For some time, Ansible has been my configuration management of choice and we use it for both Screenly and YippieMove. Since both of these services are running on Google Compute Engine, we’re using Ansible’s dynamic inventory for GCE. (Behind the scenes, this dynamic inventory is using Apache Libcloud, which is a great Python library for interacting with …
The built-in Internet Sharing in OS X is very handy. When I’m on the road, I frequently use this to share my laptops WiFi connection with other devices over a wired connection (such as a Raspberry Pi, when I work on Screenly). If you’re connecting some kind of headless device, you will likely want to connect to this device over SSH or similar. The only …
I’m a huge fan of autojump. It allows me to quickly navigate my filesystem in ways without having to type out every folder. There is however one task that I frequently that I wanted to make more efficient: create a new folder and then jump into said folder. Normally, this would simply be: $ mkdir foo $ cd foo This feels somewhat inefficient, so I wrote a …
After moving to London, I decided to go with NatWest as my bank. While it was a good experience at large, their online banking leavs a lot to be desired. Not only do they lack things like Two-Factor Authenciation (2FA), but they also have this really frustrating login system. Well, today I had enough and whipped up a CLI tool that allows you to generate the …
Dear Digital Security Controls (DSC), I recently purchased your T-link extension (IP module) for two alarm systems that I wanted to be able to remotely manage. After a few hours of troubleshooting (read: having to install Windows XP), I am now able to connect to these alarm systems over a VPN connection, but that’s about it. Please take a look at this …
(Fine, this isn’t war dialing in the 90s context, but it made for a good title.) As furious I am with Lufhansa’s strike, it did give me time to write a fun script. With the announcement of the strike, Lufthansa’s customer service lines were brought to their knees. After trying to manually call a few of them (in different countries), I finally gave up with …
After using Loggly for a few years, I stumbled across Logentries (disclosure: referral link). What I was looking for was basically something that is more affordable when the volume increases, and Logentries is a lot more affordable than Loggly as you grow. If you are just starting out using a remote shipping target (be Loggly, Papertrail or Logentries), it …
Yesterday I had the pleaseure to speak at Open Cloud Day in Bern, Switzerland. The linup for the event was good and I’m happy to contribute to the thriving open source and tech community in Switzerland. It was also great to hang out with the fine folks over at ICCLAB and ZHAW. Update: The recording of the talk is available here
Modern document management for your startup We’re currently in the process of revamping how we deal with documents at WireLoad. Here are some thoughts on this and how we do things today.