Warbreaker is the story of two sisters, who happen to be princesses, the God King one of them has to marry, the lesser god who doesn't like his job, and the immortal who's still trying to undo the mistakes he made hundreds of years ago. Their world is one in which those who die in glory return as gods to live confined to a pantheon in Hallandren's capital city and where a power known as BioChromatic magic is based on an essence known as breath that can only be collected one unit at a time from individual people.

By using breath and drawing upon the color in everyday objects, all manner of miracles and mischief can be accomplished. It will take considerable quantities of each to resolve all the challenges facing Vivenna and Siri, princesses of Idris; Susebron the God King; Lightsong, reluctant god of bravery, and mysterious Vasher, the Warbreaker.

So the entire month of September was a bit of a weird one for me, and so I completely forgot that I hadn’t posted a review for Warbreaker. As a result, this post is both going to be a) a bit of a retrospective after the memories of the book have faded a bit, and b) probably a bit short. But since no one is reading any of this, anyway, well, what do you care??

Many of the non-critical services I run–messaging, RSS, home automation–run on an Intel NUC I’ve hidden away at home. This has advantages over a VPS in that if I need additional resources, I can just add some memory or storage rather than having to move to a new service tier and paying that much more every month. Plus, given how much I’m working and using these services at home, having them hosted locally means higher perceived performance due to lower latency.

Unfortunately, connectivity for services hosted on a residential broadband connection is always a pain in the butt. While over the years my residential broadband connection has been incredibly stable, I still face the challenge of changing IP addresses. And yes, I can set up dynamic DNS, but I’ve always found it relatively fragile (not to mention an enormous hack). Additionally, you have to contend with ISPs potentially blocking ports and so forth. And finally there’s all the issues with NAT, reverse port mappings, internal and external DNS record management, and on and on. Basically it’s painful and brittle.

On what might seem like an unrelated note, IPv6 is still gradually getting deployed. Certainly mobile networks use v6 extensively, but outside that space adoption is still pretty nascent. As a result, it’s always been a bit questionable if deploying v6 at home is worth the trouble (minus the novelty and bragging rights).

But it turns out that, with a VPS and an IPv6 tunnel, you can dramatically simplify the process of hosting services on a residential broadband connection. As a result, this has proven to be the “killer app” that has driven me to truly adopt v6 at home.

My personal blog, a static site built with Jekyll, is a bit of a frankenstein. I really need to write some posts that get into the dirtier details of how I’ve stitched various bits together (like webmentions, POSSE syndication, and so on). But for this installment I wanted to start with something I’m doing which I think is a bit unique.

So, backing up, as we all know, social media isn’t just about long-form articles on Medium, medium-length rants on Facebook, or short-form trollbait on Twitter. We also track what we read, what we listen to, what we watch, the games we’re playing, the exercise we engage in, the websites we’re bookmarking, and on and on. Basically, if there’s some human activity that we want to collectively experience, there’s probably a social platform somewhere.

I wanted to explore these same ideas, but in the context of my blog. First I started with replacing Goodreads. I’ve since followed that by blogging my cycling PESOS-style with Strava. In both cases I’ve used a combination of purpose built, locally hosted tools for collecting metadata, and then integrating those tools with my blog to enabling publishing the data to the world.

I won’t claim this is a friction-free approach. But it’s working pretty well for me, so I figured it was worth sharing!