Well.
I started to write this.
Then I changed my mind and decided I didn’t want to write it.
Then I changed my mind and decided that I did want to write it.
I just don’t feel very comfortable about it, I don’t think.
We always knew that the smaller child definitely showed signs of autism, extremely high functioning autism but autism nonetheless.
This was confirmed at a parent/teacher thing the other week....
Just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out why the hell this new blog post wouldn’t render on Hugo.
Turns out when you put the date format in, and you put it inj as “2023-10-9” it won’t work. It won’t error either. But it won’t work.
So I’ve fixed it now, after trying two different browsers, looking around recent Hugo bugs (I just updated). Too many changes all at once....
I can’t believe it’s been nearly 3 months since my last post.
I’m sure I started to write a blog post.
This is on my PC. Maybe there’s a commit half finished on my laptop….lets see….
Nope.
Looks like I got as far as updating Hugo and that’s about it.
So.
Yeah.
Three months.
3D printer had a bit of action, I decided to make myself a secondary gaming table for the living room/coffee table....
As we rapidly approach the end of June, quite a lot has happened in the last month or so since the last time I posted.
I decided to give TPU another go. It went pretty well once I used a glue stick on the bed and took things super slow. I’ve still pretty much mangled a print sheet, but that was expected and I had another one lined up and ready to go....
Wow, how has it been nearly a full month since that Star Trek Bridge Commander post?! (And probably the last time I turned my gaming PC on too actuall, where did May go?).
Fairly busy one, we’re about to have our third bank holiday of the Month (it’s nice not working Mondays as well as Fridays). I went to Scotland for the first time properly (for work) and got to catch up with a bestie whilst I was up there....
I’ll start off this post by saying that the whole reason for this post (and the game behind it) is 100% due to the most excellent third season of Star Trek Picard that we’ve just had. It captured the continuation of the Next Generation era extremely well and gave me an itch that I need to scratch - be it with a board game or a video game.
The board game Star Trek Frontiers looks great, but it’s very hard to get hold of and is selling for well over the RRP....
Hello!
I started writing a new blog post about 2 weeks ago. Then forgot. Then went to write a new blog post today and saw that there was one started, I say started - I cloned the last file and changed it’s name to the date and ’tired’. Didn’t update the metadata or anything, or change the page title or change the content.
So I didn’t really start writing a new file at all....
Table progress has been going okay - mostly. Up until I tried to be clever, that is.
I was printing some bottom rails. These were taking about 8 hours. Set another lot going overnight before bed and woke up to find the printer had been beeping for hours (and had woken up my wife who was not happy). Looks like the Prusament refill for galaxy black is less than ideal for use as there’s a number of bad reviews on the website about it jamming/getting pinched in the sides of the spools....
So here we are, a week after the clocks ‘sprang forward’ and an hour was stolen from me.
As I’ve gotten older, the clock change has been consistently kicking my ass year after year and I don’t know why.
I presume its effectively jetlag. And I presume it’s because I start work early and I’m not used to being up that early anymore.
Starting work at 7:30, the clocks go forward and all of a sudden you’re starting work at 6:30....
It told me not to worry about the machine uprising.
I told it to write me some stuff about retro computing and this is what it came up with….
What is Retro Computing? The History of Retro Computing The Advantages and Disadvantages of Retro Computing How to Get Started with Retro Computing The Future of Retro Computing Let’s dive in!
What is Retro Computing?
Retro computing refers to the use of older computer systems or technology, typically those that are at least 10-15 years old or more....
So less than 90 hours since returning home, I’m on the way to London for work again. On a Sunday, on Mothering Sunday of all days.
Last trip of March though. When I return home on Wednesday that’ll be it and now that I’ve cancelled the Star Wars Celebration tickets, the scheduled travel over Easter isn’t happening anymore either.
So I get to just stay home for a bit, recenter and refocus and hopefully start to do a few things at the weekends now that the weather is improving....
Hopefully you sung that to the melody of a Nirvana song, just like I did when I wrote it.
The time is 20:24. It’s Wednesday 15th March and there is a train strike tomorrow. I’ve been in London since Monday afternoon and I’m currently on my way home. Ordinarily I’d be travelling home in the morning after another night of sleep, but with the strikes, there’s no way of getting back up....
I had an amazing time in Airecon this weekend. Lots and lots of boardgames were played. In fact, my total games played for the weekend (Thurs-Sun) stands at 61 games. My total for 2023 so far stands at 131, which is in no small part thanks to Dracarys Dice. Love that game. So much it’s been played 69 times since I got it.
