Aluminum Dirt

I’m Andrew Chao, a programmer, a mathematician, and the guy that made this website.

  • Migrating to Caddy

    Didn’t I say that this was a production server? I’m only lying to myself. I’ve been using Nginx Proxy Manager for a while now and it has a few quirks. Perhaps my problems could have been solved by using custom Nginx configurations and reading documentation, but I’ve been hearing good things about Caddy for a…

  • Hyper Converged Infrastructure with Proxmox

    After Broadcom aquired VMware, I was once again introduced to a name that had already been floating around the home-lab circles: Proxmox. At the time I still had no idea what it even was, but as my little experiment began to grow and take a life of its own, I began to find myself searching…

  • Proofreading…

    Sometimes I read this as “proo-freading” or “Professor Eading”, sometimes I look at a word for so long that it ceases to be real anymore. I’ll read the same text over and over again trying to find errors and eventually I simply begin to ignore the obvious mistakes. Faced with a wall of text, no…

  • LaTeX is Pretty Nice

    I’ve begun to realize that there isn’t much point in trying to write in Microsoft Word. It is a nice tool, but I wonder if it is really necessary for what I want to do with it. I can’t really make templates or work with multiple versions of the same document. There are two things…

  • League of Legends

    I played this game for nearly a decade. Oops.

  • AI, The Phrase

    My first exposure to AI was “bottomless pit supervisor” memes, blatantly absurd and just my type of humor. It was so silly and inconsequential that I genuinely thought that it was supposed to be a marketing gimmick or a new algorithm that superseded Markov chains, but that was it. I spent the better part of…

  • Social Media, Again

    So social media has finally begun to collapse in on itself again and the cycle begins anew – where will we flee to next? This topic has been on my mind recently …