A while back I created the Daily Patent. A Twitter bot that gets a random patent and tweets it out periodically. I started by hosting this on a Google Cloud virtual machine but eventually decided to look for something more suited to this kind of task.

Here’s my review of several places you can run a simple Twitter bot.

A while ago I received this voicemail on my personal cell phone:

Executed by the US treasury - Intending[ed?] your serious attention. Ignoring this will be an intentional second attempt to avoid initial appearance before a magistrate, judge or a grand jury for a federal criminal offence. This is the final attempt to reach you. To resolve this issue immediately and to speak to a federal agent call back number 7162269750. I repeat 7162269750. Thank you.

Rather than call back immediately (the feds can wait a few hours right?) I did a little digging.

I’ve noticed that I end up looking for the same small subset of Redshift time-related conversion operations when I need to do things like change epochs to timestamps, deal with timezones or manage time ranges. To save myself some time I decided to throw them all into one post that I can reference later - I’m also hoping these will be useful to others who find themseleves interacting with Redshift.

In the last few months there’s been a number of online password manager bugs that have made headlines. You might have seen recent reports of a major vulnerability in LastPass, one of the most popular cloud-hosted password managers.

Even more recently then that was the breach of OneLogin, a vendor for single sign on management.

While I wholeheartedly believe that online password managers can be great tools for improving your security, it’s also important to recognize that they do have potential drawbacks.

To avoid these drawbacks and still get the benefits of a password manager, let’s take a look at some local password managers.

I recently wrote a script that switches your AWS default profile. After coming back to it a few weeks later I realized I could make it more elegant by relying directly on the ConfigParser library to modify the configuration instead of doing a line by line search and edit.