Top_of_the_Stack

Tots Posts

Cloudflare_Died

2022-06-21 - Web Development - Administration

What unfortunate timing! I was about to writing up this post when I lost access to my VPS because Cloudflare went down. Here is the Cloudflare postmortem where they discuss what happened.

It looks like they where trying to "[roll] out a change to standardize [their] BGP" and, from my understanding [which I would take with about a cup of salt], moved the reject condition above "site-local terms". So the request would be rejected before being able to reach origin servers [as opposed to an edge or caching server].

I might look more into BGP because I don't know about it at all. One for the stack I suppose.

Finally_Creating_a_Homelab

2022-06-16 - Home Lab - Administration

I am currently in the process of setting up my home lab and am using my old computer as my new server. The plan is to make an environment where I can mess with all things networking and delve into self hosting [the more in my control, the less I can blame anyone else when everything explodes].

In addition to configuring and researching the new server [or old server depending on how you look at it], I've got some other projects brewing at the moment. I've been experimenting with creating a remote computing workspace that I can access from outside my network. I am also resurrecting my 3d printer that has been idle for about a year. I'll go into my setup and the modifications I've made to the stock Ender 3 Pro that I have.

Also here is something that I made today.

Welded Crab
Welded Crab

I don't want to give to much info away but long story short I had a class on welding today where I made this little crab. I've never welded before today and it was pretty cool. Defiantly a lot more to explore and learn on that front.

Hope that holds you over till Monday!

Picky_Pasta_Person_makes_Pesto_Ravioli

2022-06-09 - Cooking - Pasta

Ingredients and Equipment Needed

Dough


Pesto Sauce


Ravioli Filling


Recipe

Make the dough first beacuse it needs to sit for 30 minutes

  1. Mix flour and salt together
  2. Beat eggs and egg yolks and add to the flour
  3. Mix until fully incorporated then knead for about 10 minutes- should be firm but not too grainy
  4. Wrap in plastic wrap and let sit for 30 minutes

While dough sits start with the Pesto Sauce needed for the filling

  1. Combine all the pesto ingredients into blender/food processor and let'er rip [I used a blender and just make sure it doesn't purée the mixture]
  2. That's it, make sure it tastes good by making sure it doesn't need some extra salt

Making the Filling

  1. Mix your pesto, the ricotta, and the mozzarella together
  2. That's it! Cooking is easy-peazy

Back to the dough and putting everything together

  1. Use the pasta roller or rolling pin to flatten the dough into a sheet [add some flour to your rolling device so the dough doesn't get stuck or sticky]
  2. Cut out ravioli sized squares [whatever your heart says that size is]
  3. Put a dollop of your filling in the middle of one of your squares
  4. Very lightly wet the edges of the square with the dollop and another square [makes the edges sticky again]
  5. Lay the undolloped square on top the dolloped square and gently pinch the edges together
  6. Then use a fork to smoosh the edges more and give them a classic ravioli look
  7. Bring a pot of water to a boil and cook a few of the ravioli at a time for about 4 minutes [they can stick together if they touch while cooking which isn't too big of a deal but crowding is generally a bad idea from my xp]
  8. Then plate and add a tiny bit of butter and Parmesan.
  9. Eat the food

Log

I really dislike dried pasta. I feel like a lot of recipes say to cook pasta al dente but, if dried, you get a hard, chalky, stale center. I also think that making your own pasta dough is typically fast, easy, and tastes infinitely better.

Given this is my first Cooking post [my first anything other than Web Development post actually], I'll preface it with my experience with cooking [or the lack thereof]. In all honesty, I just recently started cooking regularly. In the past I would get inspired to cook something but get discouraged when it didn't turn out as good as I wanted [even if the liars in my life said it was good], and would go back to grabbing Taco Bell after work. Recently I decided that cooking should be approached like any other skill - starting at the basics and following guides until you gain the knowledge and confidence to experiment [and filled with feeling like you are terrible regardless of how much you progress]. So because I still am very much a beginner, I'll be following a lot of online recipes until I gain the confidence to refactor dishes for myself.

With that out of the way, I'll continue onto one of the meals I made this week.

I found a recipe for Easy Homemade Pesto Ravioli which used store bought pesto sauce and the link to the ravioli dough 404'd. So because I knew I wanted to make my own dough [given my rant at the start] I thought why not keep everything Homemade, including the pesto sauce.

So I found the recipe for ravioli dough and pesto sauce and put all three of these recipes together.

It turned out pretty tasty and I especially like having the light butter as the sauce topping as I always felt the whole point of ravioli was to have the flavor come from the stuffing and not the sauce on top.

