Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

Blog Notes Photos Links Archives About

All entries tagged tech-life.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this list.

Aug 2019

  • Ephemeral social media

    I read this post: Why I’m automatically deleting my old tweets using AWS Lambda where the justification for regularly deleting your old social media content is that they are no longer representative of the current version of you and thus can be misleading. This has certainly been the case when famous people’s older tweets resurface (James Gunn comes to mind). To each his own and I kind of understand the intent, but this kind of thinking is a bit anathema to me.

    read more (316 words)

    Posted by under post at #tech life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 316 words
  • Three Hearts

    Shogun There’s a quote I like from James Clavell’s novel Shogun: “It’s a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.”

    read more (570 words)

    Posted by under post at #quotes #tech life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 570 words
  • Big news in online repositories this week is that Bitbucket is sunsetting support for Mercurial! This might be the death knell for Mercurial, although Git was already the super popular choice before. Back when I started using online source control for my personal coding projects I started out with Bitbucket over Github because they offered unlimited private repos and Mercurial (which I had already tried out before at work, so at first I preferred it over git).

    read more (279 words)

  • The Great Memory Scare of 2019

    My current desktop PC has been with me since late 2015, so going on 4 years now. I bought relatively high-end parts for it at the time, hoping to be a bit future-proof so that it would last me longer than previous desktops. So I was a bit worried when I started encountering issues during the recent weeks. Here’s the timeline: May 2019, before my overseas trip. It happened a few times that the computer would completely shut down while I was playing Starcraft 2 coop.

    read more (1241 words)

    Posted by under post at #tech life #gaming
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 1241 words
  • Internet Commercialization

    0 A while back, I read this post from 2015: Who is doing this to my internet? lamenting the changing nature of the internet due to commercialization and advertising. 1 It’s a bit funny that the OP was lamenting about the “good old days” of the internet back in 2012, when by then the big social media networks like Facebook and Twitter were already relatively well-entrenched. When I think of the “good old days” of the internet I tend to harken back pre-social media to the heyday of blogging around 2005-2008 maybe?

    read more (800 words)

    Posted by under post at #tech life #blogging
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 800 words
  • Note-taking / Todo Workflow

    In perhaps what is a perfect example of how writing bring clarity, I started drafting a post listing out the problems with my current notes/todo workflow and ended up coming to a conclusion as to how to make things better for myself. The main issue is that I have a smattering of todo-lists and notes scattered over several platforms: plain text files (in different places!), evernote, google keep, google docs, standard notes, and recently I also started trying Trello.

    read more (586 words)

    Posted by under post at #tech life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 586 words

Jul 2019

  • Move Fast, Break Things

    As is my wont, I’m almost never satisfied with a website’s layout, so I’ve been tinkering with this blog’s layout on the backend. To make a long story short, I decided to start working on a Hugo theme. It’s still largely a work in progress, as there’s a bunch of things I wanted to implement. But it was good enough to replace the old one so I went ahead and deployed it, so maybe some bugs here and there on some pages.

    read more (431 words)

    Posted by under post at #hugo #Meta #Tech Life #changelog
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 431 words
  • Testing the Galaxy A50 Camera

    I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I might take some comparison shots using the A50’s camera, so I thought I’d post those now. Note that I am terribly bad at photography, I am well-known for often posting out-of-focus shots and such. Well, I tried at least. This one is a photo of some Deceptions taken using the Samsung Galaxy A50 camera, default settings: (Click to view full-size)

    read more (257 words)

    Posted by under post at #tech life #photography
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 257 words
  • Samsung Galaxy A50

    Since I was going to be staying in the US for more than a month, on my first day there, I went over to Best Buy and got myself a T-Mobile sim card and plan, and the staff there helpfully offered to install the sim into my phone, then the Asus Zenfone Max 4. Upon handling my phone, she commented “you know you’re battery’s expanding, right? That’s dangerous, it could explode or such”, but I shrugged it off.

    read more (760 words)

    Posted by under post at #tech life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 760 words
  • After the Seattle part of the trip, I reunited with family for the final leg of the trip where we all be hanging around the San Francisco bay area. We were based in my uncle’s place in Vacaville, which one of my friends kindly described as “in the sticks”, i.e. basically far away from everything. Like Houston, we had to rely on the kindness of relatives who were willing and available to drive us around.

    read more (1256 words)

    Posted by under post at #travels #ustrip2019 #tech life
    Also on: twitter / 2 / 1256 words

