I finished another code project tutorial. It marks the completion of this year's quota. I will submit one more for this year just for the heck of it. It is still a long way from 100 articles for CodeProject. I am very grateful for doing all the tutorials I have done over the years, especially the past few years. It was an opportunity to learn things thaT I normally won't learn at work. And I have learned so much. I will continue doing this as much as I can.

I did feel a bit tired after the tutorial. So I spent like 4 days on video games. And I finished Titanfall 2 campaign walk through. The game is pretty badass. I especially lile the story, and the idea of interchange of game play with a foot soldier and a mech suit. But the campaign is pretty short, 6-8 hours I was done. And there were a lot of jump and wall running which I was very uncomfortable with. i was getting better with those. Still It would take me multiple try to finish some minor jumps and runs. I still had fun. The mech battles are awesome. After this, I will play Call of Duty WWII. Once I finished that, I can remove this one from my XBox storage. I didn't like this game. It is clunky. Anyways, I am working on the Titanfall 2 videos. They will be uploaded to youtube soon.

This week I will come back to working on my side project. From now to the end of year, I am just going to relax and do some light work during my spare time. I really need to catch up on sleep. During the weekend, I was game playing to 11:45PM. This is no good for me. Last week, I had a lot of exercise. So I am a bit tired as well.

There is not much going on. I bought an expensive RC airplane and it flies awesome. It was very easy to fly it. The kids build a RC airplane with foam boards. But it was so hard to fly. I thought it would be useful to buy one that is easier to fly so that they can learn how to do it. But since it is so easy to fly the new one. It served almost no purpose because they were so different. I guess I need to take the home made airplane out again and see if it can fly. I know it can, just don't know how to do it properly.

During Ian (the storm), the attic room is still leaking a bit. So I went up the roof and put a lot of silicon seal (glue like substance) to the shingles near the leak, hopefully it will stop the leak permanently. We will see. I used almost two tubes worth of the seal. That was fun. I am thinking of putting a cool desk in the attic room so that I can work there. The cost is about $105.

I tried to upgrade the XUbuntu from 20.04 to 21.01. It was very messy. At first, The system wouldn't allow me to upgrade. I had to update the APT source lists with the archive Ubuntu software repos. These are not done automatically. And I had to use nano to manually add these repo URLs. After I did the upgrade of the existing system. I was able to install the upgrade UI tool. From there I was able to do the upgrade of the entire OS. And it took all day. The reason it took all day is that at times, the upgrade would stop because it requires user confirmation of actions. But I wouldn't notice it until later. And it would delay for hours. Finally when it is completed. Everything seems to be fine. "fcitx" was removed even though I needed it. I have not checked everything else. I am sure there are things that are removed and no longer works. Still a good exercise of working with Linux.

I finished Rage 2, and posted the last game playing footage to YouTube. Then I also finished Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, the last footage are all uploaded. Yesterday, I started replaying Titanfall 2 at normal level. This is a fun game and I finally was at the level I can comfortably do the jumping acrobat. And the 1st person shooting handles better than Call of Duty Infinite Warfare. And I was able to kill the Titan Kane with just two tries. It was a pretty fun night. Titanfall 2 is definitely something I like the best. After this one, I will probably finish that Call of Duty WWII I had for a while. Man I had too many games in my hands.

The CodeProject tutorial is going great. I am almost completed with it. The question for myself is, should I create a video for it? I will probably finish the tutorial today or tomorrow. Then I will think about doing a 4-5 minutes videos about it. We'll see.

Wednesday Oct 7th was pretty scary for me. The laptop almost died. I took the laptop to the appointment and when I opened it up, the screen was blank. Restarted it, again it was blank. Repeated serveral times, still blank. It was the most boring appointment I wnet, I sit there, nothing to do and just staring at the ceiling for like 30 minutes.

When I went home, the first thing I had to do is crack the laptop open, removed the battery, the memory chips, and the SSD hard drive. Then start up the computer, was still black screened. I plugged into the monitor, didn't help. Thinking it was dead, I re-assembled everything back. Then I tried to restart again, this time it came back OK. I guess there might be some serious errors with the video card. There is no logs or anything. I am a bit upset about this. And at one point, I was looking at new computers. Next time, I might spend some more money and get a Dell instead, with more HDD space and 32 GB memory.

