My review of the used Nikon D300 is here.

I have already written a blog post about this. Yet I was too excited to let it go. almost two weeks ago, I was at a convention with my kid and I saw a Nikon D300. It was listed with a low price of $125. And I jumped at the opportunity and bought it. It turned out to be a fantastic buy. It is all thanks to the fact that I have studied how to use Nikon cameras. To maximize the camera usage, I had to buy a new lens, a flash card reader, and several other items.

Waiting on the items delayed by evaluation. I made the configuration changes after the lens arrived. It will make the camera easier to use. I tested all the common functionality which I would use frequently, and all worked as expected. There is some unexpected outcome. First, I found the image sensor has some dirt or smudge. I was able to clean it up. After I turned on the sensor cleaning during shutdown and cleaned it a few times. The dirt spots disappeared. Another issue is the hot pixel at the center of the image. This hot pixel only shows up on certain occasions. It can be easily removed. I am not too concerned about it.

Overall, I was very happy with this purchase. The camera costs $1800 in 2007. I bought it at the inflated price of $125, which is almost the watermelon price for a camera. The camera performs really well in low-light conditions. And all the controls are easy to use. Even though the new camera is bulky and kind of out of style, it is still great equipment.

My review of the used Nikon D300 is here.

It has been a while, and I have not put out any updates. There is not much to discuss besides being lazy. I was busy with the tax return. It was effortless to do. And I am getting a larger return this year, which I am very grateful for. It is almost done. I feel much at ease now that I won't need to pay for the owed tax.

The new game Wo Long: Fallen Kingdom is out. This game is what I have much anticipated. But it is too expensive now. I must wait for at least 2 years before I can finally buy it. The game Ghost of Tsushima is at the low price of $19.95 at some time last week. But I don't want to buy it. I finally completed Horizon Zero Dawn in hard combat mode. And the videos are all uploaded. I am currently taking it easy. And I just started playing two old games, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Halo Combat Evolved. They are Xbox 360 games running under Xbox One compatibility mode. They are kind of boring.

I have gain a lot of focus since I finished Horizon Zero Dawn. Right now, I am working on the Twitter replacement app. It is similar to this blog management site, only simpler. I am working on the user management of the posts list. This is the paged list that I recreating for the Angular application. I have made some good progress so far. A Twitter-like application is very complicated. I am only fifteen percent completed. This project is more like a research project I write and learn about. I am having a lot of fun with it.

I installed a new VM on my Linux PC, which used to host Windows 10 OS. I had to do this in order to get Turbo Tax installed. This is one application that I have to rely on Windows OS. Installing the VM is super easy. And with two monitors I can run the host OS and the VM simultaneously. I can only allocate 4GB of memory to the VM, and Turbo Tax runs fine with such a limited configuration. When running a VM, I can do very little work with the host OS. So, I decided that when I run the VM, I will run nothing else on the host OS.

Installing Turbo Tax is really a painful experience. The base installation is OK. The update installation was also completed with no issues. The real issue comes when I try to validate the product key. For no reason, the application cannot connect to the site to validate the product key. I pinged some familiar sites and the connection is OK. I suspect that there are some bugs in Turbo Tax that prevent Turbo Tax from accessing the product key validation site. I had to reboot the computer twice to resolve this issue and finally got the product key validated. The next step is to copy the old tax file into the VM. VM and the host OS are two separate OSes, I have to create a shared folder to get the files copied. This is done with the Samba file share service. And I did learn some new tricks to allow the Windows VM to connect to the shared folder on the host OS. Once I got Samba working, I was able to transfer the files. I could also install SFTP on the host machine, then access the SFTP from VM. Anyways, I am good with the Turbo Tax now. Next, I have to face the dreadful tax season...

After a week of overtime with spare time, I finally finished the first tutorial for the year 2023. The writing process is a huge improvement in comparison to my past work. Recently I discovered a browser plug-in that can check the words, and provide suggestions for the grammar problems in the sentences. With this tool constantly providing feedback during the writing process, I could write much faster and use words more carefully. It also saves time for me to proofread the work afterward. I guess I just learned a new writing habit, and I am very pleased about it.