I realize how stupid I am now for not taking pictures of the process so you can judge if you think it looks good but uhhh... yeah. I didn't take any pictures so I guess you just have to trust me that it was good.

Online!

2022-06-06 - Web Development - Administration

Hopefully you can see this because that means that I didn't mess anything up when updating the site! I'll quickly recap what I did over the last week and clarify what's in the pipeline for this upcoming week.

So I ended up destroying and remaking the Vultr VPS [Virtual Private Server if I didn't clarify that previously] so that I could have a fresh, clean environment to start messing around in. I decided to go with their smallest, and cheapest plan to start things off [I think it can handle the traffic that I expect to start "pouring" in].

Vultr Pricing
Vultr Cloud Pricing

I found this video that explained how to calculate how much needed bandwidth I needed to budget for. Again I don't think I need much [something tells me I'm the only one checking in on this website 100 times a day]. I stuck with a Debian distribution for no reason in particular other than it's what I used previously on other VPSs [if your unfamiliar with Linux and Linux distributions I'll make some intro to Linux guides in the future that'll explain all the common nerd jargon].

I grabbed the domain name from dynadot and changed the DNS records to have it point to the IP of the VPS. I'll write up a full guide for this in a bit [honestly it's pretty easy]. I then installed nGinx, changed the config files to point to the html/css files, and started the service [kinda skipped the nitty gritty but again, guide incoming].

I was able to visit the site at this point from a client device but still had to set up SSL [Secure Sockets Layer] so that the connection was encrypted. Apparently it was pretty uncommon in the past to have encrypted connections on personal websites but that was changed with the help of the EFF with let's encrypt which offers free, open certificates [pretty cool of them honestly]. To make things even easier they also provide a python script(?) called certbot which automates the process of obtaining one of these ssl certificates. After I ran it I got the cool green lock icon in the address bar and was feeling pretty cool myself! :)

Those were the major updates for this week. Next week I'll be looking into hosting a git server to upload my code [including anything that I create for this website ie. html/css/scripting stuff] and a git visualiser. Hosting a git server seems easy enough but finding the right visualiser might need a bit more research. Right now the most promising candidate is stagit which is a static git page generator. Hope that works out.

The stretch goal for this week is the possibility to host videos with [maybe?] a peertube instance. Not sure how much of a pain and/or the bandwidth limitations will throttle the experience too much but it sounds useful to post, even short, videos demonstrating processes explicitly [if a picture is 1000 words than what does that make a video].

That's the update for the week.

Next TODOS! [Can be updated throughout the week]

Bottom_of_the_Stack

2022-06-02 - Web Development - html/css

I'll start things off with the design goals of this very website and what I have done so far to get things going.

Unless things have changed drastically by the time you read this [which I doubt it has], it should be a fairly vanilla 1995 World Wide Web experience. There are a couple reasons I chose to go this route.

Aside from the glaring hurdle that is my complete lack of any formal or informal web development experience, I like keeping the UNIX philosophy in mind when working on my projects [although manipulated to mean exactly what I want it to mean at any given time]. For those unfamiliar, the basic principle is to design programs to do one thing and one thing well. I want this website to be a place where I throw my ideas into the void and can reference them later [and maybe share some of that knowledge to the few that find themselves here]. Although fun, interactive, dynamic features would be cool to look at, I think it, ultimately, restricts my ability to complete this goal effectively.

That isn't to say that I am completely against adding any scripting for the sake of learning or experimenting [this IS a hobby website after all], but I do want to be able to quickly document my progress without too much thought on aesthetic [aside from some font colors].

But let me get down to brass tacks, what have I done so far.

Well if I am being completely honest, we aren't even online yet. I bought a domain name from dynadot and have a Vultr VPS [hosting some other things at the moment], but haven't set anything else up. I'll look up some guides tomorrow [famous last words] to see how to get us up and running.

So that's what I haven't done. What I have done is started getting comfortable with HTML/CSS. I have written in other markup languages like Markdown and LaTeX so it wasn't too painful to pick up but getting used to syntax is something you can't really rush [maybe you can but I can't].

So, a few of the things I've learned so far:

  1. Basic HTML structure ie. Defining a page with "<!DOCTYPE html>" as well as <head>, <body>, and <html> tags.
  2. Other Basic HTML tags ie. <p>, <strong>, <em>, etc.
  3. How to link to a style sheet [a cascading one to be exact] with
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="$(LOCATION OF THE STYLE SHEET)" />
  4. Defining specific tags with id, ie. id="name_of_tag"
  5. Basic CSS syntax
  6. Referencing specific tags by id with #$(ID_NAME)

Next TODOS! [Can be updated throughout the week]