// Personal website of Chris Smith

Image of Chris, distorted with scan lines and a hologram effect
Name:
Chris Smith
Class:
Programmer
Type:
Human
HP:
929
✪✪ Yak Shave After attacking, add 1d6 side project tokens to this card.
✪✪✪ Side project Multiply all damage by number of side project tokens.
01/001

Chameth.com

Hello :)

Hello! I'm Chris, a software developer from the UK. Welcome to my personal website.

The site is mostly organised around a bunch of slash pages:

  • /posts is where all my blog posts live
  • /projects lists my various side projects
  • /interests is a big ol' list of things I'm into
  • /films logs films I've seen and my reviews of them
  • /uses has an overview of the software, hardware, services, and so on, that I use
  • /contact provides a way to drop me an e-mail
  • /colophon details a bit about how the site is made
  • /snippets has little bits of code or other info I find useful
  • /sitemap is a more exhaustive list of contents

If you're just here for the blog posts, the latest ones are:

Word cloud featuring: query, chameth, records, caching, recursive, resolver, cnames, lego, nxdomain, responsible, simon's, check, rcode, propagation, nonexistent, opcode, behaviour, centauri, drill, systemd-resolved

Lego, ACME DNS-01, and negatively-cached surprises

Recently a friend was deploying Centauri, my reverse proxy service that can obtain TLS certificates using ACME DNS-01 challenges. He asked a seemingly innocent question: “When Centauri is ‘waiting for record propagation’ is there an option to increase the time?” But that’s a question with a hidden, concerning XY problem. We both use the same DNS provider, and it defin...
Word cloud featuring: month, marathon, plays, post, mistweaver, plans, rated, training, stats, next, title, gaming, music, cycle, half, season, listen, fitness, hacker, habits, versed, widgets

Monthly Meanderings: August 2026

Another month, another edition of “What’s Chris been up to?”. Fun fact: I very nearly published this post with a “[intro]” placeholder here instead of this paragraph, despite proofreading it multiple times. “Yep, that’s where the intro will go, all good”. Now instead we have this weirdly meta introduction. Website updates and other projects A few web...
A screenshot of Olive Crosses, showing links to other services with icons based on their two-word names

Building a family of single-user services

Last month I made and wrote about a personal service to track my workouts and record personal bests. Since then, things have escalated. I now have eight different services running in the same “family”: