This is a personal blog, running since 2014 — on Blogger first, on WordPress since 2026. It carries two kinds of writing that do not obviously belong together, and I have stopped trying to make them match.
The first is homelab notes. Lately that means Proxmox almost exclusively: LXC containers, ZFS replication, PBS backups, the cluster doing something the documentation did not mention. These are not polished tutorials. They are what broke, what I checked, and what actually fixed it, written down while it was still fresh — partly so I can find it again in a year, and partly because the answer I needed usually did not exist when I went looking for it. If one of them saves you an evening, that is the whole point.
The second is in Vietnamese, and it is about a country I left. A July. Whether Little Saigon is still the capital of the Vietnamese who came here as refugees. Those posts are not translated into English and are not going to be; they are written for the people who can already read them, and something in them would not survive the trip.
The two threads share a site because they share a person. The infrastructure posts are the part of me that wants a problem to stay fixed. The Vietnamese ones are the part that knows some things do not get fixed, only carried. Keeping them apart would have been tidier and less true.
You will not find my photograph or my given name here, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. Nguyen is enough. What is on this site is the work, which is the part I can vouch for.
There is no newsletter and nothing to subscribe to but the feed. If you want to reach me, the contact page is the way — corrections to a post are especially welcome, and I would rather hear that something here is wrong than leave it wrong.