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Coffee

Coffee Review: Metric Big Riff

Metric Big Riff is a classic and traditional coffee. Metric coffee is out of Chicago(https://metriccoffee.com) I prepared this using an Aeropress and I ground the coffee to 9 on the Baratza Encore. This roast is described as having hints of stone fruit, dark chocolate, and citrus. I

Coffee

Coffee Review: Alma Invierno

So I changed my trade subscription taste last month from surprising and unconventional to classic and traditional. I'm not sure how this changed the kinds of coffee I received but I guess we'll see for a few months. Alma coffee is actually pretty close to where

Health

My nutrition regiment

I've been tweaking the vitamins / minerals I've taken over many years and I still don't know if I have the right combination but I'm feeling like I'm getting closer to my ideal combination based on having less brain fog and

Coffee

Coffee Review: The Roasted Record

I tested this coffee using a French Press and it was ground to 30 using a Baratza Encore. It's a pretty dark coffee that's fairly strong. I can definitely taste the chocolate and the honey. It does also have a nutty flavor but I can'

Health

Maui Nui Venison Jerky

I've been hearing advertisements on just about every podcast I listen to for this product(https://mauinuivenison.com) so I thought I'd give it a try. I tried the peppered venison jerky here(https://mauinuivenison.com/collections/butcher-shop/products/sugar-free-pepper-stick-24-pack). I thought the jerky was very

Health

Is there anything better than a long hike in cold weather?

I love hiking but I've been a little under the weather lately with covid and a bone spur flare up that screwed up my left shoulder(so not much rucking as of late) but today I was able to get out and hike. I wasn't sure

Coffee

Trade Coffee First Review

I started using Trade coffee(http://rwrd.io/4vmrvn5?c) back in 2020 as an alternative to our daily coffee. I've been very pleased with the quality of coffee's I've received and decided to start reviewing each bag I get. This past month'

Exercise

Traditional Weight Training vs Rucking

I decided to try and do a comparison between my typical weight training workout versus a ruck workout of about the same time. Here's the comparison: Weight Training - 1hr, 6min - 502 active calories, 635 total calories, 119bpm average heart rate Ruck - 1hr, 6min - 454

Tech

I went a little over the top on logging temperatures on all my devices.

The above image is my Grafana dashboard with all kinds of temperatures, percentages and other measurements. Surprisingly this just started out as something I could look at to get my internet speed information. It's basically several InfluxDB Databases and Grafana with a bunch of integrations, some of which

Exercise

So I "Rucked" for the first time today

I've been hiking for many years and have been backpacking many times as well but I've never combined them into a daily activity ala Rucking. So since I'm a beginner and didn't want to go all in until I tried things out,

Tech

I migrated my DNS to PiHole and all my local sites now use SSL.

I was watching some TechnoTim video's on YouTube and saw one where he migrated all his DNS to two Raspberry Pi's and then set up SSL for his local sites. Now that I'm running more things locally on my K3 cluster, it's

Always check your Lag when writing a Kafka consumer.

I've been working on some code for the last 2 months and I started as I typically do by writing my code and then deploying it in Fargate.  This particular code was a Kafka consumer which made several api calls to enrich some data then made a final

Book Review: Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

I have been pretty active over the years but I'm always looking for different viewpoints so I was listening to a podcast one day and it mentioned this book.  So I decided to buy it used on Amazon and give it a read.   First off I love the

Health

Was the Oura Ring worth it?

I bought my first Oura ring back in March of 2020 right before the Pandemic hit. I bought it mainly because I didn't like the results I was getting from my Withings sleep pad and I just couldn't sleep with my Apple watch on. The Oura

K3S, Ubiquity, and PiHole - What not to do.

I started the Ubiquity journey in early 2020 with the purchase of an Ultimate Dream Machine Pro along with various switches and access points.  I've been very happy with their products and highly recommend them for the prosumer.   I've also been a fan of PiHole over

Converting from Raspberry Pi's to K3s

I was running several Raspberry Pi's to do various jobs but have always wanted to get a better knowledge of running Kubernetes(since I run alot of managed containers at work) so I began the task of migrating most of my non hardware dependent work over to K3s

Network upgrade during pandemic

At the beginning of the pandemic, I decided to upgrade my networking setup from the 10 plume pods I had to a more flexible system.  After looking over things, I decided to go "overboard" and buy a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro.  And since I was upgrading, I upgraded

3 AWS Certifications in 3 Months

Late last year I had some time, due to project and general end of year slow down, so I decided to try and see if I could achieve 3 AWS certifictions in 3 months.  I focused on the 3 certifications that best followed my career path so I started out

Finally getting around to doing this...

I've had a variety of blogs over the years but I'm going to try and start doing this again.  We'll see how it goes.  I imported all my stuff from my last blog to motivate.

So I'm going to get certified(or try to) this year.

I remember back in the day when I was doing Windows SDK programming then Visual C++ programming and Microsoft came out with their MCSD certification and I balked at them.   Well times have changed and now that I’m doing more Cloudy things, I’ve decided to try and complete

My take on Plume wifi mesh networking after nearly 2 years of use.

I want to start off by saying that the support staff at Plume(plumewifi.com) are first class.  I’ve submitted a variety of tickets asking questions ranging from pod signal strength to algorithm questions and they have always been very helpful. My take is on my pre super pod

My Favorite Sessions From Google Next 2018(that I attended)

Leverage AI on the Cloud to Transform Your Business https://youtu.be/32Q3U6-6eMo - This video answers the following question.  What kinds of problems can I use ML to solve for?  Everyone should look at the slide at about 3 minutes in. Architecting Live NCAA Predictions: From Archives to Insights

How to rotate a Key Pair on an AWS instance

This is something I don’t have to do too often but if your company has policies on key rotation then this might be useful. I’m assuming you already have the ability to ssh onto your current EC2 instance with an existing key pair you created in AWS.   This

How to create a KMS encrypted S3 bucket and how to access it from another account(because I always seem to mess up one step).

I’m going to preface this post by saying that everything I’m describing here should be automated via either terraform or cloud formation templates. The flow will be to create a KMS key, then create an S3 bucket with that KMS key, then create a user in another account

Yik Yak thoughtsOn my drive home from work today I had a random thought that led me back to something I learned at Yik Yak. Then my brain...

Yik Yak thoughts On my drive home from work today I had a random thought that led me back to something I learned at Yik Yak. Then my brain went into diffuse mode and I thought about several other things as well. Since I left Yik Yak 2 years ago