https://www.michaelcheng.us Feed for Michael's blog Sun, 15 Dec 2024 10:02:19 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/58 Google's Pixel phones received a new feature that allows you to [limit the battery charge to 80%](https://9to5google.com/2024/09/13/android-15-qpr1-limit-battery-charging/). Currently on Reddit, some are wondering why anyone would purposely handicap their battery capacity. Others say it's useful for daily usage when their phone is always on the charger. For me, the best use case is when driving. My car recently got an update which enables wireless Android Auto. Paired with wireless charging, the phone gets hot during a typical drive. If the phone could maintain an 80% charge for the duration of the drive, I believe it would help the phone keep a cooler temperature and be better overall for the phone's health. However, there's no quick toggle for the 80% charge, and going into the battery settings before each drive is pretty inconvenient. I solved this using [MacroDroid](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arlosoft.macrodroid). The trigger is connecting to my car's Bluetooth. When connected, trigger the action to change a secure system setting. To enable 80% charge limit: ``` settings put secure "charge_optimization_mode" "1" settings put secure "adaptive_charging_enabled" "0" ``` Adaptive charging should be disabled when the charge limit is enabled, and vice-versa. To disable the 80% charge limit: ``` settings put secure "charge_optimization_mode" "0" settings put secure "adaptive_charging_enabled" "1" ``` Tue, 23 Apr 2024 02:48:23 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/57 I started hosting photos on my home server to de-Google. It was an interesting experience overall, which included setting up a DNS server and fiddling with Wake on Wireless LAN. I'll explain the process below, and finally touch upon the fix for an annoying problem I encountered where the server would go to sleep for seemingly no reason. I already had [PIVPN](https://www.pivpn.io/) installed on my Raspberry Pi. From there, I set up a DNS server so I could point photos.local to an IP address within the network. I had a choice between `dnsmasq` and `Bind9` for the server, and I chose `Bind9` because it seemed like the more "correct" choice. Digital Ocean [explains](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-bind-as-a-private-network-dns-server-on-ubuntu-18-04) the setup well. After the server was running and I could connect to it, I wanted a way to wake it up so I wouldn't have to keep it always on. Since I didn't have an Ethernet port where I wanted to place the server, I had it running on a 5GHz USB Wi-Fi adapter. I found that it's almost impossible to get WoWLAN working, since the adapter needs to be powered in order to receive the packet. Again, I had 2 choices. I could either move the server to a place where I had an Ethernet port, or buy a Wi-Fi extender with an Ethernet port. I decided on the latter since latency is not critical for this server, and Wi-Fi seems stable enough. After setting that up, WOL worked perfectly. I soon ran into another issue though. The server would go offline after a few minutes of waking it up via WOL. As I had it running headless in a closet, I could only debug via RDP. Originally, I thought RDP logging out triggered the sleep. Indeed, I found [this question](https://superuser.com/questions/1827005/prevent-windows-11-from-going-to-sleep-after-rdp-session-was-closed) on Stack Exchange which had a very similar problem with no solution. I later found out the server would sleep even if I never connected to RDP. I investigated further and that brought me to the Event Log.  I did some more researching and found [this question](https://superuser.com/questions/1693220/windows-11-goes-to-sleep-mode-after-a-long-time-in-lock-mode-even-though-i-have). One [unaccepted answer](https://superuser.com/a/1795470) showed a very interesting option that I didn't have in my power options: "System unattended sleep timeout". I found [this tutorial](https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/72133-add-system-unattended-sleep-timeout-power-options-windows.html) to enable the hidden option in power options. For posterity, the commands are duplicated here: 1. Open an elevated command prompt 1. Add the option with this command ``` REG ADD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0 /v Attributes /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f ``` 1. Remove the option with this command ``` powercfg -attributes SUB_SLEEP 7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0 +ATTRIB_HIDE ``` I set the timeout to 0 minutes, and the problem was resolved.  Fri, 24 Feb 2023 05:59:04 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/56 A few days ago my Firefox browser started having serious graphical glitches when viewing certain hardware accelerated web applications such as YouTube. Naturally, the first thing I tried to do was disable hardware acceleration, and that fixed the problem. But no one likes to disable HWA, right? So I dug deeper. Most results on Google suggest to go to `about:support` to figure something out, or disable WebGL in `about:config`. I tried upgrading my graphics drivers and rolling back, using [Display Driver Uninstaller](https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html) too. I even tried re-seating my GPU twice. Finally, I found that the graphical glitches don't transfer to a different monitor. At this point, I switched the refresh rate from 144Hz to 120Hz, and the problems went away immediately. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Wed, 12 Oct 2022 15:07:05 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/55 Something I've noticed about navigation apps these days: they're hard to follow unless you're already relatively familiar with the area. I'm not sure if this is unique to Taipei or to any reasonably large city. Whenever I'm approaching a road like the one below, Google Maps never tells me clearly enough where I need to be.  Even if it does tell me which lane to be in, it often tells me that information much too late, and I don't actually have enough time to move to the correct lane. There's many places in Taipei where this is confusing. The other one I see more often is needing to be in an inner lane (which is very inconveniently surrounded by medians) in order to be able to make a left turn.  The best solution I've seen so far is 3D navigation like the one by [KingwayTek](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kingwaytek.naviking3d). It has very nice visuals that help you easily see where you should head next. Some examples:   This navigation system costs 30 USD, which is a tough pill to swallow because I've used the trial version for all of 5 minutes before deciding it was a bit too clunky—I'm still much too used to Google Map's smooth UI. Hopefully navigation apps can improve more in the future and bring 3D guidance to drivers worldwide. Mon, 07 Feb 2022 03:23:14 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/54 I've always had computer monitors, but I never owned a TV before in my life. Recently, I became the owner of a 43" 4K TV. Since I don't usually watch cable television, I connected it to my computer as an extended display, primarily using it for gaming. I couldn't get the TV's native 4K resolution to render in 60Hz though. After looking through the display adapter's settings, I concluded that my HDMI cable didn't have enough bandwidth to support 4K60. In effect, I was probably using a [HDMI 1.4](https://www.hdmi.org/spec/hdmi1_4b) cable. I later found there is [no way to determine](https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/is-there-anyway-to-detect-what-version-of-hdmi-cable-my-cable-is.3167678/post-19601026) what kind of cable is being used, since there's nothing in the spec that requires a version number to be printed. So I continued using the TV at 1080p 60Hz since I figured that was easier on my GPU anyway. After a while though, I decided to dig deeper since running 1080p on a 4K TV...feels kind of weird. I found a nice [tool](https://glenwing.github.io/adapters/?output=HDMI&input=DP) that helped me find out that I'd probably need an active DisplayPort to HDMI adapter to get 4K60 support. After purchasing one and connecting it from my computer, I found that the refresh rate was still stuck at 30Hz. I looked through the TV settings to see if there was any option to change the HDMI version from 1.4 to 2.0. There was nothing. I checked if the HDMI port supported 4K60. All ports supported 4K60. I saw an option for [EDID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identification_Data) buried deep in the TV settings. There were two options: 1.4 and 2.0. I didn't know what EDID was, but the numbers seemed to make sense. So I changed it to 2.0, and suddenly 60Hz was unlocked. After playing with the settings, I decided to use 2K resolution instead to match my primary monitor. I then noticed the display only took up half of the TV's screen. It took a while but I found out that [display scaling](https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/what-is-gpu-scaling/) should be enabled on the TV since it's rendering at non-native resolution. Most people probably already have their TV set up properly at native resolution and some crazy high refresh rate. But if you were also stuck on these beginning steps, hopefully this guide helps you get the most out of your TV. Sat, 29 May 2021 13:09:24 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/53 I'm no keyboard expert, but I've used my fair share of keyboards throughout the years. I've always loved using compact wireless keyboards because they reduce desk clutter substantially. But then in 2017, I received my first mechanical keyboard as a gift. This was my first time using a full-size wired keyboard in a long time. I had a hard time adjusting not just to seeing wires on my desk again, but also the amount of space the full-size keyboard took. However, the MX Brown switches felt so good that it was almost worth it.  I bought my second mechanical keyboard just three months later.  Again I stayed with MX Brown switches, but this time I went back to my trusted [tenkeyless](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tenkeyless) (TKL) layout. I never use the number pad on full-size keyboards, but it's important for me to have the dedicated home and end keys because it's easier to edit text.  Last year, I was itching to get another keyboard. This time I wanted to try out MX Blue switches. I knew that MX Blues were more tactile and clicky, and I wanted to see how much better the typing experience could get.  I went with a low profile Bluetooth keyboard from Keychron. The clickiness was amazing and it served me well for a few months. But I had a few minor gripes with it: * **The backlight.