I’ll post up some more thoughts and photos and stuff when I’m less tired....
When Prusa say 2-3 weeks lead time, they really mean it. It’s been 11 days and no movement yet on my order.
My estimated dispatch date period keeps changing from anywhere between the 3rd to the 11th of March. More than likely it’ll ship whilst I’m out of the country and end up in customs hell or something. There’s about £200 VAT to pay on it with DHL (unless they forget to charge it), so they’ll phone me/email me to pay before they try to deliver it anyways....
So.
Funny story.
I bought a printer today. Went for a Prusa. Went direct (was looking at kit builds that people had built - but they had a lot of build time and you just don’t know what these things have been doing).
It wasn’t cheap.
Not one bit.
But I went for the fully built version (rather than spending 8 hours on what would have probably been fun, but also a pain) - plus it comes with warranty and 10% discount on future orders this way....
You know, I’ve gotten a number of boardgames the last few months that need decent inserts.
Inserts that have been designed and are freely available on things like thingiverse.
Do you know what I don’t have?
A 3D printer.
The Creality CR20-Pro was a pain in the arse. I spent days, literally days calibrating it and getting it perfect, and it would print fine, and then for no reason whatsoever, it’d just stop printing fine....
I’ve been using spreadsheets to manage the monthly finances for years now. What we’ve got coming in, what we’ve got going out, bills, debts, spends, food, what we can afford to pay out.
One thing we’ve not had much of over the last 10 years or so is savings, that’s about to change as we’re about to start hammering the savings so that we can hopefully look to buy a house at some point....
A week-ish on from the last post, January blues seem a little less prevalent today.
I’ve resubscribed to BoardGameArena and spent an hour or so playing some of my favourite games. Won a game of Can’t Stop. Won a game of Color Pop. Lost a game of Welcome To, Railroad Ink, Ticket to Ride.
I love Welcome To, it’s such a fun game, and it’s one of those really interesting ones where everyone has the same opportunities as everyone else, but its clear after a few turns that everyone has gone off on a tangent and you have several different games going on....
Happy New Year. Hope it’s a great one for you, that you achieve all of your dreams and goals and that you get through it in one piece.
Personally I’m taking a break from social media and having a social media free 2023 - so we’ll see how that goes.
January blues have set in early this year....
I’m in quite a fortunate position generally when it comes to my career. I’ve had quite a few interviews over the course of the last 23 years or so and I can count the number of times I’ve not gotten a role I’ve gone for (as far as interview stage) on one hand.
I always tend to do quite well on interviews, not so great on technical tests (AWS aside) but in talking through concepts and competency questions, usually, anyway....
The ASUS zenwifi mesh nodes I have at home have been pretty stable up to press.
I had some issues when we first got a BT TV box a few months back and I scoured the Internet for any information.
The BT TV box is a Youview box and it uses the Internet to get all of the non terrestrial channels. It actually uses multicast for this. There’s a few settings that you need to enable on your router to get this to work....
And another three months between blog posts pretty much. Things have been somewhat hectic, between house moves, school moves, work uncertainty, half terms, hospital admissions and board game conventions, it’s been pretty manic really. Even though it doesn’t feel like I’ve done that much.
I’m hoping to actually play some more games this weekend, Harry has asked so I need to figure out what exactly we can play - I’d love to play Rebellion with him but I don’t think he’d get it just yet - give it another 12 months if we can step up gradually....
Almost managed to get through the entirety of August without a blog post. Almost. In fact, we’re fast approaching it being two months since I last posted.
It’s been quite a ride, not long after my last post, the patio in the garden of the house that we were renting was finished, there was a hot tub sale on at the local B&Q and I decided to surprise my wife with an inflatable hot tub that she’s been asking me for the last few years....
Almost three months since my last post. I think we’re at the point where it’s to be expected now.
There’s been so much that’s happened. I got a new laptop, the new laptop broke and got a new motherboard, the new laptop broke again so went back for a full refund.
We went on holiday, the youngest got chicken pox and we got stuck out there. It was a bit of a nightmare really....
Okay, so yeah, it’s been a while. It always is. Two months this time.
But.
I saw something today that compelled me to write a new blog post.
Lets start at the beginning
The Secret of Monkey Island, and the sequel LeChuck’s Revenge, were two of the games I played ‘A LOT’ on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. I listen to the soundtracks, when they released special editions of the games I pretty much bought them on every platform that I could....
Things have been extremely busy.
At work, at home, everywhere else. Busy.
