Ledger Databases and Immudb Description While studying AWS and the possible datastores you can create in the cloud I found the concept of a ledger database. It looks like this is fairly newer but has a great application. This post discusses ledger databases and installing/using one called Immudb. Ledger Databases Use Cases Ledger databases are great for applications that require trust in the data. Some examples of applications are: Finance transactions Shipping Logs Bank Accounts How it Works With every transaction a signature is used to validate the data.

Keyboard Remapping in Linux I was given a 60% keyboard for Christmas two years ago that I never used because of the layout. Some important keys were moved and I couldn’t type on it well. I created a script to remap the keys for me. The code and installer for this can be found here. Xmodmap Xmodmap is the program I use to remap keys using some commands in bash. For my keyboard I need to map RSHIFT to ‘/’ and CAPSLOCK to ‘`’.

KVM in Terrarform After the last post on using KVM I wanted to find a better way to manage entire sets of VMs at once while testing out new ideas. A make file is ok, and starting up a few VMs with virsh would work but I wanted a fully automated solution to bring up and tear down VMs when needed. Follow along with me to learn this as well. I will be using the provider documentation found here.

Qemu KVM Basics In preparing to study for a Juniper certification I found that they offer vSRX as a qcow2 volume. I took this opportunity to brush up on qemu kvm again. The ability to use the command line to manage these VMs is incredible and it’s a cool skill to have. I will not be using virt-manager. Installation Creating A VM Volume The first step to create a vm with qemu is to create a volume for the VM.

Ubuntu eGPU Setup Description EGPUs are something that I really only learned about last year. My use case was playing games on my Windows 10 laptop that didn’t have graphic capabilities of it’s own that could play modern games. The key was that it had a decent CPU and a Thunderbolt 4 port. With an eGPU I was able to play many games. When I made the switch to linux I needed to find a way to accelerate X11 with the eGPU.

Mimesis Description Something that is incredibly valuable in the programming world is being able to have generated data for projects where you need to do testing without the real data. I worked in the Healthcare industry as a Python programmer and one thing that was always a topic was “How do we test our code without working with real data?” and “How do we generate this data?” Fortunately I never had to worry about that data as I was auditing permissions in my code.

Encrypt Home Directory Description During a trip with my laptop I realized that if my laptop was taken, things like my files or tokens would be accessible. I found a great article on how to encrypt a home directory in Ubuntu after you have install the OS. This post will go through the steps I took to encrypt my home directory to ensure data security. A quick note, you will need 2.

Digital Ocean Static Site My new setup on this site is something that really just works. This post is going to talk about how everything works together compared to my old website. Old Site Setup My old website we 100% wordpress. I had a wordpress site hosted by a company. This allowed for maximum uptime and for me to have a lot of prebuilt themes to help me. I also had a domain registered to point at the wordpress instance.

Hi All! Just a quick update on the website. I have moved from wordpress to using hugo + firebase to host my website. This allows me to have much better formatting on code snippets and, it really looks nice. Please bear with me as I update images on some of the posts. The pictures are missing on most of the older posts. Anyway thanks for visiting!

Something that makes it incredibly difficult to host your own websites at home is that the IP address of your home is most likely dynamic. It can change depending on time and when the router reboots. Most providers where I live won’t assign a static IP unless you are a business. The only way to solve this is to setup DDNS (Dynamic DNS). The website noip.com makes it free to implement this solution.