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...

  For a company that sells our data (If the product is free, the product is me...and you), LinkedIn offers Premium,.  One can send 5 messages for $40 USD with Premium...or use hunter.io , finding email addresses of people at companies for free. There are issues with that, but I have a free trial!  LinkedIn put forth effort to make the cost worthwhile, so let's see if the options are worth it.   How Much of LinkedIn's Revenue is Premium? I couldn't tell, but COO Daniel Shapero says in 2024, it was a 1.7$ Billion dollar business . He raves about how Premium users like the AI Writing Suggestions tool - but hold that thought.  (On the payment page, it says "Why do we need your card for a free trial? To provide a seamless subscription experience!" It's so you forget to cancel the trial. To be fair, they do say they'll warn you 3 days before it expires, but we know what it's really about)   LinkedIn Learning  One part of LinkedIn I genuinely enjoy are the ...

    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    Here are my notes while the above portfolio is being restored; I...accidentally deleted it while mass cleaning out my Drive and didn't realize for a week. Oops. If anyone has a contact at Google who would like to help, I'm on LinkedIn.  They're messy, but the gold shines through. In Summary (Load Balancing and maintenance); I created two azure load balancers for web app redundancy and speed; this eliminates single points of failure. Health probes let me know if something needs attention.   Distributes web traffic across multiple virtual machines, making it resilient + scalable, maintain performance, and eliminate single points of failure. A health probe makes sure everything is up and operational, and LB rules distribute HTTP traffic. Hands-on experience configuring 2 azure load balancers, a tool that, at it’s base basicness, has multiple components that ensure uptime, optimize web traffi...

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...

Also posted here .   Remember that second hand Chromebook I bought for a client years ago? They upgraded and gave it back, so let's put Linux or Ubuntu on it. I'm going to see if I can put a distro in there and switch between Chrome OS and Linux. It took longer to find the correct package to install than anything else. Out of the proverbial Chrome Development Mode box, it doesn't recognize apt, apt-get, or yum.  Nor does it recognize any attempts to install them. The Chromebook's Linux option installs Penguin, the default Linux Container on Chrome OS. It struggled to start, so I deleted the Linux container and tried again with success. Most instructions say to enable your Chromebook’s Developer Mode then open a certain terminal; Instead, I found you enable Linux Penguin through Chrome OS (Easy, check your settings) and use that containerized version. When you do this, Crostini is already installed, which is a more secure form of Crouton. Crouton is outdated. C...

 A very brief look. The text says; Drag and drop any CloudFormation resource on a visual canvas Connect and configure enhanced components to automatically build IaC for an application architecture Seamlessly transition between authoring workflows visually with Step Functions Workflow Studio and defining resources with Infrastructure Composer Integrate your browser with your project through “local sync” or use Composer in the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code In 2019 there was a similar tool to build infrastructure that would be converted to code. Nice to know they bought it back. When you enter the Composer, it's a blank space with a background reminiscent to the screen for Cloud Formation. Infrastructure Objects are to the left in a drawer;  I've selected a bucket that I can rename. I went to connect a bucket to a Dynamo DB Table, and it's not available yet. It also lost a bucket somewhere in the ether of the GUI. Ah well. I couldn't find the EC2 instance in the...