technical

X11’s xdotool cli is snazzy, and solved an annoying window placement problem.

Some Thoughts on MQTT

Playing around with Tasmota - as the sensing core of an IoT-based swimming pool temperature control system.

Progress, but not where I want it to be. But it builds and installs the FreeRTOS AWS IoT demo.

A few quick notes on getting the AWS IoT C SDK running on Linux.

Dipping a toe into the FreeRTOS ESP32 world.

Finally got a few minutes to play withe the ESP32-C3 DevKit that Espressif was kind enough to ship. So I made a blinky light using the onboard WS2812 LED.

Just started playing with Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.

This week I passed the AWS SysOps Administrator (Associate) Exam. Here’s some notes on what I did to prepare, and observations of the process.

A quick measure of the costs of running on-premise computers.

A simple hotkey extension in Chrome that makes my life easier.

Quick reminder: how to increase the copy-paste buffers size in iTerm2.

Everyone is all on fire about SRE. But what is it really? It’s as easy as 1-2-3 if you boil it down to the basics.

The Blackburn theme for Hugo has a bug in how it shows social media icons. Here’s how to fix it.

Hugo made a change that broke image embedding using tags. Here’s how to fix it.

Debian not good for me on the desktop - back to Ubuntu, lost the snaps.

The Raspberry Pi Zero W is likely the basis of my next few projects.

Ubuntu just went too far with the snap crap. Back to Debian!

A trip down memory lane: the first linux telephony drivers

One of the core principles of modern “DevOps” development is to treat your documentation as code, just like code. My team at Cisco open sourced how we do that.

In AWS the AMI ID for a particular VM image is unique to that region. But it’s name is consistent across AWS. When building infra-as-code (such as terraform) use the name, not the ID. And some musings on terraform. Is it still the right answer for infra-as-code?

Link to posted video “CloudSphere: Impedance Matching Legacy Apps to Prometheus Monitoring by Greg Herlein & David Wang”

Quick reminder how to enable RDP sessions from OSX to an Ubuntu box.

SSH tunnels are basically indistinguishable from magic.

The default behavior of Ubuntu 18.04 is not friendly for a notebook that swaps back and forth from desk to mobile.

What exactly is Cloudy DevOps? How do you go from classic data center Enterprise deployments to the cloud? Here’s some of what I’ve learned across a half-dozen teams who’ve done it.

I’m building a robotics board that basically is a WiFi REST interface to a variety of I2C sensors - the I2C side uses an I2C switch driven by an ESP32. My first RBOT board arrived, but alas, I got schooled on surface mount part numbering.

From 1997 to 2010 I believed it was only a matter of time before Linux on the desktop became a reality. I gave up in 2010 and went to OSX. But we may finally be close! Here’s my notes on installing Linux Ubuntu 18.04 on a Dell Inspiron 15 7000. It’s the easiest and happiest linux ever for me.

On Becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)

Thoughts on AWS re:Invent 2018

I2C Tools I am Using for the RBOT Project

I2C Port Expander for Robotics Use - Getting Started with the NXP PCAL6416A