I run this blog off a really old Windows PC acting as a server – it’s been great, and serves my needs for years (at least since pre-COVID!)

Recently a lot of my online services and apps that I run have been dockerised and through the simple use of docker compose, I’ve always enjoyed the simplicity of using some proprietary software that required Windows, as well as just running this site off Docker for Windows.

Until now – I’ve since installed WSL2 and moved this container onto the WSL2 filesystem, and let me tell you – the performance is night and day between the site when it was running through all the translation stuff for Docker Windows, and Docker “natively” in WSL2.

I can’t believe it…!

And now I’m going to start looking at migrating all the rest of my stuff across in an effort to maximise performance.

From my last related post about all the clutter and possessions I have – as well as a history of the posts in this blog – I am quite into journaling.

I have a problem in that I have too many places to journal and keep ideas – that I’m not sure what I would consider the “most efficient” way to do things.

I have:

• DayOne
• Notion
• Notability
• Physical Bullet Journal
• Travelers’ Notebook (passport size)

So I thought I’d do a “stream of consciousness” rant and put my thoughts down on the screen about how to best use these resources for me personally.

Thoughts about each resource…

DayOne

I’ve been using DayOne on and off ever since the app first came out back in 2016 (whoa, 10 years). It’s actually been my go-to for on-the-go journaling. It has an interesting integration with my phone that just collates all the images taken on any given calendar day of an entry – meaning I can quickly and efficiently make entries as needed.

To that end, DayOne remains clearly the “first port of call” whenever I need to put something down in writing. Or should the need arise (and more often does), I can whip the phone out, press the camera button on my phone and snap something really quickly, then return later in a quiet moment and add it into the DayOne calendar entry for keeping track of the moment(s).

Notion

Notion is actually something I’ve “come back to” recently. I was previously using Obsidian as a sort of knowledge store; but with the idea of making things easier for “those who remain” – I reverted back to Notion and have since been trying to update it more regularly.

Overall I think Notion remains a knowledge store more than any sort of journal system – ironically though as I started writing this post – there’s now a calendar view that allows me to attach pages to each Day in what can only be described as an excellent digital planner/journal setup 😂

Still, it’s a much better application for keeping knowledge base items in there (like, how did I design this site, and the steps I took); and for things in my life that need more organised tables and pseudo database views.

It doesn’t hurt that Notion is available across iOS, iPadOS, and Windows – all my devices are able to access Notion smoothly. Even Linux based devices!

It means that I can smoothly access this knowledge from anywhere, and should the need arise, I can add to my “Diary” if need be to keep information tracked with a day’s entry into my journals.

Physical Bullet Journal

These are traditionally my handwritten journals that I’ve been doing since 2018 – they’re done in “classic” size gridded Moleskine book – soft covered.

Does it still make sense to have a hard copy journal?

This year so far I’ve stated doing the book as more of a long form journal rather than as a planner/bullet journal setup. I don’t carry this journal with me normally so it makes sense to turn it into something more long form, with nice photos and such.

A digital journal, the wildcard…!

Something has been sitting in the back of my mind though about it all – as the times have been changing – does it still make sense to have a hard copy journal? The DayOne journal’s benefits are the multimedia capabilities of such a setup. I can include video footage, photos and even audio recordings per journal entry. That’s simply unbeatable in terms of “saving memories”.

The biggest advantage of a hard copy journal that a lot of proponents will push, is the fact that you have an emotional connection to the handwriting of the journal – you can tell someone’s mood, state of mind or general vibe from how they’ve written on the page (e.g. agitated writing might be sharper or more jagged in the lettering; calmer might be rounder and smoother, etc.) but that becomes moot with something like an iPad Pro, and the Notability app. I can handwrite, and scribble, doodle, and draw my way through a “journal” all while still embedding multimedia into the page, almost like a living Harry Potter Newspaper-esque experience!

Travelers’ Notebook (Passport Size)

I also have a Travelers’ Notebook – a little pocket-sized journal that I can use on the go as well.

Originally after first buying the standard sized journal as a souvenir from Tokyo as well as this passport sized notebook – I couldn’t figure out how such a structure would match the bullet journaling methods I use or how it would fit in with what I do. It uses slim notebook refills and doesn’t seem to be appropriate for the longer form style of journaling that I’m beginning to do.

