Finally Replaced the Router
After years of blaming my internet plan, I finally swapped out the ancient rental router for a mesh setup and realized how much low-grade annoyance I'd just been living with.
The Boring December Server Cleanup I Do Every Year
My annual December ritual of checking domains, testing backups for real, and killing off forgotten VPS instances before the year ends.
Blocking the Bots Without Blocking Google
My nginx logs were full of GPTBot and ClaudeBot hammering old gallery posts, so I finally set up proper server-side blocking and rate limiting instead of trusting robots.txt.
Prepping the AoC Rig Again
Getting my Advent of Code setup sorted before December hits: a Python env with uv, a boring folder template, and a session-cookie mistake I'm not repeating.
Downdetector Was Down Too
A week after Cloudflare took a chunk of the internet down with it, some late thoughts on why the funniest detail was Downdetector going down too.
The Morning Cloudflare Broke My Internet
A Cloudflare outage knocked out half my usual tabs this morning, from X to ChatGPT to Spotify, and even Downdetector went down trying to report it.
The New ChatGPT Personality Dial Is Basically an Apology
OpenAI shipped GPT-5.1 this week with knobs for warmth and personality, which reads less like a new feature and more like a quiet admission about GPT-5's tone problem.
Watching Bitcoin Slide Under $100k and Nobody Seems to Care
Bitcoin slid under $100k this week after touching $126k in October, right as AI-bubble jitters were spreading through Nvidia and Palantir. A few notes on watching it happen quietly.
Ten Days Later: What I Actually Changed After the AWS Outage
A personal, low-effort fix for the thing that annoyed me most about the October 20 AWS outage: my own tiny status page went down right along with everything it was supposed to be watching.
Amazon's Layoffs and the Word "Efficiency"
Amazon cut roughly 14,000 corporate jobs and called it "AI-driven efficiency" - a look at what that phrase is actually doing, plus a friend's story from inside it.
The Three-Line Cron Job That Should Have Existed Years Ago
I finally set up automated offsite backups for this blog after fourteen years of winging it, and the whole thing took about twenty minutes once I stopped overthinking it.
What Yesterday's AWS Outage Made Me Go Check On My Own Site
Yesterday's big AWS outage took out half the apps on my phone, so I spent the afternoon checking whether my own tiny site had the same dumb single points of failure.