Chevre, this week’s parsha is VeEtchanan (ואתחנן). I’m writing a day early this week because I’m going on vacation and didn’t want to bring my laptop with me.

This week has been a busy one. We started with Tisha BeAv on Sunday. Yesterday, my wife and I sent our son, our only son (yes, I’ve been thinking about Akedat Yitchak this week) to the IDF. Super Emotional.

And the parsha has some heavy hitters like the 10 Commandments and most of The Shema. And finally, this is the first of the comforting parshiot, where the Haftorah is comforting after the 3 weeks and Tisha BeAv.

With everything going on, I have been so appreciative of the modern technical automations available to us for little to no cost. Whether it’s the automation of lights, appliances and A/C units going on and off. To the automation I use to rebuild the website for this weekly Dvar Torah. Having these things around us that make our lives easier allow us, or they are supposed to allow us, to be more productive and spend more time with our friends and families.

Recently, I have been playing more with Tailscale’s container side-car to try to make some of my more regularly used applications more robust. I spun up an EC2, quickly added some necessary packages and relatively quickly was able to migrate a couple of applications (Karakeep and Tailscale’s GoLink) onto the EC2 and onto my Tailnet. These apps are available (they were available before) on the cloud, but are no longer susceptible to my home network going down due to a fiber cut or the heat in my office where I run my proxmox servers.

The ability to play with technology in a simple lab and then deploy it to production with little to no changes, truly astounds me. I get joy out of that and a little distraction from the experiences of this week.

May HaShem bless and safeguard all our Holy Soldiers Shabbat Shalom, Am Yisrael Chai