Posts in English
Make Search Great Again!
- 10 June 2023
- World
- English
- Technology
Internet search is basically useless now, I heard it described as “no longer a search engine, but an add serving platform”. The search results have deteriorated to the point where it is even worse than an add platform it is now just a market place.
Node Virtual Environment nodeenv
- 06 January 2023
- World
- English
- Technology
If you are use to working with python virtual environments you may want to have the same experience when working with nodejs. For that you can use the python package nodenv
Chilli Crab Recipe 🌶️🦀
It is more complicated to eat chilli crab than to cook it. This is an easy recipe. Prepare the chilli paste earlier (take about 30 mins). When you are ready to eat, it only takes 10 minutes to cook.
Philips HF3520
- 16 October 2022
- World
- English
- Technology
My HF3520 had a mainboard failure and my attempts to repair it also failed. I have salvaged some of the components. Trying to save the environment by keeping them out of landfill in the hope someone else needs the parts
Dell WD19TB screen flashing with M1 Mac
- 10 July 2022
- World
- English
- Technology
New 2022 M1 Macbook external display flickers when plugged into the Dell WD19TB docking station.
Download page including assets loaded at runtime
- 06 February 2022
- World
- English
- Technology
curl and wget can be used to archive a site but even with the most exotic command line switches they will omit dynamically loaded assets pulled via javascript during run time. curl and wget will not follow them and the site will not work for later offline viewing. To download all the assets including dynamically loaded data we can generate a HAR file from the developer tools view in chrome.
Arch Linux on X1 Carbon 6th Gen
- 10 January 2022
- World
- English
- Technology
This is a bunch of random notes on installing Arch Linux on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Gen.
Arch Linux Tips
- 10 January 2022
- World
- English
- Technology
This is a bunch of random tips on Arch Linux.
Pagerduty Cloudwatch integration
- 09 January 2022
- World
- English
- Technology
It is possible to send your own custom payload to the Pagerduty Cloudwatch integration from a Lambda (instead of via a Cloudwatch alarm). Pagerduty does not document the internals but if you publish a custom message to the SNS topic that you have a HTTPS subscription to Pager duty following these simple rules you will see the event in Pagerduty.
Send payload to AWS Lambda from Cloudwatch scheduled event
How to send payload to AWS Lambda from Cloudwatch scheduled event.
The Foolproof Scones
These scones take max 30 mins to prep and cook and are very simple and enjoyable.
M5 Paper e-ink Calculator
- 27 November 2021
- World
- English
- Technology
I added an M5 Paper to my collection of dev boards and decided to make a basic calculator to teach my son to count. Since he is only a few months old he mostly uses it as an expensive teething device.
Python 3.10 tips
- 10 October 2021
- World
- English
- Technology
Handy tips and notes about Python 30.8 10, 11 and beyond.
Demystifying AWS IAM Policies: Unraveling De Morgan’s Laws and S3 Buckets Policy
- 12 September 2021
- World
- English
- Technology
As of September 2021 You will now get error messages that detail the source of a IAM access block for the following policy types:
Trust on Cloud AWS S3 Threat Model
Trust on Cloud have open sourced their AWS S3 threat model, this release is a great tool to make sense of the “shared responsibility model” and what “responsibility” means for AWS customers.
Monitoring VPN / Direct Connect Connectivity
In an on premise network it is typical to do some type of topology discovery via the MIB-II SNMP tables of all your network gear and then use ICMP to ping each of the discovered routers or switches respective management interfaces to validate connectivity and contribute to intelligence when parts of the network go dark and speed up root cause analysis.
TLS/SSL Certificate Authority (CA) Trust store verification
- 31 January 2021
- World
- English
- Technology
The CA trust store is how a TLS client establish trust with the servers offered certificates. Curl uses openssl and Python uses its own store (like Java). The store on my system is located here:
Running Amazon Linux 2 on prem on VMware
There is no default ec2-user or root password set for the Amazon Linux 2 ova. You must use cloud-init via it’s nocloud datasource
Error: The maximum number of rules per security group has been reached
- 06 January 2021
- World
- English
- Technology
How to deal with the error: “The maximum number of rules per security group has been reached.”
Stringer Self Hosted RSS Reader
- 27 December 2020
- World
- English
- Technology
My setup is using the docker compose file and a local build of the docker image
(since docker hub image is years old). Here is a dark theme (solarized) for the
CSS. Just paste this over your
stringer/app/assets/stylesheets/application.css file. I did not spend much
time on it but it looks good enough for my taste.
The Perfect Neapolitan Pizza
In Italy a society; Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana makes the rules when it comes to every aspect of the Naples pizza and they describe the rules of a Naples pizza in extreme technical detail here this is a great read if you are a pizza nerd and it details the exact procedure to cook a perfect Napoletana pizza.
AWS Sagegemaker Jupyter Notebook
I wanted to upgrade the version of pandas that comes with AWS Sagemaker Notebook to > 1.1 because this simplify handling of group by with null or NaN values.
The Best Garlic Chilli Prawns 🌶🍤
These are mediterranean style garlic chilli prawns, normally I double the garlic and chilli for this recipe and the oil is so good to dip with warm fresh crusty bread.
OSS logstash with AWS Opendistro for Elasticsearch
To get logstash talking to the Open Distro Elasticsearch the first thing that should be understood is that open distro only works with the OSS (Apache 2.0 Licensed) edition of the Elastic tools and not the Elastic licensed edition (Xpack).
