Tech

Background Thanks to Good Friday & Easter, I managed to get a long holiday from work. Normally I would just be lazy & enjoy myself, but the JLPT registration opens on the 8th of April for my city. I was considering skipping July’s test, but my friends sent me a link to a news article about engineers and visa status: According to the source, the revised policy will require applicants to submit documentation proving Japanese proficiency at the B2 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, equivalent to N2 of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test. ...

Some of my pent up negative feelings have been building up in the background lately, so I needed to get them out for my own sanity. Enshittification It feels like everything is going on a decline lately. I would have loved things to stay the way they are, but companies like to change up stuff for no reason (お金). Browser Google dropped support of Manifest V2 on July 24th, 2025. Unfortunately, uBlock Origin and other adblockers stopped working because of this. Using a browser without an adblock is insanity, so I tried 2 different things: ...

Background This is another update of my current hobby project. You can read the previous parts here: MaiSocial - Part 1 (Backend & Frontend initialization) MaiSocial - Part 2 (Comment section, Google SSO) MaiSocial - Part 3 (WebP, romaji search) I had some spare time during a sprint, so I decided to work on my personal project a bit. The feature I wanted to make is a playlist feature, where users can create playlists & can share them publicly. In this post I will be talking about a few things: ...

Background This is a short update of my current hobby project, you can read the previous parts here: MaiSocial - Part 1 (Backend & Frontend initialization) MaiSocial - Part 2 (Comment section, Google SSO) Recently I have been busy & I actually got sick for a whole week, so this update was a bit overdue. This update is going to be a short one, discussing two things: Using WebP instead of PNG Translating kana to romaji WebP? According to Google (the developers of the WebP format), WebP is a modern image format that supports lossless and lossy compression for images. Based on their own research, WebP lossless is 26% smaller compared to PNG, and WebP lossy is 25-34% smaller compared to JPEG with similar quality. As of writing, WebP is supported by at least 95.92% of all users. ...

Background This is a continuation of MaiSocial - Part 1, feel free to read that section first. On this part, I wanted to add a few features: Google SSO using Supabase There is no particular reason why I avoided using Firebase, I just wanted to explore Supabase Simple comment section under each song I will not be doing replies or nested comments (at least for this part) Nickname By default, I will use their UUID provided by Supabase, because I don’t want to leak their email or name I won’t have any unique nickname checking (for this part at least) Authentication Supabase Configuring Google Auth to work with Supabase is pretty straightforward, personally for me Supabase’s docs has a pretty detailed explanation on how to set it up. ...

Did you know that you could host a Discord bot in Vercel for free? I didn’t knew until I googled around. If you’re curious on how you could host your own bot in Vercel, follow along The theory I had made bots before, but they were like servers that are always on, so that the bot has an online status. But that was a long time ago. Discord supports webhooks for their slash commands, so when a user sends a command to your Discord bot, Discord will send a POST request. Vercel supports serverless functions, so it is perfect for this use case (despite them not recommending it). ...

Background Back when I made MaiFavorite/MaiChart (same project, just different name), I wanted to achieve two things: Bookmark favorite charts, using localStorage so that it works without having to store each user’s favorites Have an estimated rating calculator for each chart With the release of BUDDiES PLUS version, the first point is redundant because you can have up to 30 favorite songs, and it will actually show up on the arcade cabinet when you play. The rating calculator seems to be an only me thing, because other people would just use the “Recommended based on rating” category in the arcade cabinet as well. With that in mind, I wanted to remake the website, using a different stack in order to be a learning experience for myself. ...

Background I had some spare keyboard switches and keycaps lying around, so I decided to buy a barebone keyboard. Not just any keyboard, but a split one. The split keyboard that I am using is the Lily58 Pro. Something you should know I only realized after receiving the barebones keyboard, that split keyboards require some special keycaps. For example, 1u - 1.75u spacebar, 1u - 1.75u enter, 1u backspakce, 1u tab, etc. Thankfully I found an online store that offers custom keycap printing service, so I just made the keycap design myself and asked them to make the keycaps for me. ...

Background Currently my family depends on me to count the monthly spendings. Their reasoning is that so I know the cost of living. The way this works is that my mother will write out the spendings on a book everyday, and on the start of the month I will read her handwriting, add the items to a google sheet, make sure there are no items missed, and report the monthly spending of that month to my parents. After 7 years of doing it, I had enough because: ...

Background In an effort to become more professional, I decided that I want to have a personal portfolio site, and buy a domain that uses my name. I also want to relearn React and Tailwind, so this is a good opportunity for me. Creating a portfolio site Since my portfolio site has no interactive experience, a static site is my end goal. Since the static site is going to be built into HTML by Vite, I could have just made a vanilla site, purely using HTML and CSS. In the end I still chose to use React and Tailwind for learning purposes. ...