After the episode, the laptop looked fine. If it happens again, I will probably go throught the steps again. If it happens frequently then I will probably replace it. So far the laptop has been a great work horse.

Just a quick update before I forget. I have this habit that if there is nothing, then I would stop creating memos for this site. If I do have something and i get distracted, I would forgot to put out memos for this site as well. There are a couple things happened recently. The first is that the hurricane Ian did impact the area I lived, three days of non-stop raining. There was still some minor leaking on the roof. I really need to get up there and glue the shingles and stop the leak. I just didn't have time.

I did some soldering during the weekend. Had a small motor that had three lines connecting to a small battery. One of the line had the 2mm bullet connector torn off. I had to use a wire strip cutter to cut the rubber cover, then solder the line to a new 2mm bullet connector. In order to do that I had to create a small hole on a wood board, plug the bullet connector in, then solder the wire to the connector. It was a success. I also bought 4 more little motors for $33, and all of them works with the battery. The only problem is that the motor uses larger screw and cannot fit on to the little board for the RC airplane. I need more tools and material to get the new motor mounted. This is not urgent and I can wait.

Yesterday, I was working on the new web app and found an issue with CORS request processing. It baffled me as why the configuration change didn't work. This morning, I switched my thinking and decided to do a research on "how to diagnose CORS issues". The results I found finally helped me understand how CORS works. I was able to find the root cause. Again, the fix to the issue is very simple. This is something that I can make into a new tutorial for CodeProject. And I thought I have ran out of ideas for CodeProject. It is fantastic that I found something new to discuss.

There is not much update since the last one. I did published the last tutorial here. And for the past eight days, I didn't accomplish anything significant. I guess it would be something to celebrate, to discuss.

It is not like every day that I have something significant to write down and to remember. Since the last update, I did buy my first PS5 game (used game, cost $16). I don't know when I will play it. There are so many I have right now. I did play a lot of Rage 2. I believe I have described that I completed the mandatory race and won. The rest of the game seems so easy now. I should be able to complete it.

For my Linux desktop, I customized the desktop status bar a little. I wanted to add some space (padding) at the left and right side. and I found an easy solution. Add one or two separators ao each side, then set the separators as invisible. They become good padding. With this little spaces, I can now make the oval shape on each side. This bothered me for several months, now it is resolved. I feel very happy.

Almost forgot, I fixed the site bugs and redeployed. So far there is no issue. I am preparing for the next tutorial, an Angular sample application that demonstrate the data exchange between parent and child components. It is time to start the tutorial on this.

I was thrilled. I've finally beaten the mandatory Chezcar race. And it took me no more than 10 tries to win the race, 1st place. This is the hardest part of this game. If I cannot get through this race, it would be impossible for me to complete this game. I would have to give up. I am very happy this is over now. Besides this race, I have completed many side quests, some of them are hard. I am very happy with the fact that I can get through all these.

I set the cage out in the backyard again, a couple slices of apple. And on Saturday, the cage was closed. I though something triggered the cage and nothing was caught, turned out I was wrong, there was a brown rat in the cage. Heh heh. I took it a couple miles out and set it out. The cage needs cleaning which I haven't done.

On Sunday, I went out to fish, took my favorite yellow fishing rod out. At first, it was going well. I lost 3 floats and hooks on tree branches. Finally I went to a new place and on the second try I hooked a small pumpkin seed. That made me happy. If I couldn't catch one, I would be very disappointed. I bought the fake salmon egg bait, the intention was to catch trout. None of the trout was interested. There was just one kind of fish that would try the bait - the pan-fish, such as blue gills, pumpkin seed, yellow sun fish, etc. That is why I was able to catch the pumpkin seed. The bait is interesting, it is pink and it has the smell of salmon egg. Although, the trout was not interested, this bait is definitely helpful with pan fish. I guess I don't have to rely on night crawler any more.

This has been a brute summer. There is little rain. The lawn looked terrible. The yard close to the front door took a beating with the heat. Since the removal of the 150 years old tree, that part of lawn was exposed and was dying. And the side yard which is largely exposed, also had a large patch died or dying. I was a bit concerned but decided not to do anything. I figure the grass has survived for millions of years and they know how to recover, eventually. The lawn was lush in the spring. It will recover.

