Lowering my AWS bill by ~95% (spoiler: you don’t HAVE to use Route 53)

Why did no one tell me you’re not required to use Route 53 for DNS if you’re hosting a website on S3/CloudFront‽

I have quite a few websites. They’re small, static and don’t get much traffic. So S3’s pay-as-you-go pricing works well for me. It costs me a fraction of a dollar a month.

Or it would, if it wasn’t for Route 53, which charges a flat $0.50/mo for every single domain, no matter how much traffic it gets. It accounts for ~95% of my AWS bill.

Well, I randomly discovered that you can use Cloudflare for DNS (I thought if you were using S3/CloudFront you had to remain in the AWS ecosystem for the DNS).

I can’t wait to start transferring my sites DNS to Cloudflare tomorrow.

A short piece by Jeffrey Zeldman on writing with brevity.

Anyone can generate words now. A prompt and a few seconds and you have paragraphs, pages, a manifesto.

[…] Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage.

Chess > phone

In a recent post on lowering phone usage, I recommended playing chess. But I haven’t actually played chess for ages. So I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and play. And it was lovely.

I get an energy crash between 15:00-18:00 and am often tempted to scroll on my phone. Chess was a pleasant replacement. Mentally challenging, but also relaxing. Sitting there, waiting for my opponent to go, was quiet and peaceful. I briefly put some music on in the background, but quickly turned it off – I was enjoying the quiet too much.

I can see myself get into chess more regularly. I was pretty terrible today. I was matched against fellow newbies and still mostly lost. Though winning in my final match was a great feeling.

If you wanna play with me, my username on lichess.org is clowes – add me.

A digital chessboard shows a game on lichess.org with White in a winning position, as the white queen threatens the black king on g7.

ADHD is building increasingly elaborate productivity systems until you hit a complexity tipping point and want to abandon everything for a cabin in the woods.

Weeknotes (1743/4175) blot.blog/2025/03/0…

These cleaning gloves at IKEA look like they want to check my prostate.

I’ve written about how we all think we’d take a bullet for our loved ones, but can’t handle putting away clean socks. The mundane is where real battles are won. blot.blog/2025/02/2…

I’ve written about that peculiar melancholy that settles in during your 30s - when time accelerates, nostalgia becomes both comfort and pain, and adulthood looks different than imagined. blot.blog/2025/02/2…

Tom Hardy hasn’t been in a good film for years.

When I saw him pop up in a trailer I used to be like “can’t wait to check this out”.

Now when I see him I think “this is going to be terrible”.

I’ve written about how consuming excellent content isn’t a search problem. It’s a focus problem. blot.blog/2025/02/2…