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.

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 🙂

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.

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 🙂

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.

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…!

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.

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.

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.

Just a short little update to myself that I’ll keep. I’ve acquired:

• Dell R330 – R330-1
  • 4 x 500GB SSD
  • 2 x 350w PSU
  • 1 x Rail Kit
  • INSTALLED AND READY TO GO
• Dell R330 – R330-2
  • 4 x 500GB SSD
  • 1 x 350w PSU (need to order 1)
  • 1 x Rail Kit (just ordered)
  • Awaiting PSU, and Rail Kit

These are going to help me decommission my Dell R710 servers. Trusty as they are, they’ve reached their end of life, for sure. I’ll keep them as absolute backup machines; but will not be using them on active duty anymore.

R330-1

• Websites

R330-2

• Rust (Fortnightly)
• Project Zomboid (Fortnightly)
• Minecraft (Active Version)

It’s actually been pretty tricky keeping a decent track of everything; so I’ve recently signed on for some Free Plan tiered Atlassian services using Jira and Confluence. Something a little formal for my use.