The BMW is having issues with parking. I took the car to the new repair shop. After a couple of hours of diagnostics, the manager called and said there was nothing wrong with the parking. It is probably a computer sensor issue. To repair, they must replace the entire shift gear assembly. The cost is about $2200. The repair shop's recommendation is the repair is optional, to which I agreed. Instead, I got the services of flushing the brake fluid and the oil change. I was happy with how it turned out. There will be many things and places that I have to spend money on, so saving a little at every opportunity keeps my mind at ease.

Not much going on recently, I am busy finishing another tutorial. It is the first for the year 2023. The tutorial focuses on loading data in batches so that the page or front-end application can display some data as soon as the most recent data loading completes. And there will be more data available for the front end, as more and more batch loading completes. I got the inspiration from work. It was a problem I tried to solve. I figured if I can get it working during my spare time, then it will be much easier to get it working for my work project. The solution I came up with did work. Once I finish the tutorial, I will try to apply what I learned to the problem I had at work. This is going to be awesome.

I had some car trouble recently. The BMW XI is display a warning of " Secure Vehicle Prevent Rolling". The online resources indicate that there is a spring broken inside the gearbox, which causes the computer not able to determine whether the car is parked or not. I went to one maintenance shop and they couldn't fix it. And they recommended I go to a shop that specializes in fixing BMWs. I made an appointment. We will see how it turned out. It seemed to be an expensive repair. I just built a small amount of emergency cash reserve. It looks like I will lose this cash reserve.

There is not much going on with video gaming. I am playing Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 slim and making videos on it. I installed almost all my Xbox 360 games on my Xbox One S. I honestly didn't know I could play them on Xbox One -- what a surprise! Now I know, I can play all my favorite titles from the old days. It will be lots of videos to be created and uploaded to YouTube. This is really exciting for me.

I am happy to report that my issue with my laptop is not an issue at all. The issue I complained about a while back, such as closing the laptop, and the next day, it either black-screened, froze, or shut down for no reason. I thought there is a problem with the system or the display driver. Now that I had some experience with Linux. I believe what I am seeing is a usage issue, not an issue with the system.

I found inspiration from my old laptop. I made my old laptop a remote server at some point. And in order to do that, that laptop cannot shut down. So I had to do some configuration changes with the battery power management. That way, the laptop is always in ready mode. There might still be some issues with my current laptop. It is so subtle that there is no error log and no way of troubleshooting. But if I apply the same configuration on display, it should bypass the issue almost completely.

The trick is to set the display never to be turned off when the laptop is in charging mode. This would avoid the issue where the screen turns black and is unable to wake up. It also solves the issue when the laptop is inactive for an extended period and shuts itself off. Once this simple configuration is applied, my troubles with closing the screen almost disappeared. I have used this configuration for quite a long time. The only downside is that it is always powered on, and not very environmentally friendly. But my issues with closing the laptop lid are not issues anymore. With this type of issue gone, the system is much more robust.

There is not many updates for the past two weeks. The new lunar new year has passed. I did a ton of gameplay and made some videos. When the holiday is over, I decided to go back to my professional life, by cutting down game playing time and doing more development work.

So at the end of last week, I decided to start the research work of loading and displaying data by fetching the data in batches. What I have done so far is create an AngularJS application and the batch loading mechanism. The result has been very promising. Rather than loading a large number of data items at once, I have the mechanism to load the items in smaller quantities for multiple sequential batches. As soon as one batch is ready, it is added to the list for display. What I worried about is that such frequent updates would affect the UI display. It turned out that the delay is minimum, at least when it is used on directive ngRepeat.

The problem I am trying to solve is that when there is a large amount of data records, I like to load them all and paginate on the front end. Most of the time, loading all would be a time-consuming operation, my goal is to have the first page displayed as quickly as possible. The solution I thought of is first to load some records and display them as soon as possible, in the background, the data load would continue until all are loaded. The next step is to integrate with UI-Grid and see if the approach will work. I feel refreshed after I get back from the holiday season. I hope I can keep up.

