I try once more to keep up the supposedly daily journal
calendar of march with a big june superimposed to indicating the jump since the date of most recent post

Wow that was a long break…

It’s been such a long break that I don’t even remember my own stylistic rules. Should I be capitalising? Do I use contractions?

Oh wait. It doesn’t matter that much anyway, I hardly edit on this blog.

Moving forward

while it is tempting to type all lowercase and ignore any kind of stylistic rules, I have realised that writing for this blog will make up the most of my touch typing practice.

And so, here we go.

(Tech) Things I plan to do and write about

  • Migrate my mailserver from Linode to Google Cloud Platform
  • Set up my own DNS server
  • Learn Kubernetes
    • Deploy my mailserver, Nextcloud instance and other essential servers using K8s
  • Improve this blog
  • Make my server at home accessible privately from the internet

    a wild paradox has appeared!

Linode ➡ GCP

I have been renting a virtual private server from Linode for more than a year now, and I love it. The plain simplicity of a virtual machine with minimal abstractions; a responsive user interface for configuring the server and auxillaries like the firewall and the DNS.

On the other hand, I dislike Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services: the other cloud service providers I have used. I have found the abstractions extremely annoying and the user interface is just too slow.

BUT, they do have free tiers and that seems a more sustainable option for my budget. Hence the possible switch, but…

Resolve my own Domain Names

I do not want to be locked to any vendor’s ecosystem. But having multiple entries in your domain’s name server makes it not so-easy: GitHub verification, email keys, subdomains!

Should be easy enough to set up my own DNS…right?

So far I have started reading an introduction to DNS on Opensource.com. And will read part two on building my own DNS soon after.

The articles use bind, Berkely Internet Name Domain, as the server software. But I am considering [unbound](https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/) based on its being modern. Guess we’ll find out eventually!

K8s for deployments

I have been wanting to learn K8s for way too long. I currently use [docker compose](https://docs.docker.com/compose/) for my deployments. But having all my containers dev, experiment and production off the same Docker daemon sounds like a disaster waiting to happen!

I did not really manage to get around to learning K8s fully, but I ought to learn soon. Should make my migrations easier!

The blog

Well I have not really got anything big in mind yet. But it is pretty plain. And I realise I do not really want links to third party websites to be opened in the same tab. I would prefer setting target="_blank".

But I do not want to break away from using markdown! Maybe the new Navigation API will help?

The Navigation API that Jake Archibald (twitter.com/jaffathecake) has been speaking of a lot recently.

Speaking of, I have been watching a lot of HTTP203, the podcast/talk show hosted by Jake Archibald. They have a lot of interesting topics.

Here’s another thing to improve, the embed is left aligned. I want it centered, but I have no idea how.

But I did manage to fix the timezone and enable livereloads. Well they are both improvements to the development setup, but improvements nonetheless.

Internet-accessible home network???

🤫 a secret project to be revealed later

aka I don’t want to accidentally compromise my home network’s security by sleepily writing a blog post