** You can set the keyboard backlight to off, but there's still some kind of LED lighting up underneath the keys. The only time it turns off is when it's disconnected from a device. This leads to my next point. * **Battery life.** I always left the backlight off, but I still ended up having to recharge every week. Charging didn't take long too though, and it uses USB-C! * **Squeaky switches.** When pressing a key (especially the space bar), it's sometimes accompanied with a squeak. * **Connectivity issues.** Sometimes I had to disconnect and reconnect to get my computer to recognize the keyboard again. This was particularly annoying during meetings when I stopped typing for around 10 minutes, and it'd go into some kind of deep sleep mode. Then when I needed to type notes, I found the keyboard needed to be reconnected. This happened randomly, and I never found the root cause of the deep sleep. So I decided to buy another keyboard. I knew I wanted Bluetooth since this had to connect to my work laptop as well, and work doesn't like USB dongles. I also knew I wanted to go back to less clicky switches, since MX Blues are *kind of loud*. I didn't have a lot of choices, so I decided to pick the Logitech G913 TKL.  My first impressions were not good. I got the "Tactile" version, but it felt decidedly mushy and completely unlike other tactile switches I used before. I briefly wondered if this was what MX Reds were like. I opted to give it a few days though. And the days stretched to weeks. Today, I've had the G913 for more than two months already. I have yet to charge the battery. I didn't even charge it when I received it, and the battery indicator still shows green! It switches seamlessly and instantaneously between LIGHTSPEED and Bluetooth, and it never goes into a deep sleep it can't wake from. The volume wheel is amazingly useful. I'm getting used to the switches, but I still miss the more tactile MX Brown switches. You can't have it all, I guess! Tue, 15 Sep 2020 09:25:53 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/52 Despite the ongoing pandemic, I am currently privileged enough to still be able to work from home. As a software engineer, most of my work can and could always have been done outside of the office. Yes, it makes collaboration a bit more different (a lot of communication is now asynchronous). In addition, not everyone has the right environment at home for remote work (no office furniture, distractions, no air conditioning, abusive partner, etc are all things that affect one's ability to work effectively at home). But for the most part, engineering work can be done outside of the office. Three months ago, my manager offered to let me work from Taiwan in order for me to be closer to my support network of family and friends. So, that's what I've been doing for the past few months. I figured it's worth writing a bit about my experience so far! Taiwan is handling COVID-19 somewhat effectively. There are currently 12 active cases, and for the most part, besides a bit more social distancing and face masks, life is relatively "normal". I wake up at 4:55 AM every day and am "at work" by 5. I have very few meetings with my team now, even with these working hours. At around 7, I make breakfast and take a break for half an hour. With the office supply stipend given by the company, my workspace is very ergonomic, and the only thing I'm missing is a second monitor. At 12, I eat lunch with my parents. 90% of the time, my laptop is closed by 2:00 PM. Afterwards, I go to the gym. When I'm done, I have around 5 more hours left of my day. Even though I was working from home in Chicago since March, it still took a while for me to get used to remote work from Taiwan. The time difference is the biggest hurdle. Currently, Taiwan is 15 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time. That means when my work day starts at 5:00 AM, it is 2:00 PM for most of my team. Most of the team's meetings are already done by then in order to accommodate Chicago time as well. I catch up with the team by reading meeting notes and scanning chat rooms for important information. Large meetings are recorded, which helps a lot too. I used to have many meetings on my calendar. Now, I probably just have 1 hour of recurring team-related meetings each week. Because of this, I often reach out to folks through 1:1 meetings now. Another hot topic these days is whether or not companies should give employees the option of [indefinite remote work](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/22/tech/work-from-home-companies/index.html). I don't have much of an opinion now, but from what I notice, the issue isn't really work-from-home vs work-from-office. It seems to be more related to the fact that people are productive when they can focus. Some people can enter the zone in the office, but some do that better at home. I think there's a lot of room for more flexibility and research in this area, and I wouldn't be surprised if it comes down mostly to the preference of your immediate team. Regardless, I'm glad and grateful to be home and closer to the people I care about. Remote work has changed the way many people view their job, and the pandemic has changed how people view life. Please continue to take good care of yourself and one another! Wed, 17 Jun 2020 11:28:38 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/51 At the beginning of the year, I decided