Our AI-Assisted Future We are entering a world where we can create any kind of content we can dream of, just by asking an AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make it for us. This isn’t some distant future either - more like within the next 12 months. AI-generated text is basically here already, and it’s practically indistinguishable from human writing. The main limitation is it can only generate small amounts of text at a time, but that’s just a matter of scaling it up....
I have been having the most troubling dreams lately. I have my doubts as to whether I should share them with you here, as merely recalling their details causes me to question my sanity. But I must tell someone, and you are the only one who will listen. I dream that I am in Singapore, though it is not the Singapore of today. The geometry is wrong in a way that I can see with extreme vividness in my dreams yet cannot describe in adequate terms when awake....
Introduction I’ve been trying to reduce my reliance on Big Tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.) for some time now. There’s many reasons, but I can summarise it like this: I don’t think they make a positive impact on the world. Part of it is about privacy. Most big tech companies rely on advertising, and advertising means tracking you so they can target you with ‘better’ ads and make more money....
This is the seventh post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects. I mentioned that one of the goals of this project was to revive some of my older projects that tend to get neglected and stop working. So, I went through my GitHub and found an old Perl project that would be perfect to host again. Read on for my experience with migrating Perl projects to Kubernetes....
This is the sixth post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects. In this post I’ll describe my experience of hosting WordPress on Kubernetes for my personal sites. WordPress is a popular free and open-source content management system. It’s often used for blogs and e-commerce sites for its ease of use and vast plugin library. I moved to it myself for my personal blog some time ago because it takes care of all the backend parts that power the site – so I can focus on writing content....
In my earlier post I recommended including a DigitalOcean Container Registry subscription when setting up a budget Kubernetes cluster, because it’s convenient and avoids circular dependency issues. I would still recommend that option if the Kubernetes cluster is your only internet-facing cloud host. However, I quickly outgrew the 5-repository limit of the basic plan, so I took another look at setting up a self-hosted Docker registry. As it turns out, it’s not as difficult as I thought....
This is the fourth post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects. In the previous post I set up public HTTP and HTTPS access to my sites running on Kubernetes using the NGINX Ingress Controller. However, I can do better. I’ve now decided to remove HTTP access completely and use HTTPS only. It’s 2021 – who needs plain HTTP now anyway? HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, adding a layer of encryption to protect user’s data and privacy....
This is the third post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects where I look at setting up DigitalOcean Kubernetes without a load balancer. Why You Need a Load Balancer DigitalOcean Load Balancers are a convenient managed service for distributing traffic between backend servers, and it integrates natively with their Kubernetes service. They offer a quick way to expose services to the public internet without having to use NodePort....
This is the second post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects. In this post, I attempt to create a budget Kubernetes hosting setup on DigitalOcean. The goal is to provide everything I need to host my blogs and side-projects for under $50 USD. Let’s go! First Things First: Creating the Kubernetes Cluster The core part of this setup will be a managed Kubernetes cluster. I decided to use Kubernetes for its scalability and ease of deployment....
Background My personal web projects gone through various stages of web hosting. Starting with a fully hosted CompuServe page to running it on my dad’s ADSL connection. Since then I’ve been moving it back and forth between a little home server underneath my TV to a virtual machine on DigitalOcean. That’s been working well for a while, but recently I’ve been eager to try out a more modern web hosting platform for my personal projects....