The last few months, things feel like they’ve accelerated, and they’re still accelerating. Things are getting back to ’normal’, whatever that is.
Companies are wanting people to head back into the office after nearly 2 years of enforced working from home. That feels a bit weird. A lot of people aren’t as fortunate as I am. I get to go down to the office when it suits, but there’s always the option to join in with whatever activities are going on remotely too if it doesn’t work out....
Wha?
Every time I post a new blog post up, I start it off with ‘omg, I can’t believe its whatever date/time it is’
Yup, that’s me.
This time though, its been almost 4 months, that’s over a quarter of the year, we’re talking a third of the year - what gives?
I haven’t really blogged at all since changing jobs at the end of August.
It has been busy!...
Just a quick post test to check something is working out.
Full post to follow at some point this weekend. Lots to talk about.
Hope everyone is keeping safe....
I replaced my Macbook Pro battery for the third time today. It seems that when you order replacement batteries, they aren’t always that good.
The replacement battery from Ebay was better than the Ninjabatt one, but it still suffered from issues with the capacity dropping down to 6% out of the blue and then told me that the battery could only hold 94% of it’s factory designated charge.
I contacted the seller on eBay and he sent me a replacement....
I mentioned in my last post that I’d ordered a new battery for my aging Macbook Pro 2013 15" Retina.
Before I continue, I would just like to say that I do not recommend or advocate that you carry this particular piece of maintenance out, Apple are quite clear that the battery in these Macbook Pro models is not user serviceable. You should take your MacBook Pro to the nearest Apple Store and pay £199....
I’ve managed to catch a breath this morning, in between (another) water change in the aquarium, updating the Raspberry Pis and waiting for the new 3D printer nozzles to arrive today.
Lets talk water changes. So. When I last had tropical fish (probably 15 years ago), I got a tank, left it for a few days, got some fish, cleaned it out when it got dirty, cleaned the filters every few weeks, all was great....
Busy is not even the word. Busy is in there somewhere, along with ‘OH MY GOSH, WHY AM I SO….’.
Things are crazy. They’re crazy at home, they’re crazy at work. I’m about to enter the final three weeks of a three month notice and it has simply flown by, I’ve never known anything like it. Time feels like its accelerating and it just doesn’t slow down.
Which as a concept is strange, I know I’ve spoken about time perception before - and there are still days where depending on what I’m doing and what I get done, the day or at least the morning can seem to stretch out forever....
I’ve just spent the last 10 minutes, updating Hugo, trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with my Visual Studio Code and why I couldn’t see this new blog post in the local render.
Turns out it’s not the 11th of July. That’s in the future, that’s tomorrow.
Stupid date.
Still, that’s good I’ve gained a day. At least it’s not Sunday….yet.
I am still alive, promise. I’ve just been extraordinarily busy....
Good afternoon evening!!
I started writing this blog post nearly a week ago, well, maybe Sunday last week - either way it’s been 5 days or so and a lot of it doesn’t make sense anymore and has mostly been rewritten.
Both this week and last week have been an action packed thriller with excitement, sadness, ups, downs, highs, lows and a fair few bits in between. That’s why the amount of blog posts reduced from one every day or so to pretty much radio silence for two weeks....
So.
In yesterday’s update I said how I’d managed to get everything fixed and all was working, or so I thought.
That didn’t last very long.
I started having some issues with extrusion. The bed wasn’t level and the Z-offset was dragging the print.
I was also getting strange stoppages where the print would start the brim, do a line then lock up.
There were a few weird timeout issues too....
One of my ‘golden rules’ pretty much wherever I’ve worked is that we never release to production on a Friday afternoon.
There’s a few good reasons for this.
It’s Friday - quite often, more end customers will use your platform(s) at the weekend. There’s generally less support staff around on a weekend. Any issues may not come to light until Saturday It’s just a bad idea. Don’t do it. Nope, not even for that reason you think is a good idea....
I’ve been using the 3D printer quite a bit this week. I’ve still not finished the Dinogenics stuff yet, just a couple more things to finish and then I’ll be able to rearrange all of the dino meeples into their own little containers. Fun eh?
The only problem is, the stepper drivers are EXTREMELY loud, whilst this doesn’t bother me too much if I’m listening to music on my noise cancelling headphones, it can cause problems on meetings, though the noise cancellation on Teams is pretty good, it sounds like it still gets through from time to time....