Apr 2019

  • Rami Ismail of Vlambeer points out some of the problems with the mobile app ecosystem: platform SDKs update so often, so older mobile games often break, such that the reasonable option is to make freemium games that you update continuously rather than single purchase games that won’t work a year later unless you burn capital on them: “… I’m just a little wary of the smartphone market right now. I don’t currently feel at ease developing for those platforms because the SDKs change, their hardware specs change and when you don’t update the game just breaks.

    read more (311 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life #Gaming
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 311 words
  • Initial Page Load

    I read a recent blog post from a friend about the large page sizes on initial load of a web page. From there, I got to a link which said that the average page size nowadays is at least 3MB. This led me to check the performance of this very blog/site. Initial load of the home page clocks in with 13 requests weighing around 140KB total. This is not bad, in fact it would be a significant improvmenet since I migrated to a static site using Hugo.

    read more (309 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life #Meta
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 309 words
  • Digging Through Time

    I recently found out about the blog at geocities.institute where they dig through the Geocities archive torrent extracted by the internet archive and write about interesting things they find. That of course eventually led me to traipse through the internet archive’s wayback machine again, especially looking back at some of my older websites. I like having the ability to dig through time and find old content I’ve written or created. (Which is only one of the reasons why I advocate backing up your social media content regularly).

    read more (626 words)

    Posted by under post at #nostalgia #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 626 words
  • Social Media Hiatus

    I’ve written a bit about the need to reduce social media usage, so this month I’m gonna give it a try and have decided to disconnect from Facebook and Twitter until the end of the month. Actually, the real motivation is to minimize the chances of accidentally reading spoilers for Game of Thrones and Avengers Endgame! But taking a trial run of a social media purge seems a good secondary reason too.

    read more (132 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 132 words

Mar 2019

  • I posted a quote yesterday about how if you’re feeling like an outsider or you don’t belong, you should take the take to try and “find the others” who are more similar to yourself. For every person, there likely exists a “tribe”, not necessarily all in one place, a community where that person would fit in. And in the modern age, the internet and social media make it all the more easier for such “outsiders” to connect with each other.

    read more (572 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 572 words
  • Export your social media data

    As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Google Plus being discontinued, I should note that you should be regularly doing backups of all your social media content anyway. Most of them will provide easily accessible backup tools, but probably they have to be accessed via a web browser. Here are the relevant pages for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. (And be wary of sites like Quora that don’t have a direct backup option.

    read more (343 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 343 words
  • Google Plus is dying

    They’re pulling the plug on it by end of this month. I got an email telling me to backup my content from there so I did, not that I had much. I don’t think I wrote any original posts there, the export was mostly +1s and shares and such. Maybe I’ll dig through it in detail in the future. I wish I could say they tried their best with Google+, but they really didn’t.

    read more (121 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 121 words
  • RIP Webfaction?

    A few months back, my current web host WebFaction announced they had been purchased by GoDaddy, which was worrying. Back then they hadn’t announced any details other than there would be some account migrations and single sign on, so it wasn’t a big deal yet. I initially joined WebFaction back in 2008 because they were a Python-friendly and developer-friendly host that had some reasonable budget options, allowing me some space to host this blog and any side projects I wanted to deploy.

    read more (536 words)

    Posted by under post at #webfaction #Tech Life #Meta
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 536 words

Feb 2019

  • Noisy channels

    There’s a significant risk of information overload nowadays. For someone like me who spends a lot of time on the internet, there’s a lot of feeds I follow. Not just social media like Facebook and Twitter, I also follow a set of RSS Feeds via Inoreader, I’ve signed up for a few newsletters, and on weekends I read through several Flipboard categories. Just another symptom of my tendency to want everything I guess.

    read more (681 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 681 words
  • Draw Something

    Just a fun little throwback: some years back me and some friends played an app called Draw Something for a while, where you draw stuff and send the drawings to your friends and they try to guess it. I had some screenshots stored in a Facebook post for a while and it showed up in the “Memories” thing, I thought I’d post them here on the blog too. We had a lot of fun with the app back then!

    read more (79 words)

    Posted by under post at #drawing #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 79 words
  • Broken Streak

    I thought I had a post scheduled yesterday, but I didn’t. That broke a continuous streak of 124 days of daily blogging. I thought about writing a post and publishing it retroactively, but that seems like the kind of BS Type A behavior I kind of want to avoid these days. At least I did a lot better than the last time I tried daily blogging in October 2006, when I only managed 23 posts for the month.

    read more (200 words)

    Posted by under post at #blogging #Tech Life #Writing
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 200 words

Jan 2019

  • Dark Mode

    When a friend recently posted a screenshot from his discord to one of our group chats, most of us jokingly chastised him for having the default light-colored theme, asking if it didn’t blind him when opening up the app at night. I remember when I started working, I told a fellow software dev that it was a bit weird that he liked to use a dark theme for his IDE, telling him it looked like he accidentally did “Select All” on the text for some reason.

