Have you ever wondered how mail clients work under the hood? Most mail clients fetch your mail with a protocol called called IMAP, and it's surprisingly human-readable.

Here's how it looks:

Three examples of how you might use the IMAP FETCH query to see the raw data that your mail client uses

Above, I've queried the same message in three different ways, each returning different data. More info on IMAP commands and queries can be found in the latest RFC: IMAP4rev2.

This post is about saving money on hobby projects, by scraping the bottom of the barrel with what your cloud provider offers.

Most cloud providers have a free tier of hosting, with low RAM. For example, Fly.io currently offers 3x instances of a shared-1-cpu instance with 256mb RAM. But what if you need more? Fly.io's pricing page shows you'd pay ~$10/mo for a 2gb RAM instance.

I have a side project that uses very bursty RAM, so it feels annoying to pay for 2gb RAM for a whole month, when I really only need it for a few minutes a day.

Enter the solution: swapping to disk.

Do you know how some kids want to be teachers when they grow up?

Do you know why?

I do. When I was in fifth grade, I was shy, short, and quiet. I had skipped two grades, and so I was two years younger than the other students. My parents had moved five times (Vermont, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Mexico) before we had come back to Texas, and I didn't have a lot of friends. Or, for that matter, experience making them.

But in the mornings, before school, every day, I would get dropped off at around 6am by my parents. I would wait with the crossing guard until my teacher came to school, and then go sit with her in the classroom and write in my journal, and do my work, until school started. I still remember her name was Mrs. Hill.

In that class, I went from being a very-quiet, very-unsure, very-shy child, to being a mostly-quiet, mostly-unsure, mostly-shy kid. And, as anyone who's been in that situation can tell you, that's actually a lot of improvement. I felt proud when I could shape a spoon out of aluminum foil for our hands-on science demonstration, I felt good about writing, in a way I thought was interesting. And at Camp Tyler, an outdoor school that each 5th grade class in our public school distict visited for a week, I had fun.

I don't know. Maybe it's because I've got lots of things to do. Maybe that's just something I tell myself when I procrastinate work that seems hard. Why is writing hard? Because it's vulnerable? Or because vulnerable work is held close-to-heart, and the standards are higher, so I truly do need to do more work to get it out?

Why don't I feel like writing?

I don't know! Sometimes the words come out, and sometimes they don't. I guess this is one of the times where they just don't. Would I be better at editing right now? Why don't the words come out easily? Is it because I'm stressed, is it because I'm frustrated? Is it because I'm too tired and have exhausted all of my thinking potential earlier in the day? Should I not be writing late?

Why don't I feel like writing?...

Okay, this title-repetition has worn off. I can't keep going the whole way, should I scrap it? Should I just delete the whole thing and start again? Sometimes, when I delete the whole thing, I feel that the next time, I might be less inclined to start it in the first place.

Fiddling with monitors is annoying. This method lets you get an SSH connection to your Pi without having to connect it to a monitor, find an external keyboard, or manually type in your wifi password.

Simple and portable enough that you could do the entire process at a cafe

Taking out the manual process and sending everything over the wire makes it much easier to automate initial config, and I found it very useful when setting up my home servers with Ansible.

The two-cable SSH

Having a home server has many benefits:

• Spotify-connected speakers 🔈
• wifi printing 🖨
• automated laptop backups over wifi 💿
• and more! 😱

And you might find this useful, when you have:

• unused speakers

This isn't just for people who haven't gone to hackathons before, but also for people who went to one and had an underwhelming experience. Hackathons are all different, so don't let one bad experience shy you away from them.

What are they?

So you're going to a hackathon. You've signed up, and you don't know quite what it is, but you're interested, maybe because you've heard good things about them or they sounded like fun. They're all pretty similar in concept, but when I think of hackathons, I think of coroporate hackathons and collegiate hackathons.

Corporate hackathons

Corporate hackathons are generally smaller than collegiate hackathons. Both in size, and in time spent working. That's not to say they're bad, some of the ones I've been to have been better than some of the collegiate hackathons that I've been to, despite their size. These hackathons will generally be 50 people or less, and all the ones I've been to have been less than 24 hours, and they've also had participants go home for the night and come back in the morning. They also usually have no problem with providing enough food and snacks.

Here's my first post on here. I wrote it before I ended up setting up my blog. I figured I had to start writing blog posts some point, and by writing my ideas on things as I encountered them, I'd remember my ideas better.

Inspiration: