2023 has been my year of Rust. I've gotten 50% of the way on my fantasy assembly language Phantasm, the Rust implementation of Reso is nearing the 0.1.0 release. I'm also preparing a Commodore64 emulator Christmas gift for my mother in law.

I've also started publishing arbitration opt-out templates to make it easier for people to opt out of arbitration.

In projects not-even-near completion, I've been drafting up a puzzler with 5 space and 2 time dimensions, and I'm resurrecting drafts for a cryptographic hash primitive with a variable hamming weight digest.

For me, my biggest side project right now is definitely Reso. I'm super proud of it. The language implementation work is done, and I'm excited to build tooling to make it easy and fun to use.

TLDR: In 2014, SSDs were unreliable but cool and new. They've become more reliable over the years, but going into 2024, they're showing a streak of unreliability again. I've had had an SSD fail, an enclosure fail, and an SSD+enclosure which seemed to break eachother.

The worst offenders are SanDisk, Western Digital, Samsung. Backblaze reports roughly confirm this. See their full stats page here.

I didn't even know Dell made SSDs, but BackBlaze reports Dell as the lowest failure rate.

I maintain an SSH bastion server for all my beloved VPSes. The server I host this blog on only accepts SSH connections from the IP of that bastion, and I keep that bastion hardened. It's a minimal Alpine install with nothing but an SSH server.

So I felt some dismay when I found the server got a score of F on sshaudit.com. I got an F! My bastion failed 2 of 5 host key tests, 4 of 9 key-exchange tests, and 7 of 10 MAC tests.

These are the steps I took. Although I'm on Alpine, I was able to cherry pick commands from the Debian-focused server guides hardening guides on sshaudit.com.

TLDR provided below the cut, with some script script to do the work for you.

TLDR: Here are things I like and can recommend.

• Pop! OS for a Linux distribution.
• Blender for 3D graphics.
• Python or Javascript (when my friends ask for a programming language they should learn).
• 1password for password managers.
• Signal for messaging.
• Obsidian for notetaking.
• Wirecutter and Rtings for product reviews (to replace Reddit.)
• OBS for screen recording and streaming.
• DaVinci Resolve for video editing.
• micro for an easy-to-use terminal editor... But also Helix, for those wanting a more powerful terminal editor.
• Fastmail + Porkbun for personal email.

I've had friends ask me for recommendations for software. They ask me this because I am a hollow person who has spent too much of my life on the computer. I love when people ask me these questions, because my strong opinions on software are usually otherwise "offputting" and considered a "personality flaw".

All jokes aside, I wanted one place to chronicle recommendations I tend to make. In no particular order, here are some of my favorites.

I read and Consumed™️ a number of things the first half of 2023. Let me detail some of them:

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer helped me reconcile disillusionment and frustration I had with academic science, and to help me appreciate different philosophies of thought.
• The Magicians by Lev Grossman is a grounded examination of the fantasy genre within a well-fleshed fantasy world. If "Houlden Caulfield seeks Narnia but goes to Hogwarts" sounds interesting, then check this out.
• This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a short story about star-crossed lovers from two advanced, warring, timeline-hopping scifi empires. I didn't like it that much, but it was 200 pages and fun to read.
• The Before Me podcast series is a well-constructed narrative built around interviews with the narrators mother, who arrived to America fleeing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It's worth a listen.