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.

I recently splurged on a vanity domain that I realized I didn’t have time or interest in developing into a full-blown blog or microsite. Because of this I decided it would just be best to redirect it to this blog.

The problem is that I’m too cheap and lazy to pay for and manage a small server running Apache or Nginx. This can be a perfectly good option, but the last thing I want is to waste time on server management/config just to forward a vanity domain.

Instead of paying for a dedicated server for this task I opted to use AWS S3 and Route 53 to forward my domain for me. These cost me a fraction of the price of the smallest rentable EC2 instance. It also means that after I get it setup I never have to deal with the pains of configuration or server management.

Here’s how you can setup your own vanity or typo domain forwarding without paying for a web server.

I frequently find myself switching between AWS profiles, especially when I’m home from work switching between side projects on different AWS accounts. I got tired of opening and editing my credentials file manually so I wrote a Python script and a Bash function to do it for me. You can use it too!

Meet Sparrow - a Twitter bot shell that makes it easier to create interesting automated accounts. In this post I’ll show you how to make a simple automated Twitter bot on AWS using Sparrow and AWS Lambda. Better yet, it’s all free!