blog – Tiffena Kou

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All (108)

aging (3)

AI (21)

annual review (4)

art (4)

birding (14)

blogging (10)

book review (19)

business (7)

Cloudflare (4)

community (4)

database (6)

devops (8)

evaluation (9)

free-tier (9)

health (4)

information retrieval (6)

innovation (3)

Japan (26)

Japanese language (4)

knowledge management (4)

leadership (3)

learning (10)

Linux (3)

LLM (18)

machine learning (9)

NLP (5)

Oracle Cloud (11)

personal development (12)

product design (6)

Product Management (3)

psychology (7)

recommendation system (2)

retail (4)

role model (7)

software development (18)

travel (12)

user experience (6)

Learning to See with Masako Shirasu 白洲正子

All That Breathes: Turning Quiet Observation into Conservation Actions

Product Management

From the Salish Sea to the Edge: How AI and Micro-Telemetry Are Mapping Washington’s Migratory Corridors

Deep Reading in a Distracted World: Libraries, Bookstores & 7 Books That Changed Me

personal development

The NHK Vault: A Window into Japan’s Culture, Art, and Society

Neon Lights and Feathered Flights: A Birder’s Guide to Macau SAR

Build a Remote Edge AI Bioacoustics Monitor (Part 2: Hardware, Field Case Studies & DIY Build)

machine learning

Build a Remote Edge AI Bioacoustics Monitor (Part 1: The Software Ecosystem)

machine learning

The Architecture of Trust: When Dynamic Pricing Becomes Surveillance

Product Management

How To Choose a Free Newsletter Platform To Drive Engagement for Small Non-Profits

How To Leverage Free Tier Tools for Data-Driven NPO Member Research

user experience

How My Favorite Films and Directors Evolve Over The Years

The Story Behind O’Reilly’s Animal-covered Books: Learning, Branding & Conservation

software development

Designing a Lean, Edge‑Native NL2SQL Pipeline: Architecture Choices

software development

Talk to your eBird Data - Build an AI‑Powered eBird Explorer with NL2SQL on Cloudflare Workers

software development

How To Sharpen your Bird Identification Skills: A Guide for Beginners in the Pacific Northwest

Winter Birding in the Skagit Valley - A Magnificient Natural Spectacle

2026-3-6: Birding Field Trip in Port Susan Bay

How to start birding in Washington State’s Puget Sound Area

2026-2-15: Birding Field Trip in Blaine & Semiahmoo

Perform embedding similarity search with Free-Tier Oracle Autonomous Database 26ai

information retrieval

End-to-end Observability on OCI Free-Tier for llama-server Metrics

2026-1-17: Swanrise in Barney Lake - An Unforgettable Dawn with Trumpeter Swans

The Art of Staying Grounded: Building Mental Stability in a World of Noise

2025 in recap - my most favorite content

Building Modern Apps for Free in 2026 with Always-Free Cloud Tiers

software development

New Year, new blogging platform - From Hugo to Quarto

My foray into the rich natural world of birding

Build a birding trip planner using Cloudflare Pages Functions & eBird/ GBIF APIs

software development

Create a Cloudflare Tunnel to serve secure, outbound connection from private endpoints

Benchmarking CPU-only LLM Inference with Optimization: `llama-server` flags

Benchmarking CPU-only LLM Inference with Optimization: Caching and Batching

Benchmarking CPU-only LLM Inference: Prompt Variation

Benchmark local LLM inference engines in Oracle Ampere: Ollama, Docker Model Runner & llama.cpp

Serving Plamo-2-Translate LLM for Japanese-English Translation on Oracle Ampere VM

Japanese language

Convert and quantize LLM models with Ampere optimized llama.cpp container

Create portable and reproducible containers with Docker Compose

How to setup auto renewal of SSL certificates with Certbot in Oracle Linux

Enhancing Hugo code blocks with Copy Button and Dynamic Titles

How to use custom fonts in a Hugo blog

How to build a theme‑agnostic site search overlay in Hugo

software development

Organize a Hugo blog with Series taxonomy

How to use Oracle Cloud Free-Tier’s Storage more effectively

How to run llama.cpp on Arm-based Ampere with Oracle Linux

Serve and inference with local LLMs via Ollama & Docker Model Runner in Oracle Ampere

