Happy 70s Birthday Dad!
Time flies
Time flies
So as you may or may not be aware, the Portfolio page and the Photography page have been broken for the longest time, well today I managed to finally fix them. I’m not going to use the old “too busy” excuse to justify why they’ve been broken for so long (although it’s true), but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the shortcodes couldn’t parse. So eventually I decided to say f*ck it and decided to nuke everything and restore from an old backup from last year, which somehow magically fixed those pages (and also the bug where the 3D effect doesn’t work on Firefox, don’t ask me how).
Anyway now that they’re back, I should probably update them with more recent works. I don’t think I’ve added anything new for several years.
Here’s hoping I don’t take another year before getting around to actually doing it.
Okay first one down, 34 more to go. (oh yeah btw, I may have nuked my entire home server along with over 30 services running on it including Phimhub because I trusted ChatGPT to handle docker management, lesson well learned)
It’s been ages since my last post.
It’s not that I haven’t been trying to write, but lately I find it increasingly difficult to finish a post, or even a thought.
Just look at the amount of drafts I have pending, some of which dated back several years.
Even as I’m writing this, I’m not entirely sure if this will eventually make it to the blog page, or end up as another draft. Still, I needed to start writing again, or I might forget how to. Tonight is the Eve of the Lunar New Year celebration here in Vietnam, but I have no doubt it will be much later until I can finish this blog post. We’ll see.
With my wife having to lie in bed all day, I’m now responsible for making breakfast, lunch and dinner. Between preparing meals and doing the dishes, I can now barely have enough time to work on my day time job, let alone some 30 minutes to write out these thoughts. It’s tough but it also gives me a whole new level of respect for my wife, she’s been doing this for years without complain, I don’t know how she managed to pull it off while running a successful start-up, such a super human.
On a personal note, looking back on 2023, there wasn’t anything particularly eventful that I can recall. It wasn’t a bad year, per se, but it wasn’t a great year either. I visited the hospital a whole lot, perhaps more than any other year up until now. My parents had all kind of health problems as they slowly approaching 70s, my wife had a severe case of food poisoning on our only out-of-town trip of the year, we booked a 4-star resort in Vũng Tàu only to cram together on a tiny hospital bed in District 1, HCMC. And as I sit here writing, we just got back home from a week long stay in Đông Đô Hospital. To be honest, I could really use a year without going near any hospital but at this rate, things are probably not going to change this year.
But 2023 wasn’t all bad, I still managed to learn many new things. I finally got an entry level 3D printer (Kingroon KP3S Pro v2) and printed a bunch of useful stuffs, wow’ed a couple of friends, learn how to modify basic meshes to I can make things fit my need. On top of that, there’s also the AI stuffs. 2023 was the year of AI explosion, and I managed to dip my toes in some generative AI stuffs. Learned how to use Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, ComfyUI etc. Realized how useful AND dangerous this stuff is (seriously, if you post a photo of yourself on Facebook these days, you might as well be naked, as that is only a few clicks away). My only regret is that I still don’t have anybody to teach these stuffs to. I love sharing knowledge but haven’t a platform to do so.
I haven’t finished writing yet but my time for today’s up, and because I don’t want to start this new year with yet another Draft post, I’m going to hit Publish.
Happy New Year
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:
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.
But as you can see, I still suck at anime styling, but getting there. Next order of business: attempt Style2Image.
(Artwork by my friend and former colleague @Sam Hong)
Leave a comment if you’re interested in the workflow
So in the last 2 short months I’ve subscribed to:
And that is on top of my existing subscriptions:
I need help.
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.
Here’s a list of things that I believe will become obsolete in a year or even less:
I finally caved in and deployed a local installation of Automatic1111 Stable Diffusion on my PC just to see what the fuss is all about. Got my mind blown within minutes.
Just learned that my mom got diabetes today.
I know it’s not like cancer, but still, why does it get me down so much.
Old age are catching up to us all.
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.
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
Recent Comment