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I appear to be building a content farm. That is not how I described ActuallyRandom.com when I bought the domain. I called it an outlet for the ideas that bounce around my ADHD brain, a place to experiment with AI-generated writing, SEO, advertising and affiliate links. It sounds friendlier when I put it that way. Still, the basic plan is to publish articles, attract people from search engines and eventually make a little money from their visits. That is close enough to a content farm that pretending otherwise would be silly. ...

I asked a question I had heard the answer to a hundred times: is it true that half the cells in my body are foreign bacteria? The answer turns out to be yes, roughly. Which is strange, because the version everyone repeats is that bacteria outnumber your own cells ten to one, and that version is wrong. The numbers In 2016, Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo went and did the arithmetic properly. For a reference adult male of 70 kg: ...

The question I typed was “is the caspian sea salty?”, which I assumed had a one word answer. It has a one sentence answer. The Caspian Sea has a salinity of about 1.2%, or 12 grams per litre, which is roughly a third of the salinity of average seawater. So yes, it is salty. It is brackish rather than briny. You would not want to drink it, and you would not mistake it for the Pacific either. ...

I was buying a sheet of polystyrene to sit between a pool table and a plywood workbench top. The listing said “EXPOL 2400 x 1200 x 40mm S Grade Polystyrene ThermaSlab”, and I wondered what the S meant, and whether I should have bought the H instead. The short answer, if that is all you came for: S grade H grade Density 16 kg/m³ 24 kg/m³ Nominal thermal conductivity 0.041 W/m °C 0.038 W/m °C Nominal R-value at 50 mm about 1.2 m² °C/W about 1.3 m² °C/W Colour code on the sheet edge brown green Relative weight a third lighter 50% heavier H grade is denser, stronger, slightly more insulating and more expensive. S grade is the standard board and it is what most people want. ...

I have been using ChatGPT since December 2022. Every question I asked it is sitting in an export on my home server. That is three years of me being curious about things, in writing, timestamped. Some of those questions must be questions other people are asking Google. The interesting problem is working out which ones, without paying for an SEO tool. The corpus The export normalizes to 2,286 markdown files, one per conversation, at about 27 MB. Titles are generated by ChatGPT, so they are labels rather than questions. The actual question I typed is the first **user:** block in each file. ...

I wanted to add comments to this Hugo blog, so I searched for “best Hugo comment plugin.” The results were surprisingly thin. I found a Hugo forum discussion from 2023 and a Reddit thread from 2022, but no obvious answer. Both discussions offered long lists of names, and several of the services have changed, stalled or disappeared since then. I already had some experience with the most obvious answer. I used Disqus on madebynathan.com for years, then it started placing ads above the embedded comments widget. I did not want someone else’s advertising inserted between an article and its discussion, so I removed Disqus and replaced it with giscus. ...

I have a home server called reef. I have been connecting to it with ssh reef for a long time. Today it stopped. ❯ ssh root@10.5.7.35 ssh: connect to host 10.5.7.35 port 22: No route to host Then, in the same terminal, one second later: ❯ /usr/bin/ssh root@10.5.7.35 Welcome to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.8.12-10-pve x86_64) root@reef:~# Same host. Same shell. Same second. One works and one does not. I have never seen anything like it, and it took a while to believe what I was looking at. ...

At the start of this project, ~/code/actually_random was an empty directory. I had bought ActuallyRandom.com, but there was no Hugo site, no theme, no GitHub repository and no DNS configuration. I opened Claude Code and described what I wanted. Roughly ten minutes of active agent work later, actuallyrandom.com was serving a Hugo blog over HTTPS. It had a theme, search, archives, RSS, Google Analytics and an automatic GitHub Pages deployment on every push to main. ...

I have been running madebynathan.com on GitHub Pages since 2010, and ndbroadbent.com for years after that. In all that time I never verified either domain. I did not know I was supposed to. The custom domain worked, the site was up, and nothing ever complained. Then I set up this blog, went looking for the correct way to attach a domain, and found a settings page I had never opened. What verification actually protects you from GitHub Pages works out which repository to serve by matching the Host header of the request against whichever repo has claimed that custom domain. Your DNS points at GitHub. GitHub looks up who owns the name. ...

I use AI to help write ActuallyRandom.com. Quite a lot, in fact. I am not ashamed of this. The whole point of the site is to give me somewhere to put random ideas and experiment with AI, SEO, ads and whatever else catches my attention. The bat article began with something my wife heard on Russian TikTok. The Adrien Brody article began because she was watching Chapelwaite after we ate Thai food. Those ideas came from us. AI helped me research them and turn them into articles. ...