Or, “How I built Jenkins with a few lines of Terraform and some Christmas Cake”.

Almost a year ago I wrote up my comparison of Wasabi and AWS S3, and hinted at the end that I was going to use Wasabi as part of a personal system for archiving photos. Well, 2020 got fully up to speed around then, and my plans were thrown into disarray.

Over the holiday period I finally settled down to spend some time building a photo archiving service for personal use — you’ll hear more about that incoming days. This also meant that I buckled down to start writing some serious Go code, rather than playing around with initial tutorials and lessons. Here’s how it unfolded.

So, first, some caveats. This is not a how to article. It’s not even a this is how to do AWS Lambda with Go. It’s a quick survey of some of the things I learned, and the journey I went on. Part of that journey…

If you start paying some attention to keeping safe on line, it doesn’t take long before you start seeing articles — and advertisements — telling you that you need a VPN. So then — do you need a VPN?

No.

To be a bit more accurate: probably not, under most circumstances.

It might help if I talk about what a VPN is. I could start by saying it’s a Virtual Private Network, but that’s not going to help. Let’s go back a bit. At the highest level, when your laptop or phone is communicating with a remote service, we might as…

There are a handful of problems that keep recurring across my decades of working in information technology. Some problems are simple to address, some are always annoying, and a few of them seem doomed to need re-solving each time.

The one on my mind today is that of addresses, and locations. The crux of the problem is this: addresses and locations are two very different things, and yet information system designers and implementers persistently and repeatedly mix the two up, and fail to grasp the subtle complexities of either.

I’ve struggled with the consequences of this in many different arenas…

I love scams. I love the improbable email, and the cunning SMS tricks, and the eternal optimism of the inexperienced con artist. There are few things in the world of technology, and the world of information security, that reveal so much humanity as scams.

There’s one simple technique to inoculate yourself against most scams:

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The thing about scams is that they appeal directly to our emotions. …

Last time I wrote I spoke at some length about passwords, and why you should use a password manager. The nice thing about sophisticated password managers like 1Password is that they usually provide a way to make your passwords shared across your various devices — laptops, desktops, tablets, phones and even smart watches. The big drawback to that is that there is some risk of your passwords being exposed if your device is stolen or used by someone else.

It’s not only passwords that are a problem with mobile devices. For convenience we usually have them set up so that…

If you look online for advice on keeping safe online, two pieces of advice that are usually at or near the top of the list are “use a strong password” and “use a password manager”. Great advice, but useless if you don’t know why. What’s a “strong password”? One that bench presses it’s own weight? A password manager? What does that even mean?

I’ll try to unpack those and explain why “strong password” and “password manager” are actually good advice, and at the top of the list. …

I’ve had reason lately to be thinking about the information that is available for keeping safe on-line. It feels to me that a lot of it is either aimed at experts who worry about keeping a business safe, or else it’s rather too simple and likely to be aimed at your Grandma.

On that basis, I’m going to try to write a series of small pieces aimed at particular topics, keep it simple, but also offer meaningful advice.

So to start with, I thought I’d talk about the risks you face online.

There’s really only three main risks the average…