January 23, 2022

A decade of employment: A personal reflection

So 2021 was over, a year I believe most of us couldn’t wait to forget. So much time staying under lockdown, so many losses. I can no longer count with my fingers the number of my friends on FB who’s using a black avatar (a symbol of grievances where I come from).

But, sad pandemic stories aside, this year also marks the 10 year anniversary of me working professionally in the graphic design field, and I guess it’s a good time as any to take a look back and see how things have changed, and reminisce about people whom I’ve met along the way, how they helped shaping the man I am today. I will not be censoring company names, as they are publicly available in my resume, as well as my LinkedIn.

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January 15, 2022

Phimhub Major Update

As you may know, I run a little movie club, which started out as a Netflix group buy a year ago, which later led to me setting up my own Netflix (with Jellyfin) eventually leading to me going down the /r/selfhosted rabbit hole, learning a ton of stuffs about personal server deployment along the way.

It served us well, albeit with some annoyances. For starter, it only runs from 8am to 11.30pm everyday, mainly because I hosted it from my personal desktop, which is only powered on during those period. Another drawback of running it from my personal PC is the lack of space. I only had a single 3TB HDD installed, and Phimhub’s library had long exceeded that. I tried to work around it by using Google Drive File Stream (now simply known as Google Drive) to keep only a fraction of the files offline, and leave the rest on the cloud. This effectively means that only around 30% of Phimhub’s library was ready to play at any time.

image
So much room for activities!

Well, today I’m proud to say those annoyances should be gone. I’ve finished building a DIY NAS running Xpenology with a whopping 64TB of storage (2x WD Ultrastar 16Tb, 2x Seagate Exos 16Tb, all enterprise class, datacenter ready drives). I’ve also procured a more powerful laptop to act as the resident server, hosting every single services in one place (containerized of course). A bump from N3060 to an i5-4200M means now I can move Jellyfin to the laptop itself instead of running it from my PC. While the i5 does consume quite a bit more power than the Celeron (37w vs 6w), but it’s still better than running my power hungry desktop PC for 16 hours a day for sure.

Essentially, instead of hosting Jellyfin AND the media library on my own PC, now Jellyfin will be moved into a docker container on my laptop server, and the media library will reside on the family NAS. You do need to mount the SMB share as a local mount on your server of course. One drawback of this approach is that you can no longer delete media from the Web UI, since I didn’t give the docker container write permission to the SMB share. I could do that but I figure it’s better this way, since I’ll be the only one managing the media files anyway, I can just do it from my local computer.

October 12, 2021

“Invalid Location” error when trying to add SynoCommunity Repo

I presume you’re here from Google, trying to find a solution on why Synology DSM is not accepting SynoCommunity‘s repo, returning a cryptic “Invalid Location” error. You’re probably running DSM 6.2.4 or older, and currently unable to upgrade to DSM due to uh, various considerations (*cough*xpenology*cough*).

Turns out it’s a SSL error, not sure if it’s related to Let’s Encrypt’s root certificate expiring a few weeks ago knocking out a sizable chunk of the web, but thanks to @publicarray over on SynoCommunity’s Discord, we have a solution

Publicarray's solution from Discord
Publicarray’s solution from Discord

Here’s the SSH command for your convenience:

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September 16, 2021

Choosing a cloud hosting provider: Digital Ocean vs Linode

DigitalOcean vs. Linode | Low-code backend to build modern apps

I’m gonna make this short: avoid Digital Ocean like the plague.

As you know, my whole website used to be hosted on a VM Instance on Google Cloud Platform. However, the cost of GCP was a little much for my usage so I was looking to migrate to another provider. The most obvious names that comes to mind that wasn’t ‘Big Tech’ (AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Google) are the holy trinity: Digital Ocean, Linode and Vultr (which I didn’t test).

Among those, Digital Ocean is probably the most well known name.

They’re everywhere.
They seem to have the best UI among the cloud provider (and I’m a sucker for good UIs).
They have a pretty extensive knowledgebase that covers pretty everything in tech.
They have a huge marketplace, pretty much every self hosted project you see has a ‘Deploy on Digital Ocean droplet’ option.

DO sounds like a no-brainer. So I set out to create my account. Being a skeptical, naturally I sign up using a ‘trial’ account that offer a $100 credit for 60-day, there’s plenty of those on Google if you search for it, but don’t make the same mistake as I did, the 60-day $100 is a goddamn lie. When I added my credit card, I was told there might be a $1 charge for verification that will be refunded in no more than a week. When I added my first droplet, I was immediately charged $6.15, and I’m pretty sure it’s never going to be refunded as a few weeks have passed.

This shady practice alone should be enough of a reason for most of you to avoid DO. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also the performance issue.

