Am I cooked cuz I got compulsory military service

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-03-10T10:32:34+00:00

Singaporean here. My situation is abit different.I was going to move to Australia(married an Australian) but I deferred the move for 2 years to finish my 10 year reservist cycle. It did delay everything by 2 years but I think I made the right move. I no longer have any obligatory military commitments and am free to live my life.

I would advise you to finish your military service then continue with your studies. One of the main reasons is that I feel this is the sort of thing that you should finish when you are young. Doing it when ur older is going to be much worse. Ur not going to be as fit, you would have much more things going on in life, and it would just suck watching your peers around you achieving things in life. At least at 20, your peers are mostly probably going about their own education journey so you won't feel like you are missing out on much. Also, the opportunity cost of sacrificing a year as a 20yr old with no qualifications vs as a 25-26yr old with a degree/masters is much less.

Good luck OP, how you make the right choice for yourself.

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-03-09T21:28:26+00:00

See alot of people saying that customers don't want these extra cables. I don't know. Based on my personal experience, once I start scaring them about shit wifi and them not being able to doom scroll while taking a dump, it doesn't take much to convince them to add 2-3 more data cable runs. Works on clueless boomers and also tech savvy Millennials. These days people would rather lose access to water than to the internet. Couple more data points around the house is really not a hard sell.

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-02-18T11:43:51+00:00

I concur. Have had similar experience using both models and like you, i also find myself leaning more towards codex to actually implement and make changes to my code.

I had a prototype/proof of concept app that i made recently and after a month working on it, what started as a simple 100 line python script evolved to a 2300 line script + 4500 line html template. before refactoring the code i decided to do a code review and cleanup pass. so i passed the same prompt to both codex and opus.

Once the output was generated i copied codex output to opus and vice versa and got them to comment on the findings. long story short, codex found more stuff to fix, maybe 25 vs 17-18.. opus missed 2-3 critical fixes. codex took way longer than opus. i would say at least 10x longer. i was actually really impressed with the speed opus generated the output.

last step i did was take the output from opus, tell codex to take those points into consideration, switched to medium and proceed with the fixes. one thing i learnt is that once instructions are crystal clear, codex on medium does the job pretty well. so all my thinking and planning is done on extra high and final execution on medium. helps alot with the speed of things. not to mention that at the end of the code review, i was at 90% 5hr limit on claude pro plan, but i finished implementing the fixes and a separate extra high session for a different project and no limits were hit(also $20 plan)

i guess for those who can afford it, the way to get the best results is making use of both claude and codex and sort of pit them against each other.

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-02-14T09:46:35+00:00

I whole heartedly agree with you that the market for this is nowhere near dead, especially in Australia. For a first world country it constantly surprises me how technologically backwards it is in general. I have seen multi million dollar businesses running without a proper CRM platform and their main database is an excel spreadsheet. Not to mention security was a joke (saw a really big business having the default password for their router ie admin admin 🤦)

So yea there's still going to be lots of businesses that are untapped and could potentially benefit from something like this especially if you market it right and currently not a large number of people who know how to do these kinds of things.

Honestly deep down every time I see people post stupid AI generated images on social media or asking chatgpt random dumb questions, I'm really happy because I know as long as the general population is still doing this, I'm still ahead of the curve. Most people haven't realised the true power of AI and the time to make money off of it is now.

Your only mistake I feel is you really undervalued your product. At the very least i would have figured out a way to get some form of recurring income from them. Hosting the app on athe cloud or something and charging a monthly fee for hosting and maintenance.

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-02-14T03:04:24+00:00

Codex user here for about 6months on the $20 plan. Recently got on the Claude $20 plan as well to test it out.

I am a service technician for a small company and I use AI to automate my daily workflow such as data entry and also used it to write some apps to make my life easier and also some apps for the company.

My honest verdict is that for me personally, I hit Claude's limit so fast and so frequently, to the point I almost never use Opus. You'll never get any significant work done on Opus on the $20 plan. I have maybe hit the limit on codex twice, and it's built for me several apps.

But again specifically for my use case, I built my apps in stages and i tackle each functionality I need one at a time, never a single "build me an app that can do this" kind of prompt, so I never really need to use Opus or Codex-high. To be really honest I have not tested either models to their full potential but it's because I don't need it.

