Category: Year Review

  • 2024: Year in Review

    Dec 31, 2024
    Year Review
    10 minutes
    qt.ax/24r

    For the past two years, I’ve been writing year-end reviews to look back upon the year that had gone by and reflect on what had happened. I thought I might as well continue the tradition this year.

    However, I’ll try a new format—instead of grouping by month, I’d group it by area. I’ll focus on the following areas:

    1. BGP and operating my own autonomous system;
    2. My homebrew CDN for this blog;
    3. My home server;
    4. My new mechanical keyboard;
    5. My travel router project; and
    6. My music hobby.

    Without further ado, let’s begin.

    (Read more...)

  • 2023: Year in Review

    Dec 31, 2023
    Year Review
    7 minutes
    qt.ax/23r

    Last year, I started writing year-end reviews to look back upon the past year and reflect on what has happened. I thought I might as well continue to do the same this year.

    In January, I decided to finally create that stratum 1 NTP server that I had wanted ever since I heard about people doing it with Raspberry Pis. Instead of using Pis though, I ended up doing the ancient (but superior) approach of using a serial port. Along the way, I ran into various issues, but that tale is told in its own blog post.

    (Read more...)

  • 2022: Year in Review

    Dec 31, 2022
    Year Review
    6 minutes
    qt.ax/22r

    2022 was certainly an interesting year. While the world events were rather depressing, we are not here to talk about them. Instead, let us explore what I did this year—if just to help me remember it years down the line.

    In January, I ended up messing around with my domains. I wrote about this in a previous blog post, but here’s a summary: To improve email delivery, I moved this website from quantum2.xyz to quantum5.ca. Furthermore, I saw qt.ax was open for registration, and registered it to use as my URL shortener. While switching to quantum5.ca was a relatively straightforward procedure, registering qt.ax at a rather steep price of €32/year would bring about a rather interesting sequence of events, as we shall see later.

    I also talked earlier about my globally distributed backend, which in January consisted of three nodes: Montréal, Amsterdam, and Sydney. By the end of the year, this would change significantly.

    In February, I implemented my own version of the French Republican Calendar for fun, which spawned a whole series of posts on the subject. At the end of the month, AMD dropped the retail price of the Ryzen 9 5950X, at which point I impulsively bought one to replace my 3900X, which would have some interesting consequences.

    (Read more...)