January and the start of February also brought on a look at better brain dumping knowledge from inside my head, into something tangible. Sort of a legacy thing, I think.

Obsidian has been a note taking app that’s based around the markdown plaintext format that’s been around for years. A lot of my friends with a hyper technical background have been huge advocates of Obsidian and in an effort to find something that’ll let me brain dump with an intelligent linking method that is code friendly — Obsidian came up time and time again.

This blog post is generally just me rationalizing why I’m switching to it, over the two existing services I use (and pay for) – Notion and Clickup – both of which are fantastic apps for people who need something a little more fancy. But up front, I think it’s best to talk about the cost of these apps. Both of these apps are wonderful; they cost money however, at $5 USD and $12 USD respectively, and this adds up to a little over $200 USD per year. More than one might think to affect one’s finances in these trying times!

And so…! In a bid to move towards reducing my overheads, I thought I’d look into DIY solutions that I can integrate or piggy back on more critical services. In this case, Obsidian – which can use iCloud Drive to store itself works well. iCloud isn’t a service I can easily get rid of – my mobile phone, my tablet are both rooted deep in the Apple ecosystem, as there’s health related devices and apps that are better on iOS than in Android or Windows for my situation (your mileage may vary of course). Lucky for me though, that this is still usable across Windows – meaning I technically don’t need to worry about something like the paid Obsidian Sync service.

Security is also another thing I find myself concerned a little bit about. There’s not much I can do about state level bad actors gaining access to my data (and I don’t think anyone’d find use for it) – but your typical cyber criminal is still a concern because they’re on an interpersonal level. Last thing I need is sensitive data (like health records) getting compromised and having them leveraged against me. But to make things worse, it turns out that Notion isn’t encrypted on any level – which kind of explains why it’s so easy to publish something directly to the web.

Scary.

Clickup is also web based and doesn’t do much better. I feel like Notion and Clickup don’t have the resources to build privacy on a level that Apple does with its iCloud services. Having been subject to some very public breaches of customers data (not Apple’s fault – they got socially engineered) – Apple has no doubt more than doubled down to make sure it never gets the blame for any cyber security breaches.

So, all in all – I’ve moved to Obsidian and as of the time of this post, it’s been almost 2 weeks. So far I’ve started to slowly port across the knowledge dumped in Notion into it. It’s a long, slow and tedious process, but the beauty of the way Obsidian draws links between articles (Wiki-esque) means that I don’t have duplicate style documents, unless I make them forcibly within the file structure of the Vault itself.

It’s also nice that I can write SQL-esque “Dataview” queries that can generate lists of pages within things. It feels a lot more like a programmer’s knowledge assistant than a “Note taking” application.

It feels natural using Obsidian now, and I keep improving how I use it as I go along, it’s still got that shiny new “Learning new hacks all the time” feel to a new application.

It feels like The Right Move™

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.

As my Homelab and private discord community has grown, I’ve needed to roll out more than just websites, but also web applications, and differently ported things that need to be proxied back to a domain or subdomain address. The old setup was horrible… so I set about fixing it once and for all in November and December, 2022.

The Problem…

I’m stuck with something that looks like this:

This essentially means for each website I deploy, I’d need to essentially double proxy myself; and it was honestly a little bit confusing to work with SSL certificates.

How did it come to this?

One of the legacies of my time at Hostopia was building a Docker based local test environment that was portable and rapidly deployable; using an nginx-proxy container, with apache containers for the websites behind the proxy container.

The beauty of this setup was that I could quickly roll out a website as needed anywhere with the magic of Docker. And for my initial purposes, that was fine.

The problem arises when I try to roll out secondary services, like GitLab, Minecraft Maps, Game Server UIs etc. which are all related to various non standard HTTP(S) ports, but need to be reverse proxied to subdomains, etc. (an example being https://map.northrealm.info — which is a Minecraft Server Map that runs on port 8123). I’d have to have ALL THOSE RESOURCES on a single server. Or each additional server could be a double proxy to account for extra servers. This isn’t very efficient.

And secondly the bigger problem – was organising and renewing SSL certificates, it was a hassle tracking and renewing or making new certificates as needed as it was being double routed first through Nginx Proxy Manager, then secondarily on the local docker container host the app/site was located on!

So as for why it was configured like this? A mix of speed, and laziness in doing things “The right way™”. What was supposed to be quick and easy eventually just became a hassle that wasn’t working properly.

The Solution

My services infrastructure now looks like this:

It might not seem like much – but it’s now server hardware agnostic, and I don’t need to install a separate cluster of containers to manage locally any sites or apps per server.

NginxProxyManager (NPM) now acts as that cluster of infrastructure containers that span the full home network as opposed to being tied down to one host. Custom nginx configurations are created “per host” in the app, and they handle how pages and content are served for sites, or direct traffic specifically for a given application.

Much better I say! 😀

*Facepalm*

There are plenty of ways to skin a cat; and this is definitely better than the original setup! It’s also not a perfect solution, but this blog post wasn’t written in an attempt to find absolute perfection (I believe it’s something to strive for, you can’t achieve it unless you’re a divine power) – and it’s more to document the journey of my ignominy and learnings as I go about running a homelab that actually gets some use 🙂

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.

Welcome Maple. I don’t know what type of cat or kitten she is. But she’s 2 years old, and gorgeous. She’s Panko’s big sister.

She’s a tiny kitty, so here’s hoping that she and Panko get along, and he’s gentle 🙂

I’m sure she’ll very quickly establish that she’s in charge, though.

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.