Pesky's Blog

AWS allows you to enable server-side encryption (SSE) for you data at rest in your SQS queue. Disabling this option also has an effect on your encryption in transit as well. From the SQS documentation: All requests to queues with SSE enabled must use HTTPS and Signature Version 4. In other words disabling SSE also means you can now communicate to the SQS without TLS. I wrote a Python script to send a message to a queue using the HTTP API and botocore without using the higher level abstractions of boto3. Read more...

This week I open sourced a Terraform project I’ve been using for the past few months. This solution allows the user to schedule the start or stop of EC2 instances in a single AWS account. This schedule is defined through Terraform and created EventBridge Schedulers. This post will be a snapshot in time of how the solutions looks at the time of publishing. An up to date and concise description of the solution can be found on its GitHub page. Read more...

The Venlo train station has a great regional express connection to North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany every hour operated by Eurobahn from 5 am to 10 pm. The station also has stoptrein services to Nijmegen and Roermond along the Maaslijn, where they go twice an hour in both directions operated by Arriva. Lastly, it has an NS Intercity service to Dordrecht via Schiphol Airport, which is also twice an hour. As good as the timetable is, the services that connect you to and from the German train could be better. Read more...

On my Linux machine I have sometimes shared by screen as a virtual device so it can be used in other programs as a webcam. A similar FFmpeg can also just be used to capture video to the file as well. Capture as a video device The v4l2loopback module allows you to create a virtual video devices under /dev/. Load the module, with the command below. After doing so you will see a new video device under /dev/, since I have no video devices currently attached v4l2loopback creates device /dev/video0. Read more...

This is the third installment about Sprinters in the Netherlands. In the first post we’ve taken a look at the emergence of more regional, sprinter-like services in the 1970s as the Dutch moved towards suburbanisation. This required a new trainset designed to provide stop-train services, which was called the Stadsgewestelijk Materieel (SGM) and was first purchased in 1972. After three decades of service, between 2003 and 2006, the fleet of 90 SGMs was renovated, extending their lifespan to 2021. Read more...

This Christmas my wife and I booked a semi-spontaneous trip to Berlin, Germany for a few days. Our trip included visiting the typical Christmas markets, restaurants, East Side Gallery, and Museum Island. Most of our traveling around the city was done through the public tram network, with the occasional use of the U or S-Bahn. A line from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1925 short story, A Guide to Berlin, comes to mind. Read more...

You can track changes to a tag through AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, or Amazon CloudWatch Events, these methods have already been documented but they’re too slow to respond to changes, too expensive to run, not as extensible out-of-the-box, or outdated. I haven’t seen much coverage on doing this with Amazon EventBridge, which has many integration options, is low-latency, and is fairly low cost (and in this case free). There is a page in the documentation titled Monitor tag changes with serverless workflows and Amazon EventBridge that covers just that, I’d recommend starting there. Read more...

To show related content on this blog I use Hugo’s in-built functionality, which works surprisingly well with no setup. I did, however, want to test out creating text embeddings from my posts and rank them by similarity. Before you continue reading, the usual disclaimer: Do not take the information here as good or best practice. The purpose of this entry is to post my learnings in somewhat real-time. I will use Amazon Titan Embeddings G1 - Text available through Amazon Bedrock and SQLite to store the results. Read more...

Amsterdam is a busy city with residents, businesses and visitors often talked about for its good urban planning, offering a walkable city that is still accessible by car, train, metro, tram, and bus. To those who have lived in or traveled around Amsterdam you will have come across the metro and their blue cubes with an “M” and red R-NET band at the bottom. If you’ve taken the time to travel on the Amsterdam Metro, does it seem like a typical metro? Read more...

It has been 87 days since I enabled the ability to show related content at the bottom of each post on this blog, aptly titled “Related ramblings”. This uses Hugo’s built-in Related Content functionality. If you use a pre-made theme you may never directly work with this feature. I wanted to highlight how easy it was to use and how impressed and I am with the results. To enable my theme to use this features, I simply had to create a new partial that could be used in my post template. Read more...