    read more (254 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 254 words
  • IFTTT

    A free web-based service I’ve found very useful over the past few years is IFTTT. The initialism is a bit unwieldy; it stands for “If this, then that”. It basically provides a way to “glue” different services and APIs together so you can set up some kind of automation. You set up rules with conditions and specify what to do when those conditions are met. One of my main uses for it was for social media cross-posting.

    read more (362 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 362 words

Dec 2018

  • Noone reads LinkedIn profiles

    I mentioned before how I’m not a fan of LinkedIn: I’m not a fan of LinkedIn, as it seems to be mainly a way to get harassed by recruiters who didn’t even bother reading my profile. Some number of years back, I added the following clause to my LinkedIn profile: Recruiters: if you contact me, please specify the position you are recruiting for, what city it is in, and whether you can meet the above asking salary.

    read more (260 words)

    Posted by under post at #linkedin #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 260 words
  • Duolingo

    If you’re looking for a New Year’s Resolution, why not try learning a new language? Since late 2014, I’ve been using Duolingo to teach myself new languages. Learning a new language not only helps when you’re travelling, but it unlocks different ways of forming thoughts in your brain, helping cognitive development (I may have made up that last part with absolutely no basis except my own speculation.) The first language I tried to study using Duolingo was Spanish, mainly because back then we had an upcoming trip to Europe (including Barcelona) planned in 2015 so the Spanish would have helped.

    read more (933 words)

    Posted by under post at #Self Improvement #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 933 words
  • Notes on Facebook

    Facebook is in hot water again, over controversial deals it made in the past that compromised user privacy. I have been considering for a long time to leave Facebook. These are the challenges: For many people, Facebook is the only way I have to contact them I don’t have a better place to share family pictures (again most of the family is on Facebook) certain follows/groups relevant to my interest are Facebook only Basically the network effect.

    read more (438 words)

    Posted by under post at #Current Events #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 438 words
  • Github Pages

    I only recently found out about Github pages, which allows you to serve static content out of a Github repository, with a github.io subdomain. You can also point a domain name to it if you want (I haven’t tried that yet). It’s a quick and easy way to host a static site for free. Here’s mine: roytang.github.io and the corresponding repo. There isn’t really anything there right now, I just put up some links so I’d have something.

    read more (148 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 148 words
  • Macbook Air (2017 Model)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 2 / 638 words
  • Ancient PC Gaming

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life #Gaming
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 871 words
  • Quora

    Recently, Q&A site Quora announced that they got hacked. On 18 Aug 2012 1:22pm I wrote: Quora is good reading, but it seems difficult to navigate and chance upon the really well-written answers. Or maybe I dunno what i’m doing I started reading Quora back around 2012. My impression then of the site is that it encouraged insightful, well-written, story-like answers. This was opposed to other Q&A sites like Stackoverflow which encourared concise and clinical answers.

    read more (530 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 530 words
  • Online Privacy

    I must admit being a bit unconcerned with online privacy tracking by the large vendoers (Google, Facebook, etc). I mean, I do tend to use my real name as username after all, so most everything I do online can be traced back to me. I assume that anything I do on the internet can be figured out by other parties, so if something is important enough to me that it should be kept private, it shouldn’t go on the internet at all.

    read more (642 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 642 words
  • Social Credit System

    China is setting up some kind of large-scale “social credit system” to rank and monitor the behavior of their citizens. Citizens with low scores can get penalized in various ways like being denied travel or access to top-tier schools and so on. It’s quite creepy, and the mere idea evokes the dystopian Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” where people use an app to rate other people. China’s social credit system might be even worse than the Black Mirror one because:

    read more (516 words)

    Posted by under post at #Current Events #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 516 words
  • Daily Blogging

    Looking at my archives, I was blogging regularly from 2005-2009, mostly because I was really active in competitive MTG during that time. Starting 2010, my blogging activity started to taper off, with less than 60 posts until 2015. I tried to revive the habit around mid-2016, posting at least once a week, but the writing slowed down again around April this year (coinciding with one of the more busy periods for me work-wise).

    read more (863 words)

    Posted by under post at #blogging #Tech Life #Writing
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 863 words

Nov 2018

  • Review: Fitbit Charge 2

    I mentioned in yesterday’s post about my daily walks that my brother got me a Fitbit Charge 2 mid last year, I thought I’d write a quick review. (Actually, this is mainly an excuse to write down a story about how stupid I am.) Anyway, yeah my bro got me a Fitbit. Or maybe I paid for it. I don’t really recall. The point is, I had it and I’ve been using it regularly for the past year and a half.

