Yesterday, I was setting up a new Raspberry Pi Zero 2W in my home network. I'm going to use it to revive an old Brother printer I have lying around and install CUPS on it, so that I can use said printer as a network printer on the cheap. I just had the Pi flashed with a headless Ubuntu, and preconfigured it to connect to my home network via WiFi. I even gave it an example.local hostname so that I…
I recently had to test a web app I was developing on an real mobile phone, so I had to figure out how to (1) run the development server on my computer, and (2) access it from the Android phone I had in my hand. Most of the how-tos I found online were either outdated, or felt like they were a bit too complicated for what I was trying to achieve. I did not want to have to switch my computer network…
I love me a great font, and considering that I look at a text editor at least half of the time I'm in front of a computer every day (which is a lot!), I think it's worthwhile making sure I like what I'm looking at. Since the start of 2025, that font's been Berkeley Mono , which has recently just been updated to version 2. Unfortunately, this one doesn't come with Nerd Font glyphs (like with other…
I've been setting up a Paperless-ngx instance on my homelab as part of my 2024 resolution to immerse myself more into managing a baremetal server. One of the things I want it to do is to monitor my email inbox for documents I receive regularly (think bills, receipts, etc.) so that they are automatically fetched into the digital archive. However, I use Proton Mail , and as part of their security…
I've been very vocal about wanting to try it out before, but I never got around to it. Yesterday, I finally did: I reformatted my gaming PC and installed a Linux distro. Path of Exile is first on my must-install list Nobara? I went with Nobara Linux 38 . As much as I'd like to say that I'm comfortable with getting my hands dirty with all the techno mumbo-jumbo that notoriously comes with working…
Today, I finally did something I've been meaning to do since last year: I migrated my Vaultwarden installation from Amazon ECS to Fly.io . The migration really was very simple and mostly painless to do — the only part that slowed me down was figuring out how to copy files up to a (disk) volume I've set up on the Fly.io platform. Vaultwarden uses SQLite, so all of its data was on the file system.…
There's been no shortage of people harping about the amazing things you can do with OpenAI's ChatGPT. I admit to losing exorbitant amounts of sleep over the weekend because I was trying to "break" it --- I kept asking it practical but somewhat obscure technical questions to see what it can say. Here's an example: ChatGPT seems to know how to use Rust to read state from a Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins…
I am absolutely hyped up for Street Fighter VI. When I was still in high school, a huge amount of my free time went to visiting the video game arcades. The fighting games were my go-to then. I got hooked with Capcom's Marvel Super Heroes back in middle school, but it was definitely high school when I got totally hooked. Me and my friends would easily gobble up whatever the fighting game of the…
My first mechanical keyboard is a Vortex Pok3r , which I've had since 2015. It's a 60% keyboard — so it doesn't have arrow, function, navigation and numpad keys. It was a very difficult transition at the time, having only worked with standard keyboards ever since, but I've grown very accustomed to it, and now work pretty darn fast with it. Point is, it's been something close to my heart, I…
Working with quite a lot of AWS CDK for our prototypes, it's very important to be able to ensure our Stack s and Construct s are in a valid state at all times. When your infrastructure is layers upon layers of nested components, it's nice to have that guarantee at the back of your mind that your system is within expectations, and that none of our components are entering invalid configurations. Yes…
I recently had an engineering requirement where I had to build a Lambda function that would grab an arbitrary number of files stored in S3, compress them into a single ZIP archive, then upload the archive into another S3 bucket. This was eventually going to be given to a user using a presigned URL to access. It would have been simple enough to implement if we could just download all the files into…
On my last livestream session with the AWS DevAx Connect team, I talked about how you can build observability into distributed applications on AWS Lambda (among other things), particularly using AWS X-Ray . With all the positive buzz around the whole idea of microservices and immensely distributed applications, one of the very real problems it creates is that --- now that most everything in your…
I was one of those people that were pleasantly surprised, waking up one morning earlier this month, to the news of Slack announcing a partnership with AWS . While the decision to adopt or strengthen their AWS posture isn't exactly something new for a lot of companies, the real standout for me was that Slack will also migrate their voice and video call functionality to use the Amazon Chime service…
There's been a lot of fanfare about the new AWS Graviton2 processors , and the performance and cost benefits of using them compared to their alternatives in the cloud. These ARM-based processors power the new M6g, C6g, and R6g family of EC2 instance types , with the previous (first) generation powering the A1 family of EC2 instances . AWS promises that the Graviton2 offers significant improvements…
As is with many people, I'm stuck at home because of the COVID-19 lockdowns most everywhere. Unfortunately, even with the increased time at home that I can use to game, I'm also stuck with a old-ish gaming rig that's wedged with a video card that is showing it's age. As much as I'd like to order new equipment, I can't do that with the restrictions on deliveries. I've heard of Parsec some years…
In this time of global pandemic, not only are there more people jumping onto remote online meetings, but there seems to be more people trying out livestreaming and recording videos for the benefit of others online. However, unlike most any other element you're including in your recording, audio from a microphone will tend to be very finicky. There's a lot of factors that go into the quality of…