September 8, 2023

Giới thiệu SheepIt: Renderfarm miễn phí dành cho người dùng Blender

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(this post will be written in Vietnamese as those are the main target audience)

SheepIt là một dịch vụ render đám mây phân tán, miễn phí, giúp người dùng chia sẻ tài nguyên máy tính để tăng tốc quá trình render đồ họa 3D. Hệ thống hoạt động dựa trên sự đóng góp của cộng đồng, nơi mỗi người tham gia có thể sử dụng sức mạnh xử lý từ máy tính của mình để giúp render các dự án của người khác và ngược lại. Nhờ vào mô hình cộng đồng, SheepIt mang đến một giải pháp tiết kiệm chi phí, linh hoạt và hiệu quả cho các nghệ sĩ 3D, nhà làm phim và nhà thiết kế, hỗ trợ họ hoàn thành các tác phẩm một cách nhanh chóng và dễ dàng.

Full disclosure: Mình là team founder của team Vietnam trên cộng đồng SheepIt. Nếu các bạn tham gia đóng góp computing power của máy mình trên SheepIt, các bạn có thể join vào team mình. Khi ở trong team các bạn sẽ được sử dụng điểm chung của team để render dự án của mình. Các bạn cũng có thể tham gia chém gió cùng các thành viên khác trong team Vietnam trên kênh Discord chính thức của team tại đây.

September 8, 2023

Server migration (again)

So I’ve switched to yet another cloud provider. This time it’s Hetzner.

While I prefer to self-host most of the services that I use (media server, team chat, password manager, CCTV etc.), I still keep my WordPress sites on a separate VPS. The main reason why I do this is because I prefer to keep all my self-host services containerized in docker, but the LAMP stack is one of the few things that runs just so much better bare-metal than containerized. You don’t have to worry about volume bindings, multiple db container vs single db container, PHP settings etc. Plus it never hurts to have a VPS laying around in case you need a sock proxy.

My VPS history:

Started with Google Cloud Platform, it served me well and taught me a lot about managing VPS. Performance was top-notch (it’s still Google after all). Google later revised their pricing which put it outside of my price range. I then looked into Oracle Cloud since I heard a lot of good things about their free tier VPS. Unfortunately though its performance was horrible for me. I couldn’t get any of the fabled ARM VPS with 24GB RAM that they offer, but for me I would be fine even with the micro 1 vCPU 1GB RAM instance, IF it worked. Unfortunately it was unreachable most of the time (I registered for the South Korean datacenter, it was before the Singapore DC was available). So I started looking else where, finally decided to settle with Linode’s nanode.

It worked, for a while. Until performance became a problem again. With the $5 nanode (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM) I was constantly getting database timeout errors. It was clear 1GB just wasn’t cutting it. Unfortunately adding just 1GB more RAM would’ve doubled the monthly fee to $11. I was unhappy with that value.

So anyway, long story short, I switched to Hetzner as per many recommendations on reddit. And you know what, redditors know their stuffs. For less than the price of a Vietnamese Starbucks I’m getting 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB Storage and 20Tb bandwidth per month. This beats the absolute living shit out of any offer from Vulture, Linode, DigitalOcean, OVH etc.

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The downside is of course, this pricing only applies to VM instances located in Europe. I suppose Hetzner has some sort of home turf advantage that enabled them to keep the cost down. They recently introduced a new data center in Singapore. I tried provisioning a VM there but the monthly cost is more than triple the price of Helsinki. But I can live with a little of latency if that means I can keep the cost at a reasonable level. Otherwise I’d just bring everything back to run on my home NAS.

March 21, 2023

Good bye VNPT, hello FPT

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Gigabit Internet AND TV Streaming service for $12/mo? Yes, Please

We (our family) have been using VNPT as our primary ISP for years. They are the largest ISP in Vietnam and generally we have been happy with their services. That rapidly changed during the last year.

Here’s my list of complaint with VNPT:

  • Unreliable Connection: constant disconnection and inability to access the CDNs of some of the most popular websites including Shopee, Facebook, TikTok (as of Mar 2023, only Shopee is still affected, and mostly during night time). This started to become a problem around Covid19 lockdown time, they probably had a customer base explosion and their infrastructure couldn’t keep up. I get it, but 2 years? Letting that lasting as long as it does is a clear sign of incompetency.
  • Website Blocking: so they have this habit of straight up disabling access to certain websites, completely without their customer’s consent. I don’t have a comprehensive list of blocked websites but it include most of the pornographic websites like Pornhub, Xvideos etc. which I guess can’t be helped because they were mandated by the government (FPT also blocks these). But they also block 2 websites that doesn’t serve any adult content at all: Medium (where most of the UX editorial articles reside), and most recently, Behance (where people come for UI showcases when Dribbble shots don’t cut it). Naturally, you can see why I, as an UI/UX Designer, would have a major problem with this. I don’t want to have 1.1.1.1 running at startup just because I’m using a pussy ass ISP.
    Now to be clear, FPT doesn’t block Medium and Behance, I have checked. And yes, I am aware that the lawmakers who are responsible for these blocks are incompetent short-sighted pieces of shit but remember, it was us (the people), who allow these people to hold these positions. So in the end it’s essentially our fault. My expectation for government officials of a developing country like VN was already extremely low to begin with but…holy shit.
  • Shit Equipment: VNPT provided a 2-port modem on their first installation. Yep you read that right, 2-fucking-port excluding the WAN port. You can plug in a computer and a NAS and…that’s about it. You can of course phone up customer support and ask for a 4-port version, which I did, but com one. If they’re gonna cheap out on end users like that, what else are they cheaping out in the back? Perhaps that’s why their connection keeps going on and off intermittently. And also, the firmware on these modems though, holy shit I’ve probably haven’t seen such shitty software since the 90s, perhaps because they were probably made during that time. The UI and UX was straight up 90s-esque. They were ugly as shit and unintuitive to use. Took me way too long (and a lot of help from the WiFi community group on FB) to figure out which part do what. Who the fuck refer to port forwarding as ‘virtual server’ really?
    Anyway by the time I switched to FPT, the WebUI console of the VNPT modem has become completely inaccessible. Some kind of SSL error blocks access to it completely. I could probably phone up customer support for the 100th time and let them send another technician my way. But I’ve decided the next time I’m picking up the phone and calling them, it’d be for informing them that I’m dumping them.

