The Shadow Over Singapore

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....

June 1, 2022 · 2 min · Mike Cartmell

Moving Away From Big Tech

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....

April 22, 2022 · 4 min · Mike Cartmell

Migrating Perl Projects to Kubernetes

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....

September 13, 2021 · 3 min · Mike Cartmell

Hosting WordPress on 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....

September 10, 2021 · 7 min · Mike Cartmell

Setting Up a Self-Hosted Docker Registry

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....

September 6, 2021 · 3 min · Mike Cartmell