I’m sure that everyone has seen the memes that ask what if oxygen is toxic and it just takes 80-100 years (if you’re lucky) to kill you, or if the trees are really using us and it’s not us using them. Anyway, that was an attempt at a funny, relevant title and description. I don’t really buy into conspiracy theories. I might buy an axe though if they keep it up :D (only joking, I like the trees, they provide shade, and oxygen)...
Following on from my 3D printing firmware escapades, the printer is still working (quite nicely) and it hasn’t burnt the house down (bonus) though I am still a little wary of leaving it on overnight.
I’m pretty much at the end of my filament run, with my failed giant Ahsoka bust and the various other bits and pieces I’d printed, I Was down to my last half roll of 3DQF aqua PLA....
I haven’t used the 3D printer for around 8 weeks or so. I have to admit, I’ve missed the background noise a little.
I started off a huge 6 day print, and something happened to it about 4 days in, it had some weird layer shift (which I think was caused by infill being too little at certain points) which meant the otherwise flawless print was pretty much ruined. What’s worse, because it was the best part of 700g of filament, there wasn’t a lot left from my 1KG roll....
I turned 40 in March. The event itself was pretty much just like any other day. I had a little bit of an existential crisis in the weeks leading up to the ‘big day’ but then around a week before, I started to feel fine about it.
Time is such a weird concept. I always remember being a teenager, my mum and dad always said that school was the best time of your life and when you get older the days just fly by....
I can’t believe it’s been over three months since my last blog post. Anyone would think I didn’t update the site or something.
It’s been a weird few months, in and out of lockdown, haven’t really been out, haven’t really seen anyone. Work is carrying on as normal from home.
The games room (or the MattCave as I call it), has been pretty much a full on working from home office for the last god knows how many months....
We got a notification from Luke’s school late on Friday that one of the staff who had been in close proximity with Luke has tested positive for COVID-19.
This means he has to self isolate for 14 days and isn’t allowed back at school until Friday 23rd October - which coincidentally is the same day they break up for October half term. Government guidelines say that if someone is self isolating, they should stay away from the rest of the people in the household - how on earth are you supposed to do that with a 4 year old?...
I got hold of a 3D printer this week, and I’ve been playing around printing things.
I’ve been slicing things on the PC and loading them onto SD card and then letting them print.
I was messing around trying to get a webcam streaming setup, didn’t find anything with a stream latency I was happy with.
Then I came across Octoprint, and Octopi, and oh my. It can control the printer, it can do timelapse, it can do streaming....
I can’t believe that it’s almost been a month since my last post (again).
We’ve had so much going on the last few weeks, it’s been crazy. We’ve moved house - I’m living somewhere that I’ve never lived before and we’re still waiting on getting the kids sorted out in their new school, but they should be back this week at some point, so that’s at least some form of normality restored after the last 6 months of home schooling and god knows what else....
Woke up to some absolutely fantastic news via email this morning.
Earlier this year, I entered the A Cloud Guru ‘AWS Guru of the week’. They basically post an exam question on their forum, and you have to answer it and justify your answer to say why it’s the best response and why the others don’t work - so you have to know what you’re talking about.
So I did that....
I could have sworn it was July just a second ago. I guess that’s what happens when you go on holiday to the coast on the 31st of July, have a crazy first day back at work on a Monday and wonder where on earth the time has gone.
I’ve written about time perception before and how it speeds up as you get older, it also speeds up as you start to take less notice of your surroundings....
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m seeing this day we call ‘Thursday’ (Or Thorsday as my friend Gareth would say) come around extremely often.
I mean, I know that it only comes around once per week. But it feels like it’s a lot more often than that. Every other day seems to be Thursday.
I guess that because tomorrow is Friday, and we’re well past the middle of the week and we’re almost at the weekend, it sort of feels like 3/4 of the way through....
How did we get to July?
I mean seriously?
I’ve done only 6 other posts since March, and I just, I don’t know. It’s like the passage of time has sped up.
I’ve had a bit of a fiddle around with the front page. I’ve dropped off the giant selfie. It looked daft. I didn’t like it. I’ve added a link to BoardGameGeek (BGG) in the navbar. I’ve rejigged the order a little and shortened the names so that they look better on a mobile....
The wonderful people at Disqus have given me a plus subscription (worth $10 a month) for free as my site is a personal blog/non-profile.
I guess that means that the comment section is here to stay. Which is pretty good. Considering this is all statically generated, and Disqus plugs into Hugo as part of the built in code, I like it a lot.
Considering the speed of the site, the cost of running it and the ability to be completely dynamic with it, I’m seriously impressed....
