Building a 24/7 Go Bot with KataGo on KGS
I wanted a Go bot that plays games on KGS while I sleep. Not to grief anyone — just to have a persistent presence on the server, accumulate games, and watch a machine play the oldest board game in the world against real humans, all day, every day.
The result: a Python wrapper around KataGo and kgsGtp.jar, running on a $5/month Lightsail instance, playing Chinese rules on 19x19, saving every game as an SGF file, and reporting stats back to me. Here’s how it works.
Hosting a MUD on AWS for $10/Month
A MUD needs to be online 24/7. Players log in at weird hours. The server has to just be there, quietly running, handling connections from whoever shows up. I didn’t want to babysit it. I wanted to set it up once and forget about it.
Here’s how I got Space MUD running on AWS for roughly $10/month, and what I’d do differently next time.
The Setup
The game runs on Evennia, a Python MUD framework that gives you a telnet server and a web client out of the box. It uses Django under the hood, stores everything in SQLite by default, and daemonizes itself so it keeps running after you close your SSH session. For a small MUD, it’s the right tool.
How I Put This Blog on the Internet with AWS
When I built this blog, getting it running on my own computer was the easy part. Run one command, open a browser, done. The part that felt like a mountain was the next question: how do you take a folder of files on your laptop and turn it into a real website that anyone in the world can visit?
This post is the walkthrough I wish I’d had. No prior cloud experience needed. If you already know your way around DNS and S3, you can skim the steps and grab the Namecheap-specific gotchas. If you’re newer, I’ve linked out to deeper explainers at each tricky part so you can actually understand what you’re doing, not just copy commands. That’s the whole spirit of this blog: do it yourself, and learn how it works while you’re at it.