// Personal website of Chris Smith

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:

Just a nod

Last month I added a new feature to the bottom of almost all pages on this site: a “nod” button. It’s a bit like the upvote buttons you see on bear blog posts, or the ubiquitous like button you get on social media, with one key difference: it doesn’t track or count anything. Before I get into the whys and hows, this is what it currently looks like: So why bother? I like hea...

Monthly Meanderings: January 2026

Welcome to the second edition of my monthly meanderings. For a bit of context, you can check out the introduction to the first edition. Website updates It’s been a pretty busy month for chameth.com. Three blog posts: The Meaning of Life — an entry into the IndieWeb carnival where I mostly review a book on Stoicism — Surge Protectors: Marketing vs Reality which is a dump of a rese...

An interesting Tailscale + Docker gotcha

As I’ve written about before, I use Tailscale for a lot of things. I thought I had it set up in a reasonably secure manner, but I recently noticed a problem. I use Tailscale’s ACLs to limit what each node can access, based on the tags I apply to it. So an app node can’t access anything via Tailscale, while an integration or server node can access things tagged with either app or ...