A few weeks ago, I decided to step back from using Twitter so actively. There are certainly a lot of good things about Twitter - it’s entertaining and informative - but, from a mindset of Digital Minimalism, I could not honestly say that it was doing me more good than harm.

Despite this blog being initially set up to primarily talk about self-hosting, I’d actually been hosting it on AWS until very recently. This was due to caution - I know just enough about security to know that I know next-to-nothing about security, and so I didn’t want to expose any ports on my own network to the Internet. Instead, I set up an AWS CodePipeline to build the blog and deploy to S3 anytime I pushed a new change. Admittedly, this was a pretty cool project in itself that taught me a lot more about CDK and some AWS services; but it didn’t feel like true self-hosting, even though I wasn’t using anything like Medium or WordPress.

First blog post in a long time. This was caused by combination of four things (most of which I hope to address in more detail in following blog posts):

• My home network starting misbehaving and I was focused more on fixing that than blogging (the first rule of homelabbing - whatever you mess with with, your living partners need to be able to access the Internet, and to work the lights and heating!
• I finally took the plunge in moving this blog from fully AWS-hosted to self-hosted (EDIT: blog post here).
• I got Laser Eye Surgery and was recovering from that (probably won’t be blogging about that, not much more to say!).
• I started writing a post to articulate my confusions or uncertainties about web3, with the intention of understanding it better.

Update: I’m preserving the post below for posterity, but I had the obvious solution in the final sentence - I changed my setup to run Grafana from Docker and mount a folder from my external Hard Drive (I haven’t saved up for a NAS yet!), and now my dashboard definition is persistent across restarts/re-images.

The third in a series on Wordle.

My good friend George set himself a challenge a while back to read 52 books in a calendar year. He succeeded (as George is wont to do), and that achievement has always stuck in my mind as impressive¹. I don’t think I’d ever be able to equal it (especially not now, with Work-From-Home removing my most common reading time - the commute), but I did start tracking my reading as a matter of interest. To that end, I present my year-of-reading-in-review, with book-by-book recaps and the full list at the end:

If everything has worked as expected, comments should now be enabled on this blog via Disqus. Don’t make me regret that. Ensure that your comments pass through the Three Gates - they should be true, necessary, and kind. If you want to espouse homophobia, transphobia, racism, fascism, anti-vax, or anything similar, you are not welcome here. Black Lives Matter, Trans Rights Are Human Rights.

I don’t yet know if Disqus provides moderation - if it does, assume that every comment will be subject to approval. If it doesn’t, I reserve the right to remove commenting as soon as it becomes problematic, and then you’ll be the reason why we can’t have nice things.

This is a sequel to my previous post, where I laid out a Information Theoretical approach to algorithmically solving Wordle puzzles.

The other day, I saw the word game Wordle going around on my Twitter feed. The game prompts you to guess a 5-letter word in a Mastermind-like style - every letter in your guess is reported as being correct, as present (i.e. that letter occurs somewhere in the answer, but is misplaced), or as absent.

There’s an apocryphal story from the development of a game called Battle Chess. A Product Manager was well-known to always have to make a comment or propose a change on anything, no matter how minor - so, an engineer intentionally added an incongruous companion duck in a piece’s animation. The PM could say “looks good - but lose the duck”, and feel that they’d had a meaningful impact, when in fact the end result after removing the “sacrificial duck” was exactly as the engineer had originally intended.