upon using [OneDrive](https://onedrive.live.com/) as my cloud backup solution. OneDrive is more of a cloud *storage* provider, but it can also be used for backups with some simple tweaks! I was originally deciding between [Backblaze](https://www.backblaze.com/), [Dropbox](https://dropbox.com), and [Drive](https://drive.google.com). I wasn't too happy with pricing for the latter two. Backblaze seemed interesting with its "just-backup-everything" approach, but I later chose OneDrive to also get Office 365 for free. One of the problems I immediately ran into was the fact that OneDrive is a storage provider and not a backup provider. OneDrive installs itself into the user folder in Windows. From there, you can just drag and drop any files you want into the OneDrive folder, and it'll automatically be synced with your account. This is simple and seems to work well in most use cases. However, for people who already have their important pictures and files and documents in a preexisting folder hierarchy, this doesn't work well. In addition, if you're like me and have a small `C:\` drive for Windows and one or more large HDDs for storing files, you'll know how nearly impossible it is to just move everything into the OneDrive folder—especially considering that OneDrive is 1TB of storage space! Enter symbolic links. The symlink that most people are familiar with are desktop shortcuts. These soft links point to files at a remote location. For example, a shortcut to Firefox on your desktop actually opens `C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe`.  The symlink that is relevant to our OneDrive discussion is called a [junction](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/hard-links-and-junctions). This creates a sort of "copy" of the folder, which is actually just an alias of the remote location. For example, if you have a folder that is `D:\this\folder\is\nested\so\deeply\and\it\is\annoying`, you can create a junction to it from `C:\thatfolder`. You can then browse `thatfolder` the same as you would `annoying`, except the files take up space on the `D:\` drive. The command to create that junction would be: ``` mklink /J "C:\thatfolder" "D:\this\folder\is\nested\so\deeply\and\it\is\annoying" ``` We now see that for OneDrive we can easily preserve our existing folder structures at their respective original locations while also backing up their contents to OneDrive *simply by using a junction*! ``` mklink /J "%OneDrive%\Pictures" "D:\Media\Pictures" ``` And voilà! It appears to be backing up. Alas, if only things were this easy. The next problem you'll probably encounter is that it doesn't work. Or rather, it only works once. OneDrive does not appear to observe changes to junctions when syncing. There is, however, a simple way around this. In the process of finding out why this happened, I created a file in my OneDrive root. After a few minutes, it started syncing changes from junctions. After some more digging, I realized that the process of **creating and deleting a real file** in OneDrive triggers the sync process to detect all changes. From there, it was a simple matter of creating a batch script and running it from the Task Scheduler. ``` echo hi > %OneDrive%\sync del %OneDrive%\sync ``` Each time this batch script is run, it creates the `sync` file and immediately deletes it. Trigger this from whatever event you'd like, and now you have a OneDrive that can sync any folder on your computer! Sat, 23 May 2020 19:17:24 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/50 If you're here often, you may have noticed that I redesigned this website recently! The previous design was created [*six years ago* in 2014](https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/9). Here's a slight refresher on how that looked.  And here's a screenshot of how my profile page looked.  It was not flashy at all. It was minimal, and I would say it just barely served its purpose. In the 6 years since then, I created my [first app](https://www.iqwerty.net/freepee) and started working as an actual software engineer. I occasionally posted some blog entries, but I didn't have much time to improve the infrastructure or design of the website. That is, until recently... --- It was the beginning of May. Out of the blue, my webhost declared bankruptcy. Cue the emergency bells. Apparently they weren't doing so well financially, and it actually had been a while since *they themselves* paid the bill for their datacenters. Obviously I had all my code stored on my personal workstation, but I had never backed up the databases on the server! The webhost said they would not be able to restore anyone's data, but they could help customers transfer domains to another provider. --- After a few days of grief over 15 years of data loss (yes, I had been their customer for 15 years!), I decided I would just start over. After all, I *was* in quarantine, and I *had* learned a lot from my years of professional software engineering. I decided not to even look at my old code, because it would be a nightmare refactoring into something worthwhile. I toyed with the idea of just having a static site using something like [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/). I didn't want to lose data anymore, so hosting static content on GitHub was worth considering. I also wondered if I should just host everything on my Raspberry Pi. A coworker briefly mentioned that I should look into Firebase. I decided to spend a few days to just think about all my options. And in the meantime, I began designing my new logo.  