Just another update, I have started working on a new tutorial for CodeProject. The sample code project is already done. All is left is writing the tutorial article. The sample code took one night. It was something I have done it once, so figuring it out is easy. It still took time to fully implement it. The tutorial should be relatively easy. I hope.

The project work is going pretty well. I was working on the add memo page and I was able to get my reusable text editing component to work. This will allow me to create the real time editing and previewing to work with memo. It was very exciting. What I imagined can be turned into something real and usable is very satisfying. I loved working on this. Once I am done with the tutorial, I will continue on this.

Speaking on gaming, I did have a horrible Friday with FFXV. The sewerage dungeon on the far easy side of map. I spent two hours in it and got lost again. I was going through the dungeon three time trying to find the headlights and the fourth key to unlock the door at the bottom. Had to lose all the footage and redo the whole dungeon on Saturday. The second play through was fine. I had to re-walk the dungeon one more time to get to the bottom. I went into the same dungeon again to finish the hunt on Sunday. That time it went much quicker. And I finished all the fishing quest from that fisherman, only the Liege of the Lake left. For the three days, I have completed a lot of side quests. it started pretty bumpy but eventually became fun. The next one is going to be very difficult. It was the Castlemark dungeon. It will take a long time to complete, and lots of efforts. Once this dungeon is complete, I can go to the island and continue with the story.

I just want to give an update on my computer upgrade. The old one I had was from 2013. I recently replaced the hard drive. The new hard drive needed power supply of 800 mA, and the old hard drive needed power supply of 700 mA. Turned out it didn't matter. The new hard drive works.

I installed Xubuntu on it and it worked as expected. Because it was a conventional hard drive with disk platters so the performance is not quite as good. But for $24 and 500 GB space. I am very happy with it. Now that I know what that old hardware is capable of, I can easily upgrade it to a 1 TB hard drive for $53 (tax included).

I chose the minimal features for Xubuntu. I have installed DockBarX on it and finally configured to the settings I wanted. It is now a pretty good back up for my current machine.

I wish there is something awesome I can write it. Unfortunately no, there is not much. The front door has this screen door. It was ripped, fixed, then ripped again. I didn't want to have the handyman to fix this because it would cost $250 for the whole day. So I decided to fix it myself. Turned out, it was quite easy. I needed a staple gun and some staples. Amazon had a lot of that and was just $19. I got it on Sunday and fixed the ripped screen window. I didn't have the finishing nails on Sunday. And got them on Monday. I will be putting the finishing touch on Tuesday Feb 1. Even though it wasn't finished, it was still awesome.

I also bought some lumber for the backyard bench. I drove the small car to the store and when I came out with the lumber, I thought I was screwed. I forgot that I had the smaller car. The big pieces were 10 ft. And magically, I fit all the lumbers in. That was quite awesome.

I also bought a 500 GB hard drive, it was only $24. It arrived today. I have used it to swap out my hard drive on my old computer. The new one is only half as thick. The label says 800 mA (power supply), and my old one is 700 mA. That worried me a little. But after swapping it, I powered on and have Xubuntu started, the hard drive showed up as expected. Looks like the little "swap" is working. I have yet to install an OS on it. When I do, it will be exclusive - Linux. This really give me the hope that I can swap out the SSD drive for my new laptop and put in a bigger one someday.

I am going to be brief about recent changes. I still playing games 3 nights a week. And still working on uploading the game play footage. For the past two weeks or so, I have been working on the web site. And a lot of progress has been made. I got the popup for selecting resources and to add to the text data is working now. I even added the search function to the popup. Yesterday I started working on adding another page for the picture/photo resources list, instead of copy and paste the same code, I found a way to do it so that code can be re-used. it is going to be awesome.

Since I got a new screw driver, the trusty "Amartisan Ratchet Screwdriver Bit Set (18 in 1)", I have been trying to find something to do with it. I tighten the screws of all the handles for the drawers, the screws of the beds, and opened the back cover of my old Dell laptop. That is where I got an idea. I can remove my existing hard drive for this laptop and put a new one in it, then install Linux on it. The hard drive is about $39 to $50 on Amazon. Since it is non-essential, I have not bought. Eventually I will do it. Another idea I had was replacing all the planks of the old bench in my back yard. These wood planks are black, rotten and covered with moss. They are 0.75 in X 2.50 in X 4 ft, total 7 pieces. Total it is about $60 for the planks, the screws are all working and can be removed and reinstalled. I have to do some physical work for it. Again, this is non-essential so I have not placed order.

