I'm not sure why I haven't seen this before, but there's apparently an EarthCam permanently pointed at Downtown St. Louis from across the river in the Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park, and it gives a live view of the iconic St. Louis cityscape 24x7. On a nice crisp fall evening like tonight, it looks very nice:

You can watch downtown St. Louis live on the EarthCam - St. Louis website .

For the past few years, I've been tweaking a few different camera rigs for wildlife and outdoor photography. I have set up a few different time-lapse rigs using my Raspberry Pis with Pi Cameras, and I've set up my Nikon D750 in a few different ways with its built-in intervalometer, or with a wireless remote.

This is great, but I've always wanted to set up the Pi with an infrared Pi Camera, as well as a motion sensor, so

So, I have amassed a pretty massive media library over the years—my goal has always been to maintain every single bit of digital media I own locally via iTunes (and/or other libraries which can be shared with devices in my home), and be able to play any of my DVDs, Blu-rays, digital purchases, etc. on any of my devices (mostly in the Apple kingdom, but there are a few Raspberry Pis and other devices floating about).

I also like the

I noticed on one of the CI servers I'm running that the .ssh/known_hosts file had ballooned up to over 1,000,000 lines!

Looking into the root cause (I tail ed the file until I could track down a few jobs that ran every minute), I found that there was the following line in a setup script:

ssh-keyscan -t rsa github.com >> /var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/known_hosts

"

I've been working on some projects which require MFA for all access, including for CLI access and things like using kubectl with Amazon EKS. One super-annoying aspect of requiring MFA for CLI operations is that every day or so, you have to update your STS access token—and also for that token to work you have to update an AWS profile's Access Key ID and Secret Access Key.

I had a little bash function that would allow me to input a token code from my MFA device

I do a lot of local development, and since almost everything web-related is supposed to use SSL these days, and since I like to make local match production as closely as possible, I generate a lot of self-signed certificates using OpenSSL (usually using Ansible's openssl_* modules ).

This presents a problem, though, since I use Safari. Every time I rebuild an environment using my automation, and generate a new certificate for a domain that's protected with HSTS , I end up

Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 (and likely future versions) often don't have Python 2 installed by default. Sometimes Python 3 is installed, available at /usr/bin/python3 , but for many minimal images I've used, there's no preinstalled Python at all.

Therefore, when you run Ansible playbooks against new VMs running Ubuntu, you might be greeted with the following error:

TASK [Gathering Facts] *********

I recently rented a Nikon 105mm VR Macro lens for a weekend, and wanted to experiment with different types of macro photography.

One of the things I was most interested in was focus stacking . See, there's a problem with macro photography in that you're dealing with a depth of field measured in millimeters when reproducing images at a 1:1 ratio, even stopped down to f/8 or f/11. And, wanting to avoid diffraction at higher apertures, there's

I've been primarily a Nikon shooter for all my digital SLR life; I started on film with some compact cameras and a Minolta X-700, but switched to Nikon starting with a D40, working my way up through the years to a D750 today. I love Nikon glass, I love the ergonomics, and I am very used to SLR photography and all it entails.

But after witnessing the steady rise in mirrorless camera popularity, I decided to start testing the waters with