Recently I’ve been working on a project that involved using an AWS Lambda to interact with resources that required authentication using secrets. This is a fairly typical problem in cloud engineering and the “modern” approach is to use a secrets management engine to make sure only resources that should have access to specific secrets can get access to them.

Having bought a bunch of the materials I need to make my dumb wearable project and told the internet about it I now have no excuse to get started. I think the project can be reasonably broken down into 3 components; the twitter account that people can interact with, a server that exposes an API for my jacket to consume and the jacket itself.

An idea has been floating around in the back of my mind for a few months now. I want to build a coat that connects to the internet. This is what motivated me to figure out how to use micropython on an internet enabled microprocessor like the esp32. The internet of things gets a bad rap but being a massive nerd who loves William Gibson novels means I dig the idea of connecting pointless things to CYBERSPACE so long as it’s the bit of CYBERspace I control. So I’ve embarked on making a stupid leather jacket with lots of shiny LED’s stapled to it.

I’ve had a couple of ESP32 dev boards knocking around for years now but thought I’d pick one up in lockdown as a fun little project to see if I can make something cool ahead of COVID permitting EMF in 2021. This afternoon I sat down to install Micropython on the board . This isn’t the first time I’ve done this and probably won’t be the last so I thought I’d write up how to do it.

Star Wars: Squadrons is a dream game. It plays like a modern X-Wing vs Tie Fighter and that’s exactly what I wanted. In VR the sense of sitting in a space fighter cockpit is arresting. Being able to track targets naturally as you dogfight is a huge improvement to the “chase the targeting arrow” gameplay that playing a space sim on a monitor usually ends up with.

I don’t often write about politics but 4 years ago I made two posts about the 2016 elections for the President of the United States. One I wrote on the night of the election where I expressed my fears and a second where they were realised. I don’t think we’re seeing a return to the heady days of 2008 when anything seemed possible but for me the 2020 presidential elections were cathartic.

I’ve lived in New Cross for six years now but my time here is coming to an end. It’s been great living in the same place for an extended period of time, you really get to know an area and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have been able to do so. So many of my friends have moved two or three times in the period we’ve stayed here. New Cross and the surrounding streets have changed so much in the time we’ve been here, Queen’s Road Peckham is unrecognisable. All of the pubs have been refurbished, there are multiple excellent restaurants and we’re leaving it all behind.

I came across the GC-Loader while browsing the Gamecube subreddit for some cheap nostalgia thrills. It’s a little daughter board for the Gamecube that replaces the disk drive and allows you to boot directly from an SD card. This makes running homebrew incredibly easy and unlike modchips the PNP version doesn’t even require any soldering. I was actually up for a bit of soldering but given this is my first time modding a console the easier the setup the better.