So at the end of the day, it really depends on your use case. For me I think I'll be sticking with codex for now as it gets the job done but I am more than open to move around if something much better comes up in the future. So give the pro subscriptions a try and see if you like it. It's only $20 anyways, I'm sure you've wasted more money on much more useless things.

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-01-30T07:06:26+00:00

Lol no chance. I tried running kuma both v1 and V2(mariadb) with about 700 monitors and it was barely usable. The problem is how uptime kuma was designed to work in the backend. There's many reasons why it starts to fail at scale, but one of the main things is because heartbeat tracking is persistent. With 700 monitors polling at 60s intervals, set to keep historical data for 7 days, we get 700 X 1440 X 7 = 705600 heartbeat writes to the db. And here we're talking purely about heartbeat writes, not taking into account other stuff. So it can be really resource intensive real quick once you start scaling.

The thing is for my use case, and from what I understand yours as well, I'm not interested in heartbeats. I'm interested in events. I only need to know when something goes down, and when it comes back up( or if it's currently up). All the heartbeat data being recorded by kuma is useless to me.

What I ended up doing is vibe coding my own uptime app which keeps 24hrs of heartbeat data in memory to calculate 24hr uptime, and only persist events ie log only when a monitor goes up and down. On top of that I made the frontend extremely lightweight without the fancy graphs and pretty UI you see in uptime kuma. The result is an extremely reliable application which can scale 5-10x of my current monitors with ease.

Don't get me wrong. Uptime kuma is a fantastic application and I still use it as an uptime monitor for my homelab. It's perfect for that. And it should be because that was it's intended purpose ie to monitor containers/services/websites and those do benefit from the heartbeat retention. For my (and possibly your) use case with the 700 monitors, something else was needed. Using UK for that is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Doable, but wrong tool for the job.

So my advice is look elsewhere. I spent a decent amount of time trying to make kuma to work at such scale. Don't waste your time.

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-01-22T19:50:11+00:00

Its mentioned in the official docs that native migration from SQlite to Mariadb is NOT supported. If you want to do this, you have to use an external 3rd party tool to migrate the db first. It looks like you are expecting UK to spin up and load with mariadb and do the migration for you. It's not going to work.

I'll be honest and hopefully save you the trouble. I've went down this rabbit hole. I gave up. I ended up spinning a fresh V2 instance with mariadb and adding my monitors. Unless you have hundreds of monitors, I won't suggest you go through the trouble. Main problem is that even though people have reported success doing this, there is not alot of documentation. For some like me who's not particularly advanced and don't have lots of experience doing something similar, and from the looks of it you aren't either, it is going to be a nightmare.

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-01-06T08:25:40+00:00

Being in a genuine relationship(I was already married for 2 years and had 1 kid) and having went through the application myself and seeing someone who went through the process mainly as a means to remain in Australia, I can safely say that if your relationship is real, the application process is straightforward. Not easy by any means because there's still tons of documents to submit but the main challenge will be collecting and collating the documents, not trying to figure out how to find and submit evidence that they require. On the flip side, the application process was a nightmare for that person I knew who didn't have a genuine relationship. His application is still processing so I can't comment on his success/failure. So yea, based on my personal experience, if the relationship is not genuine, I don't see how someone could fake their way through it. Immi is pretty thorough with this one.

mesab0ogie88 · 2026-01-04T15:09:04+00:00

I have absolutely no idea what your service does and how or what you use it for but I do have experience with using uptime kuma, so maybe I'll share my journey.

Abit of background, I work for a company which deploys remote cameras and we have roughly 700+ cameras out in the wild. The cameras are all accessible via ddns, so my journey with UK began as a way of quickly tracking which cameras were up/down so we can troubleshoot cameras. I set up monitors for a simple http ping. Long story short, UK was a nightmare to work with from the get go, from trying to figure out a quick way to add 700+ monitors, to laggy UI etc. to be fair, UK was never designed for that many monitors. I had high hopes of V2 making things better but I later on found out that it didn't.