“Bullet Journaling” on a lighter note seems to be the answer for me – it’s less about doing bullet journals in the way I’ve always known them, and more using the Traveler’s Notebook as a sort of physical life planner that logs appointments to keep, as well as a sort of daily log of where I’ve been or what I’ve done in bullet point format.

There’s 2 refills I keep within the book, and a small kraftpaper folder to hold things like spare cards.

The first refill is an undated monthly view planner book; the second refill is a dotted grid book. Keeping a physical planner system is probably going to be more significant to me as I can look back for a quick jog of the memory for a day’s “traveled journey”.

Coming to a decision

I think it’s time to make the switch to a fully digital journal. Being able to put my thoughts to screen above – led me to realise that Notability is the solution to my future journal needs. It covers:

• the emotional connection of hand-writing and drawing my entries
• being able to embed photos, video and audio into the page for multimedia entries
• iCloud based backup for future use across devices
• on device storage for the Notability files is possible
• editing the journal is far easier – I can select, move, resize things as needed

It also gives my iPad Pro an important use case, aside from just being a graphics tablet and secondary monitor for my laptop, or my desktop – it’s also the device I update my journal in. So there’s clearly a lot of boxes it ticks.

Figuring out the negatives however, are pretty simple:

• it’s battery powered
• there’s an Apple Pencil involved – and that’s expensive…!

There’s a whole load more upsides than downsides – and I haven’t even covered everything. But at this point it’s clear that it’s the future of my journaling.

So here’s to making my iPad far more useful to myself again! 🤣

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.

2026!

I can’t believe I made it past 40 times round the Sun on this ball of dirt. I’m not usually one to wax philosophical in a public space, but I’m old, and I figure it’s alright for me to be doing this now.

This year is all about adjusting to the changes in my life over the last 2 years. This marks my (going into) 2nd year of being “retired” but in reality, I’d say it’s more like a “doing a lighter workload”. And boy it wasn’t a matter of becoming a man of leisure, instead I decided to buy a cafe on my birthday last year🤣

At the end of last year I bought an apartment, my own little slice of paradise in a great spot in Sydney about 15 minutes from the CBD. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to do so, but it’s a big adjustment from my previous living conditions (I’d always lived in free-standing houses usually of 3 or more bedrooms).

It’s forced me over the recent holiday period to look at all the things I own, and how to cut down on excess – something I think I generally suffer from especially the last few years (I have so much computer related crap in my possession). And really, I suppose it’s inspired this post for me to rant about how I’m going to start the year and approach life, etc. Looking back in the post history on this blog, I don’t really recall writing about things like this so much, but I suppose this is a bit more of a personal project now. So, time to ramble on!

Like every trend chasing “New Year, New Me” kind of person in Western Culture, I looked at what I thought would be a “foreign yet cool” concept as a starting point, and of course, looked to Japan. A bit awkward considering I’m an Australian-born Chinese person, but hey! Sort of in the right region!

• Ikigai – I think this means to find meaning and purpose in life on a day-to-day basis
• Kaizen – I think this means to constantly improve, as long as it’s a step forward, it’s improvement
• Wabisabi – Finding beauty and perfection in the imperfections, impermanence and incompletion

I like the muddled sort of “constant improvement” and reiterative process of development these Japanese Philosophies talk about. And I think in a lot of Asian culture, the grind culture is definitely something they’ve mastered over the years. Maybe it’s appealing deep into that heritage inside me 🤣

Not to be outdone though, the Swedish themselves also have a philosophy called Lagom – a term that actually hits with a bit of PTSD from an old development project for me (it was named Lagom). Lagom means “Just the right amount, not too much, not too little. Just right.” and is the idea of perfect moderation and balance in execution.

I think, this year I’m beginning my 40s with a step towards making my life more like a chill game. More Stardew Valley, and Animal Crossing; and less the Sims without a ladder, or Elden Ring 😱

It’s more about making sure each day I’m a little bit better than before. But also accepting that not all days will be like that, and some days there will be steps backwards, or time needed for recovery. And even in those challenges and setbacks, there’s beauty and joy to be found.

Happy New Year 🙂

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.