Annie and I are spending a week in Japan! Dec 1st, to Dec 8th – as of reading, I will of course, have returned to Sydney. But this is it! I was a little scruffy from looking after Panko at my sister’s apartment for a couple days leading up to our flights!

For this particular trip; I decided to try a Business Class seat on ANA – return from Sydney to Tokyo (ie, there and back again) – to see if I could enjoy the flight and get some rest from it. I have a huge problem with economy flights where I found it hard to regulate my body temperature and relax when in such close proximity to so many people with very little privacy.

Spoiler: It was fantastic, and future travel is all ruined for me as I now have to book business class for the flights.

Checking in our bags and passing through security was honestly about a 15 minute process – Sydney International has ABSOLUTELY nailed it with the process nowadays.

The Lounge (Sydney Side)…

As a Business Class passenger, for ANA – you get access to the Air New Zealand Lounge, and honestly it was…. “ok”. Maybe a solid 6/10 given the food and lounge ambience.

The lounge had a lot of weird seating that wasn’t really easy to sit in, and for some reason – it was incredibly busy.

I managed to grab a bunch of drinks – of which the Coke Zero post-mix was completely flat, and warm. From all the machines – it was quite disgusting to eat. Round two of the food was just some fruit, a chocolate mousse (that was alright) and some bread. The non-alcoholic Hills Cider was nice and cold, but again, the Coke i got from another machine was also completely tepid.

Definitely not a fun experience in the Air New Zealand Lounge – they really could’ve done better

All aboard…! (NH879 Boeing 787-9)

Eventually we boarded. I was in Seat 2E right up the front of the plane, in the central aisle. The 787-9 I was on had a 1-2-1 setup in Business Class. Sitting in Seat 2E (the first row of the central aisle) – if you’re travelling with a partner or friend, is ideal – because there’s an extra space available between the entertainment units that can be used as desk space for extra storage/comfort.

I was fortunate enough that no one was seated next to me for this flight!

Once you’re in the seat – there’s a standard entertainment unit in front of you with what looked to be like a 22″ screen (approximately). To the side (depending on where you are) is your table, control unit and power (USB + universal socket).

There’s a side table, with a folding out table that will become your dining/work table for the flight too. Along the edge of the side table are your seat controls – quite intuitive and easy to use.

The fold out table is actually surprisingly generous, it’s capable of holding both a 14″ Macbook Air (M3, 2024) and gaming mouse; or a full dinner washoku set for your inflight meal

The inflight meal was really tasty. As was the Ippudo Ramen – “plant based” (which I’d hope so, don’t really think stringy meat noodles would be ideal) of course, the broth is what they mean.

I was stunned at how well my Macbook Air played Satisfactory, actually. And it’s kind of an idea to write something up in the back of my mind about “CrossOver” and the compatibility of games it can play across the setup.

We had some technical issues before we could take off that delayed our flight by about 2 hours (in fact, we were the last flight out on the day) — the towing truck that helps pull the plane out of the gate, actually snapped somewhere on its towing aperture; they had to get a new truck out to try and subsequently all safety checks had to be re-done.

If I was in economy, I don’t think I’d be in a positive headspace at all. It got hot on the plane, until our pilot was allowed to turn on the engines and it took a while before cabin crew could serve us drinks or help us cool down.

After a couple hours, thankfully though, we were given an exception into the Sydney Airport curfew and allowed to take off after hours. Once the flight started, it was a good time

All in all I had a fantastic time flying from Sydney to Haneda. I made one little mistake though — they give you a seat topper to act as extra padding for a mattress if you sleep. I failed to use that even in a seated position. On my return flight, I used it – and it was LIFE CHANGING. The flight became EVEN MORE tolerable, but that’s for a later post

I managed to catch about 3 hours sleep on the flight – probably in due part to not using the seat topper and having a fitful sleep.