In typical fashion, I over-engineered a solution in my head, went through all the hardship of setting it up and then wasn’t overly happy with the results so went and did what I wanted properly.
I had this idea of having two different repos, and two different hugo pipelines. I could have the photoblog linked off the main site off the navbar, set up another cloudfront distribution, SSL fronted and a new repo....
I don’t think it’s any secret that I’ve suffered from mental health issues throughout my life. I don’t even think it started when Sue passed away either. I think there were issues before then.
As you may or may not have noticed, I don’t really blog anymore. I certainly don’t blog all that much about my thoughts or feelings. I don’t know whether or not it’s because I’ve matured and seem to internalise things more or whether or not it’s opinion that some things shouldn’t be shared and the world shouldn’t know about my problems....
I decided that I was fed up of the theme I had in place on the website. It was fairly basic looking and didn’t have a right lot going for it. It was good, just wasn’t as good as it could be, and it needed to have a dark mode, because nobody likes looking at a white screen at night, amirite?
Gosh its a pain in the backside if you want to post more than one post on the same day and all you’re using is date stamps and not timestamps....
When I fixed the draft post I’d left up since March the other day, I added in my Amazon Wish List to the menu. People are forever asking me when my birthday comes around, what I want - they’re constantly saying that I have everything and never want anything. So rather than buying things, I’ve started to put them on an Amazon wish list. These aren’t things that I want people to buy me, nor are they things that I would expect people to buy....
I should probably post a new blog post at some point, I’ve been sort of busy with the lockdown though.
I’ll post up something soon. Probably....
T’was the night before Airecon, and all through Harrogate, not a gamer was stirring, not even a MtG player.
Landed in Harrogate this afternoon and checked into my hotel. Promptly received a free upgrade to a club room, which in itself is fantastic, but the benefits that come with it are even better. There’s access to the club lounge which comes with free drinks and nibbles. I’m currently on my second bottle of Corona (yes, I chose it on purpose) and I have tortilla chips, popcorn, sweets and crisps....
It’s my birthday tomorrow!
Yay!
I don’t really get all that excited by them anymore to be honest. They’re just a reminder that I’m not 16 anymore and they’re always pretty disappointing. Same sort of stuff. Same sort of day.
My amazon wish list for anyone that wants to buy me anything…. :D
Stuff Matt wants
Anyway. I’m going to my mums tonight, she’s making her world famous Cornish Pasty, and there will be cake....
So here we are, three weeks on from the phone call from the doctor where I was told that I was prediabetic.
It’s been a fairly productive three weeks, I’ve gotten control of both my calorie intake and my exercise levels.
The exercise bike that I purchased is generally used most days (today is a rest day on account of my calves telling me so) and I’m generally having less than 1800 calories a day, with the occasional pure Huel x 3 1200 calorie days to keep things interesting....
I started to write this post nearly two weeks ago. I say I started to write, I created the basic post, figured out how to put images in to a folder so that Hugo would see them and generate them and then I didn’t actually write the post. Post was dated the 6th Feb. It’s now the 17th Feb.
So. Here we are.
I had my bi-annual blod test done and general check up at the doctors late January....
In just under two months, I’ll be travelling to Harrogate to attend Airecon. Airecon is a board gaming convention that runs over the weekend (Fri-Sun). It’s a fantastic weekend, away from digital distractions and an oppertunity to sit down with friends (old and new) around a table and play board games.
Tickets are still available here on the Airecon website.
The convention is running from March 13th to March 15th....
Without buying any more hardware, and wanting to use the equipment I already have to not only update my blog, but to do further development work concerning not just AWS but pretty much anything, there wasn’t much choice.
£19.99 feels like a bit of a sting, but only because we’re so used to free software and iPhone/iPad apps being so cheap.
Supporting indie developers is important, and to be fair there really is nothing else out there....
It’s almost payday. Which is great because I have no money left. At all.
Working copy worked a treat, git push is a paid for feature, you can free trial it for 10 days but then it’s £19.99 to unlock. It’s one of those where you get to use paid features for a certain amount of time and then when the developer decides, they charge another upgrade fee.
I’m not using this enough to warrant that at the moment....
Downloaded working copy, have set up the git repo on here and have cloned down from codecommit.
Created a new file, renamed it, am now typing into it.
When I commit and push, this should trigger the build and deploy process as per expectations.
Let’s see what happens....
My website has been offline for pretty much 5 months or so, simply because I wasn’t using it all that much and the AWS credit that I had, finally ran out and those $40 of services that I was running (and being billed for) every month just wasn’t really affordable.
