So, I run a number of domain names – all variously themed around jtiong.* where * could be dev, blog, network, food, media, games, etc.

A good variety of gTLDs just for vanity’s sake really.

Here’s essentially the full list:

• .blog
• .dev
• .food
• .games
• .media
• .network

Sure it seems like no big deal, but when you think about it – each domain renews annually for about $30-$50 per year each. That’s right – I’m spending about $250 per YEAR on just domain names.

And across them all there’s probably about 20 to 30 subdomains for various apps, services and sites. When really, all I need is one domain name and I can just do an infinitely long nest of subdomain names as needed.

So, it’s not really a huge consequential cost in the grand scheme of things – but I’ll consolidate everything into the single jtiong.com domain (that you’re on right now). I suppose over the years (I’ve now had this blog running almost a decade) – it’d add up to an ever growing cost to keep all those domain names registered.

Saves a whole lot of messing around with homelab stuff too 🤣

My Windows based gaming PC has recently had a change I’ve been slowly feeling over the last year or so…

Windows is starting to feel like a service. A subscription I have to pay that chips away at the financial base I’ve been trying to build for myself over the years. This does include things like Spotify and such – and I know it’s too little too late to avoid such services – there’ll be things I always need, like Apple Care for my phone, or iCloud and Apple+ for my portable devices, Google services for my business related things, and a few other bits and bobs.

However, my desktop since taking a step away from my career as a software developer, has taken a backseat – and Windows has started to make it feel like things are a subscription to my own hardware. Forced AI tool insertions (go away, Copilot), advertising tracking INSIDE my OS and desktop – opening the Start menu shows me ads for apps, and it tracks my file history on stuff?!

And worst of all – why can’t I make a local user for my PC (easily) now? Why force me to use a Microsoft Account by default?

There’s a lot of egregious things that Microsoft is now doing, by trying to cross various lines – like adding Microsoft sign-in to MS Paint and providing BitLocker encryption keys to the FBI, and in fact, storing those keys in the cloud – where any bad actor who manages to break through Microsoft’s security (which they have repeatedly done so in the past) can acquire the keys to the kingdom, so to speak.

I know you can deactivate storing your BitLocker keys with your Microsoft account, but saving them to the cloud shouldn’t be the default option. I suppose all these potential breaches in privacy are the cost of convenience for the every day end-user.

I can’t exclusively walk away from Windows – I doubt I’ll ever be able to, but I’ll be able to minimize the exposure of it. As far as I can personally tell for my own usage, the only apps I ever use that are Windows exclusive now are:

• Adobe Creative suite – mostly for professional design related stuff PDF, PSD, IND, AI file formats will forever be the bane of my existence
• Microsoft Office suite – again, same as above – mostly for professional work, legal documents, contracts and accounting data all require this, although it’s slowly starting to diversify…
• Bambu Studio and Fusion 360 – work related, for printing out components and rapid prototyping production, this just simply can’t be ignored
• Games that require kernel level anti-cheat – this is becoming a far smaller problem than I thought it was originally – games like Battlefield 6, Valorant, etc. all for the younger generation of gamers that my old bones can no longer keep up with. And their audiences are dwindling anyway as people realize how much of a rip-off hamster wheel they’re on.

All the games I currently enjoy right now, and all the home lab, and entertainment stuff I do enjoy have ways of running on Linux. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a time before, and I didn’t actually expect to hit this point in my lifetime 😂

But, should I really join Team Penguin?

So “click engagement” memes aside – all the influencers are talking about moving off Windows; perhaps I am just getting influenced heavily, but there’s a mote of sense behind it.

Whilst there’s a lot of upsides at present in regards to moving away from Windows for my personal PC. I’d be remiss to not consider the negatives of moving away too. And while seemingly small and insignificant, the “blockers” are actually very significant indeed!

1. Hardware

• Linux HATES Nvidia’s drivers situation at present, which is never great, and it’s more unstable than on Windows so I’d potentially have impacted performance on some games and apps I use.
• Streamdecks – I have two elgato stream decks – a classic “Mk. 2” (3 x 5 – 15 button deck) and a Stream Deck + with the 4 action dials and slider screen
  • These stream decks integrate with games like FFXIV, Star Citizen, and
  • Apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and
  • also control my audio devices which I split into various channels (media, games, chat)
• They simply just don’t work properly in Linux
• My Earbuds – I use Steelseries Arctis Gamebuds and a Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless headset depending on physical fatigue around my head 🤣
  • These devices don’t work with Steelseries GG software, which doesn’t work in Linux well

All in all, very compelling reasons to not switch to Linux. If I can’t easily deal with sound as I’m constantly changing my headphones, or streaming audio correctly when I screen share with friends, family and clients, it kind of defeats the utility of my PC as a whole.

