I made some changes to my quadcopter the other day for a new photography project I’m working on. Unfortunately, it turned out that it wasn’t good enough, and that I’d have to tune my PID loop, which I knew
You might have noticed the buzz around WireGuard lately. WireGuard is a very simple VPN that uses state-of-the-art cryptography, and the buzz comes from both the fact that it’s simple and good at what it does, and the fact that it’s so good that it’s going to be included in the Linux kernel by default. Linus Torvalds himself said that he loves it, which took the software world by storm, as we weren’t aware that Linus was capable of love or any emotion other than perkele.
The only problem I’ve found with WireGuard is a lack of documentation, or rather a lack of documentation where you expect it. The quickstart guide, the first thing I look at, mentions a configuration file that it never tells you how to write, and it also assumes you’re more familiar with networking than I am.
Since the initial conditions at the creation of the universe set things up so WireGuard would eventually be underdocumented, I am going against Creation itself and showing you how to easily configure and run it. Let’s
A few weeks ago, my task at work was an interesting one: To deploy a Kubernetes cluster and write the associated tooling so that developers can deploy the code in the branches they’re working on to it, so they can test their changes.
Until that point, I’ve been wanting to learn Kubernetes because it sounded interesting (even though the name is rather problematic when you’re Greek), but I never had an opportunity because I don’t have anything that needs to be on a cluster. So, I jumped at the chance, and started reading up on it, but all the materials (including the official tutorial) seemed too verbose and poorly-structured, so I was a bit dejected.
Anyway, after a few days of research, things finally just clicked and I was deploying machines left and right with wild abandon, quickly racking up thousands in AWS bills, like any self-respecting backend developer in 2018. Since my resume now said “Kubernetes expert”, a thought immediately occurred: “Why not take my vast, unending knowledge of this system that I have collected over hours of research and make it more accessible for people?” Since I couldn’t convince myself I shouldn’t write another rambling article, I quickly got to it.
This is
Today, it got into my friend Harry’s head that he wants to buy a 3D printer. Normally, I would applaud the decision, so I did. I’ve bought lots of expensive crap I ended up regretting (damn you, quadcopters and photography), but the 3D printer wasn’t one of them. Sure, I don’t use it every day, but it’s amazing to be able to design small things for around the house or parts for hobby projects and seeing them turned into objects in a few minutes.
Since Harry has many questions, as I did when I was his age, I figured I’d answer them all in an article so more people can benefit from them. If you have questions that aren’t covered here, please tweet or toot them to me, and I might add them. Let’s start!
Sometimes, when I show people another crazy side-project of mine, they ask me how I manage to be so productive. I never have a good answer to give them, because I don’t really consider myself very productive (unless you count my 2,000 hours of sucking at DotA2 as creative output), but they are invariably unsatisfied with that answer.
I saw another post about productivity on Hacker News today, and it made me finally express something I’ve been feeling for a while but had never managed (or taken the time to) put into words. It wasn’t so much the post itself (I didn’t read it), but the fact that I saw it, and that it exists. It made me realize my stance on productivity, and today I’ll share it with you, right in this article.
A great advantage of having a large network of technical friends is that they ask you for advice on things, which I love giving. One great disadvantage of people is that they rarely take my advice without justification, even though I think everybody should know better by now. A discussion I frequently have with friends (and which they don’t just blindly take my advice on), is their choice of datastore, which invariably goes something like this:
- Trust me, don’t use MongoDB.
- Why, what’s wrong with it?
- Look, how many times have I given you some advice, you didn’t listen, and later on it turned out I was right?
- Ah, so you’re saying I should use Cassandra.
So, since I keep having to justify my opinion (can you believe that? Just ridiculous.), I figured I’d do it once, in this post, and then I can just point people here when they’re about to do something dumb. If I linked you to this article, this means you.
EDIT: Apparently the self-deprecating sarcasm above wasn’t really very obvious, and it comes off as arrogant, but my intention was for it to be satire (cleary opinions should be justified, even mine). Also, the Cassandra joke was a reference to this lady. Like an ancient Greek proverb says, “the best joke is one you have to explain on your blog”.
The datastore is often the most important part of
Ever since I was a wide-eyed little boy, I would look up at the stars and wonder in wonder: “What if I could lease my very own, beefy, dedicated Hetzner server and have an easy way to deploy all my projects onto that?” But lo, my dreams were dashed because Docker wouldn’t be invented for another twenty years, and Hetzner did not accept Mastercard at the time.
