I recently went digging through my ~/.aws/config and found exactly what you’d expect from a file nobody’s looked at in years: two profiles, each with a plaintext aws_access_key_id and aws_secret_access_key sitting right there. One of them turned out to be a root account key. Not an IAM user with scoped permissions — the actual root credential, with the ability to do anything, including closing the account, stored as plaintext on my laptop.

That’s the setup most people have. It works fine for years, right up until a laptop gets stolen, a dotfiles repo gets pushed to the wrong place, or a debugging script accidentally logs the environment.

The fix isn’t a better way to store the secret. It’s not needing one at all.

A few years back I set up this Middleman-powered blog and then… promptly let it collect dust. Life gets busy. Motivation comes and goes. The friction of spinning up a dev environment, remembering the Slim templating syntax, and figuring out what to write is enough to keep most updates from ever happening.

So I tried something different: I asked Claude to do it for me.

For almost a year the ability to change the MAC address on MacBooks has been broken or disabled.

For the last 3-5 months I have been having issues hearing audio with Flash on Chrome. So many times I would go to YouTube, see the video and hear no sound. My solution at the time was to “force close” Chrome and reopen. I sent numerous bug reports...

I recently discovered a very useful set of Perl command line tools. I hope you find these as useful as I have.

pmall

show all installed versions and descs

pman

show a module's man page

pmcat

page through a module file

pmdesc

print out version and whatis description...

Now you can get custom sized images from the Facebook graph api.

By default, Komodo does not work well with public key only SSH sessions.

I was getting this error every time I tried to open a remote file on a specific server:

Remote SSH server does not allow password authentication. Allowed types are: 'publickey...

I was getting a segmentation fault after upgrading to ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.0 and it was driving me crazy.

/Users/cowholio4/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p0/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/http.rb:799: [BUG] Segmentation fault

To fix this I rebuilt ruby with a...