While looking for personal projects to work on, I turned back to my blog. I’d been using WordPress for almost 20 years, but felt like it was time for something more modern, and more cost effective. After having played with Hugo in the past, I decided to give it a try. Back in 02019 I had migrated my site from a VPS to AWS LightSail. It was an interesting project, and I learned a lot while also lowering my monthly costs from about $10 to $5.

A little over a week ago we had onsite Microsoft training for Azure Fundamentals, followed by a proctored exam through Pearson Vue. We are a Mac shop and as part of the exam, you had to run the Microsoft Secure Browser which would lock down your computer to prevent switching apps, desktops, or anything else that could allow for cheating.

After the exam (I passed with flying colors), I noticed that some of my Mac Gestures were not working. I did not realize how dependent I was on Mission Control (the three-finger swipe up) until it was broken. All of the three and four-finger gestures were affected in some way.

After having to run through this on a new computer, I figured I would document it for later use.

I received a 15 gallon used Rye Whiskey from my wife for my birthday last year. I had been meaning to build a barrel stand for it, but had not gotten around to it with travel and the holidays. As it’s a new year, this should be an easy one to cross off the list. I was not able to find too much online regarding plans. I did find this site but quickly realized this was way too low to the ground to be able to siphon beer out.

First week of progress. Started small and have continuously added/improved. At this point I have a Lambda function in Python that takes the input of action and project then append the time (hard-coded to be EST). I think I need to simplify back to the original thought of just doing start and stop time, though other input is good for testing (see here).

Without further ado, here’s the progress made so far.

Having gotten back from re:Invent 2016 with ideas brimming, I thought it time to start another personal project, this time more tech-centric. My idea is to start simple: a project to write a simple Lambda that will tweet when I am working on the project (meta, I know). Then continue from there, see which services I don’t get a chance to play with at work I can integrate.  Right now thoughts include Alexa triggering the Lambda function, storing some data in DynamoDB for future use, a mobile app through Mobile Hub… sky’s the limit. I am dubbing this project Codename: Applesauce.

I can think of thirty reasons

Why I’m where I am today

All the things I didn’t do

And all the things I did.

I don’t have a lot of regrets

Because I’m still too young to

Say “I’ll never get to do this or that.”

- John Millard - Thirty Reasons

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

- Robert A. Heinlein

Recently I decided to watch some sports on WMC. After attempting to watch TV on Windows Media Center, I kept getting the error, “Viewing or Listening Conflict, No tuner to Satisfy The Current Request”. I tried to reinstall the HDHomeRun drivers, I tried to scan all channels again. It seemed everything I tried would not work, and Google was not being much help.

Then I remember that I recently upgraded my home WiFi Router and dug in to it a little bit more on that front. I found that since WPC is always in the foreground, when then network changed, I never classified the network type (Home, Work, Public). Windows by default will set any new connection to Public for security concerns.

Recently I ran into an issue with the default s3cmd package (v1.0.0) in the Ubuntu repositories. When using a very specific IAM user with PutObject only allowed for a bucket, files over 15MB would error out. After digging into the issue, I found out this was due to the way s3cmd (or maybe just s3 in general) handles large file uploads. Anything over 15MB will be broken into smaller pieces of a multi-part upload.