RUN TCP/IP | Morgan Lucas is Tech Blogging

   Perplexity AI, according to BuiltIn , is an AI-powered search engine - and it's now valued at 1 8$Billion dollars, with a B. I had it on my phone for research testing - something I do between contracts for money - and simply kept it all this time. With it making a resurgence, I can show you if it's viable for every day use cases.  I did not use it to generate "art" or writing.  Screen Reading and Photo Identification. I have used Perplexity to read Chinese characters on my screen, asking to point out the radicals, tone, and meaning of unfamiliar characters. There are minor differences between what Perplexity answers with and what Duolingo and DuChinese deal with, but I know enough Chinese* to figure out the difference - though a recent study calls the accuracy into question. For instance, below I've asked it what the radical is in  水 (shui, water)      [alt: The character in your image is  水 , which is the Chinese character for "wate...

    Semi-Retro Computing Style   After I placed my start menu and icons back in their proper position , I vibe more with the visuals. They me of Web 2.0 Gloss - But you may know it by another name, Frutiger Aero - of the mid 2000s and Vista. I do miss the active tiles in the Start Menu. I liked pinning images to it Ain’t No Party Like An S-Mode Party So I took 11 out of S-Mode to install Firefox...not knowing Firefox was already in the Windows Store. I swear , I searched. Freeing myself from S-Mode was inevitable anyway - There were many third-party packages to install anyway. After all, chocolatey and Terraform are not in the store. For people who simply need to type and browse, S-Mode is your best Mode. Setting Up The Place To Code Visual Studio Code (VS Code) downloaded without issue, which is not the case for the AWS CLI through the VS Code Extensions store. The popup did helpfully have a link to where I could download it via Powershell that worked. Time to re-login...

This blog post is located over here; Managing Scalable Azure Infrastructure

I nfracost integrates with Infrastructure as Code technologies to check the costs of the infrastructure you're creating or changing, in multiple currencies, multiple cloud platforms, and can integrate with multiple repos and pull requests.  Hooray!   The single-sentence description is 'Shift FinOps Left". Not sure what that means, but let's look at the software itself. The tag policies feature seems similar to the regulations one can set up in Trivy, like I've done over here , to make Terraform code adhere to certain rules. I installed it via chocolatey on Windows 11, using it to check my Azure resources. Don't forget to get the API key as well, it is a lot easier to set up than you think, and used the CLI in the program; here's that documentation (Option 1) . It does not check the free tiers of Azure and uses On-Demand prices by default. This is the output for infracost breakdown ;  You'll notice that it does round down; My cost is 15.41$, and the t...