One of my colleagues at work happened to mention hugo, I had a look into it and it looked moderately easy to migrate over from wordpress....
I’ve been told that when the company I work for first started to create new AWS accounts, they would have to set aside a day for it. A director also had to be tracked down in order to get hold of the company credit card details.
Fast forward a few years and this process still took at least an hour – maybe two hours depending on what it was you were creating....
I’m not sure about you, but my main experience of bullying at school was on the receiving end. I was bullied mainly about my weight. I’ve always been big. It’s never been that fun. It restricts some of the things I can do, it results in being pointed at and laughed at by strangers, it results in unwanted comments from some other strangers too and ‘friends’.
The worst part of this was at school....
Right, after finally getting around to it, I’ve sorted out my httpd conf so that it’s working as expected, moved some common parameters into a separate common configuration file, set up an additional VirtualHost entry and turned on listening through port 80 again.
Also taken another image of that so that when the spot instance invariably fails, I’ve got a new golden image to go.
I should probably add in some backup scripts and config backing off to s3....
The below makes 12 – but if you only fill the tins halfway up rather than most of the way up you’ll end up with crispier puddings rather than big floppy ones.
You will need:
250ml (about 1 US cup) of milk (I’ve used whole, semi and skimmed – it works well with all)
163g (1 and 1/3 US cups) of plain flour
5 large eggs
(you can also use the measuring jug method – break your eggs into the jug, say they make up to 400ml, pour them into your bowl, add 400ml of milk, pour that into your bowl and then pour flour in up to 400ml line then pour that into the bowl- what’s important here is equal measurements of the ingredients)...
The AWS summit was absolutely fantastic. Met up with a few colleagues I haven’t seen for years, learned a few new bits and pieces, saw some really energetic and charasmatic people present ideas, solutions, challenges and ideas and mingled with around 12,000 people who were all interested in AWS.
It was mind blowing to think that there were people all around me, brilliant people, trailblazers, thinkers, do-ers.
I can’t wait to go back next year, and all it did was whet the appetite to get out to AWS Re:Invent in Vegas....
This one has been brewing in my head for a few weeks now. It’s strange.
Do you ever feel like your life is a little bit like playing The Sims? Trying to juggle work, home, friends, other responsibilities and maintain all of those different relationships?
You used to have to give them a phone and have a chat with them to maintain that level of friendship. Absolute nightmare to manage, it still gives me palpitations now....
Came across this YouTube video earlier.
If one of the guys involved in putting together facebook (who has since left) is telling you to stay away and not use it, you should probably do that....
Turns out Bamboo wasn’t working properly – I think I’d started to create a test job, and that had broken the DB patch/reboot job. Just re-ran it through and all seems good now.
Need to stop it from emailing me every night and having me just ignore the emails. I might tie it into SNS or something. It’s good to have something to play with....
Last week I was on holiday from work, looking after the kids on half term. I found that a new game has hit the Nintendo Switch E-Store – Tetris 99. It’s Tetris meets Fortnite and it’s amazing.
A fast and frantic battle royale with 99 players all playing tetris at the same time, with a slightly updated version of the Tetris theme that we all know and love and with completed lines being sent to opponents that you can target in order to scupper their plans....
Looks like my main web server instance is costing less than $2 a month on a T3 Micro. That’s a spot instance with a fairly high bidding price set so that it’s very unlikely to ever be outbid and is still the cheapest way to provision EC2 capacity.
By the same token, my database server is also a T3 micro instance and that’s looking to cost just under $7 a month on demand – same uptime as the web server so you can see there’s a $5 saving....
Not a single server outage in the last three weeks. Which is great, it means that I’ve gotten everything set up properly as far as server updates, security groups and maintenance are concerned.
Bamboo seems to be doing what it’s meant to do and is rebooting the servers nightly. Everything seems to be working properly with regards to database backups and everything. I need to double check what the monthly cost is looking like when I start to run out of promotional credit at the end of this year....
Today I start my new job. I’m really excited.
Even though its just over the road from where I used to work, and the commute is pretty much exactly the same as what I have done for the last 7 years, I still drove over there yesterday to check out the car park in a bit more detail, find the visitors spots I’m supposed to park in and just make sure that nothing has changed in the last three months since my interview....
Thought I was having some apache woes earlier this week. Looks like it was just a red herring and the real issue was the 80 > 443 forced redirection I’d set up.
Properly set up and test now. You never know, I might even start getting traffic....
