Jessica Huynh

Kobo Libra Colour setup

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:14:58 -0400

On Black Friday 2024, I got myself a Kobo Libra Colour ereader to replace my old Kindle Touch from 2011. This was in part a desire to de-Bezos my life as much as possible, and in part a desire to get some quality of life features (USB-C! A backlight! Color!!).

I mostly use the stock Kobo software setup, but I have made a few modifications over the past couple of years, which I want to go through now.

Agentic Website Update

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 22:20:12 -0400

Six years between posts is probably not breaking a world record for time between blog updates but it might be close. I’ve made a number of fixes/improvements (most notably, fixing the RSS feed and category/tag pages and adding the privacy policy) but before that, I had to bring how the site is laid out up to date and in line with the latest version of Hugo.

Last time I touched this site, I was on Hugo 0.79.0 and there was a toolchain set up to do LESS preprocessing. We are now on Hugo 0.164.0, which includes built-in Dart Sass preprocessing via the binary. Bringing things six years and 85 versions into the future seemed both annoying and not exactly fun, so I decided to see what would happen with agentic coding.

Đậu hũ nhồi thịt sốt cà chua

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 18:29:38 -0400

Đậu hũ nhồi thịt sốt cà chua (tofu stuffed with meat/pork braised in tomato sauce) is one of my favorite dishes to make—it’s really simple, doesn’t require a ton of fuss, but tastes good. This is an adaptation of my mom’s recipe. Normally the tofu is fried but I didn’t do that here (it’s too warm for that right now!). I also added in straw mushrooms. I’m a believer in the “never-too-many-mushrooms” school of culinary arts.

You don’t need any special tools for this. I used a simple stainless steel sauce pan from IKEA. If I were frying the tofu, I’d use my wok. Or you could buy pre-fried tofu if you’re in an area with a large East or Southeast Asian population.

Finished Couch-to-5k

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:47:06 -0400

Like a decent number of people, I started the couch-to-5k running program in the middle of stay-at-home orders. I finished it up just today and felt like rambling about what it is and how it went.

I had been meaning to do it for a while now (Google Play tells me that I had gotten an app for it a couple of years ago). Now that my commute is five seconds and there are fewer cars out, I didn’t have much of an excuse anymore. I would describe my cardiovascular fitness when starting as “good for a desk worker” (I was already doing yoga and pilates and biking regularly) and I just wanted to be able to run a few miles without stopping.

Taxonomies in Hugo

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 22:06:47 -0400

It’s been quite a while since I’ve touched my site but stay-at-home makes for strange decision making. I’m doing some cleanup of the design, fixing broken links, and generally making it more efficient (minifying, dropping dependencies since I’m already deployed on a CDN, that sort of thing). One of the changes I just finished was fixing up my links to the post type, categories, and tags, which all make use of Hugo’s taxonomies.

Continuous Deployment

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 11:32:11 -0400

tl;dr: switched continuous deployment hosting providers due to laziness and stinginess

Gỏi cuốn and peanut sauce recipe

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 22:22:26 -0400

Gỏi cuốn are Vietnamese spring rolls; they’re easy to make, especially for group things. This is an appropriate-for-cheap-college students version of a recipe I learned from my mom.

I’m not giving any particular amounts because I never measure things.

Discover Deis

Wed, 04 May 2016 22:07:20 -0400

Discover Deis is a navigation and location finding app for Brandeis University that was started during the summer 2015 JBS on Voice, Mobile, and Web App Development by myself, Tianci Zhong, and Ziyu Qiu. It was continued with me, Ziyu, Limin Wang, Dewar Tan, and Jane Kwon during a Fall 2015 independent study with the five-member group continuing to work on it since then.

Arabic grammar review

Wed, 04 May 2016 19:29:15 -0400

I’ve been playing around with Sway, the newest entry in the Office line-up, to make a series of brief grammar reviews for Modern Standard Arabic. You can find them collected individually below. I’ll add more slowly as time goes on.

Migrating to Hugo

Wed, 04 May 2016 16:43:24 -0400

I’ve begun the processing of migrating my blog posts from WordPress over to Hugo, a static site generator. I just hand migrated the lengthiest posts (the image galleries I can do later when I figure out a good way to associate images with particular posts). Layout is all new, all improved!

Starting out with Discover Deis

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 12:00:00 -0400

For the past nine weeks, I’ve been a member of the Voice, Mobile, and Web Application Development Justice Brandeis Semester, a program that helped us learn exactly what it seems like we should. Now that it’s over and done with, I’d like to look back on exactly how we got our app to where it is and some steps in the future we can take, because it’d be nice to make this a much more official app and fill out the empty spots in our already extensive database.

Custom Sidebars in WordPress (again)

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I figure it would be a good idea to repost my previous entry on custom sidebars in WordPress, partly for fun, partly to remind myself. This should work for any WordPress website on custom hosting (which means not WordPress.com blogs, unfortunately, unless there’s some magical way of getting at the code the Internet has yet to discover). I will be assuming you’re working off one of the WordPress default templates or can modify as needed on your own.