Get the most out of your software
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Los Angeles Tennis Court Availability API
Do you live in Los Angeles and book tennis courts through laparks.org? You may have noticed the interface is clunky; pages are slow to load, and you need to load a separate page for each location and date. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a single view of all current availability? In comes the Tennis…
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Get Started With Google Cloud Free Tier
Unlike AWS, Google Cloud offers free forever compute, meaning you can run websites, mail servers, and custom applications with high uptime, low network latency, and a static IP address for free, indefinitely. Here are the free usage limits and details: Tools Steps Select A Region My goal is to have low latency to the entire…
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Are LLMs Like ChatGPT Passing The Turing Test?
In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT 3, the impacts of which are still reorganizing our economy and society. Large Language Models (LLMs) are now competing with highly skilled work; they have been used to file lawsuits, diagnose medical issues, and give better answers than Google to search queries. Google has issued a ‘Code Red‘, acknowledging…
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Configure A Desktop To Run As A Server
If you are interested in running a compute project for the absolute cheapest price possible, you may decide to use old desktop computers and configure them to run as servers on premises. Right now you can get renewed HP Elite 800 G1 SFF Business Desktops on Amazon for ~$115 with some decent specs: And while…
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Log Everything About HTTP Requests With Varnish
Having incredibly configurable, robust, scalable, and efficient logging is just one reason to put Varnish at the outer most layer of your infrastructure. Commonly to Varnish is used just for logging, even when no caching is being done. Varnishncsa is a separate process than Varnish, with a shared memory buffer, allowing you to control multiple…
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A Tour Of Infrastructure Dashboards
Observability, monitoring, and alerting are essential ingredients when it comes to ensuring that you are able to know when something is wrong, fix it right away, and prevent it from occurring again. For monitoring infrastructure I’m using Grafana Stack, including the following open source, free tools: Here is a look at some of the most…
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Create A Business Email for Free
Once you purchased your own domain, you may want to create some email addresses on it. Creating email addresses on your own domain is a premium feature of most email providers; here is some of the pricing we see. You can run and email server yourself for free, and have email addresses for several separate…
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Generate Your Own TLS Certificate
Whether you are putting up a new website, running your own SMTP server, or transferring files via FTPS, encrypting with TLS for public connections is no longer considered optional. Generating a TLS certificate requires input from a certificate authority, which, until late 2015, costed money to do. Since then, free TLS certificates have been available…
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Get Started With AWS Free Tier
AWS Free Tier is legendary for being an option for getting a VM running on the open internet for pennies each month. This can be used for running websites, mail servers, and other low CPU tasks. This article runs through the AWS free tier, specifically for linux. Choosing an Instance Type Here is a break…
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Test VCL Using Varnishtest
Varnish developers know varnishtest, it’s yet another executable that ships with Varnish. When compiling Varnish and VMODs, there is typically a set of varnishtests you can run to ensure that everything is working correctly. And without a doubt it is useful to be able to validate that 1 + 1 = 2, as this allows…
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