These are all the latest updates. It is not very exciting but life is like this.

Linux Mint 20.3 Una was finally released. I got the upgrade notification from System Report on 1/6/2022. I didn't immediately do the upgrade because I didn't want to see some new bugs hinder my work efficiency. On 1/7/2022, I had some free time, so I decided to do the upgrade. Aside from the slowness of downloading the files, the upgrade was uneventful and everything looks like exactly as it is after the upgrade, including all the customization I have done. That was a pleasant surprise. The Linux Mint team has done a great job. Thank you, Linux Mint development team!

There is not much going on with new tutorials. I have been busy working with my own project. I was spending time with codeproject tutorials in December. Right now I am trying to make up my time right now. And I don't have any new ideas right now for CodeProject. I will spend more time to get my project working. As for video editing and uploading. It is going well. While I work on code, I will run the video conversion in the background. I could upload 12 to 15 videos a week. The process is streamlined. First comes conversion, then editing and conversion again. Finally uploading. I don't want to monetize the videos, they are saved as memories.

I bought a new hard drive to save the converted videos. And a new screw driver. I had a 4 headed screw driver, and lots and lots of exchangeable bits. So I decided to utilize these by getting a better screw driver that can mount these bits. The one thing I needed is a magnetized bit holder. And I actually found one that is about $11. It was very awesome. One last thing, my other furnace is broken. This January I will spend a lot of money. And the stock market is crashing recently. It was very miserable time. I hope everything will be better soon. Yep, all the recent update posts are like summary.

Not much going on recently. I feel like I was on vacation. This is why I have not posted anything here. For the two weeks from Christmas and New Year, I played 4 days of games every week. That was fun. A lot of videos were capture and I am still processing them. The whole processing is tedious, but not very bored.

For the new year, I think I will take Angular as a priority and learn as much as I can. I will be ready in case I have to go for interviews. It is not something I enjoy, but have to be ready. Since I have mastered AngularJS, I doubt the whole experience would be much trouble to me.

A big headache for me is that for the new years, what do I have to focus on for the CodeProject tutorials. For the first one and two, I will be just free styling a little before I can get a bearing. I just momentarily lost my focus a little. Maybe a few ones on the Angular?

After a few updates with Linux Kernel, I noticed something strange with the Sound Volume control. It was OK with the PC speakers. But, when I plugged in my Logitec microphone, the volume control was never working correctly. And I finally figured out. I had to open the sound mixer and play with the microphone volume in the advanced settings section a few times and then the sound settings will be all right with the Logitec microphone. Well, as long as there is a way to get around these annoying issues. They are just annoyance, nothing more.

The issue with Linux OS not waking up from sleep. The issue is still exists, The system has been performing superbly, and can go on for weeks, before this issue shows up. I was hoping future updates can fix it for sure. There has not been any updates during the holiday season. Everyone is on vacation I guess. Then after Jan 3rd, a bunch of updates came. Let's hope this issue will not occur for at least a while. Other than this, everything else has been great.

Finally I have completed the last tutorial this year for CodeProject. It was long and painful. But all the efforts are worthy. It turned out to be great. The tutorial is OK and the sample application is fantastic. I can use it as a skeleton for another project. Not sure how secure the whole thing is, but it work as as I imagined which is awesome.

I recently had some minor oral surgery. It was very painful. It is still painful. All I can eat is soft or liquid based food. I hope it was worthy of the trouble. Second check up is in a week. I also had the booster shot. The drug store guy said the dose is half of the original. But it still hurt. It took me more than a day to recover from the side effect. Now the whole family is vaccinated for both Flu and COVID.

Video gaming is great, I was replaying FFXV on XBox One. I had it for a long time, started at level 11 and never completed. Now I am at level 30. Last night, I even killed a Cactuar. And I doubled the experience at the hotel, bumped the level from 28 all the way to 30. Video capturing, processing and upload online is working as expected. The laptop, aside from the problem of draining battery really quick when doing video editing, works as expected. I thought I would replace the OS with another one in a couple months. But it is being used by me for the whole year, I don't think I will replace it. Even though it has some issues with stability, it works great.