Since the last update, I have been playing a lot of video games. I feel lost again. I will be honest, what I feel right now is a sense of trying chasing away the boredom. Since the day I finished the re-vamp of this web site, I thought I will rest for a while. Now I felt I am addicted on video games. First it was the binge of Far Cry 5. Then COD Black Ops. Finally, I decided to re-play Horizon Zero Dawn and capture it for YouTube.

Right now, I don't have any new idea on what the next tutorial will be. There are a couple enhancement I have to do for the web site. For the new project, I also have a new enhancement I have to fix. It is progressing along well. I was able to get to the point where the post can be loaded and display on the edit post page. This project of twitter replacement is not bad. Just need more work. Since I have done all the work before, this is not a hard project. Now I need to find some thing more interesting to work. Maybe I should write a tutorial of JSP project using the old approach, but with the latest Spring framework jars.

I saw the movie Bullet Train, it was awesome. I saw it on the night I was off from game playing. The movie was really refreshing. The cameos are cool; the actions are awesome; it had some really interesting ideas. Licorice Pizza is boring. The plot is funny but overall it was very boring. I used to be very big on the movies, not so much these days. I guess my attention span is getting shorter now. Anyways, I will play some more games and get back to work.

My family went for a 3 day vacation at Kalahari Water Park Resort. Once arrived, checked in and had lunch. I had to watch the kids in swimming ware for 5 hours ine the afternoon of Saturday. Then another 5 hours on Sunday morning. It was pretty tiresome to walk around with bare feet, in swimming shorts, and all wet for all that time. I experience wet and cold, uncomfortable ground for the feet, and some stress of watching kids for all that time. I am so glad it was over.

The breakfast on Sunday morning was very good. I had three or four links of sausages, two pieces of ham. One bowl of cereal, some potato, and a lot of fruits. It was a breakfast buffet, so it was very nice. Afterwards, I was on the 5 hour water "fun". The breakfast really saved the day. Without it I wouldn't last that long. The dinner on the previous night was very good as well, I got gourmet burger and some fries. That breakfast was just better. Overall, the most expensive items from the trip is the food. But I am not complaining. I am over the phase that I complain about the expense after the trip. It was a good trip. I would avoid such trip because it is very hard to watch the kids under that type of environments. Going to the beach is a lot less stressful.

Before I left for vacation, I installed Outrider on my PS5, it took all morning. One of these days, I will take it out and play it for a couple hours. I took out Horizon Zero Dawn and started playing from beginning again so that I can capture the game play for YouTube. I got to the point where I have to fight might first mini-boss. Last time I started re-play this game, I felt bored because of the grinding. This time, I felt refreshed, I think I can get through it again.

FYI. I bought some drawing supplies, a pack of roller ball pen (0.5 mm) for drawing fine lines, some pencil lead, and a hi-polymer eraser. I was thinking of finally using the drawing pad and do some drawing. I just don't have the inspiration and time. I will squeeze out some. I guess I can put this as a new-year resolution item.

I just finished another 3 nights of binge gaming. This time, I finished Call of Duty Black Ops (the first of the Black Ops series). I had to setup my XBox 360 console to run it. I just completed Far Cry 5. This is a break from my usual XBox One games. Black Ops is the best of all the Call of Duty games. When I first played it, it gave me a huge thrill. And this is the third time, it still has its unusual charm. It took me around 6-8 hours to complete it. It has a snappy story line, and it made sense. The game play is fast pace. At normal level it was still playable. I have enjoyed it very much even though it was the 3rd time I play through it. I am compiling the videos right now

I have missed XBox 360. The console runs with a lot of noise, caused by overheating and fan running to cool off. The DVD drive and hard disk are also contributing to the noise level. Still, the experience is really good. I don't have to wait for the game install, which is huge! The disk pops in and game runs with in a minute or so. XBox One, PS4, and later generation consoles can never beat this. The installation and the constant need to update the games taking hours, it is time wasted. Unfortunately, the way XBox 360 runs games is not the way we will go back to. I feel pretty sad about that.

