I started learning how to write single page application using latest Angular framework. It was much more complicated than it was four years ago. Not only I had to install the latest Angular, I had to install latest Bootstrap just to get some idea how to integrate everything together. And I was immediately in trouble. It took me a while to figure out how to add the bootstrap CSS file to the application, and how to add JQuery and bootstrap JS files into the application.

In the end, I finally figure it out, it has to add to the angular.json file. The next problem is that I had no idea how bootstrap 5 works. Yep. that is the version I added. And I had no idea how to use it. It looks so alien from bootstrap 3.4.x. This really proves my point. When you mix all the new stuff together, the learning curve would be many times more difficult than learning one thing at a time. This presents a challenge: how do I learn several things at the same time, absorb the knowledge, and retain them for future use.

The solution I will be trying is I learn one thing at a time, and well document what I learned, then I should be able to retain these knowledge for future use. I think. The problem is that technology evolve so fast that the notes I have take now might not be relevant a few years down the road. So there has to be some way to update the knowledge so that it can stay relevant. I have not figure that out yet.

I got great news. I have successfully backed up the database from the server, and restored on my dev machine. I got great plans for this operation. I will finish the development of the new blog engine. Then I will use these data to restore the database so that new application can use the existing data.

The problem I have face is that even I was able to restore the data, I was unable to save the new data with UTF8 encoding. That was in the morning. Later, when I checked, every table was using default encoding of latin1. I had to change all of them and solved the encoding issue.

There is really not much other updates. I finished FFXV on XBox One. I felt a load off my shoulder. I have leveled to 97, which made the finishing of the game really easy. That game was just ridiculous. After over leveling, the ending is so easy to beat. When I first got this game. It was so intimidating, I had to spent so much time, and I thought it was not worthy. It was actually a fun game to beat. Now it is completed, I will put game aside for a while and work on my project. I got my focus back.

Anyways, these are the update for the past few days, I did a lot of project work, this is the best news I had so far. I think the rewriting is going to paid off.

I have done it. Installed a new medicine cabinet. Here is the back story. The original medicine cabinet face mirror was damaged when I attempted to clean it. The surface that I thought was glass was in fact something very fragile. So it suffered extensive damage when I used a sponge for washing the dishes. There is no way of fixing that face mirror without some kind of replacement.

At first, I thought I can replace the door of the medicine cabinet with a new one from the same cabinet, I just purchase one, remove the door, and use it to replace the damage one. The problem is that I didn't save the receipts of the original one. I scouted the Home Depot and Lowes for similar one. Just couldn't find it. I had to play guess game. Finding one with the same size and hope it is it. If the new one does not fit. I will remove the old one and install the new.

I bought a new one on Thursday 3/3. And installed on 3/4. As expected, the new one has a door that did not fit the old one. The positions of the door hinges are different for the two. So much so for the idea of swapping the doors. I had to remove the whole thing and install the new cabinet. I had a lot of luck. For one, I had a old tarp cover that I can use to cover the wood floor. It was big enough to cover the floor for the dirty work. Next, it is the problem of removing the old cabinet. And it was super easy, unscrewed the top fixture and the cabinet can be removed.

Once removed, I was able to position the new one on the old bottom fixture, unfortunately, the problem came with one of the top fixture. I think I hit the stub with the screw and was not able to screw the nail all the way in. That was on the right side. The left side was screwed in OK. I had the two pieces of top fixtures from the old one. I used them to stabilize the new cabinet. I thought I was done. Then two hours later, I decided to fix it proper. I had to unscrew the old nail and use a shorter one. That solved the problem. The cabinet was sticking to the wall as it should.

Now I know how to install a medicine cabinet. Later that day, I finished the game Final Fantasy XV on XBox One. With the main character on level 97 and rest three on level 96, the ending is very easy to complete. That was a pretty good week.

I am almost finished Final Fantasy XV replay on XBox One. It was fun but also disruptive to normal life. I spent 3 nights a week playing it. Almost 9 hours a week. That is too much. I like to cut down to the old schedule, 2 days a week and max 6 hours. Yet I like the new schedule, give me a lot of time to relax. I am unable decide at this point. On the down side, I relax more, on the up side, I do a lot more work during the day, so that I can free up time at night and have fun.

I installed Cyberpunk 2077 on the new PS4. It took a couple hours. 45 minutes to install the base data. Then 4 hours to download and install the 1.51 patch. All that is straight forward and simple. And when I test drove the game for 10 minutes and it was good. The graphics is rough (I got a cheap and crappy TV), but it works as expected. And I thought the game was fun. There were dialogues, and driving vehicles. I think I will do some research first on this game and I am going to drive like crazy and see how much fun this is going to be.

There are like 8 different games lined up in my queue, and I have not install them. This is the scenario that there are so much fun and not enough time. Heh Heh...

Finally, I ordered a used PS4 Pro for $350 (a little steeper than before social mess). And it arrived yesterday. When I ordered, I picked one that has no accessories (no power cord, no controller, and no HDMI cables). The shipment came within two days. And all the accessories are available. This is a pleasant surprise.

I have been thinking of buy a PS4 Pro for a while. It started when I saw the terrible graphic rendering of FFXV on PS4 slim. The outcome is not as good as on XBox One S. And I bought a bunch of new games. One of them being Cyberpunk 2077. This particular game is very trouble some. After FFXV on XBox One, I will try install this game and all the updates and see if I can play it. There is a lot of bugs which I hope a beefier system might mitigate some.

I am very thankful to the declutter service. The price is low, the hardware is high quality and delivery is very quick. Very happy with this purchase. Recently, there is a lot of cash outflow and I will not be worrying about that. I am just going to be the happiest kids of this planet!

There is not much going on recently. I finished the CodeProject tutorial and it was posted. While I was doing that I recorded a video showing how the sample application works. It was nice. With this new laptop, recording desktop activity was very easy.

I did have the 2nd minor surgery recently. It was not as bad as the 1st one. I can move the mouth and eat some more solid food. Not like the last time. The 2nd day is still tough, having a headache, and some burning up. But I was fine after 3PM.

Still playing the game FFXV. I am at level 84 and will soon be over level 85. I was thinking of getting to Level 90 and finish the main story line. Still posting videos.

Finally, I was trying to get an Android emulator. I like to install some games on it. The only one I was able to get to work is Android-x86 on my QEMU emulator. Unfortunately it runs rather slow and dies unexpectedly. Not sure what was happening. It is fun trying to figure things out. Since this is not working. I will put it on hold for now.

I am currently working on the memo features for the new website.

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.