It has been a while since the last update. There is not much going on. I have been playing FFXV on XBox One, and had made 15+ hours of recording. The capture device split the recordings by 4GB per file. And there were quite a few files. And last time I checked my sd disk, there were 88GB of files. I am busy processing them and upload them. My goal is to capture the entire game playing, of all the good and bad and upload all of them. It will be a daunting and enduring task. I believe persistence will prevail. Right now, I plan to complete the processing of all existing files. then resume game play capture. I am also thinking of capturing the end of the game play for FFXV on PS4 and make a video for upload. For the holidays, I purchased three more games, now my library has expanded with eight more games.

While I am not playing games, I was working on the last tutorial. I was not familiar with jwt token, and how it was used. So the sample application took a lot of time. And the tutorial will not be as complete. There were some unforeseen technical issues. Resolving them would take a lot more code and explanation, which I think a second tutorial can expand on. In the middle of this year, I thought I would do a tutorial with OpenID. It didn't happen. This JWT token tutorial would be the alternative. The follow ups can expand one or two more tutorials. It would be good for next year.

Besides playing games, and doing tutorial, I have not make any progress with the rewrite of this blog site. Since the old site is working, there is no rush getting the new one to work. I will probably get back to working on this once the tutorial is done. My personal computer is working as expected. I have not restarted since last update. And since then I have done a lot of video processing, which are memory intensive. When I am not using it, I can just lock it, then put it hibernate/sleep mode. Then close the lid. When I need to use it, I can open the lip, and log back in and use it. It is fantastic. I couldn't be more happier with my Linux OS. Some time earlier this year, I had serious thought of replacing this OS with another OS. Now I don't see the need to do that.

They finally fixed it. After at least a week of testing, I was very happy that the problem related to sleep mode or hibernation of my laptop seems fixed. I think what fixed it is Linux Kernel 5.13.0-21 I have recently installed, which might have a better firmware. For the past week or so (maybe longer), I was able to lock screen, then set laptop on Sleep, close the screen. Then a few hours later comes back, open the screen, and unlock the desktop. Even doing this for many times for the whole week, it was still able to awake and function normally. I have not seen slowing down, huge CPU usage spike, or signs of huge memory leaking. Although, lock it then put it to sleep is still too many steps, I am still very happy with it.

AverMedia's video capturing device is working perfectly. I was able to hook up to my Xbox One S and capture several hours of re-play of Final Fantasy XV. It splits the video files into several 3.7 GB chunks, now I have a lot of file to edit and post.

I have posted two more articles to this site. They are the earlier work of this year. I am working on one more tutorial for this year - JWT token for authorization in Sprint Boot Web application. I met with some minor obstacles with initial testing, and was somewhat inspired by the solutions. This will be a fun tutorial, for the end of the year.

I finally completed FFXV. It has been a long time. I was addicted to Shadow of Mordor when I first bought FFXV for XBox One. At that time, I had a love-hate relationship with Shadow of Mordor. It was a pretty hard game for me. And the adrenaline rush is quite addicting. I eventually got good at it. But at that time, I figured if I can get another game that can kick my addiction from Shadow of Mordor. That was FFXV. I browsed shelf of GameStop trying to find something similar to Shadow of Mordor. FFXV was the one caught my eyes. I bought it for $10 and played 10 hours then stopped. Not until recent few months I picked it up again. I bought the PS4 version ($14.95) after I completed Dragon Quest XI and started playing it.

The game's story plot was incomplete and oversimplified. The game was over emphasize on side quests, hunting monsters and daemons, along with some other fun activities. Half of the game was left unfinished (the ride to the evil empire's capital, should have more locations to explore). The final two bosses were fairly easy to beat. Although I had to spend some hi-potions and elixirs. Overall, it was fun and addicting. This is the third FF game I have played and first to complete the story plot. I also played FFVII and got to the final boss then I gave up. The final fight seemed endless.

I was contemplating of buying the FFVII remake, and a new PS4 Pro for it. But I am undecided. I did sign up for the waiting queue on Play Station Store to get a PS5. I guess I will wait. Meanwhile I will put $200 per pay check to a saving account for that expense. Meanwhile, I started replay FFXV on my XBox One S and recording the game play, and will be post to youtube, just for fun.

I found a tutorial on how to use JWT token as the authentication cookie for the Spring Boot web application. I will be replicating this for my own use and do one last CodeProject tutorial. The way this works is to have the auth token as a bear token, then use the an http interceptor to get this token and verify user's access rights. This idea can expand with possibly multiple tutorials. I am very excited. This will be a great and fun tutorial to do.