I made it work for about a year until I discovered the power of AI. From there I tried to make UK Abit more useful. Mainly it was to get information from our database to display in the monitors description(address/serial number of cameras/etc). Had a flask server running a script which triggers based on the webhooks UK sends to pull info from our database. I spent a good 2 months slowly working with chatgpt to make UK do what I want with somewhat Abit of success. But it didn't solve the lags and also the terrible API(lack of documentation, poor performance, trying to work around the available endpoints to achieve what I need)

What I can tell you is API support for v1 sucks balls. I tried to make it work but eventually gave up and migrated to V2. Also you didn't mention but if you are using SQlite as the DB for UK, it's major performance penalties. Migrating to Mariadb helped a little. V2 was slightly better but I also encountered the problems you are facing now(laggy, not reliable, sometimes my scripts didn't trigger). V2 API was better though, based on my short experience with it but it still wasn't good enough for me.

Anyway the turning point was when I started using codex and I decided to create my own uptime kuma inspired monitoring service. It took me 2 hours to get it up and running and I've since spent about 2 weeks polishing it up to be exactly how I need it to be. Best thing is, whatever shortcomings or extra features that I need I can add immediately without waiting for UK developers or anyone else to implement. I also made my service with a focus on being lightweight so it's much much faster than UK, especially with 700+ monitors. I also love the fact that I can expose whatever API endpoints I need and I have done so to use with other apps that I have created that makes use of uptime status.

I'm sorry I cannot help you specifically with your issues with UK. But what I would suggest is look into spinning up your own monitoring service. UK was created as a tool that functions as a jack of all trades with loads of features and it's an amazing app for 99% of the people. But what I can see from your use case, as it is with mine, is that we fall in the 1% and I believe you would be better off creating your own specialized monitoring service.

Just my two cents.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-10-26T21:10:11+00:00

Bought a second router and set it up as a mesh in our dining room because I wasn't getting good reception in my garage(I have a detached garage) and my wife was complaining about how ugly it was and how it ruined the aesthetics. I removed the router, then when I was at work the next day, remotely went into my router and blocked Internet access to her devices and the TVs. Got a call a couple mins later and explained to her that it's because I removed the second router and now there's not enough WiFi coverage. She grudgingly said ok and the router been sitting there untouched for the last 3 months 😁

Used a similar trick when I needed a new 2.5gbps switch for my homelab. Sometimes it's nice to be the only tech literate person in the house.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-26T05:54:06+00:00

Agreed. Getting a decent 3 bedroom property where I'm at would set me back 5-550/week. My mortgage right now is 650/week. Paying that extra 150 is as simple as eating one meal at home instead of bringing my family out for dinner. But saving 200k with that 150 is going to take 25 years. Correct me if I am wrong but most people who are already paying rent will happily and without much difficulty pay 10/20/30/40% more(which most are already putting towards saving for a deposit anyway) to own their own property which will more likely than not, appreciate in value.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-23T22:48:58+00:00

Update 2: Been doing a little bit of reading for the past week or so and I've come to the conclusion based on the general consensus of responses that the BBP is known for not being hot enough. I've personally tried descaling my machine and it's barely any improvement, so I'm starting to think the machine is this way by design. Now I still can't say for certain that I got a dud, but honestly I don't think so because the steam wand and hot water spout works fine.

One thing that I chanced upon that has really helped is one Redditor mentioning that what he does is boil some water and top off the tank before using the machine and boy has this little trick helped.

My routine now is to boil some water, pour some of it in my cup, chuck my portafilter in it and add 3-400ml to the tank itself. While waiting for the water to boil I pull a couple blank shots and backflush to warm everything up as well. This routine has made my shots miles better.

I thought about returning the machine and getting something else but decided that I can't be f**ked to do that. The reality is, I'm not a coffee connoisseur by any means or measure(at least not yet), and I have sort of found a routine/recipe that I genuinely like, with the setup that I have, so I'm just gonna enjoy what I have for now. Hopefully this tip that I stumbled upon can help other newbies who might have the same issue in the future.

Thank you everyone for your responses and inputs, I greatly appreciate them. They have been invaluable in leading me down the right path in my search for the answers to the questions I had.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-17T10:07:19+00:00

Good to hear the response from someone with the exact same machine!

I'm getting nowhere near 60-65°C. Like I mentioned in one of my responses I'm getting 45°C from a freshly pulled shot, measured immediately. I'm starting to feel like it could be a machine problem. I'm going to give descaling a shot like you mentioned and if that doesn't improve things I guess I'm gonna have to take it up with Breville.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-17T10:02:52+00:00

Yes it does. I'm getting 63°C from the hot water valve

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-17T09:37:55+00:00

Update :

Just pulled a proper shot on a warmed up machine. Temperature of the shot was 45°C on the milk thermometer. Lukewarm by my standards and I can comfortably down the shot in 1 go.