Intercept HTTP/HTTPS TLS traffic
- 22 November 2020
- World
- English
- Technology
Use open source project mitmproxy and have visibility into what iOS apps (or anything else) are sending back to their mother ship.
Moved blog to alabaster with Sphinx
- 21 November 2020
- World
- English
- Technology
Mostly notes to self on how to deploy and architecture / setup. Inspired by https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch
Logstash ingestion of AWS billing customer usage reports
To get the CUR reports into elastic search:
Kubernetes tips
- 08 November 2020
- World
- English
- Technology
The problem is solved by removing the leading slash after the podname colon separator:
Enterprise tips for AWS Workspaces and AWS Managed AD
- 08 November 2020
- World
- English
- Technology
fjleon of Reddit has pointed out that today many of the limitations I have written about have been solved. see the discussion on Reddit Or check the documentation for the latest.
IAM resource based policy implicit allow
- 28 January 2020
- World
- English
- Technology
Resource policy are typically used to allow cross account access for resources where it is supported some of which include:
AWS Boto KeyError endpoint_resolver in session.py when using multithreading
- 14 January 2020
- World
- English
- Technology
When using multithreading in Python with AWS boto to get a session I was randomly hitting this error:
Route 53 Associate multiple private hosted zones with same name
- 10 January 2020
- World
- English
- Technology
Can I associate multiple private hosted zones with the same domain name to the same VPC?
CloudTrail and VPC Endpoints Logging
Today I learnt that AWS CloudTrail does not log requests that are denied by VPC endpoint policy. The reason for this is that it would allow an attacker to exfiltrate data via CloudTrail and the VPC endpoint outside of the VPC! (For example by sending lots of requests with data you want to extract in the request fields)
Expose WSL2 To LAN
- 30 November 2019
- World
- English
- Technology
I need to connect to my WSL2 container from other machines on the network over SSH:
My container is assigned 172.24.208.2 and I will map 5022 to 22 on the host.
Cloudwatch Loginsights handy queries
- 26 November 2018
- World
- English
- Technology
Find all requests matching URL
Cloudformation: Provided Load Balancers may not be valid. Please ensure they exist and try again
Spent too much time troubleshooting the following error but I happy to find the solution for this error:
Empty the clipboard as keystrokes with AutoHotKey
- 01 January 2018
- World
- English
- Technology
This is an AutoHotKey script for pasting the clipboard contents by simulating hardware keystrokes. It also fixes for stuck keys such as control and shift keys after the shortcut runs which are useful when pasting into a KVM, VMware console, RDP or Citrix session where latency is high or clipboard support doesn’t exist.
postfix/smtp[5600]: fatal: valid hostname or network address required in server description
- 25 October 2017
- World
- English
- Technology
Getting the error:
Introducing X-ENI or Cross Account ENI
- 24 October 2017
- World
- English
- Technology
Stumbled on an interesting new feature based on a commit in the AWS .net SDK which may have been released early.
TQFP-48 Breakout AKA NO. SA248 XELTEK Pinout
I am working on a project with the STM32F103C8 and I not using a dev board but rather a breakout board called SMT Test Socket TQFP-48 Breakout AKA NO. SA248 XELTEK
Tomu Send Keyboard on capacitive sense touch
Tomu is a USB chip with capacitive sense buttons that fits inside a USB port and has a ARM EFM32HG309 MCU and a few LEDs inside.
Python quick dirty ping scan subnet
- 05 March 2017
- World
- English
- Technology
This script will automatically ping scan the subnet your host is connected to. To do this it does the following:
Tourists went off road, stranded overnight in Kruger park encounter Leopards
Here is a true story about our safari trip in South Africa and our harrowing encounter with leopards and hyenas, as we narrowly escaped death in the long grass.
Proxyify application that does not support proxy
- 01 February 2016
- World
- English
- Technology
I have a legacy application that needs to connect over a proxy such as squid
or HAProxy to a service on the internet.
In other words I want to use netcat (nc) or something similar to proxy
traffic through a proxy using the proxy protocol (or CONNECT method).
Error when checking or applying host profile compliance “coredump partition”
- 13 May 2015
- World
- English
- Technology
The following error message occurs when you either
LiPo Charging Hack
- 01 October 2013
- World
- English
- Technology
When trying to charge a LiPo that had been drained to 0 voltage I was getting an error:
Make an 8 bit adder out of relays
- 27 April 2013
- World
- English
- Electronics
I want to build a relay based 8 bit adder for fun, kind of like a puzzle or playing chess to exercise a different way of thinking. Also the clacking of the relay is quite soothing.
How to check MTU with ping on ESX (or any OS)
- 14 February 2012
- World
- English
- Technology
Just keep decreasing the packet size with -s flag on the ping command:
2147943712 Task Scheduler
- 20 September 2011
- World
- English
- Technology
When trying to get the Task Scheduler to run regardless of if a user is logged on or not.
Make any Windows window transparent
- 13 March 2011
- World
- English
- Technology
Everything displayed in the Windows user session is ultimately controlled by the Windows GDI Any everything displayed in a users session must run as that user (without modifying kernel or display drivers). Python provides a convenient API to control GDI.
Failover Cluster add disk fails on Windows
- 30 April 2010
- World
- English
- Technology
When trying to add a new cluster disk in a Failover Cluster the following error comes up in the report.