Another blog bites the dust

TL;DR – this is why (and how) I created the electronic version of EFF’s Dice.

I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and believe in their just cause. I support it as much as I can and try to educate as many people as I can about their rights, privileges online and how to correctly behave in this new found jungle.

So, you’ve decided you want to blog or write on Medium – where all the cool kids hang out. Great. Remember there are other similar platforms to write and blog and at some point Medium (like everything else on the Internet) might lose its appeal or even, god forbid, shutdown.

When that happens, what will happen to your posts? How can you and the rest of the internet reach it?

Are you using Lets Encrypt? (If not, you should go ahead and use it to generate SSL certificates to ALL of your web servers).

If you want to run it on EC2 or GCE using the –standalone argument (./letsencrypt-auto certonly –standalone -d example.com) make sure port 443 (for SSL) is open on that server.

Otherwise you’ll get the infamous:

`Are you using Lets Encrypt? (If not, you should go ahead and use it to generate SSL certificates to ALL of your web servers).

I’ve recently had the chance to write a new project on AppEngine.

It’s been a long time since I tried I was too lazy (as always) to setup servers just for that.

I’ve decided to use Python but just to be sure I won’t be vendor locked into various AppEngine services I’ve decided to use:

• Flask (instead of webapp2)
• Cloud SQL (instead of DataStore)

This will ensure that I can break out of AppEngine easily with minimal code changes.

In addition to my previously published (very early) project to stream NSQ messages directly to BigQuery, I am happy to presents a modified version of nsq-to-s3 that supports streaming NSQ messages directly Google Cloud Storage.

Grab it while its hot from the nsq-to-gs repo.

I do see a future for a merged version of these two projects that supports both S3 and Google Cloud Storage but this would have to be enough for now.

In the spirit of nsq-to-XXX such as nsq-to-http and nsq-to-file – I bring you the very first version of nsq-to-bigquery.

nsq-to-bigquery, as the name suggest, streams data from an NSQ channel into Google’s BigQuery using the Streaming API and provide very effective means to stream data that should be then further analysed and aggregated by BigQuery’s excellent performance.

This is a (very) initial version so it has some limitations and assumptions.

I’ve bene running a Tor exit node in the Netherlands since August 2013. I believe in the cause of Tor and it was only a matter of time before I started adding code in some for or another.

gonionoo is Go wrapper for OnionOO – the Tor Network Status protocol as is the first step in a slightly larger project I’m working on that I’ve been planning for a while ever since I’ve became a Tor exit node operator.

I’ve created a nice little bash script to take MongoDB backups that is replicaset aware.

It will only take a backup from a replica so if you have the classic master,replica,arbiter configuration you can setup the script via cron on both (current) master and replica and the backup will only run on the replica.

It will then tar.gz the backup and upload it to Google Storage. It can be easily adapted to upload the backup to S3 using s3cmd or the aws cli (aws-cli).

It’s that time of the year and Seedcamp Tel-Aviv is back (for the forth year!). This time lool Ventures is part of the event

In one of my hats I’m the CTO of lool Ventures and I’ll be there as a mentor to give advice and share from my experience in building a startup.

So if you have a great idea and started to work on it be sure to apply now.

Two days ago I’ve shut down the longest running electronics device I ever owned.

The device was my an Alcatel Speedtouch Home ADSL modem which I got circa 2001 when I was lucky enough to get an ADSL line at home.

It was only turned off when there was a power failure or when I moved an apartment.