Decades later, with Docker finally invented and Hetzner accepting all major credit cards, my dream lay all but forgotten, because Docker could not do zero-downtime deploys natively and I hated it. That was how things remained, until my friend Theodore told me that he tried Dokku and that it worked very well.
I had heard of Dokku (and Fig, Deis, Flynn, Kubernetes, etc etc), but I never paid too much attention, as these PaaSaaSes struck me as too webcale for my simple projects. All I wanted was a way to skip through all the boilerplate configuration of deploying a Django app, and Ansible wasn’t cutting it, as it was still too much plumbing.
Since Theodore tried it and said it was apparently pretty easy to deploy with, though, I figured I’d give it a shot and see. It helped that Dokku was explicitly designed to be light and self-contained, whereas Kubernetes is for much larger deployments, so Dokku fit my use case exactly.
To try Dokku out, I needed a project. Luckily,
I’ve been making web apps since 2003, which means that I’ve been doing this for fourteen years now, or it means that I can’t count. So, there are few people more qualified than me to tell you this:
The web is crap.
If you disagree with the above statement, you spent more than $1000, less than two years ago, on the device you’re currently reading this on, so websites feel fast to you. There are many factors that make the web crap, but today I’d like to talk about one of them:
Web analytics.
The web was created in, like, the nineties, and was initially envisioned as
I recently got a motorcycle, and with it came a problem. My motorcycle jacket has very little pocket space, and I was told that I shouldn’t put any weight (i.e. extra keys) on the keyring. However, I still need to carry my house key and my bulky and heavy garage remote, which means that I need a second keyring just for these two, which is the problem.
Another issue is that using the remote is a hassle, as I have to always be removing my gloves, unzipping my jacket pocket, fishing for the remote in it, pressing the button, zipping the jacket pocket back up, and wearing the gloves again, it’s a nightmare, almost something out of a Lovecraft novel.
However, a thought occurs: Since I have a 3D printer and CAD software and I’m not afraid to use them, I can design an enclosure and mount for the remote so that I can permanently have it mounted on the handlebars, which both frees my pocket and is easily reachable, even with gloves. This thought is so exciting that I can hardly contain myself, and don’t.
In this post, I will take you through the process of designing and 3D printing the mount,
MORE RECENT EDIT: After the initial failure, I decided to do the next best thing, and write a short program for the ESP8266 that will generate a random seed every time it boots up and print it to a screen. That should be a good compromise, and it works well, scroll down to see it.
OLDER EDIT: I have been informed that BIP39 derives the last word from SHA hash of all the others, and thus needs a computer to generate the seeds. Thus, this post is moot and useless. I will leave the post here as a mahnmal, in the hope that someone will find something in it useful.
Being the geek that I am, I find Bitcoin fascinating (if only everybody focused on something other than the price!), and hardware wallets doubly so. If you haven’t heard of them, hardware wallets are small, flash-drive-sized devices that usually connect to a computer’s USB port and hold your wallet keys. That way, even if the computer you’re trying to send bitcoins from is riddled with viruses, you remain very secure and nobody but you can pay on your behalf. Unsurprisingly, I bought one! I was between the Trezor and the Ledger Nano S, but I decided on the Nano S in the end, as their platform looks more exciting, more secure and I was quite satisfied from the two HW1s I had bought for cheap at a sale.
However, since I’m in it for the technology and cryptoparanoia, rather than for any practical purpose, I find that hardware wallets have a few issues. For a short primer, a hardware wallet’s main advantage is that the keys are generated on the device and never, ever leave it, as whoever has the keys can spend your money. Since the keys never leave the device, though, you’re screwed if you ever lose it. To avoid that, wallet designers usually allow you to do a one-time export of the keys (many devices have a screen they show you the keys on), right after creating them. The export is usually a Bitcoin standard called BIP39, and is usually in the form of 12 or 24 everyday words, which you write down on a piece of paper, store it in your safe, and that’s all that’s needed to retrieve your keys if you lose the hardware wallet. No computer ever touches the keys, and you can sleep peacefully.
My problem, though, is that
Greek. Amateur F1 driver. Technology enthusiast. Single parent. Liar.
Founder of Stochastic Technologies, a software development agency, and creator of various products which you can find in the résumé.
