The Pip-boy project has finally been finished, after a bit of a hiatus. The last things that needed doing were finalizing the electronics, and writing the software.
My original plan was to just use a Raspberry Pi to power the whole thing, but it turned out that dealing with the inputs from the physical buttons and potentiometers was much easier to do by adding an Arduino Nano Every in the mix.
Continue readingA recent interaction with AWS support reminded me of something that happened to me and a co-worker some years ago in a previous job. The people and companies in the story have been anonymized, but I’m “Eric”.
I (“Eric”) worked for the online development team of a large media company (The Company) “somewhere in Europe”. Some years ago our IT infrastructure was outsourced to India to The Service Provider, since “it’s cheaper to have them maintain our infrastructure”.
Continue readingI’ve noticed before that this build has some issues with scale, but now it’s really hitting home. Some of the details are ridiculously fiddly.
Starting with the faux vacuum tubes; Not too bad, just smaller than any real vacuum tubes would be, and even then they aren’t actually fully shown from behind the grill.
So that happened. And I spent much longer than should’ve been necessary to figure it out. What I was trying to do was this:
I’d already set the following permissions:
kms:GenerateDataKeyPairWithoutPlaintext
secretsmanager:DescribeSecret
secretsmanager:CreateSecret
What I had neglected was the fact that Secrets Manager needs permissions to use the CMK. Adding these two helped:
kms:GenerateDataKey
kms:Decrypt
This is documented in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/services-secrets-manager.html , under “Authorizing Use of the CMK”.
I’ve added some more detail. Now I think this is getting to stage where there will be no more major changes, and where the next prints will the final pieces.
Here’s another one of my projects that has been on the back burner for quite a while: A replica Pip-Boy 2000, as originally seen in Fallout 1, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics (with minor differences). I’m designing the prop in Blender, and mostly 3d-printing the parts. The Pip-Boy will be powered by a Raspberry Pi with a 5″ LCD.
The finished product
TL;DR: It’s a dedicated desktop Pong console for two players. An Arduino Uno provides the brains, and an Adafruit 16×32 RGB LED matrix the display. The only inputs are two potentiometers connected to two of the analog inputs left free by the LED matrix. There are a couple of pins still available, and initially thought I’d use them to add a push button for each player, but decided to go with a minimal user interface instead. Continue reading
It looks like no-one has yet taken advantage of the CC-BY-NC-SA licence under which Adam Savage kindly licenced his plans for the EDC One and EDC Two bags. I’m not planning on making one of the bags anytime soon, but I did want to take a look at the plans. Since I couldn’t find a free download anywhere, I decided to buy the plans and share them here:
If you do download a free copy to take a look, and then decide to make a bag, please consider buying the plans as well. It’s only $5 US, after all. And if you make something, don’t forget to share what you’ve made with the world!
NOTE 2019-06-26: The original way this check worked with Terraform 11 no longer works with Terraform 12, as v12 checks that attribute names are valid. The code has been updated accordingly. Instead of a null resource, we now use a local_file data source with Terraform 12.
I’ve recently begun working with Terraform at work to move our infrastructure definitions to code. Like a lot of companies, we have some legacy applications that either have never been re-installed, or have been re-installed using a very long and usually outdated README or other document. Using a tool like Terraform and moving infrastructure into code makes re-installing a system much easier.
Terraform’s workspaces are designed to keep different environments (dev/production) separate. Mostly workspaces seem to work fine; For example, it’s quite easy to automatically select the correct variables based on the current workspace.
However, workspaces don’t keep the environments quite as separate as I’d like. Once you select a workspace, Terraform won’t go out of its way to remind you about which workspace you’re on. It’s only a matter of time before this happens: Continue reading
