Test Post

Testing microformats in this theme, and testing mastodon syndication.

Extracting secrets from AWS-Vault

Recently I was in the situation in which I needed to do some automation involving AWS-Vault, which is a tool for securely managing AWS access keys on developer workstations. Until now I had been using the file backend, which relies on encrypted-at-rest files to store the secrets. Since there is obviously no caching involved here, every time I wanted to use a secret I would need to type in the passphrase to unlock it, with no cached copy of the passphrase involved.

Hackerbeach Days 1-3

For the last few days I’ve been spending time in El Rodadero, Colombia before setting off to Palomino for Hackerbeach. Another participant arrived today, and joined me in relaxing before the primary Hackerbeach work in Palomino. It’s peak season here in El Rodadero, which means all the restaurants, the malecón, and the beach are filled to the brim with people, mostly traveling Colombians who come here for what is justifiably one of the most gorgeous beaches in the country.

Hackerbeach Day 0

It’s been hell, doing a 4 flight stint for the better part of a day with no off-plane sleep. I read recently that airplane humidity is typically around 20%, which is drier than the Sahara desert. Lesson learned: always bring and fill your water bottle. When you’re dehydrated, the mucus membranes have trouble keeping a layer of mucus, and can let more dangerous external matter through. That results in a sensation, that, when you swallow, can be unpleasant.

Working WWAN on the X1 Carbon Gen 6

When I initially received my new X1 Carbon I was very excited at the new hardware. More pixels, more lumens, more cores. After I got over my initial euphoria, I noticed that some things didn’t work, and confirmed such by a very helpful Archwiki page. Some of the things that didn’t work include ACPI suspend-to-RAM sleep (since corrected in a BIOS update), the the fingerprint sensor (still outstanding), and the WWAN LTE Cat9 card that Lenovo seems so proud about.

IndieWebCamp 2018

I’m looking forward to attending the 2018 IndieWebCamp. It’s a small 2-day event happening in Portland and is exploring the topics of independent web hosting and technologies to knit them together. If you’re in Portland, you should attend too! https://2018.indieweb.org/

Installing RemixOS to an internal drive

After initially running RemixOS, the new Android build for PCs, I decided that I would rather play with booting it natively from my SSD instead of from a USB device. Performance should be better, it would free my USB thumb drive up for other duties, and it would make booting more convenient. This turned out to be a relatively simple operation. What follows is my methodology for doing that. Please note that these instructions assume you are running Linux.