Introduction The company I work for has changed its device usage policy, and now it doesn’t allow company devices for personal use. So, I decided to buy a mini PC to setup a small homelab server, and migrate my personal data to it. Also, I wanted to start de-googling by having all my and family photos to it. This was my summer project this year. Mini PC for homelab server I bought AceMagic’s this mini PC for less than $200. I was pleasantly surprised at how small it is. It has Intel N150 processor, 16GB DDR4 RAM and 1TB S-ATA SSD. It’s not powerufl, but the beauty of N150 is its low power consumption, thus low electricity cost and also it’s relatively silent. ...

I love Emacs. Emacs is a great text editor, plus much more than that. You might say that anythig text-based can be handled nicely in Emacs. I first chose Emacs at work as it looked more sophisticated than vi. Decades later, I still use Emacs as I’ve been convinced that it’s one of the best tools and worth the time and effort to keep learning. Following are my current worklows using Emacs. ...

This is a draft speech script for a Toastmasters club. Introduction Do you like moving to a new apartment or a house? I hate it. Although I didn’t like my previous apartment much, I didn’t have a plan to move to a different apartment either. But almost at the end of June, I suddenly got an email from my landlord that he wouldn’t renew our lease this year. This was a surprise to me. He said that the apartment would be in a big maintenance cycle, once in 20 years. It sounded like I had no choice, but why hadn’t he notified me of this much earlier!? ...

This is an incomplete draft speech script for a Toastmasters club I belong to. I decided not to use it as it has gone too technical for non-IT audiences. Introduction Have you heard of the word “de-google?” It means to stop using Google web services such as Google photos, Google maps or Gmail. As a Pixel mobile phone user, I heavily depend on Google services. There are many reasons to de-google. Some people believe Google has become evil. But to me, it is mostly a fear that they might raise price drastically or worse, stop services that I’m using. ...

Introduction This past summer, I bought a $200- mini PC and made it my homelab. I installed proxmox + ubuntu + docker, and deployed several services on it: Pi-hole - network-wide DNS with ad-blocker Immich - Google Photos alternative RomM - retro-game library The other day, I obtained a domain name from https://porkbun.com/ and exposed the mini PC to the Internet so that I can see my photos from remote. I deployed: ...