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Nam Vu Personal SiteNam Vu Personal SiteNam Vu Personal SiteNam Vu Personal Site
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April 13, 2021

Prettify your qBittorrent WebUI

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : DIY, Randomness, Tips & Tricks
qbit1
qbit2

I absolutely love qBittorrent but as an UI Designer, one thing that doesn’t sit well with me is its 1990-esque web interface. While they do allow you to load your custom CSS, there wasn’t a lot you could do with it beyond changing a few colors, and even the most downloaded themes in the community still only looks marginally better.

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April 10, 2021

Things I learned after a week of “homeservering”

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Randomness
  1. Reverse Proxy: Setting up Caddy and write a proper caddyfile for reverse proxying to different endpoints within my local network.
  2. Personal DDNS: dynamically update my domain(s) A records to point to my home’s public IP so I never have to worry about Viettel’s shitty service changing my IP every 2 damn days. This is done by setting up a cronjob and utilizes CloudFlare’s public API.
  3. AIO Clientless SSH/RDP/VNC solution: I’m sure most of you already figured it out just by reading that sentence, yes it’s Apache Guacamole, and yes I know it’s been around for a while, but I’ve only discovered it last week, and it basically changed my life forever. I’ve been kicking myself for not looking into it sooner. I can’t even remember how much time I wasted setting up TeamViewer/Anydesk/Putty on new machines. This thing just makes it feel so effortless, and it runs directly in your browser so no corporate firewall should stand in your way.


April 1, 2021

VPS Trials: Google vs Microsoft vs Amazon

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Uncategorized

This is a venting post, not an actual comparison

For people looking to spin up a VM that can be used outside of their home networks, there’s several free offers out there, including major names like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba. Personally I’d rank them like this:

  1. Great tier: Google Cloud Platform, $300 trial credit for 12 months, reasonable pricing. Realistically you’ll probably get around 10 months out of your trial if you provision your VM correctly). UI is a bit confusing but overall usable.
    Very transparent about pricing, even has a toast message showing your remaining fund and trial period. Doesn’t charge you a cent after your trial period ends, it just turns off your VM(s).
  2. Meh tier: Microsoft Azure, $200 trial credit for 12 months, worse pricing. While 200 doesn’t seem to be that much worse than Google’s offering, in reality it is a LOT less due to the higher pricing of VM provisioning. I burned through that $200 in around 3 months. The UI is more intuitive than GCP though.
    Less transparent about your trial period than GCP, but still doesn’t charge you a cent after your trial period ends, it just turns off your VM(s).
    Alibaba cloud is somewhat similar, I haven’t used it that much to have a solid opinion, but on paper it should be on par with Azure. Will update later.
  3. Trash tier: Amazon Web Service. Shitty UI, took me longer than all other services when it come to spinning up a VM, and even when it’s up and running, configuring networking to connect to it was challenging. I gave up after a few days of trying, and then kind of forgot about it. When I come back after a year, I was surprised to see my account suspended for ‘unpaid bills’. And check this out:
image
Amazon quietly put a massive charge on your account when you aren’t even using your EC instance

No surprise there, having dealt with Amazon before as a student, I am positive this is a government sanctioned scam organization. Avoid Amazon at all cost!


Looking back at 2020
February 26, 2021

Looking back at 2020

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Rants

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

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 1 comments /
  • Under : Tips & Tricks
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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

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Linux, Tips & Tricks

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


Bootstrap Studio 5.5.1 running on Linux
February 4, 2021

Bootstrap Studio 5.5.1 running on Linux

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Tips & Tricks, 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!

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Design
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.


So uh,
September 22, 2020

So uh,

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Randomness

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?


404 Not Found Page
June 18, 2020

404 Not Found Page

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Design, Randomness

Which one should I choose?

LfFBMmc


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