2. Software

• Adobe can run, but not natively – and its performance is hampered, and at any time an update may break the functionality of Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator – keystone applications in my business(es).
• Office 365 – as annoying as it is, it’s a Microsoft product, it’s going to work better on Windows
• Fusion 360 – this also can’t run on Linux presently, and some parts of my business require it

So whilst gaming is taken care of, sadly the business end of my computer use isn’t covered anymore (unlike when I was a full blown software dev) which is disheartening.

3. Legacy & Accessibility

This isn’t as spooky as it sounds, but if I were to be incapacitated in some way and unable to use my PC and my loved ones needed to access my stuff, sure I’m blessed enough to have wonderful friends who could help out, but end of the day, in those quiet moments in the evenings, my loved ones might need to access my PC/Servers – and Windows is something familiar to them at least.

And as of right now, this is something that Linux is definitely lacking in. There’s no way to fix that specifically unfortunately.

A decision

I think my desire to switch to Linux, is kind of trying to subconsciously return the halcyon days of simple OS usage like Windows 2000 and Windows XP! Those were the glory days – it was simple to hack away at your PC and have it run fast, without any of the bloat.

Unfortunately the small but significant issues I have with software, drivers and hardware not working – are big enough that I’ve decided I’m going to stay with Windows for the foreseeable future. Even with all their atrocious missteps towards becoming an “Agentic OS”, and all the nagging logins like Microsoft Online sign on for basic applications, built-in classics like Notepad not working, and more — all for the purpose of meeting their install base KPIs.

I hope Microsoft starts to take a step in the right direction with optimising and simplifying Windows 11, but we’ll see what the future brings. Their track record so far isn’t so great.

Welp, seems to be an almost yearly thing – although to be honest there’s no plan to how I do things with my jtiong.* sites — it’s all very whimsical 😅

I’ve started working on a new site theme called “Chubby Snorlax‘ – a sort of sequel to “Minty Charmander” (the theme you see now on this site – as written about here).

This was mostly brought about by wanting to freshen things up when I started updating my jtiong.games website. The site itself is going to be used as a personal game server documentation and humble bragging website for all the stuff I run and mod for family and friends.

Behold!

The site design pulls back more towards engineering documentation style layouts with a little bit of a flair taken from my jtiong.network site. It’s part of an intended update to all my domain names that I’ll write about (I suppose…) in the future.

The design itself is mostly complete – with the final steps being to make sure that any content I put into the theme is represented fittingly with the design (ie. there’s no weird layout issues or formatting issues). After that, I’m not going to immediately update this blog’s theme; but rather I’ll deploy Chubby Snorlax into the jtiong.dev site first, alongside some behind the scenes updates to that site!

Minty Charmander was a fairly easy update – I was able to create a WordPress compatible theme, then roll out a similar style that matched to jtiong.dev – however, this time the workload has increased to three websites (.blog, .dev, .games) at least. So complexity of the project does grow – each site has its own unique functionality, .blog being a WordPress powered site, .dev being a stylized website that interacts with GitHub, and .games being almost entirely handwritten HTML/PHP content. I’m trying to unify their look & feel, as well as bring them all under an umbrella sort of branding “jtiong.network” like a media network or some such. It’s just a fancy hobby name for my rapidly costlier hobby.

It’s almost been a year to the day since I last wrote any line of code that I committed to a git repo on GitHub.

Burnout’s definitely been a real thing, and it’s been a real struggle to get back into the joy I had from tinkering and building things (no matter how jank the code) online.

In between fixing my health and personal life, and the challenges of being a cafe owner, I finally managed to push out some code to a new repo for a website.

I was surprised at how much I struggled using my simple docker container for php-apache, and getting it to interact with Caddy reverse proxy for my little project(s).

I’m glad I pushed through and finally did something about it!

It’s been a frantic 3 months or so since getting the cafe and the learning curve has been steep and once again, I turn to organising my home lab and home services to try and keep my technical skills going (and boy have they fallen short since leaving tech).

NPM has served me pretty faithfully all these years – but it wasn’t ever properly “configured” (API tests and connectivity checks would never work due to API failures somehow).