    read more (701 words)

    Posted by under post at #walking #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 701 words
  • iPad Retrospective

    Looking back on 8 years of apple tablets. I got my first iPad (1st generation!) back in 2010 with 64gb storage. This version was purchased for me by a friend in Singapore. I got the 3g model back then, but I never got around to using that feature. Future purchases would be wifi only. My main usage for the iPad back then was for reading ebooks/comics and playing some games. I spent a lot of time on Tilt to Live on that bad boy.

    read more (1293 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 1293 words
  • Posted by under post at #hugo #wordpress #Meta #Tech Life #changelog
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 1780 words
  • My history in text editors

    Text editors (and by extension IDEs) are a programmer’s best friend. I thought I’d look back at a number of text editors I’ve used over the years. (I grew up with Windows, so I won’t list vim/emacs/nano here, even though I’m at least a bit proficient with vim by now. That is, I know how to exit vim.) Notepad – of course, the default editor in Windows. The one we turn to when all else fails.

    read more (666 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life #Software Development
    Also on: twitter / 3 / 666 words
  • I had always considered my responsiveness to emails and IMs a point of pride – I liked to keep an empty inbox so I replied to emails and IMs as soon as I became aware of them. This of course turned out a bit bad in the short run. I was easily distracted from whatever work I was doing – although I did take pride in being pretty good at multitasking (Yes I know, no one is *really* good at multitasking, I’m just less bad at it than other people).

    read more (292 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 292 words
  • Apparently, Youtube’s algorithms tend to promote extremist content. This is an unsurprising (yet unforeseen) consequence of the “free” advertising-driven internet. Social media algorithms optimize for engagement (eyeballs, views, likes, whatever, etc). Meanwhile, humans are more likely to engage with controversial content. Everyday status quo content is boring by comparison. Hence, controversial or extremist content will tend to bubble to the top. It’s the same reason politics has made social media divisive – promoting divisive content has turned out to be profitable in terms of engagement.

    read more (125 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: twitter / 0 / 125 words

Oct 2018

Aug 2018

  • (Somehow I now have a series of posts about blogging in 2018. Here’s the first one. Two is a series, right?) Great comment the other day on reddit (found via r/bestof), in response to Twitter’s inaction vs Alex Jones. Quoting part of the comment: How can the OG generation of web users possibly hope to maintain the Internet as a free and decentralized medium when a growing majority of the current userbase accept centralization of content and audience, as not only the status quo but as the way things should be?

    read more (1042 words)

    Posted by under post at #blogging #Tech Life #Writing
    Also on: tumblr twitter / 0 / 1042 words

May 2018

  • A couple of days ago I was rummaging through some old files and found a folder of some personal files I had copied from work computer at my old long-time place of work. One thing I was hoping to find there was this TODO text file that I kept throughout the years I worked there, even as I moved from one computer to another. It was a very long, append-only file, accumulated over some number of years.

    read more (891 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: tumblr twitter / 0 / 891 words
  • Google recently had a demo of their new AI assistant Duplex at Google IO 2018: It’s an amazing demo to watch, from an engineering perspective. Basically a combination of natural language processing + text-to-speech that can emulate human speaking patterns. It’s not that much of a breakthrough (more like putting several different things together), but it’s impressive and is a good indicator of where we are with regards to true conversant AI.

    read more (598 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life
    Also on: tumblr twitter / 0 / 598 words
  • Spoiler Alert!

    When Game of Thrones entered its sixth season in 2016, it was true spoiler territory for those of us who had read the GRRM books before HBO’s TV adaptation turned the property into a worldwide phenomenon. Due to the author’s glacial writing pace, at this point the TV series went past the point that the novels had reached. Thus nobody – book readers or tv viewers – knew what events would unfold in the story.

    read more (786 words)

    Posted by under post at #Movies #tv #Pop Culture #Tech Life
    Also on: tumblr twitter / 0 / 786 words

Mar 2018

Feb 2018

  • Around four years ago (give or take a few days), one of my many Twitter interactions with Globe Telecom’s CS account went a little bit viral due to them trying to justify their Fair Use Policy by calling 3% of their users “rotten bananas”. Apparently I didn’t bother writing on the blog about it back then, so I thought I’d do it now. View post on imgur.com The exchange went a tiny bit viral on social media, with friends telling me about people I don’t know sharing the image of the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

    read more (545 words)

    Posted by under post at #Tech Life #favorites
    Also on: tumblr twitter / 2 / 545 words