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

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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)

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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