Logistics Day — DNS, Deliveries, and Documentation

2026-03-08

Not every day is a breakthrough. Some days you fix DNS records and wait for Royal Mail.

The blog

Launched this blog at blog.egc.land — an Astro site deployed to Cloudflare Pages. Browser-default styling, no JavaScript, no CSS framework. Markdown posts rendered at build time. The whole thing is static HTML.

Then immediately did a full content revision pass across all existing posts. Budget figures corrected (was quoting £445, actual spend was £434.42). The literature review section rewritten to honestly describe the methodology — running a structured prompt through Claude, not manually reading 60 papers. The March 5 radiator discovery expanded with the full data: 5-hour sustained event, -0.914 Pearson correlation, 22.9% combined suitability. Navigation links updated for the new March 6 biology decisions post. Small things, but accuracy matters when you’re writing about a science project.

Cloudflare DNS fix

When we moved the egc.land domain from Namecheap to Cloudflare DNS a few days ago, the staging sites for EGC’s WordPress instances lost their DNS records. Three staging sites — staging-qista-ro.egc.land, staging-ro.egc.land, staging-uk.egc.land — all returning NXDOMAIN.

The fix was more complicated than it should have been. Wrangler (Cloudflare’s CLI) has no DNS commands at all. And the OAuth token wrangler uses for authentication has zone (read) scope but can’t access the DNS records API endpoint. Had to create a separate Cloudflare API token with Zone:DNS:Edit permission, then add three A records via curl against the REST API.

The staging sites use Let’s Encrypt SSL with HTTP-01 challenges, so the A records had to be DNS-only (not proxied through Cloudflare). Proxying would intercept the ACME challenge and break cert renewal. All three sites confirmed back up within 30 seconds of adding the records.

Delivery status

The Shelly Plug S — the smart plug that will give Claude control of the room heater — is stuck with Royal Mail after two failed delivery attempts. I ordered a second Shelly from a different seller as backup.

The Camera Module 3 replacement from JAF Enterprises (Amazon) was expected today. Didn’t arrive. The Pi Hut backup order (£24, £11 cheaper than Amazon) is also in transit. At this point I’m betting on The Pi Hut arriving first and working — they hold their own stock, no commingled inventory.

The agent doesn’t need a camera to do its job. It’s been monitoring temperature and humidity autonomously for over 24 hours now. The camera adds visual assessment of cultures, but there are no cultures yet. The camera can wait.

The fridge

Checked the fridge temperature: 12°C. Way too warm. The PGR solutions (plant growth regulators — the hormones that tell cultured cells what to do) need 2-8°C. They’ve been sitting at 12°C since they were rescued from the radiator two days ago.

Turned the fridge dial up to setting 4. My kefir culture also lives in this fridge — at 4°C the kefir goes dormant and stops fermenting. PGRs win. The kefir moves to room temperature fermentation.

This is the kind of triage that defines home lab work. In a university, the PGR fridge and the lunch fridge are different fridges. In a flat, the BAP and the kefir share shelf space, and someone has to decide whose temperature requirements take priority.

Agent status

The autonomous agent on the Pi continues running. 24+ hours of continuous operation, no missed cycles, no crashes. Temperature stable in the 21-24°C range. Humidity still dipping below 40% overnight — the humidifier is on the list but not yet purchased.

The agent logs every 15 minutes. It flags humidity warnings, tracks consecutive excursions, notes recoveries. It’s doing its job. It just doesn’t have anything to control yet.

Where things stand

Tomorrow: check if either camera arrives. Check if either Shelly arrives. Check fridge temperature. The agent keeps watching. The biology waits for the logistics to catch up.