google

Google Cloud Compute using Terraform, locally and on GitHub Actions

Recently, I had a hell of a time figuring out how to handle authentication for running Terraform against Google Cloud. Most of Google’s documentation is way more complicated and uses a lot more jargon than the corresponding AWS documentation. Additionally, most of the existing blog posts I could find by other users talked about creating a service account and then downloading its key, and Google recommends against that for security reasons.

My first contribution to open-source!

(Technically, this is my second contribution, the first being to the Worldforge project. But since Google paid me to contribute to it, in my head it doesn’t count.) I recently discovered that Calibre supports fetching news from different news sources and converting the fetched news to mobi/epub. In addition to this, one can schedule this to happen, say, everyday at 6 am, and also configure Calibre to transfer freshly-downloaded items to your kindle via Amazon’s Whispernet.

Goodbye Google Search

I’ve been having trouble with Google Search results being too smart for their own good for a long time now. I don’t know how recently this changed, but I started noticing that instead of showing me results based on exactly what I entered, Google had started showing results that had synonyms of the words I entered. Being a programmer who uses search mainly for looking up solutions to issues I’m facing with whatever I’m working on at the moment, I really didn’t (and don’t) appreciate Google showing me results for “apt-get upgrade” when I’ve searched for “apt-get update” just because update and upgrade have similar meanings (a stupid example, but the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment.