Jack Jackson's Blog

“The Liar”, Stephen Fry’s first novel follows a Wildean young man studying language at Cambridge University.

Just a quick note to record that, for the first time, I’m taking part Advent Of Code - a series of programming challenges that run every day from the 1st to the 25th of December.

It’s fairly uncontroversial that, for a good service-deployment pipeline, there should be: at least one pre-production stage automated tests running on that stage a promotion blocker if those tests fail The purpose of this testing is clear: it asserts ("v…

As I’ve discussed before, this blog is hosted on a k3s cluster which runs on 3 Raspberries Pi in a nifty little case.

I just added a process to my blog deployment pipeline to block the deployment of any blogs that contain the characters “TK”.

It’s a warm-ish Sunday evening in the East Bay.

I’ve said previously that I don’t do New Years’ Resolutions.

Observant readers of this blog, refreshing every day desperate for new content, will have noticed that the last blog post - dated 2022-12-31 - actually went live in the middle of January.

One of the first posts on this blog was a retrospective on my reading in 2021 - it seems only natural to do something similar this year.

I was surprised to find that there’s not much discussion of putting Kubernetes pods behind a VPN.

Thesis statement: Most communication is less urgent than you think.

A day or so ago, news broke that engineers at Twitter - newly-owned by Phony Stark - were being asked to “print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, so they could show it to Elon Musk himself”.

Since leaving Amazon ~4 months ago and dedicating more time to my own personal projects (and actually trying to ship things instead of getting distracted a few days in by the next shiny project!)

I’ve had several instability issues with my Kubernetes cluster recently, and so I wanted to install some monitoring to notify me of incipient issues.

Another quote from the experiences of Zakalwe, the career mercenary for the Culture.

I use Cloudflare Tunnels to expose services (like this blog!)

Another Iain M.

Another snippet of literature (following this one) that I think about regularly - this time, from Excession by the late great Iain M.

Less a blog post, and more “something I want to have a persistent addressable record of”.

Way back in this post, I talked about enabling Analytics Tracking on this blog.

I’ve written before about setting up my ssh config so that I’ll automatically join an existing screen session when ssh-ing to certain hosts, by setting RemoteCommand screen -D -RR -p + However, this has a couple of issues: It will always create a new wind…

EDIT 2024-04-16: turns out that there’s a built-in, fc, which does basically the same thing, though it edits the command that was just entered (which is typically what you want when you encounter an error or want to do “the next thing”, anyway).

I’ve been using tags - or taxonomies, as Hugo more generally calls them - to organize posts in this blog for a while, but haven’t imposed much structure on them.

Part of the self-hosted setup that supports this blog (along with all my other homelab projects) is a Docker Registry to hold the images built and used in the CI/CD pipeline.

[Content Warning - politics, abortion, human rights] Last Friday, SCOTUS officially handed down a previously-leaked decision overturning Roe vs.

I want to start this article by clarifying that I want web31, as commonly proposed, to succeed.

Last Friday was my last working day for the foreseeable future.

I just added a page-source link to my blog setup.

A few days ago, I hit a 100-day streak of meditating using the Ten Percent Happier app.

screen (Wikipedia) is a Unix tool that starts a persistent session on a remote machine, allowing you to detach from that session while keeping any running processes alive.

A few weeks ago, I decided to step back from using Twitter so actively.

Despite this blog being initially set up to primarily talk about self-hosting, I’d actually been hosting it on AWS until very recently.

First blog post in a long time.

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!)

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.

If everything has worked as expected, comments should now be enabled on this blog via Disqus.

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.

There’s an apocryphal story from the development of a game called Battle Chess.

I fully intend to write a full blog-post as a follow-up to my previous post at some point, detailing some of the quirks of this setup and issues that I ran into - but I just got a timely reminder of the importance of checking backups, and wanted to pass it

In true navel-gazey meta style, the first post on this blog is a description of how I set up the blog.