Michael C. Beck

Personal Blog about Tech, Architecture and other Thoughts.

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Getting started with Teensy Development on PlatformIO on a remote Machine

Published

Sometimes it is necessary to connect to a Teensy/Arduino via a remote host. May it be due to limiations in connectivity or because the chipset is not fully supported on your host OS but rather some linux variant that has the appropriate support out of the box. This guide will help you to understand how to connect to Teensy on PlatformIO and the additional steps being necessary to connect to it via a remote host.

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Watchmaker includes enormous loading indicator

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H. Moser & Cie released another watch resembling the look of an Apple Watch with their Final Upgrade. While I am a huge fan of mechanical watches it’s somewhat ironical to me to see a watch maker confusing time measuring with waiting for it to never end. From wikipedia: A throbber is an animated graphical control element used to show that a computer program is performing an action in the background (such as downloading content, conducting intensive calculations or communicating with an external device).

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Switching Jobs

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Switching Jobs Switching jobs is a process not a task. Everyone familiar with the feeling of discomfort of any kind or having a new opportunity that excites us coming up has felt this before. And while one wants to directly jump in and switch, it’s not something easily done. There are multiple factors to it, one might be the process of leaving a company or it might be a longer time of struggling and inwardly quitting until you cut ties.

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Completing the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam

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I am really excited to have my Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam completed. While I do not recommend anyone to have their internet connectivity dropping in an exam [sic], it worked out for me in the end and having this completed was a great experience. It’s a very thorough exam, which tackles your knowledge of the various topics Core Concepts Multi-Container Pods Pod Design Configuration Oberservability Services and Networking State persistence as well as your ability to work quickly with an eye to the detail.

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Installing Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes

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After taking the TAS for Kubernetes route lately I wanted to try out the underlying project in v0.4.0, as this incorporates the Paketo Buildpacks. Preparation steps are the same as for the TAS installation, but the project includes some great documentation for installing it on a local cluster, may it be a kind or minikube one. Assuming you have your kind cluster installed, kapp, kbld, ytt and bosh installed, changes start to kick in when preparing for the configuration.

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Apple's Statement on the rejection of Hey App from Basecamp founders

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Apple, writing to Basecamp Founders David Heinemeier-Hanson and Jason Fried: Thank you for being an iOS app developer. We understand that Basecamp has developed a number of apps and many subsequent versions for the App Store for many years, and that the App Store has distributed millions of these apps to iOS users. These apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years.

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Deployment with Hugo (and Github Actions)

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One of the main tasks to relaunch this blog was to migrate over to Hugo. While the initial setup had been done on Github Pages and this is an excellent choice for zero-cost hosting, I wanted to personalize and own my content rather to host it on some other platform which is not made for this exact purpose. Additionally I didn’t want to upgrade my account just for this reason (Github doesn’t allow private repositories to publish sites unless on a Pro Plan).

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Installing Tanzu Application Service (formerly Pivotal Cloud Foundry) on Kubernetes

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It’s now a couple of years since I tried to install Cloud Foundry for the first time when joining Pivotal. During that time we made the shift from using DEA (Droplet Execution Agent) to Diego (Differences) and now with the shift towards embracing Kubernetes as the container scheduler it was time to give it a go on my laptop. Pivotal Cloud Foundry has been renamed to match the Tanzu brand and while this is more of a branding effort, the real changes are now in beta and ready to try out.

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Blog Update

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It’s the beginning of restarting a blog. This website and blog has served me for various endeavours throughout the years and I wondered if it was time to restart a blog in those times. Blog you say? Yes, old-school technology that somehow made it along and is powering various opinion websites. RSS and a reader If you’re using a Mac, I highly recommend to install NetNewsWire which is the best RSS reader by far.

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