The issue

When running an Arch cloud image on Digital Ocean, DNS lookups frequently fail or take an unreasonably long time to resolve.

Look at this insanely long query time:

λ resolvectl query archlinux.org
archlinux.org: 95.217.163.246                  -- link: eth0
               2a01:4f9:c010:6b1f::1           -- link: eth0

-- Information acquired via protocol DNS in 13.3339s.
-- Data is authenticated: no; Data was acquired via local or encrypted transport: yes
-- Data from: network

And this query just fails:

Preface

Imagine you attain self-awareness.

You are not your thoughts. You are not your feelings. You can consciously perceive yourself in your surroundings and within yourself.

There is the you that is the personal narrative—objective facts, subjective details, social roles, gender roles.

There is the you that is the inner monologue—actively assessing, questioning, judging, reasoning, and rationalizing any given moment, situation or behavior.

There is the you that is the observational self—hearing your inner voice, seeing in your mind’s eye, perceiving emotions within their situational context, maintaining mental flexibility, committing to value congruent action.

Hello!

A significant chunk of this month and the last were spent being sick. It took a lot out of me.

AUR PKGBUILD linting

All the PKGBUILDs that I maintain and co-maintain on the AUR were linted this month. Bracing variables, using sha256sum, adding .gitignore files, and updating maintainer information, were among the things I did.

Media Library Space Savings

Videos

I came across the SVT-AV1 encoder earlier this month. It encodes AV1 fast and scales across logical processors.

Hey!

This month was basically a blur, but I got a lot of things done.

Website

The projects page used to be just a plaintext list. It is now fleshed out into cards with descriptions, along with website, repo, and mirror links. This was quite fun to do. I wrote little zsh functions to create git remotes, push to all remotes, and to print the links subsection for the projects’ READMEs.

Hello!

This month went by relatively fast! Plenty of things happened, both planned and unexpected.

Emails

I had my domain set up for emails earlier this year. I’ve slowly been replacing my primary email (unfortunately Gmail) across services with service specific emails. These service specific emails are going to help me find out which services are selling my information to spammers and cold-emailers, and where spammers tend to scrape my contact information from.

Hey!

This month has been an absolute shitshow of negative emotions and helplessness.

LAN Goodies

Up until earlier this month, I had been using localhost:<port> to access services on my desktop. While touching up my unbound + stubby configuration, I realized I could finally set up a domain to access local services and test servers.

Khazad-dûm

Moria is my favorite place in ALL of Tolkien’s works! I absolutely love the Dwarves, their lore, and Dwarven architecture. It should come as no surprise, then, that I named my local domain khazad.dum. Navigating to it in the browser yields a list of local services which are reverse proxies to individual subdomains. There is Jackett, FlareSolverr, Syncthing, and :8080, to name a few.

I finally got around to creating this blog! It took me longer than I thought it would, even considering the parenting, house-spousing, depression, and curve balls in life.

Landing page

The landing page for the website was ready around the beginning of July. The pixel art was initially actual images enlarged with image-rendering: pixelated and image-rendering: crisp-edges, which meant the HTML was smaller and cleaner, however, the sword hilt and tip had alignment issues with the navbar blade. My CSS-fu was too weak to fix it. Toward the end of the month I re-created the images with CSS Flex and one div per pixel. It made the HTML way longer, but there are no alignment issues, and I like it much better this way.