Containing all the sites

Every website that NPM used to point to was routed through a php-fpm container that had virtual hosts configured for it – this meant each time I had a site to have additional advanced nginx config parameters put in for every entry in it. This was a pain to do and prone to a lot of issues and errors.

It looked a lot like this:

This served my purposes quite well. But it WAS clunky to configure and add new sites to it.

Even more so, the biggest drawback was adding something like uptime-kuma or any other app to my server. Adding it as a subdomain in NGINX Proxy Manager was a muck around for some bizarre reason, and adding additional apps that worked on arbitrary ports through the web UI was troublesome. I suppose my biggest complaint at the end of the day was the webUI was somehow easy to use yet cumbersome 😱

I’ve been out of the tech game long enough to be able to claim ignorance to best practices now I think, but Caddy’s straightforward “chuck everything in a Caddyfile” approach simplified a lot of things for me – and made it straightforward routing traffic to apps, or different website domains as I needed.

None of this is new, and all of this is what I used to do in my dev environments back in the day. But I hadn’t touched it in so long it feels nice to be doing something so close to the “good old days”.

Baby steps…

Well… my last post mentioned the numerous domains I own – all “jtiong” themed – and one particular site was jtiong.games

This particular domain and its purpose was more to act as a nice set of subdomains for connecting to whatever various game servers I’d be hosting (most notably Minecraft). And really, that’s all I did. I built the boilerplate code for the jtiong.games website

I suppose one thing at a time. I’ll try to find more time to put down some more commits and enjoy the process of building up my little corner of the web with no timelimits or deadlines 🙂

It’s been a while since the last update!

I think it’s no surprise to a lot of people that the cost of living is making things like streaming services, media and general online services a little bit more unaffordable in this day and age. We’re all trapped by them though, and require them to some degree.

To that end, I’ve spent the last little while during my down-time running several services and resources for my family and friends. This is all well and good – everything works fine, and there’s minimal issues really. But in the spirit of homelabbing, would it really be a hobby if I didn’t set up some hyper-intricate domain name scheme that would let my family and friends access said services?

What’s changed since 2024?

Newly Deployed Apps & Services

• Tailscale (Headscale) implemented across my devices
• Uptime Kuma for service status and monitoring
• Paperless-NGX for document management both personal and for business
• Kavita for e-books, comics, manga and more!
• DumbAssets for tracking assets of stuff I own
• ChartDB for database design for some personal projects
• Draw.io for diagram and chart drawing
• RomM for retro game ROM backups management

App & Service Changes

• Caddy replaced Nginx Proxy Manager for locally hosted stuff

Infrastructure Changes

• DOMAIN NAMES – I’ve now updated a whole bunch of domain names
  • jtiong.com
  • jtiong.com
  • jtiong.dev
  • jtiong.media
  • jtiong.network
  • jtiong.games

As you can see there’s a whole network of domains now 😜

Each domain has it’s own set of subdomains which of course, expose various services and software for my family and friends to use 🙂

Yup – I bought a cafe 🙂

Happy Birthday to me!

Here’s to a new adventure 🙂

This is the 100th post in this blog 🙂

This year, one of my goals is to blog and journal a bit more consistently. I have a bit of a weird process, but we’ll see if I can keep it up 🙂

My day to day, and default “journal” I reach for, is on my phone using the Day One app. I’ve been using this since it first came out in 2011, and it is in fact one of the reasons I kept to using an iPhone (the other being my medical data in my diabetes sensor apps from back then too).

Since roughly about November 24th, I’ve been managing to pop in at least an entry per day; so my hope is to keep that “chain” going – and manage a post in the Day One app per day.

These entries generally just tend to be photos, or really short entries about thoughts/happenings throughout the day. It’s easy for me to reach for my phone and I have a lockscreen shortcut to Day One.

Following that, I’ve started making longer form blog entries into this blog that you’re reading right now!

And finally, the hard copy “bullet” journals – I used to keep these bullet journals as my day-to-day things, but nowadays my phone will suffice for that with short Day One entries. So these Bullet Journals are actually kind of historical objects that I’d write/draw/scribble in retroactively. At least, that’s the plan…

I keep these paper journals consistently in a Moleskine Classic Soft Cover Notebook Large Size (Amazon Link for the books) that’s grid-drawn for easy planning and sketching things. I started the 2023 bullet journal, and kind of took a break. So I’ve got to catch up on them all, and make sure I more consistently take the time to keep the 2025 book up to date too (it’s a good place to doodle around and be a bit creative).

