February 26, 2021

Looking back at 2020

I mean, fucking 2020, amirite? It was one hell of year, or hellish, might I say. Almost every living creature on this planet was affected one way or the other. Despite all the crazy shits that happened during the year, it wasn’t all bad. I’d like to take a step back and look at things now.

I know, I know, you’re probably asking “Dude, it’s almost March 2021 now, why the hell are you looking back at 2020 now?”

Ok first of all, according to the Lunar calendar, it’s only barely 2 weeks over January now, plus prior to it I had a shit ton of work I need to get done. I don’t even like doing look back posts like this, but something just happened that prompted me.

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February 24, 2021

Hosting my own Netflix on an ancient Mac Mini 2011

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(This is not really a guide or a tutorial, you may get some tips on how to setup a reverse proxy to access your server from your own domain, but if you’re here looking for a full blown media server setup guide, you’re in the wrong place)

I’m sure I’m not the first to have setup a little media server at home serving all kinds of, um, totally legal content that you obtained from the Internet. But accessing it outside of your home has always been something that I never got around to do.

Until this Tet holiday that is.

Since I had to spend like 4-5 days at my inlaws during these times, I knew Netflix alone ain’t gonna cut it, especially since I’ve pretty much watched everything that worth watching on it. I need to be able to access my quality contents that were sitting under my TV in my bedroom, a hundred kilometer away.

phimhub jelly
Jellyfin running perfectly on my inlaws’ smart TV

Anywho, enough rambling. You want to know how I set it up. Read on.

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February 16, 2021

Google Drive File Stream alternative for Linux

A cloud drive is more or less an essential part of everybody’s workflow these days. For those utilizing Google’s service like I am, then Drive File Stream (now renamed to Google Drive, again) is one of the first installer you run whenever you setup a new Windows or Mac OS system. Its biggest appeal comparing to a traditional sync client like Mega.nz or Dropbox is that it doesn’t take up a shit ton of space on your own hard drive, because the files aren’t actually synchronized with your computer. They are only downloaded on an on-access basis. Now this is not something that most people who’s using Google’s 15GB drive would be concerned about, but for people like me who’s approaching 4TB, local synchronization is pretty much out of the question.

Google’s lack of attention for a native Linux client for Drive File Stream has always been one of the major hurdles to people like me who were looking to migrate my entire workflow to Linux (along with Adobe’s apps, but the recent rise of web based design tools like Figma has greatly mitigate my need on Adobe). Luckily, like everything else with Linux, when a multi billion dollar corporation fails to provide a tool, the open source community steps in and save the day.

Introducing google-drive-ocamlfuse, more or less the closest you can get to Drive File Stream on Linux

February 4, 2021

Bootstrap Studio 5.5.1 running on Linux

Just installed Manjaro KDE Plasma today after Deepin 20 totally let me down. One of my worries when switching to Manjaro is software availability (or lack thereof). Most pre-packaged softwares on Linux comes in either Debian flavor (.deb) or Red Hat flavor (.rpm), and Manjaro is well, neither. It’s Arch-based.

Luckily, its user repo is pretty massive. I was able to find almost everything I wanted on AUR (Arch User Repository), and pretty much everything is up-to-date, unlike Deepin’s shitty ‘App Store’. Proprietary softwares however, are harder to come by.

One of them is Bootstrap Studio.

I was super relieved however, to learn that the developer chose to release the linux binary as an AppImage as opposed to DEB or RPM. Which means it’s super convenient to work with.

Since it’s electron-based, it basically uses the same binaries for Windows, OS X and Linux. So if you wanted to, you can replace app.asar with the same file from another platform and it would just works™.

Why would you want to do that? Well if you’re here then chances are you already know why.

What you basically want to do is grab the AppImage, run it with the flag --appimage-extract, which will extract everything to a folder called squashfs-root. Just go in there, replace the file, then repack everything with the command appimagetool -v squashfs-root and you will have what you want.

Just don’t tell anybody about this, m’kay?

December 21, 2020

The Results are in!

image

Figma is now the king in interface design industry. It didn’t just overtake Sketch, it pretty much buried it six feet under. Not only that, it even managed to buried other competitors in other category too. Like prototyping (which was pioneered and led by InVision for the longest time) and handoff (something that was typically handled by Zeplin).

Figma’s lead in almost every single category in the design process is a testament to what the designers truly want: more feature in a single, unified package rather than super specialized tools that focus on a single aspect of the design process.

Don’t get me wrong though, specialized tools have their uses, and I’d argue their places are quite indispensable. But they are more useful in large studios with extended work pipelines where there are people dedicated to certain parts of the process.

September 22, 2020

So uh,

My wife asked me for a ‘generic’ banner to act as a placeholder on her e-learning website, said I could put whatever I want on it as long as it looks colorful and school related.

I’m pretty sure I delivered.

And yet she’s still mad at me.

Dunno why.

Women, amirite?

April 6, 2020

What is “Creativity”?

So one of my fellow designer recently posted this:

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Basically one of his client saidthis

Using repetitive layout patterns in app design in order to improve learnability is just an excuse for being lazy at creativity.

And that raises an interesting question (for me anyway): just what is “Creativity”, anyway?

Now I’m not talking about its literal definition, we all have our own intepretation of what it is. I’m talking about how we – the people in the design community – perceive it.

Graphic designers, product designers, illustrators, painters, UI/UX designers, visual GFX artists, game artists etc. we’re own thrown into the same blanket category: “Creatives” they call us. But that word, Creativity, it’s not the same thing for all of us.

For graphic designers, illustrators, painters…Creativity is a goal, the ultimate destination where you want to take your creations

For UI/UX/Product designers…Creativity is a tool, and as with any other tool, you only wield it to serve a purpose. And in our case, that purpose is Usability.

Think about it, if you’re an artists, a painter, your work doesn’t really serve anyone else but your own creators, and those who follow their visions. The ultimate validation of your works is its creativity.

But as a product designer, your work serves other purposes

In conclusion, to answer the question: is it bad if your creation is not super innovative?

I’d say it depends on the purpose of your creation.

If it’s for show, then yes

If it’s for use, then no.

April 2, 2020

Figma UI Recreation Challenge #1: Streamlabs Dashboard

Once in a while I’d come across a screenshot of a cool UI that I think would be relatively simple to recreate in Figma, so I made it a personal challenge to do so. This is not something that I do in my spare time or anything because, quite frankly I don’t have any spare time anymore. This is more of a distraction to prevent me from going insane between juggling 3 different major projects atm.

I will first start with 2 Streamlabs dashboard screens.

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