Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are both great. Any system released before supporting those two technologies is going have its fair share of quirks, OEM frustrations, and compromises. Thankfully, in the BMW e46 (+e53, e83, others), BMW put together a fairly tweakable system that you can probably get 95% of…

I sat my first AWS exam: AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate in April 2015. In the 6 years since, I have sat a total of twenty two AWS exams. I failed 3: my Advanced Networking specialty (beta) in 2017, my Solutions Architect Professional & Devops Professional re-certifications in 2018…

My son Rory was born in November 2018. He is 937 days old. This week he had a positive Covid-19 PCR test following an outbreak of Covid-19 (Delta/Brexit Trade Deal variant) at his nursery. Assuming the ‘official’ start date of the pandemic is March 23rd 2020 (“we’ll turn the tide…

I’ve written a bunch of other medium.com stories for claps and cash recently surrounding TLS certificates for my Synology box and for running applications. I’ve got both SickBeard-custom and SABnzbd (both from synoCommunity) on my Synology NAS and they have worked well together. However, once I started digging round into…

Remember when you’d enjoy chips* cooked three-ways? Yeah me either. Legit medium.com story-for-claps. So my bash history is 5000 entries of my trying to understand how to install Python, different versions of Python, pip, pipenv, pyenv and so on. Somewhat labourious. I do understand the distinct advantages of virtual environments…

AWS’s second speciality exam — big data — is designed to validate technical skills and experience in designing and implementing AWS services to derive value from data. The exam is for individuals who perform complex Big Data analyses and validates an individual’s ability to: Implement core AWS Big Data services…

I recently sat and passed the Terraform Associate Exam; and wanted to share some thoughts-for-claps about the exam content, and how to best-prepare yourself to take it. I am not a devops Engineer. Ask any of my colleagues. I leave the heavy-lifting of Terraform to some fella called Jenkins and…

I’ve had some spare time recently to write a bunch of stories on medium that link together. This is the third (and final) in the series about getting Pihole setup once you’ve successfully: Using Cloudflare for DDNS with LetsEncrypt for TLS Certs — medium story Configured macvlan networking for Docker…

Following on from my other story about DDNS and TLS with Cloudflare, I now want to extend the services on my Synology NAS to include Pihole, DNSCrypt, others; ideally using Docker, rather than some of the SynoCommunity images. …