Man Shouts At Clouds
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Midnight Commander

Midnight Commander (mc) is one of those awesome tools that just makes life so much easier. However the one option that should always be turned on by default but never is is Lynx-like Motion which basicly allows you to navigate the mc pane with arrow keys.

AWS Renewal

So it had been over two years since I’d last sat my AWS SysOps Associate exam and it should have expired … but heres my experiences of renewing it.

Ansible Vs Cygwin

New year, New job, New laptop. As part of the fun and games when changing job I’ve been handed a windows laptop and rather than immediately running off and installing a Linux distro or whining till they gave me a mac I decided to stick with it. Unfortunately due to $Reasons, upgrading to Win10 anniversary edition to make use of the windows subsystem for linux is also out :( Cygwin to save the day So after installing all the usual tools I found I need to be able to work with ansible for which there is no windows binary and rather than having to bother with jumping onto a local vm every time I wanted to play with it I figured it can’t be that hard to get working … and it wasn’t except for one little package.

Ablocking with Pi Hole

So like most people I really dislike adverts on websites, and while it’s nice and simple to throw ublock origin on to a browser when running on a desktop/laptop once tablets/phones/internet enables fridges it becomes a bit more tricky to get rid of the obnoxious adverts. This is where pi-hole comes in handy. Not only does it block adverts for your entire network but you also get a fancy looking dashboard showing all sorts of metrics and all you have to do is (not so) simply repoint your the DHCP service to use pi hole on a router to use it instead of your ISP provided service.

Enabling U2F in Fedora

So the majority of my accounts are secured with two factor authentication. This was all fine until I tried to use my U2F enabled yubi key on a fresh Fedora install and kept getting An Error Occurred when trying to use it to login to both Google and Github. Not the end of the world as both accounts are also setup with time based one time passwords (TOTP) for just this reason.

Hibernation in Fedora

So I’ve finally gotten round to installing the Fedora 25 Beta on a spare laptop and it looks nice. However something seems to be insisting on suspending when the lid is closed, not an unreasonable default behavior but this is not what I want in this case. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a GUI in the latest gnome for editing hibernation settings, which is a slight pain in the arse.

Hugo

So instead of attempting to rebuild a ruby environment for Jenkins when I flattened and recreated my local lab setup I’ve decided to jump over to using hugo instead. This was mostly down to the fact that it’s a single binary and it’s hard enough to motivate myself into posting let alone when I need to fight ruby dependencies.

Compiling Textual

Textual is a nice gui IRC client for osx for times when you want inline images and clickable links by default. You really should just fork out the 4 quid for it… However since as it is open source, you just can compile your own copy for free. It’s a fairly simple procedure and even on a ye olde 2011 Macbook air only takes a few mins. This guide assumes that you have git and xcode setup and installed.

Cloudformation and Cloudfront

Since as I’m having fun (for a given value of fun) with Cloudformation at the moment, I thought I’d give trying to setup a hosting for a static website using Cloudformation with the intention being to eventually wind up with everything being automated right down to SSL certificates. However I’m currently a bit stumped as to how to import my SSL certificate from LetsEncrypt into Cloudfront automatically. but heres how to do the rest.

SSL and Transmission

Transmission is a bittorrent client that just works and is piss easy to setup for remote management either using the web interface or RPC. However by default it is also piss easy for anyone to sniff your credentials so this is where nginx and Lets Encrypt come in. First we’ll need the transmission-daemon installed and running (in fedora & ubuntu the package is transmission-daemon). In the settings.json file for transmission you’ll need to set a username, password and whitelist some IP addresses.