For this year, I have grown 3 pots of mint. All successful to a certain degree. The trick is spread the seed on the top of the soil. Do not bury it in the soil. Also I tried catnip, and lemon balm with the same technique. All works. There were 20 tomato plants and generated 3000+ cherry tomato. We had 2 weird tomato plants, and got about 50+. We took in 120+ bitter melons, a lot of green vegetables and they are still growing. And there are more. It is an overall success. The down side was the money spent on fertilizer, soil, and the water/sewerage use cost some money. Success nonetheless.

The garden attracted lots of birds, which hunted the insects. Also a lot of leopard slugs. Then there are three ground hogs came fearlessly and regularly. I took care two and the last one was nowhere to be found. It might have died somewhere else. I got a trapper cage from a family friend and all I caught was a squirrel. That was fun. I am looking forward to the next year's growing season.

Also, the sink in the master bedroom was clogged when I cleaned the stopper for the sink. I don't know what I did, the water was slowly flowing out. So I bought a hand cranked auger, it worked, better than I expected. The water sink in the garage bad a pump that get rid of the water. The running of the pump shakes so bad that the pipe was loose and hitting the wall cabinet. Yesterday, I went to and tighten the screws, and put a padding between the pipe and the wall cabinet. This shaking is not as bad now. I love these small home improvements.

Again, there is not a lot of updates. I finished another codeproject tutorial. The new one is on how to streaming media files in a RESTFul application. This is one of the question I want to get answered. And it is finally done. Now I have the knowledge to do this correctly on my web site. I felt very happy.

During the labor day weekend I have went to two hiking trails. One is the Ithan Valley Park. There were quite a few trout in the water. This one fish I didn't know how to catch. I read that Salmon eggs would work, and bought some artificial ones to try out. During the hiking I saw two mothers accompanied their sons to fishing. it was quite interesting to see. Another trial I went to is the Skunkhollow Trail. There is a small creek and seems to have blue gills in it. It is another ideal place to try fishing.

I am struggling with Rage 2. The unsolvable issue is the mandatory race that I have to finish and it was pretty hard for me. I am not good at races in games. It is almost impossible to win. I guess I might have to try 100 times before I can finally win. I will keep trying but I might have to give up soon. There are other challenges as well. These are slightly easier than the race. If the race prevent me from finishing the game. I will probably give up once most of the open world quest are completed. This game has been fun. The other day, I went back to the Call of Duty Infinite Warfare. The game play is quite different from Rage 2 and it was pretty hard for me to enjoy. I will probably finish that one as well once I have some time. Time flies when I have fun playing games.

It has been a couple days and no updates. That is bad for me. I really want to add some updates even though there is not much update. Yep I got the PS5. Took me about 45 minutes to set it up. I got no PS5 games yet. But it was nice to know that I had one in my house. What is funny is that on Labor day 2022, I got email from Steam that my Steam Deck is available for purchase. And I am not going to buy it. Now I know that I need to get my pre-order in if I wanted something, and I will get the production in time. I don't need a Deck and no time of any of the PC games right now. I will let my reservation lapse. Labor Day 2022, Steam Deck reservation ready for final payment.

The tutorial is great. I had some small set backs with the coding and testing. In fact in my code, I found a few issues and fixed yesterday. Then I had some issue with testing the media playing with FireFox and I just fixed it today. Apparently, it is not a good idea to play the raw media file in the browser. The video should be wrapped in a web page and then the playing would be smooth. When I finished this memo, I will continue with the tutorial. You see how boring it is with my life?

I think I have hit the limit on the game Rage 2. There is a mandatory car race that I had to win. And I am really bad at this type of races. I will give this race a chance. If I can get through it then I will continue with it. If not, I will explore a little more and quit. Or I can just keep trying the races until I get really good? There are plenty other games I can try I guess. I don't have to hang up on this.

I replaced the light fixture of the closet in my bedroom.

I found a few place where trouts are available. I think my next project would be learning how to fish trout. This is one thing I never learned how to do. It is the bait, I don't know what I need to get these fishes. I guess being in Pennsylvania is the chance for me to learn that. I hope I can find time for this. If I have to do this, I need to figure out a plan to reach it.