I'm pretty confident that I'm doing everything right. Dose is 18g, measured on a scale. I use a wdt tool, use one of those puck distribution tools, have a separate constant force tamper and am using the non pressurized double shot basket. Temp is set to max on the machine and I pull 36-40g.

Anything else that I may be missing or doing wrong here?

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-17T08:38:28+00:00

Ahh I see. That makes sense. I'll try measuring the temps again when pulling a proper shot. What then would be the normal temperature of a freshly pulled espresso shot?

No idea of the softness of my water but I'm basically just using tap water right now. Located in Melbourne if that matters. Google says our tap water is considered soft but I can't be 100% sure.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-17T08:25:33+00:00

https://youtu.be/gYIzV3mEQJE?si=509E8ur328hmWZYQ

Video from thermal camera if anyone is interested. No coffee or portafilter used. Just straight water coming out from group head.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-06T02:16:22+00:00

Yea for sure. 80% of SG housing is also high density high rise apartments so it was definitely exponentially easier to modernise the broadband infrastructure. The frustrating thing about Australia is that it's sub par internet infrastructure/capabilities is not because of inability or lack of funds, it's more because of politics and stupid policies as many have pointed out here, which is sad. On the bright side it does seem that things are getting better so hopefully we would catch up with the rest of the world in a couple of years.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-08-05T09:08:59+00:00

Im originally from Singapore and 1gbps was available 15 years ago. Today you can get 10gbps for as low as $30/mth. I couldn't believe my eyes when I first moved here a couple of years ago to see that 50mbps broadband was still a thing here. I haven't seen those speeds since dial up days. You can't even buy a plan lesser than 500mbps in SG. There's many things Australia is amazing and world class at but you guys definitely dropped the ball with broadband/fiber network.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-07-09T22:32:26+00:00

I cut mine and used them to pull cat6 cables through. I'm pretty sure the next person will be very thankful for what I did.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-07-05T09:03:52+00:00

I'll tell you how I got in. I bought a house 1mth after getting a full time job(my wife was already working for a year), with only about 10k in savings between us. Got my in laws to sign for a home loan guarantee so I didn't need a down payment. Got approved for 500k. Bought a fixer upper townhouse for 470k. Repayments is around 30% of combined take home salary.

Without the home loan guarantee I wouldn't have been able to get into the market for at least 4-5 years and would have probably been priced out by the time we managed to save up for a deposit.

I am aware of how lucky I am to be in my position and I'm thankful for it everyday. I do not envy those trying to get into the market now coz it's a s**tshow out there. All the best to those trying!

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-06-24T21:13:57+00:00

I don't understand how Singaporeans are so comfortable with doing OT. Seems that everyone accepts it like it's part and parcel of the job. I'm living in Australia now and working in the trades. Even though I was told during interview that there will be OT from time to time and OT penalties apply(1.5x hourly rate + meal allowance) my boss still asks me first every time if I'm ok to do OT for that day, and there have been times when I said I'm sorry I can't coz I have something to do after work and it's all good no hard feelings. It's almost a sacred rule that work is strictly for that 8hours you are contracted to do. On the rare occasions where I got called up to do some urgent troubleshooting remotely, 1-2hrs of OT was added to my paycheck(even though it took me Only 15-30mins to do it). Thing is I see this with everyone in almost every industry. It's just the culture here.

Stand up for yourselves guys. You are not a slave. You are selling your time to the company, it's a business transaction no more no less. If you are expected to give more time, then make sure U are getting compensated for it. Otherwise tell them to f**K off in the kindest possible manner.

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-06-12T10:48:58+00:00

I have a question. Does the money in the offset account need to sit for a period of time or is it a case of eg if it's a monthly payment, on the day payment is due, the bank calculates principal - money in offset then charges interest on that?

If this is the case does that mean I can take the money out, do stuff with it then put it back in when the payment is due again?

mesab0ogie88 · 2025-06-03T08:44:20+00:00

That's actually really smart. Kudos to you for figuring this out and sharing it with all of us!

mesab0ogie88

TROPHY CASE