For reference, for the same price I’m paying ($10/mo) I’m getting more or less the same speed (150Mbps) on FPT but with a free Android box and a subscription to their TV service FPT Play. (VNPT also has MyTV, but it doesn’t come with the internet package). This puts FPT values way above VNPT even for the base package. But things start to get interesting once you get to the next package tier. For an additional $2/mo, FPT buffs your downstream speed all the way to Gigabit! That’s absolutely crazy.

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I can download some stuffs at the same speed that I’m copying files from my local NAS now!
March 20, 2023

Subscription Hell

So in the last 2 short months I’ve subscribed to:

  • Voicemod (lifetime)
  • FaceApp
  • NextDNS
  • Midjourney
  • ChatGPT+
  • FPT Play
  • VieOn (basically means suscribing to K+ and HBO Go also)

And that is on top of my existing subscriptions:

  • Netflix
  • Adobe Creative Cloud

I need help.

March 19, 2023

AI Pursuit Burnout

Keeping up with the latest tech/tools/terminology in the AI space is incredibly exhausting right now. It feels like every other week there’s a decade worth of development going on. I’ve never seen anything move at this speed since the dotcom era.

“Have you GPT it?” have officially replaced “Have you Google it?” when people ask each other any sort of question now (at least for those around me at least). And that is saying a lot. Anybody who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s remember how ‘Google’ became a verb. It took them a few years and it was already considered incredibly fast back then. GPT just did that in a matter of months.

There’s plenty of debate/discussion to be had regarding this tech of course, but for me I feel like those who rally against it are exactly like the traditional Xe Ôm driver before the arrival of ride hailing apps, or the radio operators before the rise of television, or the teachers of the past who organized protest against the use of calculator. Love it or hate it, it is something that will change world forever, and it’s here to stay.

Anybody remember when this tweet went viral just a few years back? Who’d think that less than 2 short years later it’s already changed. I often say to my friends that in addition to Googling, they need to list “prompt writing skill” in their resume as well. It often incites a laugh or a chuckle but I’m dead serious. You don’t want to take a backseat in this revolution unless you want to become obsolete.

Time for an update

Here’s a list of things that I believe will become obsolete in a year or even less:

  • Content writer/planner. Might have happened already.
  • Tour guides. Article.
  • Coders/Programmers. Not all of them of course, but only the outstanding ones will be left.
  • Renderers (as in V-ray, Redshift, Thea etc.). This one might be around for a while, but their days are numbered. Just look at this shit.
September 8, 2022

Shout out to Portainer.io for the UI facelift

As an avid Portainer user and a UI designer, I just want to give a shout out to whoever worked on Portainer 2.15’s new UI facelift. They truly did a great job. Not only does it LOOK better, it actually addresses some of the minor annoyance that existed in the old UI.

2.15 ui home comparison
Environment Page comparison
2.15 ui addregistry comparison
Registry Page comparison

Now to be clear, the old UI wasn’t trash or anything, it was pretty okay, but it wasn’t GREAT. And while it didn’t affect the way Portainer works, there were some minor visual bugs that bother UI designers and/or hardcore nitpicking perfectionists, and I just happen to be both.

Take the App Templates page for example. In the old version, there were no constraints set for the app icons, and since they come in all shapes and sizes, they often get stretched and distorted beyond recognition, making the page looking very amateurish.

That’s no longer the case

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Great job, Portainer UI designer
July 22, 2022

Nam Vu’s curated list of 18 excellent services you can self-host

It is no secret that I am a major self-hosting fanatic, but people have been asking specifically about what it is that I host my home “server” (which is a glorified term really, it’s only an old Pavillion laptop running a 4th gen core i5 and 8GB of DDR3 memory). Still

1. Authelia (Authentication and Authorization gateway)

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There’s not much to Authelia’s interface except for the login screen.

Authelia is an authentication gateway. You only need to sign in once and you’ll get access to the whole server, but it’s not really SSO. You still need separate accounts for their respective applications. Still, having an additional layer of security in front of your services does provide peace of mind, especially when you combine it with Duo Security as a MFA method.

2. NGINX Proxy Manager (Reverse proxy)

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NPM is my reverse proxy of choice, and is central to my whole setup.

There’s many reverse proxies out there, like Traefik and Caddy, which is actually what I started it. But I choose NPM due to its simplicity. Sure Traefik and Caddy may offer more fine tune controls and is more suitable for power users, but NPM just works™ with minimal configuration. It also handles SSL (via Let’s Encrypt) and its default configuration covers most of my need.

3. Jellyfin (Media Server)

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Among all the services that I selfhost, Jellyfin is by far the most frequently used. (Pictured here is the VueJS frontend)

This is it, this is what sent me down this self-hosting rabbit hole. Those who followed me would remember that I run a small movie club called Phimhub, and I started out with a WordPress website much like namvu.net, that listed (NOT hosted) a number of interesting movie titles for our group. Much to our dismay Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided they didn’t like the site and axed my account (no specific reason given). So I did what any reasonable person would do, and host my own media server, with blackjack and hookers.

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