Not much updates lately. First I want to discuss problem I have faced. The OpenCut Video Editor is no longer working. I believe this is related to the Linux Mint 21 upgrade. The problem is that the Time line sub window cannot be opened, hence no way of adding clips to the Time Line then export. I tried all the ways to fix this and no way of fixing. I decided to abandon this tool and use other tools for similar operation. I used ShortCut and the problem I found is that it failed to process if the overall video is more than 2 hours long. To avoid this issue, I had to cut videos into the one hour to 90 min long for the videos. The processing takes an hour, but it consumes a lot of memory. So what I have to do is run the video process and some other light weight processes, and not run Java related processes. This allows the video processing to be done somewhat quickly.

And this morning (8/26) I received the email that I can order a PlayStation 5 on Amazon. So I ordered one and moved some money from my investment account to cover this expense. I thought I would never be able to purchase one since the unit is out. The supply is so limited and scalpers have diminished supplies by bots. I signed up for the notification, invitations to buy, from all kinds of places. Amazon is the only one that actually provided an opportunity to purchase one with the right price. The other places, have not. No wonder this company is taking over the market place. Anyways, I also placed a request to order from Steam for Steam deck and have not received any response that was almost 5 months ago, and I paid the reservation $5. This sucks. Even if I get notified, I won't buy the device.

I am still working on my sample application. And it is going great. I have moved some code from my old project into this new project and integrated. There is a lot to do. I will try keep progress updated in this updates section.

Again, not much of update recently. I was playing Rage 2. It was pretty hard. The last time I played, I was crashed by a giant monster, and when I tried to overtake a mountain fortress, I died many times and finally won. That felt very good. That was last Sunday night 8/14. I was no good with first person shooting games with game console.

The only thing significant is that I finally upgraded my Linux Mint OS to v.21 Vanessa. That was a pretty awkward process. First I have up download the minitupgrade tool. Then run it. It would prompt me to create a Time Shift back up of existing application. Then it complained about nodejs repository, and I had to disable it. Then there is a problem with applications has higher version than the ones supported by Linux Mint. The upgrade provided a button to "Fix" and would downgrade the applications. And finally the upgrade went through successfully.

After the upgrade, it was a mess I had to clean up. The upgrade installed Java 11 again. I had to remove it then the version 17 would be available. Again GNote was uninstalled and I had to install it back. The node.js is not available and I had to re-install it. That took some work as well and I have already documented the work on the blog post. Everything else seems to be working as expected. The process took about 2-3 hours. It was not for beginner users. I have aborted two times before this successful upgrade.

My big car's tail turn signal light is not working. I think I know how to fix it and have ordered the light bulb. I will do the fix once the parts arrive. Never a dull moment in my life.

I just want to post a quick memo on what I am working on recently. It has been a short while since my last posting, I don't want this blog site to fall behind with new things I am doing. First thing, I completed Mass Effect Andromeda, and last videos of the series are posted. I started playing a new game on XBox One, called Rage 2. It is an open world first person shooting. Published by iDSoft and Berthesda. It has been a very pleasant experience with this game. I adapted the style of using assault rifle and shoot enemy at a distance. Once I thinned the herd, I would go in with shotgun and finish the quest. I love the open world RPG games, combining with first person shooting, my experience with this game has been very good.

I also installed NES emulator and SNES emulator on my Linux desktop and downloaded some of my favorite roms. Occasionally I would bring them out and play a bit. I got a SNES joystick and it works with Linux without needed installing any drivers. The only problem is I am no good with these games, except the RPG games. I am not going to spend too much time with these retro games.

On the positive side, I have started learning Angular. Turned out that this new technology is no different from what I was doing with AngularJS with ES6 scripts. As I have suspected, once I got in depth with the AngularJS with the new ES6 syntax, Angular becomes very easy to learn. The problem I have is that I can no longer use Thymeleaf with Angular because of using nodejs and webpack to build and distribute the finished front end code. And I have devised a way of utilizing this, then package into a Spring Boot jar. I will be documenting this in a codeproject tutorial for sure. It has been a very interesting couple of days. I hope this nice kicking energy can stick around for a while.

