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.

In the course of my day-to-day tinkerings, I’ve occasionally needed to whiteboard an idea with friends and family. Now, from my former professional life, tools like Figma, and Miro come to mind; except for a simple home user like myself – they’re paid platforms, or their free tier restrictions are too much.

I came across ExcaliDash by ZimengXiong – a free, self-hostable version of the very popular ExcaliDraw web app that offers a set of pretty awesome features:

• Drawings are stored on the server, making them easy to backup and export/import
• You can collaborate with as many people as you want
• User authentication and management is within the app
• Each person can see their own drawings or can be configured for sharing
• It has a dark mode ❤️

What about Obsidian’s Canvas feature?

Canvas is great – for mind mapping stuff, sure! But that’s about it — sadly, if I wanted more complex diagrams of things like server structure, etc. there’s issues with “Ordering” of entities on the screen, as in you can’t send things to the front, or back, or bring them up/down one layer. More complex editing features like grouping and ungrouping and even more are not in the Canvas feature. It wasn’t designed for this kind of diagramming, so it’s understandable!

What about draw.io?

A fantastic self hostable app too that actually works really well! But it doesn’t allow for collaboration, and I can’t add user authentication, control or sharing very easily either. On top of that, it doesn’t store the diagrams locally on my server, rather they become downloadable files that can I load in/out of the browser, or if I use local browser storage, the diagram isn’t as portable (I can’t work on it across networks or machines).

Done deal!

I’m happy with the setup, it’s not without it’s jank, but the project is active, and it works well for my very simple needs! So if anyone else is looking for a collaborative whiteboarding app, give ExcaliDash by ZimengXiong a look!

Back in a previous post about Obsidian, I mentioned that I was paying for Notion, and Clickup. In an attempt to reduce my overhead costs, I had initially started using Obsidian as my main PKMS (Personal Knowledge Management System — I didn’t make the acronym up, there’s a fantastic sub-Reddit you can find at r/PKMS). I have since been bouncing between Notion, Obsidian and a newcomer, Affine Pro.

One step closer to completing the jtiong.com project, I finally laid down the groundwork for the Photos section of the site. It’s always been something I wanted to include in the website, being able to share photos of my adventures and hobbies with the few friends & family who visit this website from time to time!

To give some insight into how jtiong.com currently works, it is a marriage between a WordPress backed blog for my Blog entries and my sections as “sub-sites” in subdirectories like /games or /labs. By doing so, I get the feature and stability(😏) benefits of using (I dare say) the world’s most popular blogging CMS/platform; and the flexibility of adding in dynamic features that suits my needs like Game Server info, network status, and other integrations to the site.

It’s been a bit of a steep learning curve (if the number of commits I’ve done in the month of March alone is anything to go by) but there’s been something really fulfilling in finally building the site that I’ve always wanted to but never quite had the time to.

That’s not to say the site is perfect, but there’s beauty and perfection in the very journey of just building this, and maintaining it, and eventually (over time) evolving it into whatever my needs require.

Just in that alone, there’s the Ikigai, Kaizen and Wabisabi of it all.

Update: 20th March 2026

The Photos section is completed in design! It took a moment longer than normal but I managed to shoe-horn the functionality of mobile/sidebar stuff into the WordPress ecosystem properly <3

All done 🙂

I’m finally back on working on some more public facing stuff on jtiong.com — this time, bringing my website jtiong.dev, into the Labs section of my site. Here’s the older design (jtiong.dev), vs the new design (jtiong.com)!

In the original design, I showed every month since 2015 until present day, with the number of commits showing as a bar graph across the top of the page. Now, this was all well and good, but further down the track the bars are going to get smaller and smaller as time goes on. Not really ideal!

In the new design, I’ve taken more “inspiration” from Github (really it’s just straight up copied) using a tabbed layout to show my commits across the years, plus a slightly more unique “last 365 days commits” in the first tab to make it a bit more dynamic.

I’ve listed the commits underneath the graph too, they don’t link to any repos or commits themselves, as generally I work in mostly private repositories.

The mobile view and compatibility is even better – the tabs are swipe and tap friendly, meaning it’s easier to browse my commits as needed if I ever need to reference the day’s code.

I think a lot of creators say, “When you have a nice space, it makes you want to use it more” or something along those lines for creative output. Having nice tools makes you want to use them more, a nice chair to sit at, or a powerful PC, shiny power tools to make things, etc.

That philosophy even rings true for something as basic as an online blog (well, now more of a whole damn website). Since deciding to redesign my site and consolidate it all, it’s given me ikigai and really, it’s become a joy to start updating my this site (and even this blog) a lot more.

I won’t go so far as to say my aim this year is to blog more or do more content – but I’d like to foster a better environment around which I can update this site more often, be it with blog posts, or new site features, or otherwise.

An evolution of my website’s themes

Independent Publisher is a fantastic theme – I loved how simple and straight to the point it is. I actually came across this theme when I started following a Minecraft Modder back in the early halcyon days of Minecraft’s modding scene, the early alpha and beta days. There was a modder by the name of Sk89q (Albert Pham) who actually developed one of the most important mods that propelled Minecraft into its modern day popularity, WorldEdit. His blog had this theme in a nice neutral toned colourway that made it easy to read and keep up with a lot of his (sometimes not so) little projects. I immediately took to using the same theme, with a few little tweaks of my own, and left it mostly at default with a colourway change for things.

Minty Charmander is my own from-scratch WordPress theme, the first time I’d actually properly done something like this without just hacking other themes or shoe-horning other layouts in. I made this theme shortly after meeting my fiance Annie 🥰. One could even go so far as to call her my muse! The theme’s nomenclature came from our shared enjoyment of the earlier Pokemon games (Red/Blue) and how we both chose Charmander as our starting Pokemon.