The old logo was supposed to represent my hobby as an engineer via the computer mouse in blue. This time around, I decided to drop that. *"Less is more"*, right? I went with a dark gray background instead of black for a more matte appearance. Instead of completely flat iconography, I added a slight shadow to add some layering. I chose purple because I'm really loving purple recently! As I finished up my new logo and was about to turn my attention back to what tech stack I should use, the webhost announced that *their* provider was willing to turn on the datacenters for 48 hours in order for us to recover our data. That pretty much solidified the decision for me to remain with [`LAMP`](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)). Also, I was elated that I would be able to download my lost data! In a few days, I came up with a new design and re-created my website using what I hope are reasonable best practices in a modern world. I **finally** started using SASS, and I wrote my own build pipeline called `Ceres`, which I will release to the world (i.e. GitHub) when it is ready for prime time. I also fixed lots of long-standing issues related to time in my old website. You may have noticed that sometimes a date would be incorrectly formatted as "yesterday", even though it should have said "today". That's because [time zones are hard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY). I also finally started supporting [Markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/) in my blog, though I am still hesitant to enable it for comments because XSS is scary. As of a few days ago, I am feature complete on the re-design of this website! Some have asked for the ability to reply per-comment in the commenting system, but I do have questions like how many nested layers should a comment be allowed to have? Please comment with your thoughts! 😉 Even though I came out of this ordeal with a shiny new website, there is still an important lesson to be learned. And that is: **backup everything**. Spend some time to automate it so you don't have to think about it. Check every so often that it's working the way you intended. If you go for a [cloud backup solution](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/), do spend some time thinking about encryption and recovery paths. Make sure you encrypt your files yourself before they hit the wire, even if a service says it provides end-to-end encryption and encryption at rest. All in all this was a very fun albeit slightly stressful experience. It highlighted just how endless the possibilities are in something seemingly as simple as web development. The vast amount of time and dedication one must have to complete a side project are not easy to come by. For more on this topic, definitely take a look at this article by my buddy Nish about why [it's ok to never finish your side projects](https://nishtahir.com/why-its-okay-to-never-finish-your-side-projects/). Happy coding! Thu, 23 Apr 2020 23:27:44 +0000 https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/49 It's a strange world we're living in right now. [COVID-19](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html) has pressed a giant pause button on all of our lives. For some, this pandemic has given them the opportunity to [rethink their life and priorities](https://www.reddit.com/r/minimalism/comments/g1l0vc/coronavirus_changing_peoples_mindset_about_what/). Some people are finding the silver lining in [giving Mother Earth a break](https://www.reddit.com/r/spirituality/comments/fjhfwf/i_cant_help_but_feel_happy_that_the_world_is/). Some are saved from dead-end jobs and [make more money on unemployment benefits now](https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/fzgmgr/the_coronavirus_pandemic_has_saved_my_life/). Others are simply glad that [distancing is now a thing](https://psiloveyou.xyz/2020-is-officially-the-year-of-the-introvert-58b9ff2a9e1e). I bring up these perspectives to take you on a break from the general sentiment of negativity building up these days. One only needs to open any random news site to get more than they need of anxiety-stimulating articles. Everyone is navigating quarantine in their own way too. Personally, I'm missing the gym, as well as being able to go back home to family and friends in Taiwan. This is already almost the longest I've been gone from home. With the pause button pressed however, I'm finding gratitude in finally resolving some of that [burnout](https://www.verywellmind.com/stress-and-burnout-symptoms-and-causes-3144516) that's been causing me some stress for the past year. Finally, I just want to remind my readers that it's okay to feel uncertain or anxious. It's okay to have problems and stress about it. Many people are afraid to talk about their fears and anxieties because they're often met with the phrase "well, other people have it much worse". If a problem is real to you, then it is real. It doesn't matter what your situation is, or how privileged you may or may not be. Everyone has different problems that come from their very different lives. We are living through times where there is no good option for many difficult choices—only the least bad option. Do what you need to do for your health, and remember to be [gentle](https://www.michaelcheng.us/stuff/48) with yourself.