7 posts tagged with "Computers"

Last year (December 2025), LanguageTool, a popular open-source grammar checker, unfortunately decided to put its browser extension behind a premium subscription paywall. While this decision is unfortunate, there is a workaround to use the browser extension without paying: self-hosting the LanguageTool server. I set up one for myself 3 months ago. It has been working well.

LanguageTool requires a server to process all grammar rules. It handles multiple languages, consuming gigabytes of storage and RAM. Self-hosting means running this server ourselves, and connecting our browser extensions to this server instead of the official LanguageTool server. Even the official server no longer accepts requests from browser extensions, our self-hosted server can. Self-hosting allows us to use the browser extension without a subscription.

There are many online resources available on how to run the LanguageTool server locally on localhost. In this blog post, I will instead demonstrate how to run it on a virtual private cloud server, enabling access from any of your devices, anywhere. Meanwhile, keeping the server unexposed to the public, only accessible to my devices, with Tailscale VPN. Finally, I will share tips for optimizing the performance and resource usage, such as loading n-gram data from a volume, using zram and a swap file to increase the available RAM, and using Netdata to monitor the server performance.

A couple of months ago, I got a MacBook Pro. The first thing I need to do is to remap the keyboard, just like what did I with my Ubuntu laptop using keyd. Once again, I realize the CapsLock is not useful enough for it to earn this precious place. I keep accidentally pressing the CapsLock key, thinking it will work like a Control key in Windows/Ubuntu. This post is about how I try to replicate the setup I had in keyd to Mac with Karabiner-Elements. I will show you how to

• Create custom forward delete
• Using z + h/j/k/l as arrows
• Switch between chosen apps with z + <number>
• Make CapsLock useful again by mapping it to multiple modifier keys, etc.

Spoiler, I underestimated the complexity it can get.

This blog documented my setup for self-hosting a web server. Hopefully this is helpful for others to get started with hosting your web server. I was intimated by all the potential cost and complexity before, but after all, it was not that complicated.

It starts from renting a virtual machine and setting the machine up, to running my web servers in containers, setting DNS records, running Nginx and monitoring tools. All cost me on average less than $4 a month. Including the cost of renting my own domain, it is still less than $5 per month on average.

It gave me a lot of fun to tinker with things. It allows me to host more than 1 web server on the same machine using nginx. I would like to share the steps, thought process and learnings in details.

Last month, out of curiosity, I reimplemented all 38 JavaScript Array functions (e.g. .forEach(), .map(), .sort(), etc.) with while loops only. As always, I learned something as I work on the all the functions. Some features, edge cases, considerations that I previously do not know about JavaScript.

• There are sparse arrays and the pain of handling them
• Arrays are objects and its implications
• What copy of a reference in JavaScript actually means
• What are iterators and generators
• Different kinds of equality in JavaScript

Other than that, there are some less-known functions that I discovered, at least I have not used them before until now, like .copyWithin(), .splice() and .with().

To be honest, most of the implementation is tedious and repetitive. A lot of effort goes into handling edge cases, which are the interesting things I learned. The implementation is not as interesting compare to random things I learned, so I will focus on sharing the lessons first. But if you really want to, you can skip to the implementation considerations where I explained the setup, how some functions are implemented, especially some interesting one like .flat() and .sort().

The full code is available in this repo.

What is that 6 digits number in the authenticator app? Why those numbers change every 30 seconds? How are they generated? How does the server know that this is the correct number? How does it work offline?

Also, why do we need to scan a QR code when setting it up? What does the QR code contains? How secure is the whole system? What are the limitations? What to consider if implementing a server to support this authentication method?

We will start with a some simple intuitive explanation and slowly go into the technical details and algorithms. Hopefully you can answer all the above questions after reading this. This is not a high level explanation of why it's good to have MFA, or how to deploy it, there are plenty of resources explaining that already. This article focus on the details of the technology under the hood.

Think about how you use your keyboard. Imagine how good it would be if your CapsLock can be used as Ctrl, how much better it would be for your left pinky? That is the power of remapping the keyboard. It means you can customize the functionality of each key on your keyboard.

This is a walkthrough of my setup in Ubuntu using keyd. A guide I wish it existed when I first try to find out how to remap my keyboard in Ubuntu.

A few months ago, I finally took the time to set up dual boot on my laptop. I would love to try Ubuntu as my daily driver again, while keeping the Windows OS just in case. I treated this as a learning opportunity and configured dual boot with secure boot still enabled and have full disk encryption configured for both operating systems.

I wrote this blog because I could not find a single guide explains all steps for secure boot and full disk encryption sequentially, and these steps interleave each other. So, I made some notes before the installation to ensure I am doing the right thing at the right time. For example, I won't accidentally skip a step about configuring secure boot when I am focused on following another guide about full disk encryption. This guide is a cleaned up version of the notes that I compiled for my dual boot set up.

I organized the whole flow into 6 general steps:

1. Preparing in Windows: set boot mode, partition disk, etc.
2. Configure BIOS: boot mode and other BIOS settings
3. Configure Ubuntu Partition: boot and data partition
4. Install Ubuntu: configure dual boot and mounting volumes correctly
5. Set up crypttab for full disk encryption
6. Reboot and fix some other issues