I’ve always had a thing for lemmings. It’s my go to Amiga game and always one of the first ever things I fire up when I plug the Amiga in or Amiga forever. There’s something oddly satisfying about getting those little guys from the entrance of their hazard filled world to the exit.
I got to thinking the other day, I played a lot of lemmings during my early computer stages....
Just one week until I start my new job. Excited is an understatement. Can’t wait to get going. My playing around with bamboo was in preparation for this, and it seems to be running pretty well – it’s updating and rebooting both of my ec2 instances nightly using AWS tasks and emailing me using SES to let me know whether the job has passed or failed.
Everything seems fairly stable....
Make sure that bamboo isn’t backed off to the RDS instance you deleted, and if it is, make sure you take that final snapshot so that you can easily move it over. Oh, also be aware that mariadb isn’t compatible with bamboo unless you throw in some startup arguments.
It was a fun couple of hours at least. Yay....
Since we’ve got a dedicated DB server, not running as a spot instance now (so it shouldn’t just disappear whenever the hell it wants) and we’re not running RDS, I’ve re-implemented nightly sql backups to S3.
Gosh technology, isn’t it great?...
Yet another DB migration – this time to a dedicated box running mariadb. Testing to make sure that posting a new post works and it appears in the right database…....
The only way to use Amazon’s free SSL certificates is if you pipe them through something like cloudformation, use them with cloudfront or a load balancer.
Tried that for December and it turns out its fairly expensive to run an ELB for a month – it’s all fine and dandy whilst I’ve got EDU credit to burn through but I can’t afford $20 a month to shortcut an easy way to SSL cert up the site....
It’s always a good idea not to forget your password. Especially to your blog, especially when you haven’t posted to it for months.
So, yeah, it’s also a good idea to not remember your password and then be fooled by it not working because you’ve locked your account out yet there’s no visual feedback of having done so.
I find more and more that I’m just letting my phone randomly create a password for me/store it in my keychain – seems better that way, plus when I do actually start forgetting important things it won’t matter, because my phone will for all intents and purposes be me anyway....
As a professional working with AWS, is there any event in the calendar year that is more exciting than AWS RE:Invent?
Gutted I didn’t get the chance to go this year. I am SO EXCITED by the new tech coming out of there though.
Robotics AND SATELLITE DATA!?
Amazing stuff....
Today is the day we get to see which retailers have elastic scaling infrastructure and half decent architects with forward planning and those who do not.
CDKeys and ChaosCards have already been hit with downtime post mail shots – don’t email your customer base if you can’t cope with them all clicking the link at the same time.
Chaos tried to put a queing system in front but the site still ended up offline mid browse....
In the middle of a migration from the local EC2 instance of mysql back to RDS. Need to burn through this promotional credit somehow.
Lets test that DB writes are still working….....
I’ve started to play around with Bamboo and a few other bits and pieces in an evening and I’ve managed to find a few promotional $150 vouchers for AWS that you would usually get from AWS training courses on ebay – prices range from about £11 to £35 depending on expiry. Bamboo will not run on a T3 micro – it just doesn’t have the CPU capacity – definitely needs 2cpus, even for a tiny installation – that’s Java for you 😉...
Turns out that WAF costs $5 per acl and $5 per rule per month. And that $10 protection I had in place for a simple geo block against China and a few other countries I was getting probing attacks from wasn’t included in the AWS credit I’ve got so I’ve turned it off.
Done some playing around with ALBs and fail2ban including setting up a custom filter for script attacks but need to do some further refinement with x forwarded for headers and what not....
Since I’ve got $300 of AWS credit to use up before December 2019 and my t3 micro instance isn’t really doing a good job of that, I decided I might as well throw up a load balancer, get the certificate assigned to it and set up route53 properly to that alias.
So far so good. Green padlocks are fun....
So I passed my AWS solutions architect associate exam on the 27th September. I think I ended up with about 87%
Pretty happy with that. Now trying to decide if I’m going to go for the systems administrator exam and developer exam or if I’m going to concentrate on solutions architecture.
I’m also eyeing up an open university degree in computing. I say I’m eyeing it up, I’ve registered and I’m waiting to see if I get approved for a part time student loan....
Picked up the October Mickey Mouse memories edition from the Disney store this week.
Wasn’t sure about it when I first saw it but after looking at it for a few minutes and realising it’s the same terminal colour scheme as I use on SecureCRT for my Mac, and it’s full of binary, I absolutely love it.
Pretty sure the binary will say something. Haven’t worked it out it googled it yet....
I’ve put together a skill as part of a tutorial from acloudguru and I’ve had this published by amazon.