software development

Running LLMs locally on Ampere A1 Linux VM: Comparing options

Learn Japanese Language with modern Japanese NLP tools and LLMs

Japanese language

Automating image deployment workflow with GitLab CI/CD

Beyond Docker Hub: free private container registry options

Run Django and ASP.NET apps together in Oracle Compute VM with Docker

software development

Deploy an ASP.NET Core app to Oracle Ampere Linux VM using Docker

software development

My treasure box from Japan, #3: People

personal development

My treasure box from Japan, #2: Places

My treasure box from Japan, #1: Art

Arimoto Yoko on honing one’s own taste for good living

My treasure box from Japan

personal development

Performance benchmarking of embedding similarity search: ChromaDB vs. PostgreSQL pgvector

machine learning

information retrieval

Deploy Django app to Linux VM with Nginx and Gunicorn in Oracle Cloud

software development

Setup an Ampere A1-based VM in Oracle Cloud Free Tier

How to blog from your phone using Hugo, Github and Obsidian

Deploy Hugo blog automatically to Firebase hosting with Github Actions

Perform multimodal and spatial search using PostgreSQL as a vector db

machine learning

software development

information retrieval

Setting up PostgreSQL for vector search in Windows Linux Subsystem

software development

Somatic healing: mind-body connection for healthy living

How to enable comments in a Hugo blog

How to streamline theme switching in Hugo

Japanese NLP: Challenges, Latest Developments in LLMs, and Business Opportunities

machine learning

Japanese language

software development

Evaluate threshold and density-based clustering algorithms with parameter tuning

software development

machine learning

Perform multimodal image search and visualization using CLIP, ChromaDB, UMAP and Bokeh

machine learning

software development

information retrieval

Generate meaningful insights from Japanese content with Topic Modeling using BERTopic

machine learning

Japanese language

software development

information retrieval

The joy of reading, as echoed by the book Hidden Library

Why we created FindMyRyokan, a ryokan recommender

user experience

recommendation system

How I become a more effective learner with adaptive learning

personal development

Build a second brain with Obsidian as my Knowledge Management System

knowledge management

personal development

2024 in recap - my most favorite content

My learning journey on Coursera and MOOC platforms

Creating Value, Not Just Products - Lessons from Keyence

Debunking the creative process : how non-creatives can harness creativity with routines, linking and practice

personal development

Too much creativity, or too little humanity in a GenAI priest

Nakano Yoshihisa on always living in the present moment

Innovations by Japanese booksellers to bring people back to reading and gathering

user experience

Out with negative content, in with nutrients for our mind

Wakamiya Masako, world’s oldest iOS programmer, on lifelong learning and aging wisely

Minimalist living in Tokyo opens up a big world

Regain your innate calmness with renowned Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh

2023 Books Recap

Recalibrate our brain with mindfulness

personal development

Matsuura Yataro on training oneself for thoughtful and tasteful living

Tsutaya - transforming physical bookstores into concierges for idea exchange and lifestyle exploration

user experience

Recommender Systems - Then and Now

recommendation system

information retrieval

machine learning

Kihon - my fundamentals and principles in life

personal development

Traveling as a PM dojo

Product Management

7-11 Japan’s hypothesis-driven innovations for product excellency

user experience

The beauty of practicing Just Enough Design in our daily lives

3 things a new hotel brand teaches us about product planning

user experience

3 time-tested leadership lessons passed down by Japanese temple carpenters 1000 years ago

2022 in recap - my most favorite books

What can Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning in inevitable sufferings teach us today?

‘The Drowned and the Saved’ - an introspection of humanity’s grey zone

How to upgrade your Kindle while keeping your existing notes, bookmarks and reading progress

How to produce an interactive visualization using Matplotlib in Python

software development

Danshari - a radical way to declutter before clutter even happens

personal development

Integrate Firebase CLI, Hugo & VS Code for a seamless development environment in Windows Linux Subsystem

software development

Why do we procrastinate or aim for unachievable perfection, and how to fix it?

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 3 : Metrics

personal development

knowledge management

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 2 : Build the app

personal development

knowledge management

Improve your reading ROI by building your own knowledge tracking system - Part 1 : Learn better

personal development

knowledge management

Setup your own blog in under 1 hour with Hugo and Firebase, all for free!