The newest iteration of one of my all-time favourite games, Monument Valley 3 is a relaxing adventure. You guide Noor to find a new source of power for the world’s fading light. With a simple interface, and a cinematic soundtrack, the gorgeous artwork can find one engrossed for hours. Check it out! Monument Valley 3When an apprentice, Noor, discovers the world’s light is fading, they must rise to find a new source of power before the light of the world fades forever.ustwo gamesMonument Valley 3 App - App StoreDownload Monument Valley 3 by ustwo games on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games like Monument Valley 3.App Storeustwo games

I am known for hyperbolic tendencies in my writing, and I hope you will forgive me on this occasion. I have some news to share. Something that has crept up on me, almost catching me by surprise. I’ve been involved every step of the way, don’t get me wrong; making the decisions leading up to this. But the achievement is now settling in… This website, this blog that I have been publishing on-and-off for about 15 years, is now a business. A digital magazine. On the 5th of this month, I had an appointment at the KVK, the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, and signed documents making it official. The paperwork itself is nothing to write home about, and there’s no approval necessary: I had to show up, verify my identity, and pay a fee. But from a personal perspective, it’s a milestone. I have aspired to be a writer for as long as I remember. This blog goes back to 2010, and has been through numerous iterations since teenage Ashish first began publishing. But it is the edition you’re reading right now which brings me the most pride. It is the culmination of years of effort and practice, and I have now become confident enough to not only put my name on my words, but also share more of my personality. To meet people, and confidently identify myself as a writer, and a publisher. My readership may be small, but I appreciate every single one of you. Thank you for being a part of my journey; I could not have done this without you. I hope to continue to use this platform to shine a light on the glittering facets of what it means to be human. Oh, and one more thing. As of 14h today, this website is listed in the annals of the _Koninklijke Bibliotheek_ , the National Library of The Netherlands. ISSN 3117-7409.

Amsterdam, NL

was listening to this classic, and then it hit me: we live in a world without both cobain and bowie

I care deeply about privacy, and people’s right to anonymity. It is a fundamental, inviolable human right. For most of this year, I collected web traffic analytics for this website. It never felt right to me, and alongside multiple attempts at filtering out bot traffic, I kept resetting the data. I liked the information; I do have an ego. But it felt queasy. And over time, it started becoming a familiar task to check my analytics data each morning. It was private, I told myself. I wasn’t collecting anything personally identifiable. And yet I could tell which of my three friends viewed which post. The ball dropped when I gave someone a list of instructions on how to avoid detection by my analytics systems, while mentioning that I care about privacy. I built a bypass mechanism for people to avoid being tracked, while the irony that they had to be tracked to learn of this method was completely lost on me. This slight has now been corrected. I have, as of ten minutes ago, completely and irrevocably deleted all my analytics data, and have switched off any web/newsletter analytics services. This is a public service announcement to hold myself accountable. There will be no traffic analytics of any kind on ashish.co again. Ever. Your privacy is guaranteed. I apologise for the hubris.

Most websites don’t need to warm their cache; regular traffic does the job. That first viewer might have to wait half a second longer, but it’s no big deal. In my case, that first viewer might be the only viewer I get. And I want them to have the best experience. A cool feature of GitHub Actions is that you can use them to create workflows that are odd cron jobs, run on schedule. This action is also automatically run after every deploy, so that first viewer never needs to wait. This simple script also complains when it fails, with a notification sent to my phone, which tells me that my website is not responding correctly. An uptime monitor, and a cache warmer. Two birds, one stone. name: Cache Warm on: schedule: - cron: '0 */2 * * *' workflow_run: workflows: ["Deploy"] types: [completed] branches: - master workflow_dispatch: concurrency: group: cache-warm cancel-in-progress: true permissions: contents: read jobs: cache-warm: runs-on: ubuntu-latest timeout-minutes: 2 if: github.event_name != 'workflow_run' || github.event.workflow_run.conclusion == 'success' steps: - run: | urls_to_warm=( "https://ashish.co/" "https://ashish.co/rss/" "https://ashish.co/sitemap.xml" ) curl_version=$(curl --version | head -n 1 | awk '{print $1"/"$2}') user_agent="ACacheWarmer/0.4 (+https://ashish.co; +https://github.com/${{ github.repository }}) ${curl_version}" for url in "${urls_to_warm[@]}"; do curl -fSs -o /dev/null -A "$user_agent" "$url" done

> It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to _originate_ anything. It can do whatever we _know how to order it_ to perform. It can _follow_ analysis; but it has no power of _anticipating_ any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making _available_ what we are already acquainted with. – Ada Lovelace