If you’re studying for your AWS solutions architect associate exam and you’d like to stream exam tips and tidbits of information to your Alexa – have a look at it here.
https://skills-store.amazon.co.uk/deeplink/dp/B07HJ4T9DH?deviceType=app&share&refSuffix=ss_copy...
I’m 3/4 of the way through my acloudguru AWS training course for solutions architect associate and decided that now I’ve done most of the VPC chapter and my understanding of the subject is helped infinitely by my experience, it was time to use the practice exam voucher on the AWS.training site to see how far off I am with less than 2 weeks to go until i sit it....
This is absolutely crazy.
Look at the price difference between a t3 micro and a t3 small running spot.
It’s well under half the price.
Much cheaper running it this way than having apache on a t2 small and a seperate RDS instance.
S3 backups running well – or they are now that I’ve sorted out the cron job. Had a little issue with a misplaced * instead of a 0 which meant I got 60 backups between 1am and 2am rather than just one backup at 1am 😉...
So less than a week after returning to school, Harry has brought a cold home.
More importantly than that, he’s shared it with me, and now i have the cold.
Luckily, this appears to be a cold that is paying attention to Day Nurse, so I’m at least getting a clear head once the tablets have kicked in.
Lots of stuff going on recently, passed my AWS certification exam, got another one at the start of October, so that’s going to be good....
So the RDS instance has been terminated now.
I’ve got S3 backed mysql backups running nightly, so I’m saving myself an absolute fortune.
Still some tuning to do and I’m not sure if I’m going to stick at spot pricing or look into reserved pricing. I need to get some tuning in place first with regards to apache and mysql and make sure with Trusted Advisor that I’m running at the right sort of level....
Turns out that running an RDS database is quite pricey – moving this over to the EC2 instance whilst I re-evaluate my architectural decisions. Spot pricing looks to be the best way forward still, but I need to make sure I’m getting backups – will have to set up a nightly mysql backup to s3 I think, probably the best way to do it.
Test post to make sure the database is working as it should be....
I’m on the train on the way back from Manchester to Leeds after having completed my AWS Cloud Practioner examination.
I passed!
Not sure on my score yet, waiting for the report and the certificate to be available from my certification account.
I’ve just realised that this is my first certification since getting my Network+ way back in 2004. That’s insane. 14 Years.
No wonder interviewers asked me if I’d considered getting certified for anything recently – its like those restaurants that have restaurant of the year 2004-2005 on a sticker in the window – it just looks out of date....
I came across an issue with my DNS entries that mean every time that my spot instance was terminated, I had to manually change the A record. That’s not very cloud-like.
Found an article(below):
The problem with the article, is that the API has changed since it was written and the script no longer works.
Steps 1-5 are spot on, and most of step 6 is perfect – aside from the script – my fixes are below, I’ve updated the api call and also added in a path statement so that the script will run non-interactively....
Interesting lunch hour today – had to fix a script I’d found to update route53 dns records on reboot because the API has changed since the guy wrote it. Gave him my additions and it works a treat.
Also got bucket storage set up, so my images are all being server from S3.
More technical data on what I did to come soon.
Exam tomorrow. Eeeeek....
So as expected, I’m going to need to make a few tweaks to the ami and the image running along with adding a bit of scripting magic to make things run more smoothly.
In regards to the ec2 instance, spot requests are definitely the way to go. The cost saving is insane, and it’s not like this website is business critical.
That said, I would like to keep it up and running which in itself presents a few challenges....
Technically we were always in the cloud. I mean, after all, the cloud is just somebody else’s computer, right?
I was using a hosting company called tsohost, been using them for years and years and years. £50 a year, they manage the underlying infrastructure and I manage the sites and mail and whatnot.
Mail was crap, it was slow, the ssl certs kept erroring and to be honest, I didn’t think I was getting value for money....
So, I’ve got this new site all set up and running, split into several sections to have a proper separation between tech posts, photography posts and other stuff. We’ll see how it goes.
Three separate RSS feeds, for three separate areas of interest with varying levels of updatedness. But hey, if it gets me away from Facebook, that’s good.
Photo was taken at my dad’s 60th birthday celebration the other day....
New site, new hosting, new blog, new content.
New hosting that I built myself, I might add, in AWS (woo). Using my Cloud Engineering skills.
In fact, more to the point, everything that you’re seeing here, this blog, the photoblog, the underlying infrastructure, I built it all from an IPad Pro, tethered to a mobile phone from a caravan on the east coast of England.
Now that is 21st century engineering, yo!...