Blog

Remove unnecessary files in node_modules

As the meme goes, the object with the largest mass in our universe is the node_modules directory. Generally speaking, storage is cheap, and while an unkept set of dependencies can be quite messy (and often times a security hazard), the [...]

Multi-factor authentication (MFA/2FA) not working

Multi-factor authentication is an absolute must to help maintain the highest level of security on your accounts. There's many ways to go about MFA/2FA from using an authenticator app to receiving a text message on your phone. Regardless of the [...]

Debugging an AWS Lambda that stopped working

My wife and seed would agree that talking about AWS Lambdas are in my "big three" of things to not shut up about, along with fishing and professional wrestling. Regardless, I do love them so (both the Lambdas and the [...]

Fixing Nest error e73 - No power to Rc wire detected

It's been heating up in Texas recently, even more so when I had discovered that our Nest unit was giving us grief about the "Rc wire" not being detected. This is an existing unit, not one that I recently installed [...]

VPS Showdown - August 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

It's that time again! Been extremely busy on my end, so it's more of the same at the moment in terms of what's covered. Something notable that I had missed last month is that UpCloud is now offering managed database [...]

How to kill a query on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Coming from MySQL / MariaDB, I was surprised that I couldn't kill a query on an Amazon's Relational Database Service or Amazon Aurora with the kill command. Fortunately, the functionality isn't omitted, it' just buried under some AWS RDS specific [...]

Setting an authorization header when using file_get_contents with PHP

Going through some of my old lists of blog post ideas this weekend. While it's not something I've needed for a minute, it's still something worth taking about. How to set an authorization header when using PHP's wonderful file_get_contents() method [...]

How to push an empty git commit

We've all been there. We need to trigger something from a commit to a git repository, and instead of triggering the build directly, we end up tweaking something in a file, committing it, and pushing it. It's usually just adding [...]

VPS Showdown - July 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr

I got a few bits of feedback recently that I took into consideration before doing this month's benchmarks. The first bit was to include some additional price points and plan types instead of just the $5 plan. The other (opposing) [...]

Migrating from aws ecr get-login to aws ecr get-login-password

I'm not entirely sure when the change happens, but recently as I was upgrading AWS CodeBuilds to use a newer version of Ubuntu, I ran into some problems with aws ecr get-login. Without making any code changes, my build started [...]