Home

How-To

  • van parked beside the road near handrail and ocean

    Japan Highly Skilled Professional to PR Process and Necessary Documents

    Edit (October 12, 2022) : Fixed typos. Added some small details in required documents section. Edit (August 4, 2021) : I have received my PR card. Updating documents required and all sections after and including “During Processing”. Edit (April 14, 2021) : Added additional documents required for PR submission (self, proxy/agent). Filled in “Submitting Your…

  • Essence of Taiwanese Mahjong – Introduction

    Even after immigrating to California at six years old, I have played Taiwanese mahjong on and off for a good majority of my life – mostly with family and friends. No friends and relatives around me were very serious about mahjong, so it wasn’t until a few months ago I was humbled by the skill…

  • Opening A Rakuten Bank Account

      Disclaimer (2020-06-03): The first half of the guide (first page of registration) has now been updated to the latest version. The second section about Credit Card information has been left as-is since its UI has been left nearly the same since two years ago. Ignore the sudden jump in numbering as I have only…

Site/Tech

  • Google Cloud CDN for GCP WordPress

    The more (concurrent) traffic a website receives, the more important it is for its contents to be hosted on a content delivery network (CDN). By having your site resources spread out across many servers across many regions around the world, it will take much less time (in terms of “hops”, or jumps from server to…

  • Tips For Building A Python Web Scraper

    Automation is my hobby. Admittedly I never thought that I would be interested in it when I studied computer science and engineering back in my university days (my father said my personality befits a software engineer, and I blindly followed his advice). However, during my journey to become a competent software developer I invested much…

  • Update PHP Version For WordPress On Debian 9

    As of April 30, 2020, the current version of Google Cloud Platform’s WordPress Click-to-Deploy deploys WordPress 5.2.3 using PHP version 7.0.33. PHP 7.0.33 was released in January 10, 2019 and since then the PHP developers have released the most recent and stable 7.4.5 version. As a site administrator it is highly essential to update system…

Misc/Fun Stuff!

  • Protecting Your Cryptocurrencies – Online and Offline

    The cryptocurrency universe continues to grow in popularity in the wake of global turmoil and COVID-19. Despite such uncertainties with the economy and unemployment levels soaring following the first outbreak of COVID-19, younger individuals in the workforce are eyeing cryptocurrencies as a method of investment. Just last week I was pleasantly surprised to hear both…

  • JiyuuLife is Live Again!

      Wow, it’s been a while! While neglecting to publish some new posts due to being busy with work, I also overlooked the fact that after the GCP trial period ends, there is only a 30-day grace period for you to update to non-free status before they TERMINATE your compute VM. This means that while…

  • Applying For Rakuten Card

    Disclaimer: This is a guide I have migrated from a previous website I managed. The site was created in 2016 and so contents in this guide may be stale. I will update it with additional information when I have some time to do so (or if there is an immediate demand for it…!) Introduction Rakuten…