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The Great Domain Migration to NameCheap

  As you may not know, but now know, Google Domains is being sold to Squarespace -- To the annoyed groans of many around the world, myself included.  Word spread on Twitter (I will not call it X) on how Squarespace was often a costlier option for people. I don't remember exact numbers people had experience with, but it was more. 36$/yr sticks in my head, but check for yourself. With a domain costing 12$ through Google, I thought above making the choice to transfer myself; and after perusing this Twitter thread , decided to go with Namecheap on a whim. I didn't know there were so many choices to host domains, DNS options, email services. That would actually be a field of interest to own a business in. It has that old internet charm (robot text anyone?). Now, this very site is hosted on Blogger, which is owned (and ignored) by Google, so it probably isn't being killed anytime soon (I hope). Google Domains was owned by, well, Google, so attaching the domain to the site was qu

Securing Terraform and You, Part 3 -- The Finish Line

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now OpenTofu   I swear, this is not a recurring series. The problem just -- finally -- got solved. Part 2 is over here . I went back to tfsec after seeing the simple start guide posted here , by Liam Galvin at Ghost Security. There are two aspects of my code:  Allow buckets starting with [word]  deny buckets that don't start with [word].  The initial guide only has "don't allow buckets that are exactly named this", but that's all I needed to actually get going! The problems could have been; The rego file and the terraform file don't play well in the same folder. Having the options in two separate subfolders helped even though there was a command that I used to read both files in the same folder. Trivy ... I don't know. Maybe the metadata setup was incorrect - but if it's set up as comments -- readable by the program but not acknowledged in the rego -- who knows. I can work on that in the future. The code w

The flickering of a 2019 MacBook Pro

  It started, late one summer evening... This laptop is pretty much lightly used, was package well for shipping, and only sat on my desk after arrival.  description:  a computer monitor with a silver base and black border with a photo of a desert landscape. white lines dance across the surface. I see other people have tried steps listed as to remedy the problem, to no solution. One person on Apple's forums even received an entirely new (to them) machine, and it still persisted, so I'm thinking it's a software problem.  After restarting several times, I restarted into the diagnostics tools. I had dead pixels on my old MacBook Air and I dropped that more than once - no flickering. How can a laptop that simply sat for a few months flicker on the display? [ I forgot to make a video while the issue was happening. If it starts again - hopefully not - I will edit one in ] The stripe is only on light backgrounds.  Anything darker than white does not see the stripe.  There are occas

Meet the Metaverse: Hiberworld (Featuring ReadyPlayerMe)

  Fun fact: This was initially about Roblox, but when I came across a survey about making a meta verse avatar, I decided to go the whole hog with it. I've always loved create your own avatar games. While the metaverse as a concept to the GP is already outdated, some interesting things were created before everyone decided machine learning via ChatGPT and its clones were the hot new ticket to claw our way out of Web 2.0 First, ReadyPlayerMe is a place to create a Metaverse avatar that you can import into the surprising amount of meta verse games out there. I hit the androgynous face type and couldn't change it again but you know what, I like it! Even if it's still somewhat masculine. These days, people seem to be very 1:1 about their virtual avatars. It's just them in a shirt and pants. The world is your oyster, make your virtual hair green and give yourself android lines on your body. Building a level is a lot more intuitive (and doesn't kill my CPU) than using Robl

Making KPI Dashboards with PowerBI

 While this is the free tier, I cannot share or collaborate with others, nor can I publish content to other people's workspaces, but they will not stop me from screenshooting and recording these self-taught adventures,so! I'm doing this because I idly searched "Mattel careers" and "Information Technology", and seeing a bulletpoint saying the following: Analytical and reporting skills such as creating dashboards and establishing KPIs such as experience with PowerBI, Cognos, Tableau, and Google Data Lake/AWS is preferred And thought "Well, I've used Tableau, and I've heard about PowerBI,  even if its in-demandness is questionable , so how similar is it? And can I write about it?"  First, PowerBI (PIB) does have a downloadable, local version, but apparently Windows-only. I could download the .exe but I couldn't run it / drag it to applications on my MacBook.  Not a problem, we'll use the online SaaS version, and a dataset found here,

Securing Terraform and You Part 2 -- Trivy by AquaSecurity

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu    Part one is over here . This comes as the 3rd tool in a long line of tools I am using to make Terraform (OpenTofu) code consistent. I went back to the Styra Academy courses for OPA Policy Writing. I am a very "Just show me the general idea, and I can probably figure it out", and I am reasonable enough to say that it didn't work this time, and I had to take the slow road. Good start; Trivy told us where it installed; trivy info installed /usr/local/bin/trivy /Users/morganza/Library/Caches/trivy the homebrew package had an outdated version, so I had to install v. 0.40.0 myself and link it to the previously installed 0.18.0 I believe -- See the GitHub discussion here . We are now back to rego, but fortunately, Trivy works as intended when you run it locally with the following command; trivy conf --policy . --namespaces morganza . There was an odd combination of YAML with a bit of rego involved for tfsec -- can

Lambdas

 A Lambda is an anonymous function. Places like AWS have services set up entirely just to host these simple functions that don't require a ton of code or backend. To run the Python here, I go back to Google Colaboratory; Check out my Lambda book here   Ex. 1   g =  lambda  x:  3 *x +  2 g( 3 )     Simple.  Ex. 2   full_name =  lambda  fn, ln: fn.strip().title() +  " "  + ln.strip().title() full_name( "   Ember" ,  "Serros" )     Notice the spaces in front of the first name (' Ember')      Ex. 3     def   func ( x , y ):    """Does things"""   func2 =  lambda  x: x + y+ 3 print (func( 2 , 7 ))   Using def seems to be hit or miss. This returns None, which technically is correct,  but I'm expecting a number (12). It's missing a return statement;   return  func2(x) +  3       Ex. 4   def   func ( x , y ):   funct2 =  lambda  x: x+y+ 5    return  funct2(x) +  6 print (func( 3 , 78 ))   Works just fine.      E