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!

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!

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…!

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 can’t believe it’s already been a month into 2023! I guess time flies when you’re very busy… And January was definitely a busy month for me! There’s so much to update everyone on, that I think it’ll go across several blog posts! 😂

Work begins!

I’ve been enjoying my time at MindArc – it’s an interesting, and dynamic company to work for so far. The eCommerce/Shopify learnings are very interesting.

I’m managing a few people, and it’s been a big lesson in learning how to capacity manage, plan and be more strategic in my day to day.

There’s a step challenge that the business is doing – and I’ve decided I’m going to participate as it’s a good opportunity to get healthier AND be a part of the team.

Loving it so far, looking forward to the future!

Server Update? NORCO becomes SILVERSTONE

I’ve spent the last half of January working on fixing my Norco fileserver case – which has now officially been decommissioned, and replaced with a Silverstone case! Even better, it’s got shiny rails, and is rack mounted properly!

I lose out on 4 hard drive caddies, but I hadn’t filled up the previous Norco anyway, and I intend to move to much higher density drives shortly. The case is nicer, it’s a 20-bay SILVERSTONE RM43-320-RS 4RU chassis, with railkit.

Yes, I know my JT-LAB room is a mess! But I promise, it’s being worked on. That room has had all manner of clutter and stored stuff from the last 30 years that my family’s lived in this house! It is definitely being worked on, and I’ll post an update regarding that soon!

Anyway, what makes this so special, is it’s a completely brand new chassis for JT-LAB. I’ve never bought a brand new chassis and the Norco 4224 (you can see it in the second picture sitting emptied on the left hand side 🙁 ) had served me fantastically well for years. Easily a decade. But it’s time to retire it. I’m hoping to get at least a decade out of this Silverstone case – it’s not being lugged to LAN parties, so that should help its longevity!

Should I change up the Site Theme?

I think, I’ve been posting using this theme for near on 7 years now. Might be time to change things up a little! The blog timeline list on the left is starting to get comically long 😂

UPDATE: Nevermind! I found the setting to change the Archives list to a Dropdown menu!

So it’s 2023!

I’ve taken all of December 2022 off – in the hopes that I’d recharge and destress.

According to my doctor, I haven’t 😂

Still, there’s more passion back for doing technical stuff, a desire to clean up and shape up everything; whether or not this is just the New Year New Me phase, we’ll see. However, I do find myself working towards achieving a whole bunch of things with my Homelab, my internal network services, my health, and my home office setup.

I’m looking forward to my next adventure with my career – and am keen to get started.

As my Homelab and private discord community has grown, I’ve needed to roll out more than just websites, but also web applications, and differently ported things that need to be proxied back to a domain or subdomain address. The old setup was horrible… so I set about fixing it once and for all in November and December, 2022.

The Problem…

I’m stuck with something that looks like this:

This essentially means for each website I deploy, I’d need to essentially double proxy myself; and it was honestly a little bit confusing to work with SSL certificates.

How did it come to this?

One of the legacies of my time at Hostopia was building a Docker based local test environment that was portable and rapidly deployable; using an nginx-proxy container, with apache containers for the websites behind the proxy container.

The beauty of this setup was that I could quickly roll out a website as needed anywhere with the magic of Docker. And for my initial purposes, that was fine.

The problem arises when I try to roll out secondary services, like GitLab, Minecraft Maps, Game Server UIs etc. which are all related to various non standard HTTP(S) ports, but need to be reverse proxied to subdomains, etc. (an example being https://map.northrealm.info — which is a Minecraft Server Map that runs on port 8123). I’d have to have ALL THOSE RESOURCES on a single server. Or each additional server could be a double proxy to account for extra servers. This isn’t very efficient.

And secondly the bigger problem – was organising and renewing SSL certificates, it was a hassle tracking and renewing or making new certificates as needed as it was being double routed first through Nginx Proxy Manager, then secondarily on the local docker container host the app/site was located on!

So as for why it was configured like this? A mix of speed, and laziness in doing things “The right way™”. What was supposed to be quick and easy eventually just became a hassle that wasn’t working properly.

The Solution

My services infrastructure now looks like this:

It might not seem like much – but it’s now server hardware agnostic, and I don’t need to install a separate cluster of containers to manage locally any sites or apps per server.

NginxProxyManager (NPM) now acts as that cluster of infrastructure containers that span the full home network as opposed to being tied down to one host. Custom nginx configurations are created “per host” in the app, and they handle how pages and content are served for sites, or direct traffic specifically for a given application.

Much better I say! 😀

*Facepalm*

There are plenty of ways to skin a cat; and this is definitely better than the original setup! It’s also not a perfect solution, but this blog post wasn’t written in an attempt to find absolute perfection (I believe it’s something to strive for, you can’t achieve it unless you’re a divine power) – and it’s more to document the journey of my ignominy and learnings as I go about running a homelab that actually gets some use 🙂

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.