridiculous now. It’s not really a great way to present readable content (at all!)
Luckily it’s also much easier nowadays than having to hack apart the style.css in the theme files editor in the Settings section.
Now, I can just customize stuff > add additional custom CSS and paste in…
.entry-content,
.entry-summary,
.widget-area .widget,
.comment {
-webkit-hyphens: none;
-moz-hyphens: none;
hyphens: none;
word-wrap: normal;
}et voila!
It’s been an entire year since mum passed, that I didn’t update this blog. I kind of let things fall by the way-side, and to be honest – looking back with some hindsight, the last 3 years had been the toughest of my life. It had been utter chaos looking after my mum with failing health, juggling duties at work and a personal life that had been imploding (an ex who had issues and we just toxically made each other way worse for it).
So I’ve relaunched this blog onto https://jtiong.blog
This is a personal blog to just float some ideas out there. It’s more to keep track of things that interest me. I should’ve started this at the start of the year, but things got away from me. So the promise as I start this, is that I update it at least once a day.
We’ll see how that goes, heh.
I think, it’s quite safe to say that 2020, has been an insane year.
I didn’t do my usual post at the end of 2019; and I didn’t do much for the start of this year either with my blog. There’s a lot of reasons for it; but on both a personal level, and indeed a global level – I think 2020 is a year that my generation will remember for quite a while.
It’s a year in which, the global markets stopped, then through sheer force of will, continued on. The age of the internet and remote services & tools were forced into a level of maturity that up until now, were only something the novel few could dip their toes such waters. Indeed, my own blog post (this post you’re reading now) is all about figuring out being able to work from anywhere, at any time.
2020 brought with it, COVID-19; which brought with it – significant health risks, and significant situations to my life that honestly, I never thought I’d see.
2020 was actually going to be a rough year for me anyway, as I moved towards focusing on caring for my elderly mother. I’d moved back home, and have been deciding what to start discarding in an almost Marie Kondo-esque fugue state. My home has always been filled to the brim with old knick knacks and gadgets, not to the excess you see on Marie Kondo’s show, but still – quite impressively full of old tech, clothes, and furniture.
There’s a lot to keep track of, and I’m in the process of decluttering my life. To do this, I’ve turned to a really interesting application that my friend and colleague, Matt, has pointed me to — Notion (https://notion.so). It’s kind of an all-in-one workspace style data collection application, kind of like Evernote.
It works across iOS, PC, Linux – it’s a web based application that’s very responsive. It provides a great way to take notes and keep organised, especially in the current hellscape of things in life right now.
It’s really interesting to try and build out all the solutions of a modded Minecraft server, into a vanilla server! This morning, I encountered an issue where Villagers were unable to execute their regular mechanics (repair items, farm, breed, etc.) due to me disabling mobGriefing in the server’s game rules – this prevents them trampling crops, blowing up blocks, etc.
I ended up needing a solution via CommandBlocks which I’ve now had to carefully hide into the architecture of my little home so that other players on the server don’t inadvertently disturb it. I attached the following command to my CommandBlock, and set it to Repeat, Unconditional, and Always Active:
execute as @e[type=creeper,nbt=!{ExplosionRadius:0}] run data merge entity @s {ExplosionRadius:0}There’s only one small disadvantage right now – Creepers don’t actually deal any damage anymore…! I guess this kinda makes them… huggable?
Northrealm as a whole – proceeds well! It’s less a sort of MMO style map/game as it is just a creative, adventurous sandbox right now. Eventually I might start building in specific styles and locations into different regions; but it’s more important to just stick to building what’s fun and chilling in the server.
It’s fun, in and of itself – coming up with solutions to our server’s problems without the need for heavily modifying the server itself!
It’s a new year – and really, time to move on from my previous lifestyle of just working and hardcore gaming.
I’m looking into removing the errant Cat5E cabling around my house, both for safety reasons (I have an elderly resident who can’t always avoid the cables and might trip up) and just general home pleasantness. I’m also left with a lot of computer hardware that – thanks to Project Cloud Citizen, I’m no longer in need of, such as massive servers in my house…
To that end – recently, I bought myself a Christmas present — a Google Wifi home mesh setup; and implemented it around the house. It’s my hope that I can transition the household to a wireless fix, instead of having everyone on a cabled solution.
2018 was a year that was very focused on improving my workflow on-the-go and out on my day-to-day work commitments. I ended the year by turning to Linux as my main operating system on my laptop; and I must admit – yes, the change in operating system has been disruptive – it’s actually had far less disruptive impact than first thought. I’m able to do the vast majority of my work with Linux, using a system that is much better suited to coding, Docker environment development, and overall lets me just get elbows deep into productivity.
2019 – is going to be a year of improving my ‘home base’. I find that due to the nature of my work over the last 12 months; I find the need for always-ready access to my code a necessity. However, I occasionally need to do a couple extra things which my laptop-centric workflow doesn’t allow as yet:
- I need to engage in creative work; Photoshop, etc.
- I need to unwind with a bit of fun, too! (going to the gym is more a physical release thing)
So after the events and results of Project Cloud Citizen – and the revival of my laptop as my core workhorse; I’m declaring 3 projects for 2019 on a personal level!
- Project Stronghold – designing the perfect space(s) at home for Rest, Play, and Creativity!
- Project Fortify – building up my health, and shoring up against future complications
- Project Foundation – My laptop proved its worth this weekend with both Windows and Ubuntu – tweaks to improve this 🙂
2019 will be about good ol’ hard work, growth, and improvement. We’ll see what the year brings!