I just realized that I had 15+ XBox 360 games, This year 2023, I will spend some time and play some of them. I had quite a few that I never finished. These ones will be the ones I will focus on. The one I am hesitant is Fallout 3. This game is massive and long. I want to take one last shot so that I can finish. I came very close of finishing it. I am a bit intrigued to completing it. The hesitancy comes from the fact that it took me seven years to complete Fallout New Vegas. So Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 are just seemed a bit too out of reach for me. I had the goal of at least finishing the first of the three games for Mass Effect Legendary Edition. I was thinking of running the game to the end just focus on mostly the main missions and not exploring the side missions too much. We will see how much time this will cost me.

Last night, my Linux system broken again. It was caused by some bad icon set I tried to install. As soon as it happened, all the windows title bars disappeared. None of the input areas can accept inputs, the docking bar is not working. It was just really bad. I thought I had to re-install the system. I managed to use a terminal and delete the stuff I installed, then use appearance to revert the icon set used in the system. After restart the OS several time, and no improvement, I had to search the internet for solution.

It took a while to figure out. The windows manager crashed. The internet solutions recommended first clean up the session cache, basically remove everything in the directory ~/.cache/sessions. Then run the command: xfwm4 --replace. That actually fixed the issue. The issue can also be viewed on the System Reports application. Apparently, I am not the only one who had the same issue and there is a solution. This saved me from wipe everything and re-install, which is my biggest fear. Even though it looked scary, it was recoverable. This is fantastic, I learned something new.

I finished the new tutorial for CodeProject on Christmas day, included the video showing the sample application. Because of the holidays, I can work a little during the day, and save the night for video games. On Far Cry 5, I have just one main mission left to complete the game. I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Not sure if I want to replay it soon.

Anyways, I am not going to finish the game right away, will wait for the weekend before new Year's day and finish it then. For the next game, I am not sure what I should play, I have Mass Effect Legendary Edition installed, and I have Far Cry 4, and Far Cry Primal. I bought Far Cry Primal because it looked like Horizon Zero Dawn. Yeah Horizon Zero Dawn is also an ideal one where I can do for the videos. Far Cry 4 is another one where I can put crazy titles and descriptions for the videos. I am currently having the kids in the free candy store syndrome. There are too much games and not enough time to play them. It is approaching the end of 2022, and once it is done I will need to get serious on getting Spare Time work done.

For the next year, I will do a lot more Angular tutorials. It is the year I am making myself an expert on Angular framework. The sample application I am working on right now. It is intended to be a job search demo to show off my skills. When it is done, it will be awesome. I think I am 1/4 complete on that. I plan to finish it in the year 2023 and use it as demo for job hunts. Once the year end is done, I will get serious and put more work on this.

A little tip

Lobster is on sale the day after Christmas. $12.95 is regular price, $8.99 is the sale price. Two lobsters cost about $21.00. And the quality is not bad.

This is an update of my recent progress. The winter cold is here. Rained two days. Then the temperature dropped to single degree. The whole family came down with COVID. Somehow I didn't catch it (tested, nothing there). But I did have itch throat for a long while. Even now I have it. I guess either I caught it earlier or I got lucky with the vaccine.

I am almost done with the new Code Project tutorial. During the writing process, I even figured out how to properly use the local variables for the form fields declared in the form. Such use was not explained in detail in the Angular official documentation. This tutorial will offer something unique to the readers. I feel very thrilled about it.

Besides this, there is not much. Two achievements. The first is that I was able to upgrade my computer to the latest of Linux Mint (21.1 Vera, released just before Christmas 2022). The upgrade took about 10 minutes (maybe just 7 minutes, don't remember). I guess I have been keeping the system updated all the time, that saved a lot of unnecessary work for the upgrade. It has been super easy to update Linux Mint. Every update took a few minutes here and there. This is the reason my upgrade was so smooth. And this time, I don't have to re-install some apps, they were still available. I also updated the web server for this site, again there is no glitches. I loved it when it is all smooth sailing.

