Batista Harahap

Hi 馃憢

I’m Tista, I write about tech, music and life.

Getting Serious With LLM Assistance

Great to be back writing the blog. I have just recently (yesterday) updated the blog with a new design template. To my surprise, the switch was effortless thanks to Claude Code. Found a few templating stuffs I wanted to make changes for and Claude did this impeccably. In actual fact, Claude Code has been a main stayer in my day-to-day coding work. I took out a 15 inch portable monitor just for it and positioned it below the primary monitor. The second monitor serves as the Claude Code terminal. This helped a lot, the focus now is bounded to the second monitor in comparison with multi tasking with the primary monitor only. The primary monitor now becomes a monitoring monitor of Claude Code changes. ...

August 18, 2025 路 Batista Harahap

SleekChat: Research to Production in 1 Week

This is a writing about getting things done more than it is a showcase of a new business and the tech empowering it. Within this, an attempt to explain the why will also be written. But before all that, I鈥檓 going to try to look cool first so get ready for some cringe moments. Vibe Coding Hell yeah! But not in a way most will vibe with. Being a backend guy, giving up control is not my nature although the web frontend is vibed. As with any experiments, it started with an idea then proof of concept, hit walls then pushed through. Here are the core tech stack to build SleekChat: ...

April 25, 2025 路 Batista Harahap

Meet Broto: An AI Assistant For Kids To Learn

It鈥檚 that time again when I learned about something that triggers my curiousity and make it useful. This time that thing answers you back and that鈥檚 an LLM or a Large Language Model. I was late to the AI hype because I haven鈥檛 found a specific use case that is interesting for me. Now I have, it鈥檚 called Broto. How It All Started At work, we have a need to deploy an LLM to automate some of the stuffs we鈥檙e cooking with. That was months ago and ended up with a no go because it鈥檚 too easy to fool the LLM. Forgot about it and just recently started working on it again. To my surprise, it worked now, fool proof. ...

May 19, 2024 路 Batista Harahap

Building an API in 2023

This blog post is actually taken from my pet project DNSDig鈥檚 README.md file. I鈥檓 putting it here because I like what I wrote about it. DNS Dig API A project to learn about DNS in Python while investigating what it鈥檚 like to build an API in 2023 with FastAPI, Pydantic and DNSPython. Authentication and authorization is handled by Kinde. Getting Started Python 3.11 is required to run this project. If you don鈥檛 have it installed, you can use pyenv. ...

October 15, 2023 路 Batista Harahap

Yet Another Unraid Build

Why right? Short answer, I had 2 server builds and 1 of them smoked in the literal sense. Smoke was coming from the CPU socket and I had to put the air purifier in max to get rid of the awful smell. It was supposed to be a ProxMox build to host all of my VMs in my home lab. What an epic fail! Smoked Build It was my first time ever building PCs that went horribly wrong. But the good news is I can salvage most everything from the build except for the PSU, CPU, Motherboard and GPU. I remember I had a slip of the fingers when I was installing the GPU into the motherboard but I was sure I didn鈥檛 knocked any components in the GPU. To be safe, I wrote off that old Quadro GPU. ...

September 19, 2023 路 Batista Harahap

High Refresh Rate HiDPI For 1440P Screens On Apple Silicon Macs

Boy this was a rabbit hole necessary for my eyes and their well being. I have 2 monitors and both of them are 1440p Ultrawide and 1440p Super Ultrawide. Out of the box, Apple Silicon Macs doesn鈥檛 rate these monitors as HiDPI, external monitors are rated as HiDPI if it鈥檚 at least a factor of 2x. What is the cheapest and straightforward solution to make 1440p monitors as HiDPI? This post answers that question. ...

June 18, 2022 路 Batista Harahap

Hackintosh: Virtualized VS Bare Metal

It鈥檚 been a few days since my last blog post about a virtualized hackintosh, I鈥檝e got some time to tinker and form opinions and gather facts about it. It鈥檚 not bad at all but it comes with a compromise, let me try to follow up on what I鈥檝e written before. Why Virtualize At All? Why not? But a more convincing argument is because I have a gaming PC with a 16 core/32 thread CPU lying around. It鈥檚 rather fiddly to dual boot between macOS and Windows because both my GPUs (Radeon RX 570 and RTX 3080 Ti) are connected to my monitors and on Windows this is not ideal. The best possible experience is to use an HDMI or DP switch to connect the GPUs to my monitors, I don鈥檛 have such a device and I鈥檓 pretty sure I don鈥檛 want to explore the quirks that comes with using it. ...

January 31, 2022 路 Batista Harahap

Virtualized Hackintosh and Gaming PC

I have installed hackintoshes since the very beginning on a Core2Duo laptop. Back then the term was OSX86 and the only way to get the OS is through torrent downloads. Since then I鈥檝e built hackintoshes especially when Intel Macbook Pros are so pro. I can鈥檛 believe all these years I never tried to do the virtualization route. The past few years, my hackintoshes were always a dedicated PC separate from my gaming PC because Nvidia GPUs have no hope in hackintoshes, now it changes. ...

January 27, 2022 路 Batista Harahap

Noiseless PC Audio

The first experience I had listening high fidelity music involved a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy and a 5.1 Creative speaker setup, this was back in 2003. At the time, I just plug analog outputs to the appropriate speakers, there was no noise or distortion distinguishable from the speakers. It鈥檚 a different story today, analog outputs are noisy and your speakers will bleed the electrical noise into sonic waves. A while ago I wrote about Airplay for listening but after a while I wasn鈥檛 enjoying the sync delay every time I play any video file. This also doesn鈥檛 work with Windows PC so I wanted something that works using a universal standard even though if I have to buy some more toys to do any signal conversion as long as it stays digital all the way to the DAC. ...

July 29, 2021 路 Batista Harahap

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - What I Found So Far

Since the game launched in August 2020, this has been the game I spent time the most with over than 463 hours logged so far. Becoming a pilot was what I wanted to be before I knew how to code, learning to fly is nothing like coding, bugs are fatal. This write up sums up what I鈥檝e found about the game so far I wish I knew before playing the game. ...

March 11, 2021 路 Batista Harahap