I created a nano droplet (the $5/m variant). You may ask why I decided to go for the bottom of the barrel choice even though I have $100 in trial credit. In my opinion, a service is only as good as its bottom line, and testing it should give a pretty good overview of the quality of the service being offered. And boy was that the correct decision.

Performance was good on the first day, but it only goes downhill from there. I have a total of 6 WordPress websites with virtually no traffic (only one of them has like 100 visits per DAY). And yet the droplet was slowed to near unresponsive level when I finished migrating my 4th website. SFTP would constantly timeout. If I try to visit 2 of my sites at the same time, the server would return a 504 error. It was unacceptable.

I was ready to give DO the benefit of doubt and blame the disruption of AAE-1 international internet cable line as a factor (even though the droplet I created was provisioned on the Singapore data center, which shouldn’t have been affected by that incident.

It was then that I decided to make an account on Linode and give it a shot. The sign up process was exactly the same but they didn’t even charge me a cent for verification. I fired up a $5 linode, going through the same migration process, and lo’ and behold, everything just worked! All 6 websites up and running without a hitch. The hardest part of the migration was, ironically enough, caused by Digital Ocean. As the websites keep timing out when I try to create Duplicator packages.

Normally to save space on the droplet I’d make Duplicator send the packages to my Google Drive and my OneDrive Business storage, however on the DO droplet, they couldn’t even communicate with either Google or Microsoft server at all, forcing me to SFTP in and painfully try to download the package manually, bit by bit (thank god WinSCP can do that without poping up a dialog ever 5 minutes). The failure to communicate with Google and Microsoft’s server is a testament that the connection problem was with Digital Ocean and not with my ISP.

Anyway just wanted to share my experience. Obviously I’m not endorsing either Linode or Vultr yet since I’m only on a trial run with them, but one thing is definite: avoid Digital Ocean.

That’s all for today, folks.

August 22, 2021

Enhancing OpenMediaVault’s sidebar

Replaced Rockstor with OMG on my little ChocolateBox NAS. At first glance it appears to be better than Rockstor in pretty much every way except the front end. As a designer I’m always greatly bothered by subpar UIs, even those belonging to FOSS. Just spent an hour or two reimagining this part of OMV if it was created with a more modern design language:

omv sidebar 1
Lato + Carbon Icons is not a bad combination. The primary may remain the same, for now.
August 18, 2021

Install Photoshop CC on Linux

Screenshot

No, this is not GIMPShop or any other dirty hacks that attempt to make GIMP/Krita look or feel like Photoshop. This is the real Photoshop. And no, Adobe hasn’t changed their mind about making a native Linux version available either. As you may have guessed, despite the fancy new splash screen, this is just Photoshop CC running on Wine, but it has been repacked so the installer does everything for you. If you already have a PS + Wine in place there’s no need to read this.

Bits of warning though, I’m not entirely sure this is legal since the authentication part appears to be bypassed also. While I do have an active subscription to Adobe CC, I haven’t been able to find a way to sign in with this. If this repo gets popular Adobe might kill it, so just keep that in mind.

Anyway, you can find the instruction here in this Github, I’m not going to mirror the instruction in this blog post (unless the repo goes down for some reason, in which case, let me know in a comment below)

July 30, 2021

Apt-get update chậm như rùa? Hãy chuyển sang dùng mirror trong nước

The following post content will be written in Vietnamese since it addresses a specific problem that only affect Ubuntu users currently residing in Vietnam

Mấy ngày hôm nay mấy anh em dùng Ubuntu như tôi chắc khốn khổ vì chạy cái apt update cũng phải mất cả nửa ngày. Lí do thì vẫn như thường lệ, cá mập cắn cáp AAG, chuyện năm nào cũng xảy ra đều như vắt chanh mỗi năm khi đất nước có ngày hội lớn. Chúng ta bất lực với cá mập nhưng không có nghĩa chúng ta không có cách khác để giải quyết. Nếu các bạn check danh sách mirrors của Ubuntu sẽ thấy VN là 1 trong những nước có tương đối nhiều mirrors với 9 cái:

image 8

Điều này có nghĩa chúng ta hoàn toàn có thể sử dụng mirrors trong nước để gia tăng tốc độ cho apt. Trong những phiên bản gần đây của Ubuntu chức năng tìm mirror đã được build luôn vào trong apt get nhưng ko được enable mặc định. Vì vậy để enable features này chúng ta cần thêm những dòng sau vào file /etc/apt/sources.list

deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt focal main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt focal-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt focal-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt focal-security main restricted universe multiverse

(Lưu ý VD trên là dành cho Ubuntu 20.04, nếu các bạn dùng Ubuntu bản khác thì nhớ thay thế code name focal bằng code name của version tương ứng Lucid, Precise etc.)

Chạy lại apt update và chứng kiến sự thay đổi kinh hoàng trong tốc độ:

image 9