The design began as a way to “modernise” the look of the site, and it was the first attempt at sharing a common design language between mutliple domains (jtiong.blog and jtiong.dev) — in fact, you can still see the older Minty Charmander design applied to jtiong.dev (as of the time of writing!)

Chunky Snorlax is of course, the current incarnation of the site, and a much larger project than just a WordPress theme. It too is written from the ground up, but with a few hard requirements to the project such as:

• The site must be usable on mobile
• Discord integration for my personal community must be implemented
• It must be able to handle private gated sections for family, or friends

The project is like Minty Charmander, targeted towards unifying the domains under jtiong.com as well as having consistent branding across the sections of the domain that they’ll become; and is in fact, so large that I even have it documented in Notion for task tracking and managing what I’ve done so I have a reference to come back to in future development.

It’s an interesting development project for me because after a few years away from the tech industry, I’m finally dipping my toe back into coding and learning some skills along the way, at my own pace 😃

The site will continue being a desktop first website. I’m always designing and developing the site based off how it appears on my personal desktop, before making the design responsive and accommodating for mobile resolutions afterwards.

Improving standards in publishing posts

I’ve been a WordPress user for a long time in regards to this blog – about 10 years apparently. But it’s always been a secondary, perfunctory usage. I’ve always just very basically logged in, dumped what was in my head into a post, and hit publish.

Since I started with Minty Charmander during July 2024, I started to use more features of WordPress’s editor like Galleries, and photo uploads properly. And with the blog’s current iteration, I’ve started:

• paying attention more to CSS styling (partially due to design hard requirements above)
• learning to use the built-in lightbox feature and some improvements with it
  • the lightbox now loads the source image in full res when you click on them instead of delivering an upscaled thumbnail with the native WP feature
• learned that adding image captions improves traffic to my site
• likewise, feature images also help increase traffic! It also just looks a lot nicer across the blog 🙂
• the tags and categories system needs some refinement, but works fairly well
  • I need to go through my posts and re-tag and re-categorise as appropriate!

So it’s nice to see that putting in the effort into the site has also meant I’ve started improving my own methods and processes for creating content here. It’s an older form of content, I’m not a YouTuber or some sort of highly skilled video editor; and it’s never a “no” but for now, I enjoy the written word more. And so I rant on the internet using this blog 🥳

The new update to jtiong.com brings with it not only the Blog – but also an attempt to roll in all the content of my other domains into it. I come across an interesting dilemma – I haven’t really got a plan for the design of the site per se… I have content – yes, that’s easily pulled from the existing Minecraft info website (at the soon to be defunct jtiong.games domain), but no actual design idea.

The Old Design

Below is a set of screenshots of the jtiong.games Minecraft section:

Deciding Requirements…

The “original” design had a number of features I’d really like to pull over to this current site – like the Whitelist section – I was particularly proud of that section having fought with bootstrap CSS to try and get a nice layout happening. The Whitelist also allowed authenticated users to dynamically add themselves to the Whitelist without any manual intervention on my part. It was convenient, and looked cool!

Here’s the thing though, all that information, all those features – they’re split up across 4 or 5 separate pages! And I don’t think I should have an online form where my friends can arbitrarily add people to the server’s Whitelist – just for posterity’s sake. It is meant to be our FOREVER SERVER after all. People who join the server should be vetted and added when a human moderator is able to.

The Requirements

Thanks to my ranting above — I have an idea for some design requirements now:

• Condense the server information into less pages
• Find a way to integrate the Server Map nicely into the site design
• Display the whitelist in a reasonable way (a list maybe?)
• Integrate a way to see posts I make about Minecraft (and the server) into the page(s)
• Make this section easily viewable on mobile (this is a hard requirement across the whole site)

The New Design

Behold! The new design!

Almost everything about the server, fits on the one page! With the exception of the World Map – a visitor can view everything they need about the server, although the Player Whitelist is hidden for unauthenticated visitors.

There’s a few adjacent tasks for jtiong.com’s upgrade to proceed in tandem with the rest of this section’s update, but for the time being, this’ll serve all my requirements!

So, it’s been a pretty quick pivot recently as you might’ve gleaned from my previous blog post – but I’m consolidating all my domains under a single jtiong.com domain name. And not wanting to throw away the hard work of Chubby Snorlax from my jtiong.games and jtiong.network domain names – I’ve begun slowly shaping the existing site you’re reading right now into what is called “Chunky Snorlax” – a similar theme (still following the Pokemon theme for things – Annie’s a big fan of Pokemon of course) with a twist, the “Chunky” nomenclature is because the site is just full of stuff from my other domain names.

True to form, it’s a darker themed site as usual – although there are some nicer features I’ve implemented including:

• Update to Bootstrap v5.3.8 which is the latest version
  • This also include Bootstrap Icons v1.13.1
• There’s now an image Lightbox overlay that I’ve tweaked for viewing images (for future posts going forward – it’d take me forever to update things retroactively sadly)
• There’s a more considered approach to the mobile version of the site now (tidier menus)
• There’s now a Tag Cloud (although I don’t know many people that browse that way?)
• Captions on images now appear with a frosted effect at the bottom of images too (FANCY!)

I’m hoping to keep this theme around for more than 12 months this time around, but I think going forward it’ll be less a “brand new revamp” and more of an evolution of design going forward as the needs of the site evolve too.

Chunky Snorlax is probably the most “complete” WordPress theme, I’ve built to date. There’s no doubt a lot of bugs and issues, and the theme itself is very simplistic, but it’s mine, and it’s built from scratch, warts and all 😄

Hope you all enjoy it 👍

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.