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…

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.

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 😂

The gang got together for some breakfast Yum Cha at the Eight restaurant today. It was interesting, and to be honest, we felt a little ripped off, I think.

When the lads and I were sat down – because the majority of the table were Caucasian – one wily old lady came over with her cart of fried food and essentially unloaded the entire cart on our table.

This was probably one of the biggest whirlwind days in recent memory! Strap yourselves in, dear audience – this is a long blog entry with plenty of photos.

My sister Sarah and I headed out to the Rocks, just under the Sydney Harbour Bridge for an awesome lunch of food trucks with tacos and Don Julio Tequila. The food was made by (now) celebrity chef, Roy Choi. He’s famous partly for the Kogi food truck, his contributions to essentially feeding the Marvel Studios crew during their Marvel Cinematic Universe adventures, and his adventures with Jon Favreau in “Chef Show” on Netflix. The movie, “Chef” (also directed by Favreau) was also based loosely around his life.

I know right, the tacos don’t look like much to look at – but somehow, they were amazing. The tortillas were fresh, the recipe clicked together so well, and they were hot and tasty. Definitely impressive, especially considering there were other “great mexican food trucks” there who partnered with Roy on the event, and they served their tacos – side by side, Roy’s food was still trumping theirs. 😲

Despite the wet weather that crept up on us around the start of the event, by the time things were well underway (and PACKED with way too stylish people and hipsters) – the sun came out and everything went smashingly 😂

But by far – this was the highlight of my day 😱

Being able to meet Roy was amazing, we exchanged only small pleasantries and I thanked him for helping me see more of the world of food; he was soon mobbed by at least 30 other people.

If you haven’t seen his show – this is good watching, people: https://www.netflix.com/watch/81288533

Then what happened?

I topped off the day with Korean BBQ with the Snacks gang.

What should have been a night at Mjolnir – a viking pub in Sydney, ended up turning into a visit to our group’s fave Korean BBQ chain – this time instead of being at the CBD, we went to the one in Strathfield.

Lesson learnt – we had a huge group so we had to wait a long long time to get seated. Easily an hour. We did eventually get in though, and they spread us cross two long tables

A fantastic night was had by all. Great food, better company – it was an awesome night to enjoy lots of food and drink 😇

We then had a brief wander around to chill and cool down from the heat of the BBQ, and digest our food a bit.

Plenty of memes were had. A good night all round, and a fantastic day that I’ll look back on for a long time to come.

So, it’s no secret that I’m very much into PC gaming; and with it, the hobby of essentially running LAN parties or gaming communities.

Recently, with the growth of the pandemic, I’d been able to grow my own little community to about 120-odd people on Discord. There’s a core group of about 15-16 of us that play games together, and the rest sort of float in and out of discussions and various gaming releases.

September’s been a pretty crazy period; and I’ve started taking stock of the hobby I call “Only Snacks” and gaming. Not only is it a gaming community of close friends and family, it also ties into an enterprise level server rack, and internet connection. Granted I get benefits out of it in terms of business and capabilities; but it opens doors for our small group that didn’t exist before.

It’s pretty expensive. I don’t mind, there are others out there with wackier and (far) more expensive passions. I’m still within my means, but I did note today that it eats up almost all my time and energy.

The group is something I consider close friends – and among them a circle that I’d consider family. They honestly saw me through a rough time (that I think everyone went through) yet here we are, still together and thick as thieves.

So what’s going on? Nothing really, I’m actually just putting down some musings into the blog to keep things going.

I’ve got several servers which I work on, and quite often, this involves running regular cron’d tasks that perform various backups and configuration updates for me at odd schedules (as an example, my Rust server wipes fortnightly, and needs a config update to change the server name to reflect the last date wiped).

To do things like this, I’ve usually just written a script in PHP and run that at a given interval (daily or otherwise). There’s no real reason I chose PHP to write these scripts aside from familiarity with the language, and no doubt the rest could be easily achieved be it through Python, Shell Script or any other language out there.

For now though, PHP serves my needs just fine.

The problem is, I don’t actually keep these scripts backed up anywhere, or organised in any sort of manner!

The age of GitLab

Over the last couple days, I’ve implemented GitLab into my homelab stack (JT-LAB), and will be using it to store most of my code as a “source of truth” and subsequently sync things to GitHub afterwards (depending on the projects of course).

To the Game Servers, Four Branches…

Based off the various server types; specific branches would be used. For now, these would be:

• Rust
• Minecraft
• Factorio
• Satisfactory

Each game would be represented in its own branch, and based off that branch, would deploy a specific set of commands as needed. For the most part, only Minecraft retains itself in persistence, and the rest rely either on a voted wipe, or scheduled wipe paradigm.

To the File Systems, Five Branches…

Then we have servers with actual file resources and assets that I’d like to keep; things like Photos, Design Assets, old code references, etc. These would be:

• Media
• Design
• Research
• Education
• Maintenance

And nine, nine branches were gifted to the Websites

I also run a number of websites for friends and family on a pro-sumer level. I won’t really list these projects, but they do total up to 9! So it all kind of fits the whole LOTR theme I was going for with these titles.

One Repo to Rule them all…

The decision to build everything into one repository to manage all the core backup operations means I have less to track; for a personal system, I think this is fine. Monolithic design probably isn’t the way to go for a much larger operation than mine though!

Announcing…

Cronjobs

So this is the hypothesized project I’d like to build over the next few days; in combination primarily with jtiong.dev which will help track the commits and such that I do. Writing these projects up here as project whitepapers on a more formal basis might help with some resume stuff going forward for my future career 🙂