Not much update ffor the past few days. I finished another tutorial. It is already published. Because of unexpected delay, I didn't finish it soon enough. The quality of the tutorial seems to be better than the ones I have done earlier. I am look for a new project. At this point, I don't know what I am going to do. I will create a skeleton project with basic authentication, and I will think of what next after it is done. The new one will be a demo application that I can show off in the future.

I was distracted recently by a novel, and spent most of my time reading it. I finished the web site, and finished two more tutorial. I have time to relax a little. As a result, I also finished Mass Effect Andromeda. In the process of converting the videos for upload. This is one thing I want to finish. It is a crappy game. And finishing it is a proud accomplishment to me. There are so many games at hand right now. I don't know which one I should start next. I have installed Rage 2, and I want to complete Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. I like to complete TitanFall 2 one more time as well. But this game is too much for me sometimes. I also want to replay The Outer Worlds again. But don't have the time. So many games at hand, it is so hard to pick one.

Not much update recently. The previous Code Project tutorial has bee published. I have completed another sample application and will start the write up of a new tutorial. I will focus on tutorials for the rest of this year, and relax. At this time, I have "wasted" about 87 hours on Mass Effect Andromeda. I am at the last story based mission. It is a fun and frustrating experience with this game. It has a lot of bugs, and overall the game play is lacklust. At the end, the game play has been pretty fun. The battles at the end of the game is much bigger, the enemies are smarter and enormous at times. The game is well worth the cost I have paid. Anyways, I will finish it and then somehow archive the game.

The next tutorial I will be providing to Code Project will be a tutorial on minify javascript and css files for Spring Boot applications. This is one of the areas that I want to at least get some idea on how it can be done. Like all the other technologies, it was very easy to grasp and utilize. I used the yui-compressor maven plugin and easily made the process working. I will summarize all that in my tutorial. This will be a simple tutorial, and it will be fun.

I recently bomded an interview. It was not a big deal. I didn't prepare, and was using it to gather some intel on the Java and Angular related job interview. I have some ideas now, and will spent some time to study the subjects so that I can get better on the interviews. I will share some of the study tips and tricks in my blop post section. Stay tuned.

I recently completed the new tutorial on integrating GraphQL into Spring Boot application. And it is sent to codeproject for publication. It was a fun project and I have learned some good stuff. I have already had another idea on the next tutorial. The next one would be the minify of JavaScript and CSS files for web applications in Spring Boot using the YUI compressor and associated Maven plugin. The way it will be done is using environment flag so that application can use un-minified JavaScript and CSS files during development, and in production, it will use minified files.

I got a new hard drive for my Linux DEV PC. It is 1TB big. It costs about $90+, and I bought a case to store the old 512GB drive. So I am busy re-install the new PC. The cost total is about $105. Seems like throwing money away. My justification is that I do a lot of video editing, and I need the extra space. With 1TB I don't feel like I am running out of space. I know there are plenty spaces available. And it give me some upgrade on my PC which is an activity I enjoyed. I also checked the memory, it seems one of the 4GB memory card can be replaced with an 8GB one, so that the PC can have 16 GB of space. And the memory card is about $30, an easy upgrade. I will do that with my next pay check. The joy of PC upgrading. Everything is going great.

It feels nice when things are going as good as it could be.

It has been a crazy week. This site is running well. But in the past two days, I have discovered multiple issues. It is expected. The number still scared me a little. This morning, I found a series of issues when I tried to add a new link as friendly link. First, I couldn't add a new site link. It is caused by the date string format, after that I was unable to add a header image. Turned out there is a fireign key constraint issue. This was fixed in the database. After that, the link is not working because the link was HTTP encoded, and it was not pointing to the correct site link. That was also fixed. Finally, the global flags for hide comments, private messages, and mailing list subscriptions were not working. I spent the whole day fixing. I guess I was careless for this rewrite. After fixing all these, the site is running even better now.

I think I will reward myself with a 1TB SSD hard drive for my current PC. This is going to be an interesting upgrade for my laptop. I did open my current PC a while back, it should be an easy upgrade. But the PC will be out of commission for a while. I have to consider this a bit. Anyways, I am going to do some more research on my next codeproject tutorial. I think the next one will be a GraphQL tutorial. It should be simple enough for me to get back into the game.