But 100% this Business Class flight saved the trip for me. It meant when I landed, I was more rested, in a better mindset about being in Japan, more tolerant, more relaxed and physically more ready to take on the 20,000 a day steps I was about to attack my body with during this vacation!

Previously, on JT’s bought some books…

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…!

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

Annie and I checked out VIVID 2024 for Sydney — here’s a link to the album of photos

https://photos.jtiong.blog/share/OBiBXUG7SIFhx1IwlhRxBRaThtL0yZalU3ZC42wPP2W6GZ3Kao6DFOqikcR-VgC6Bxs

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.

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!

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…

The OnlySnacks fam hit up Japan It was a helluva adventure as a big group

The photo album for the adventure is here

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.

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™

I’ve been back into coding this month, on my own projects and not just for work. The passion isn’t “burning bright” anymore, but I’m working towards reigniting it by finding coding little bits of things doing what I want, etc.

https://jtiong.dev is a bit of a commit msg logging script that I had written and integrated with my local GitLab installation; but as you’ll see if you visit the site – October’s my highest number of commits in recent memory on personal projects.

The reason for the skewed figure is because up until about August 2022, I had most of my projects stored in GitHub. Some part of me still thinks I should keep things in GitHub – but I’m looking into using that as more of a backup style system.

The Code Backup Project

I know GitLab has a “mirror repository” feature – but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be working very well for me (too fiddly).

So to get around that I’ll be looking at building my own little automated flow:

It’s not an ideal setup – but I think it will work for my needs. Because of how nagging it is, I may well end up writing the automation script entirely in PHP (this way, I can integrate notifications to myself over Discord and other things).

Other Projects

This month though, I also worked on:

• snackpack.gg – integrating it with my Snack Pack discord server which’ll let friends and family login with their Discord accounts, and see private content on the domain (members only areas)
• topdownshooter – my first sort of game project, name is self explanatory, written in Godot Engine, sort of to prove to myself that I can make a game that’s more than just a random prototype. It should have levels, a menu, and be packable as a real release
• Private Broadcasting System – a private broadcasting system for a friend – she’s an online radio DJ and runs a virtual club which people can tune in and listen to/participate in a talkback radio show

All-in-all, it’s pretty cool to get back into doing some tinkering things, and having the time and wherewithal to do them.

Recently with my career, health has become a thing I’ve been a lot more conscious of. Physical, mental, etc. So I’ve made the decision to move to 3 days per week, leaving Thursday and Friday available to me for health care and rest.

I’d like to eventually transition to a career in which I can work more independently as well, and the career options are pretty simple:

• Come up with a product – build and sell it (SaaS, etc.)
• Come up with a service – promote and sell said services (Contracting, etc.)

I have a couple of projects and things that I do which fall into the second category – I do some web hosting and consulting on the side, which produce some income for me. So I feel like I could certainly return to pushing those paths a bit more if need be.

Games are a passion project…

– me, now.

However, I’ve always wanted to build a game. Since I was a kid playing Super Mario Bros. on the NES back in the 90s, all the way through my adult life – I’ve always been a gamer.

In my mind, games aren’t something you build to make money – sure there’s that one in a million opportunity to build a Minecraft, or the next World of Warcraft. But that’s both extremely rare, and extremely difficult to achieve. Games are a passion project, and if you’re lucky, you get a financial reward if you find something that strikes a chord with the gamers who try your game out.

I’m at a stage in my career where I can afford one last hurrah at a passion project beyond the gaming events and marketing adventures of yesteryear.

Time to give it a go!

Do you have a plan?

I’m not quite sure about the games I’d like to make yet. But I think the plan is to build:

• Some basic indie games to learn games development, and;
• learn some basic art creation (2D – Aseprite, 3D – Blender) to flesh out said games, and;

In terms of sound creation and audio design – I may just leave to 3rd parties, if I’m honest – Audio is always and will forever be a dark magic for me

Okay…

So why am I blogging here about something I haven’t even started?

To keep myself publicly accountable. I’ve already told my mates on Discord, now I have to just execute