Blog

September 29, 2023
in Debates
5 min read

Doctors and Bus Drivers

Are doctors more important than bus drivers?

Most people would generally agree that while all jobs are important, certain jobs are more important than others. For example, a surgeon performs operations to save lives, while a bus driver ferries people from location to location.

That being said, it is interesting to attempt to argue from the other side, and push for bus drivers being at least equal, if not more important than doctors. The focus on bus drivers here is arbitrary - bus drivers could be changed to say, train drivers.

September 17, 2023
in Programming
1 min read

Yjs vs Traditional Databases

Yjs is a conflict-free, replicated data type, which allows for distributed, collaborative editing and offline synchronization, with automatic conflict resolution.

It can also be used as a database backend.

Recently, I was deciding between Yjs and the Prisma + tRPC + SQLite combination. As it was a small todo-style app, I settled on Yjs.

Here are the factors I considered for this decision.

September 11, 2023
in Cooking
4 min read

The Best Way to Cook Beans

Beans (also known as legumes) are an excellent source of protein and fibre, and are also one of the lowest GI (glycemic index) foods available. They are also relatively cheap.

However, legumes contain sugars known as galactooligosaccharides (GOS) which are non-digestible, and hence ferment in the gut. While they have benefits, such as being a prebiotic (stimulating the growth of healthy bacteria in the gut), the fermentation process can cause gassiness, bloating, flatulence and even nausea.

August 30, 2023
in Programming
2 min read

Video Archiving with FFmpeg

I keep most of my photos and videos on Photoprism, a great open-source Google Photos alternative with features like facial recognition and viewing photos by location.

July 19, 2023
in Philosophy
3 min read

On Attractiveness

Recently, in my country, there has been a spate of politicians getting involved in extramarital affairs. This got me thinking more deeply about how we rate other people in terms of attractiveness, and whether a total order of the individual's ranking exists.

June 24, 2023
in Programming
5 min read

Setting up the Mikrotik hAP ac² with Singel Fibre

The Mikrotik family of routers are known for their extensive configurability, offering enterprise level features such as PoE, custom routes, VLANs and more. It runs a custom Linux distribution known as RouterOS which offers a WebGUI and terminal interface, as well as SSH.

I wanted to replace my old Singtel WiFi Gigabit Router AC Elite, after it started intermittently dying.

February 1, 2023
in Programming
4 min read

Music Management with Navidrome, DSub and Beets

Previously on Windows, I was using MediaMonkey to manage my music. It offered wireless syncing (over LAN) for the associated Android client, and worked well.

When I switched to Linux, I had to look for a replacement. I wanted a solution that was free and open-source, could be self-hosted on a server, and supported features such as bookmarks, playlists and transcoding (for clients not supporting certain formats).

January 11, 2023
in Programming
2 min read

Self Hosted VPN with Tailscale

Having your own VPN can be useful for bypassing geo-restrictions and censorship, as your IP address is that of the exit node. Your traffic is also encrypted and this protects you against sniffing attacks when using public WiFi.

However most VPN services are paid. So if you have a physical server/VPS running somewhere, why not use that?

Tailscale is an awesome open-source VPN service which lets you create a secure peer-to-peer network between your devices. It's built on the open-source Wireguard protocol which is faster than the IPsec and OpenVPN protocols.

December 27, 2022
in Philosophy
15 min read

On The Measure Of Intelligence

ChatGPT was recently released and has been taking the world by storm. In the online space, there is much discussion about whether we are close to general purpose AI. There is no doubt that better and more capable models (e.g. GPT-4) will soon be released, which will overcome the flaws of its predecessors.

December 16, 2022
in Outdoor
1 min read

Club Med Tomamu Skiing

I skied here during December 2022 with my family. Most of the slopes were closed due to insufficient snow (we were here before Christmas, early in the season), and so we spent most of our time on a few slopes (Silver Bell, Twisting Forest, Knaster).