Recent adventures series, extremely belated part 3. I've been extremely busy and very low motivation to do other things due to school, so I haven't worked on any of my major projects really. I have done something in the last several months though.

ha!

I've experienced the occasional mystery issue with nginx as a reverse proxy, but always just sort of brushed them off. In about february of this year, i figured i might just switch to a real dedicated reverse proxy software like haproxy, and i put it on my to do list. there it remained until this week, when i finally put in the work to do it. the configurations are much cleaner and everything still works like it used to. i'm still using nginx to serve this webpage as well as to run git.periwinkle.sh but now all of the proxying is done by haproxy. i'm a much bigger fan of haproxy configuration (especially maps!) than i am of anything in nginx. please email or matrix me if you find anything that appears to be broken, as obviously this is still very new.

un-screwing myself

a while ago I got a multi bit screwdriver set as a gift. it was nothing special but it was pretty nice to have, since i didn't have anything else like that. somehow, within the next year or so, i actually lost the screwdriver handle part of it. i have no idea how this happened. anyway, i still had most of the bits as well as the extension thingy, so i recently finally got around to 3d printing a new handle for the screwdriver so that i can actually use it again. it's very nice to have it not just taking up space while being completely useless anymore. the model is pretty simple except for the knurled surface, which causes fusion 360 to lag for about 6 minutes with any minute modification.

the new and improved screwdriver

elevated

sometime since the last blog post, i finally got a multi-monitor arm so that i can move my monitors around as i please. this is really convenient for when i want to use my laptop and desktop at the same time, as i can now just raise one monitor above the height of the laptop so everything is visible... or so i thought. turned out that by default, the monitor arm was about 3/4 of an inch too short for this to work, so either part of the monitor or part of the laptop would still be covered. i glued together some pieces of plywood and cut them out in the shape of the foot of the monitor arm with a jigsaw and now everything is all good, and i can use the most overkill possible setup.

the block of plywood

2 computers, 3 keyboards, 2 mice

ꙮ <- pretend this is the nucleus of an atom

since i got this website, i have really wanted to have an @periwinkle.sh email address. however, you may be aware that it's basically impossible to host your own email server and actually get your email delivered to major providers. as much as i wish i did not have to do this, big tech wins this one. i created a proton mail account and paid them money (ugh). after some tedious dns verification setup, i now have @periwinkle.sh email addresses, through protonmail. i'm using the proton mail bridge to use aerc on my computers, which is a very comfortable setup. i've also set up my school emails to forward to this proton account, as well as created a separate address for signing up for accounts. proton's really nice filtering setup (a whole scripting language!) allows me to filter these emails (especially the school ones, which are often inconsistently addressed) into specific folders, which is really nice. overall, the purchase was worth it, even though i will have to purchase it again next year.