posts

overview note - this is a WIP while i find time to write this down notes on installing mastodon in a self-hosted manner where the front end is largely proxied by cloudflare’s tunneld services and object storage is handled on an S3 server someplace in the cloud. pre-requisites you’re gonna need the following a domain with the ability to control your DNS if you want to use the cloudflare biz, you’re going to need to have the DNS and the account elements setup on cloudflare in advance of this because, well, cloudflare’s going to be the front end of things....

2034: a novel of the next world war – (ackerman, stavridis) the audible version of this got me across the better part of south dakota. i can only listen to fiction via audiobook and this did the trick. it’s a solid ride through the coarse concepts of potential american decline in military dominance. or put less jingoistically, an interesting conception of what the rise of china and india means in a multipolar world order....

writing to learn (william zinnser) this is not really what i was expecting it to be and it was surprisingly engaging. broadly, this is an argument for using writing as a mechanism for learning vs. learning to the test or via standard educational practices. he highlights institutions that have incorporated writing deeply into their programs. i have a natural bias towards organizations that have a culture of writing and this is perhaps the one thing that’s intrigued me about amazon work culture from what i’ve heard from friends....

somehow i got pointed at this thing and, like a fool, i couldn’t look away … prompt: He was successful, attractive and charming but he’d learnt that people of that age always had secrets. … and go! … this was most certainly the case for chaz. chaz was brought up in the boomer generation and while he’d been fortunate enough to accumulate a small amount of personal wealth, there were clearly some “unaccounted for” expenditures....

master of the revels (nicole galland) i’m glad i got this on kindle, because i slogged through this for far too long. this is an amusing sequel to the rise and fall of D.O.D.O. which was done with neal stephenson as the co-author. this builds on the whole time travel via witchcraft thing which is an amusing trope that i had fun reading. superficially, the premise is kind of neat; a rogue witch who’s engaged in the government’s time travel project decides that she’s going to make witchcraft supreme and stunt the emergence of “technology”....