I played a lot of XBox One, Far Cry 5. It will be completed soon. And I converted these to videos and uploaded to YouTube. Now I had consistently 10 to 30 views a day. The view count is higher when I upload new videos. This is the power of search engine and internet. As long as a person is persistent and constantly creating content, this will draw a crowd of viewers.

I finished Stephen King's Bag of Bones. It was addicting. And I did finish it in four days. But I will stop reading his novels for the time being. It was so time consuming. Keep reading would not be sustainable for long time. Anyways, I will stop now. There is no good novels and I don't want to waste time like this.

I spent a lot of time with the Far Cry 5 on XBox One. I figured that I have worked hard this year. It is time to have a break. I felt bad that I play games during week days. It seems to be such a waste of time. Recently I decided I don't want to feel bad any more, hence I played games during any night I wanted. I also wanted to complete the second region. It was completed last night.

I forgot to mention in the last update. I installed RetroArch on my mobile phone, then connected a Nintendo controller using USB 3 and USB-C connector. And it works with RetroArch. It is buggy and works sometimes. And I was able to play Warriors of Fate on MAME with such a setup. Technology is wonderful.

I am going to focus and start working on my next tutorial. It will be finished by the end of this year.

Recently I was hooked on Stephen King's book Bag of Bones. Started reading them Friday, and I am almost finished. Stephen King's Books are the only fiction I read now. I got hooked since I finished the book Lisey's Story, and multiple books of his short stories. His book On Writing explained his up-bringing and his method of writing, which helped me appreciate his work a bit more. Still, it was an acquired taste.

When I first started Lisey's Story, the first 50+ pages didn't make much sense. Once the story did make sense, one would start appreciate the story all the way to the end. That was three years ago. Since than, I probably ready 15+ of his book. For most of 2022, I did a lot of fun stuff because I am bored, not books. At the end I guess I had nothing better to do and started reading Bag of Bones. It was good. I saw the two parts TV movies, but it pales in comparison to the book.

I will probably stop read Stephen King after Bag of Bones. It was time consuming and obsessive. I have to finish before I can do something else, which is very bad for a normal life. So once this is done, I will stop for a while. Other than reading this book, there is no much else. I have not written code for a few days, which is bad. It is Dec, 2022, I still got one tutorial left, and I have not started it. I have time to finish. And I will once my obsession is done.

This year's Thanksgiving is uneventful. Unlike previous years, there is no big feast. The only eventful thing is that the BMW X1 has some battery issue, I couldn't start it up. The symptom is that when I pressed on the brake, then press the start button the ignition cannot be started. The dashboard display works.

I have seeing this type of issue three times so it is not surprising. To resolve it quickly, all I have to do is calling AAA, have them do roadside service, and specify battery to be checked.

Because Thursday is Thanksgiving, I waited until Friday 11/25. The first thing I did after getting up is to set up the appointment. The service was done from 9:30 AM to almost 10:35 AM. And it was caused by battery. Once it is replaced, the car is working as expected. The challenge is getting the battery out and getting the new one in there. The guy who did the work had to find where the battery is, and it is not in the trunk, but at the front, driver side, close to the wiper. AAA's mobile app did the scheduling, the cost estimate. The whole process was very smooth.

Before the battery issue is fixed, I was thinking of buying a portable battery for jumping start the car. Now that it is fixed, there is no need to do that. It costs $200+. Now it is fixed, I don't think I need it at the point. This saves me some money.

I also checked online finding a way to jump start the car. But in the end, I decided it is best to leave it to the professionals. If I do this without thinking using my other car Buick Enclave to jump start, it is possible that the Enclave will be damaged by power surge. This is why I thought I should buy a portable battery jumper. But if I can get help almost immediately, there is no need to try jump start myself. There is a time to try thing myself and there is a time not to. This is not the time for self repair. I made the right decision.