Notes for the Week #5 (2026)

This week note covers the week of 26th January–1st February.

Life#

I returned to work last Monday after a ten day vacation. It was hard; my mind kept going back to the relaxing days. I felt very refreshed. It lasted only a day.

My whole family caught a cold on Tuesday. My wife had it worst. While A and I have recovered, my wife is still not well enough. We made through the week somehow fighting the weariness.

Despite the bouts of sickness, I’m happy to tell you that I was able to walk 316727 steps in January, that is 10217 steps every day on average. I missed hitting the mark 6 days out of 31, but because of walking extra steps on other days, I maintained the average. I’m going to continue this habit for now.

Personal Projects#

Not much work on the website this week, I think I’m done for a while. I don’t have any pending tasks or ideas for now. I’m going to focus on other projects next. I did accomplish a big one this week.

I’ve been running my VPS on Digital Ocean for the last 12 years. It’s been convenient and I never faced any issues, but the bills have been increasing over years—recently I’ve been paying 17 USD per month for a single CPU/2GB RAM server. This week I moved all my services and websites to Hetzner. Hetzner is charging me 15 USD for a four CPU/8GB RAM server. It made no sense to stick to Digital Ocean.

The migration was painless thanks to NixOS. Most of my service config is already in my Nix files. I had to copy some data over, mostly service databases and files. Here is the checklist I used:

• Pin MySQL version
• Build service
• Stop service on old VPS
• Dump service database
• Disable service
• Switch DNS to point to new VPS
• Enable service on new VPS
• Start service on new VPS
• Stop service
• Copy database dump to new VPS
• Copy config files
• Copy data files
• Copy secret files
• Restore permissions
• Start service on new VPS
• Verify service
• Enable service backups
• Enable service health checks
• Run backup

I migrated one service at a time, starting with the stateless services first. I had been delaying the move to Hetzner, because unlike Digital Ocean it is not hosted in India, and I wanted to have a good backup strategy. I ended up going with BorgBase’s 10GB free backup space plan to backup the dumps of service DBs and files. I also enabled weekly full disk backups in Hetzner. I’m comfortable with this arrangement.

I also installed Beszel following Sathya’s recommendation. I already had Monit set up for alerts but it’s nice to see metric history and charts in Beszel.

One day after the move, my website was discovered by terrible Chinese crawlers. They came very rapidly from random IPs, using headless browsers to visit one page at a time. My now powerful VPS held but I didn’t like them anyway. So I got back on Cloudflare proxy after two months of being off it, and turned on Cloudflare verification for Chinese IPs. The crawlers finally backed off after trying for few more hours.

Reading & Watching#

I started reading Proto by Laura Spinney. I love reading about linguistics and anthropology and I’m hoping this book is everything it is hyped to be.

Wife and I watched Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, a short TV show based on Agatha Christie’s 1929 novel The Seven Dials Mystery. The acting and sets were great but I was not entertained by the mystery of the case, which was rather tame.

I’m super excited about the second season of the Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End anime. I loved the first season and I’ve been eagerly waiting. The first season has been ranked one in MyAnimeList’s list of top anime for years and I expect a great second season too.

Interesting Internet Links#

• Wheel Reinventor’s Principles
• The Value of Things
• (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python))

That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading this post via feed. Feeds are great, and you're great for using them. ♥

This post was originally published on abhinavsarkar.net.

Like, repost, or comment on:

• Fediverse
• My website

Read more of my posts and notes.