I know it's been a while, without much update. Actually, there were a lot of things happened. I bought a video capture hardware so that I can record game playing. And it was great. The hardware has the ability to capture video without a laptop. And it was just awesome. One click and I can record video of any length then stop with the same click. And I also tested recording with laptop using the same hardware, with OBS studio, I was able to record the same. It was very flexible. I am glad I bought this even though it cost a bit more than other video capture devices. With that, I captured 10 or so videos, did the editing and uploaded to youtube. The editing took a little time. There were some problems with OpenShot Video Editor. I found a way aroun the problem and was able to edit all the videos. They were some fun side project. And it gave me ideas of what next blog post would be.

I got a hand saw, some planks, and started the small project fixing the unfinished closet in the basement. The plank was not wide enough. I cut enough pieces and covered the floor. They where exact fit. The problem I was not able to solve effectively is the unevenness of the floor, so it is still a bit uneven. I am getting a bit ambitious. I am thinking of covering wall with large fit wood planks as well. It is another fun project.

I finished another tutorial and uploaded to CodeProject. That was fun. And I did get distracted by FFXV. For the past three days, I played two dungeons. I got pretty un happy about these two. One is that I went through the whole place and couldn't find the exact destination. That one gave me about two new levels. The other one is much worse. For two hours, I was going through the maze trying to find a way into this locked room, and I had to fight very tough monsters. In the end I was not able to get in. It is a side quest which I don't have to finish. So I quit before it wasted all my Elixirs. I used about 50 of them. It was crazy. But the whole quest gave me 300,000 some experience points and five new levels. I was still angry. The whole dungeon crawling is a waste of time and resources. For now, I stopped playing games, until it is the weekend. For now, I will concentrate on work.

It has been a while without updates. I was busy playing FFXV and doing a new tutorial for code project. The game is quite addictive. It was easy to play and easy to level up. So player can get a lot of endorphins, and not much of adrenaline. It is ideal to me. So I play like 3 nights a week. Hence, the no update for 8 or 9 days in a row.

I am happy to report that I have successfully installed MySQL (actually MariaDB) on my EndeavourOS. Again, the process is tedious. Installing the application took no time at all. But starting it up took a lot of time. The problem was that the default Db instance was not part of the application installation. I have to explicitly create the instance via command line. And figuring out what the command line for this took a long while. But once it is done, I was able to start the instance. I have not done the secure installation yet (for tighten the security for the database). But the hardest part is completed. In case any one wondering how the install works, here is the link.

In case you wonder what the new tutorial is. It would be a tutorial on two way communication between an AngularJS directive and its parent controller. This is something I have always wanted to document. It is valuable information to me and I can reference back whenever I needed. It will be ready soon.

One last update. I wanted a video capture box so I can record game playing. Finally got one today. I don't know how easy/hard this would be. It is $135 so it should be all right. Because of lack of hardware, I can't use the laptop to record. This piece of hardware should be able to self record. I will try it out when it arrives. I will give a status update when I get it to work. Stay tuned.

First thing first, I installed slide-able drape for the skylight window for the attic room. It was scary because it was big and looks fairly complicated. And it wasn't fit. I had to use a garden clipper to trim the frame a bit. Turned out, the installation was pretty quick. First I had to remove the old one, which is busted, dirty. And apparently pretty easy to do. Two screw on the side gotta get them out, then there are the 4 clippers on all sides. Screwed them out then the frame for the windows would be clean. Then I had to get the 4 sides of the new drape put together. And push the who frame up. And first screw the two on one side, then the next two on the other side, finally the two in the middle. And it is all done. The scroll of the drape is bit hard in the middle. But it is up there and looks good. I was happy it worked out.

The other thing I did, I thought it would be funny if I change the Linux boot menu to display "Gundam Linux", with an icon that looks like Gundam. Turned out, it was pretty easy to do. I was able to change the config file for the Grub menu using grub-customizer. Then I decided to see if I can change the icon as well. The thing is the OS is called Gundam Linux, But there is the icon of "LM" displaying next to it. It looked like a buzz kill. The first thing I tried was edit the config file to display the Gundam icon. I found out that the config changes would not be permanent. And every time I open the config file and the change would be reverted back. I tried to change the 30_os-prober script. It was fairly complex and not something I can mess with. I reverted the changes. And found a better idea. It would be permanent. I renamed the default icon to a different name. Then I took the Gundam icon and name it as the default icon file name. And it was permanent, always displays. Here is a screenshot I have taken with my cellphone:

Word of Caution: I am sure what I do is not legal (a copy right/trade mark infringement). It was a joke. So please do not name of your OS "Gundam Linux".

Recently I deleted my Manjaro Linux install and replace it with Endeavour OS, which is another Arch Linux fork. Afterwards, I proceeded installing Java 17 on it. At first, when I ran Java, it gave me error that the exec binary format was invalid. I checked and found out that Install the ARM version instead of the x64-x86 version. That was pretty funny. After correcting that mistake, I tried to set the system wide environment variable JAVA_HOME and PATH to the Java binary exec. I made the mistake of using SET to set the variables. When I rebooted the machine, I can't log in, the login process will cause desktop to crash and return back to the login screen.

So I learned how to boot to console, which happens after choosing the boot option on the Grub menu. Then click CTRL + ALT + F2 before the login screen comes up. Then I can login as root, and update the changes I made in /etc/profile. Then reboot again and I was able to login. Afterwards, I can run Java 17 at the command line. That was a lot of hassle.

After Java, I tried to install fcitx for Chinese input. I used pacman to install it. Then I tried to configure it and the configuration app was not there. I have to use pacman to install it which is:

pacman -S fcitx-configuration

After I checked the configuration and added the PinYin input to fcitx, I tried with CTRL + Space to switch between input languages and nothing showed up. After some more research, I found that there is a fcitx-diagnose application which spits out all the errors about the configuration. Turned out I need to add some more configuration to .xprofile for my user account. After I add those changes. Then I restart the desktop again, then the fcitx input window would appear. This is exactly what I have faced 12 years ago when I was working with older version Linux (don't remember which one, probably RedHat). But this exercise shows it is pretty hard to configure such a bare bone system for user for average user. For me, it is fun. The practical goal is that if this OS works OK with the laptop screen flip, then I will switch from Linux Mint to one of these Arch Linux flavors, and use it as my day to day work laptop.

Just want to put out a quick update. While I was doing my Desktop customization, I made a mistake and my shut down/log off options dialog disappeared. Instead, the power off button logs me out without allowing me to select an option on what to do. There is a way to re-enable this. I will write a quick tutorial on it. There is another thing I want to throw in for the same quick tutorial, at this point I can't remember what it is. It is probably how to change your name and icon for your profile. I just remembered (edited on 09/21/2021), I will also include the tip on how to remove the annoying popup asking for the password to the system KeyRing that Chrome always asks. And I will also explain why this happens and why it is OK to disable it.

For my personal project, I have created the site links list for the admin page. And again, the paged items directive is working as expected. Although there is a duplicated code for the page flipping functionality. I need to thing of a way to resolve it so that I can eliminate the code duplication for this once for all. But so far, the effect is fantastic. It is combines re-usability and flexibility into one, which is great.

For fun time, I was play FFXV. The reason I put it off initially is that it is very time consuming, and a lot of the side quests were silly. But now, it feels like something rather enjoyable, and it does not spike up the excitement making me unable to sleep at night. And the achievement of completing the quests feels very good. And the leveling system feels all right, it is rather quick. I am now at Level 42. It is quite amazing how fast a few finished quests can quickly level you up. Making gil (money) is very quick and convenient as well. Hopefully, this will last.

Two days of hard work, I finally completed the tutorial for Linux Mint 20.2 Uma XFCE desktop customization. It is quite hard. The writing is easy. Writing technical stuff is getting easier and easier because I write so much recently. That is progress for ya. The challenge with this one is that I have to take all the screenshots, upload all the screenshots, then associate the images with the post at the right location. It is quite crazy. After posting the tutorial. I realized two issues, one is that I forgot to mention adding the DockBarX to the "Session and Startup". The other is that I forgot to mask my name on the start up menu. Both were fixed. And took much of the time to do. It took a while. But it was done. Here is the link to it.

I just want to add one more paragraph here. I was playing FFXV. This is another crazy thing I found. I actually liked this game. I do not care much about FFVII (the original or the remake), this FFXV is something I like to finish. I especially like the way that one can go around and explore, taking and finishing quests. It is also different from the other JRPG, the playable character gets jump around and do actual fighting. I just hope the controller can hold up with all the finger hitting. I have broken one XBox One wired controller from playing too much of Shadow of Mordor (which I played really well). The nice thing about playing games is that once play enough, I can get good at it. It could be addictive, but I was able to plan the whole thing around my life and still get things done.