Disclaimer: This content reflects my personal opinions, not those of any organizations I am or have been affiliated with. Code samples are provided for illustration purposes only, use with caution and test thoroughly before deployment.
The Problem: My stock broker outsourced their Android app to a third-party company, so LastPass treat the desktop website and Android app as different sites. Although I can save them separately in LassPass, their password won’t synchronize with each other.
(continue reading...)Three years ago, I wrote the FocusBlocker to help me focus on my master thesis. It’s basically a website blocker that stops me from checking Facebook every five minute. But is different from other blockers like LeechBlock that requires you to set a fixed schedule. FocusBlocker lets you set a quota, e.g. I can browse 10 minutes of Facebook then block it for 50 minutes. So as long as you have remaining quota, you can check Facebook anytime. I’m glad that other people find it useful, and I even got my first donation through AMO because of happy users.
Since this extension serves my need, I’m not actively maintaining it or adding new features. But I was aware of Firefox’s transition from the legacy Add-on SDK to WebExtension API. So before WebExtension API is fully available, I started to migrate it to Chrome’s extension format. But I didn’t got the time to actually migrate it back to Firefox, until a user emails me asking for a WebExtension version. I looked into the statistics, the daily active user count drops from ~1000 to ~300. That’s when I rolled up my sleeve and actually migrated it in one day. (Although later I found out that the drop is not entirely due to users upgrading to newer Firefox, is because of this change.) Here is how I did it and what I’ve learned from the process.
(continue reading...)祝大家退役愉快。護照上如果有退役前的「持照人出國應經核准，尚未履行兵役義務」章，雖然還是可以出國，但是據說海關要查比較久，而且可能會要求出示退役證明，所以還是去註銷比較方便。我是 2017 七月去辦的，最新規定請直接詢問外交部 (聯絡方式與營業時間)。另外以下是研發替代役的規定，其他兵種不確定，但應該差不多。
(continue reading...)It has been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy for the first half of this year but now I got more free time. Hopefully I can get back to my usual pace of one post per months.
My old laptop (Inhon Carbonbook, discontinued) had a swollen battery. I kept using it for a few months but then the battery squeezed my keyboard so I can no longer type correctly. After some research I decided to buy the ThinkPad 13 model because it provides descent hardware for its price, and the weight (~1.5 kg) is acceptable. Every time I got a new computer the first thing is to get Linux up and running. So here are my notes on how to install Ubuntu Linux on it.
TL;DR: Everything works out of the box. Just remember to turn off secure boot and shrink the disk in Windows before you install.
(continue reading...)I’ve been attending and even talking at tech conferences for some time. One of the challenge is to keep track of when those conference will take place. Also there is no single list of all conferences I’m interested. There are some website that collects them, but they often missed some community-organized events in Asia. Or there are some community-maintained list of open source conferences (Thanks Barney!), but they don’t include for-profit conferences.
Therefore I build a simple website that collects all conferences I know in Asia, focusing on open source software, web, and startup:
(continue reading...)