So here’s me publicly saying that I’ll blog and journal more consistently! And we’ll see if I really keep up at a minimum, the daily entries into Day One and from there, I can further update the blog site, and my paper journals.

A quarter century into the new millennium!

A start to the year that was full of cleaning, fun, and dinner with my beloved family.

2024 was a whirlwind of a year – I moved house (again!), I finished the year no longer a bachelor, and I even managed to get in a trip to Japan 🙂

The year has truly been something else – and I’ve managed to “solidify” the technology side of life at present, even with this blog maintaining its uptime finally!

2024 definitely ended on a more positive note than 2023 did; and I’m excited to see what happens going forward this year in 2025 🙂

Went on a bit of a trek all over Sydney yesterday for a date day with Annie – it’s a bit unusual as usually we just have a single destination that we kind of go and check out, then head home afterwards. Instead this time, we went to:

• 2 Foodies in Mt. Pritchard for super authentic Pho, and Vietnamese Food
• Bondi Junction Westfield to watch War of the Rohirrim (great film!) and just check it out
• Macquarie Centre for dinner (Claypot Kitchen ♥)

Crossing Sydney as a whole multiple times was interesting, kept the day rolling along, and was a good day out!

I picked up Annie, and we trekked it over to 2 Foodies (https://www.instagram.com/2foodies_)

The food was super delicious at 2Foodies – it was extremely authentic and it was full of Vietnamese people ordering for their busy Sunday lunches! Annie went with a fresh Noodle Salad, and I went with Pho – with Beef Balls, Brisket and Rare beef and a Coconut Juice drink on the side!

We smashed our food so hard 😋

Neither of us had been to Mt. Pritchard before and we sure as heck picked a sunny, hot day to visit. Parking was a nightmare at the Petrol Station where 2 Foodies is located – so next time we go, we’ll definitely look for street parking.

Tummies full, we made our way to Bondi Junction’s Westfield Shopping Center — I’d never been before, always only passed the center. But this time around we were going to watch the new LOTR animated movie, The War of the Rohirrim.

Driving the M8 route from Liverpool all the way to Bondi was definitely a new experience for both of us, and it was kind of amazing seeing that Sydney had such a long underground tunnel for cars to travel. We made good time though, thanks to it!

I was impressed by the movie – it was an anime film that sparked a lot of Stranger of the Sword meets Princess Mononoke to me – and those films I rate probably a 9.5/10 – some of my favourite anime films of all time!

Imaginations inspired, we left – looking for dinner we actually decided to completely forgo eating at Bondi – the Westfield was incredibly disappointing. And headed “towards home” for a favourite at Macquarie Shopping Centre; Claypot Kitchen.

All in all, it was a fun day – and we’ve resolved to go on more “adventures” to check out more of Sydney together in the future. As Sydney natives – sometimes we just don’t really see things to do or enjoy in Sydney as much as it’s “home” for us.

Hopefully this opens our eyes up to more!

Previously I ran a server rack on a 1000/1000mbps symmetrical service to my home (Ethernet provisioned from an ISP) to provide a number of personal media services to myself, friends and family.

Having had to relocate across 3 properties in the last 12 months however, drastically changed things – and I’ve since fallen back to a single 4RU server that’s packed to the gills with storage, and uses generic off-the-shelf consumer parts to keep going. There’s been a lot of benefits to this actually.

• It’s simple to get replacement parts
• Noise is kept to a minimum
• Reliability and up-time is a little less than enterprise hardware, but otherwise acceptably usable

With my recent trip to Japan and return – I’ve found the need to actually back up all my photos and media into a singular place that’s much easier to manage. So now I just run a single monolithic server called JT-SERVER which provides all the services I need.

Services I’ve built up to use nowadays are:

• Plex Media Server
• Nginx Proxy Manager – which routes to:
  • Overseerr
  • Immich

That’s it – nowadays there’s very little I do in the way of other things. A game server is still desirable but it’s not the highest priority for now. Maybe in the near future I might run:

• Minecraft (resuming previous efforts)
• Satisfactory (occasional)
• Factorio (occasional)

But otherwise most gaming requirements and needs for my “village” of friends and family aren’t necessary.

I think over the course of 2024, I’ve had to be much leaner, out of necessity. And I’ve come to find that some things just aren’t that necessary for “me and mine”. As I go into 2025, I head in with the goal of not buying any new technology, but rather just maintaining the status quo of what I have, and building a necessary platform of services for myself and my loved ones. It’ll be minimal, and a lot more wallet friendly, I think.