What the....where the hell did 2020 go?

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. It’s been a while. I think that’s why there’s not been that many board games played over the last few months. It’s not just the equipment being on the game table (I can move that out of the way pretty easily), it’s more spending 8+ hours a day in the room that is meant to be my games/hobby room working, looking at the monitor, and I just don’t want to carry on doing it at the weekend.

I’m pretty sure that last weekend I didn’t even plug the keyboard back into my gaming pc, just left it in the work laptop.

The 3D printer has been sat gathering dust two. With two of us working in here full time, and it not being the quietest of things, Kayleigh just didn’t appreciate the noise all day.

I did buy her some noise cancelling headphones for Christmas, so it probably would have been okay for the last month, thinking about it.

Anyway, she’s painted her room, I’ve ordered a desk and a kallax for down there from Ikea which is coming tomorrow and I’ll have the MattCave back to it’s former glory.

It’ll be nice to not have to constantly look at equipment everywhere all the time, might even get a board game set up, you never know.

Because the 3D printer has been offline for a few months, the Rasperry Pi plugged into it needed a fair bit of work. The auto DNS update script for Route53 updated itself without too much hassle, but the letsencrypt SSL cert that I hacked into place in September just would not work - and I couldn’t for the life of me remember how I’d configured HAProxy to deal with it.

So I had to reverse engineer everything, get it to the stage where it was working, then set up a cron job to renew the cert, concatonate everything into a file where it’s meant to be and then restart HAProxy, so that should make any cert renewals easier going forward.

Nobody else cares about the stuff that I do, but its nice to write about it from time to time.

And it gives me something to do in order to make sure that the workflow still works in codebuild and my codepipeline.