Blog — » Henry J Schmale's Blog

Unveiling the Risks of sts:GetFederationToken, You Probably Don't Need It 2024 May 02

Let’s talk about sts:GetFederationToken and why we should disable it within our AWS Accounts. This call allows the creation of temporary access credentials that can be associated to any user identity. These credentials are difficult to revoke from the console, and cannot be revoked using the standard deny all credentials created before X time policy. It is much better to use standard built in identity providers like the OpenID Connect for CICD Operations or IAM Identity Center for federated user access. We’ll walk through how this call works, what it was originally intended for, and some threat detection.

How I Updated Ruby on My Arch Box Cause the System One Was Out of Date 2024 April 15

I just moved my laptop to run an arch derivative because I got a new SSD installed for more exiciting projects. To my surprise the current version of ruby in the repos was out of date by 9 months. So I had to learn how to use rbenv in order to build my blog and deploy new posts. It’s just like virtual environments with python, but unfamiliar because I only use ruby because I did this site in Jekyll, and to migrate would defeat the purpose of this site which is to share my writing and show off the cool things I built.

A Diagram to Explain the Various Magic the Gathering Formats 2024 March 26

I was struggling to explain the various formats of magic the gathering to my friend, so I made this diagram using d2lang, a nifty diagram creation language. There’s about 5 commonly played formats on paper and then there’s the digital formats. Each format has different card pools and its own banlist to enhance the health of the meta. Each format may also have different set construction rules, but the only special one is commander.

The Magic of Beer Can Chicken 2024 March 19

Beer can chicken and it’s derivatives are my favorite thing to cook. I have laid out in this post some notes on cooking it well, and how to do it right. It’s not something that is explained easily or obviously. These are my personal notes on how I do it, and will be updated as I learn new things about it.

Linting IAM Policies Automatically in Your Pipeline 2024 February 16

When writing IAM policies there are a lot of concerns that must be taken into account. These JSON documents can be the cause of a lot of hurt when deploying them. People often mess up formating, write overly broad permissions, and just don’t get them perfect the first time. Sure you could use a dumb linter just for JSON, but that doesn’t cover all the potential screw ups. So I want to share a smarter linter I found and how we integrated into our deployment pipeline.

Porting a Linux Program to Run in Browser using Emscripten 2023 December 21

On my infinitely long list of things I wanted to implement one of them was taking a binary and stuffing it into a webpage to run entirely client side. Today I have accomplished just that with my new Atari 2600 IDE. This allows you to write an assembly program entirely in browser and run it without setting up any kind of toolchain on your own machine. The following are my notes on getting emscripten, a way to compile c/c++ to run in browser using llvm and wasm, to generate a binary and interfacing that binary with some vanilla Javascript.

Easy Access of Cloudformation Lambda Environment Variables. 2023 September 11

Sometimes you want to run your lambda function deployed as a cloudformation stack locally for testing purposes but you don’t want to hard code any of the underlying resources into your environment. These resources might be things like DynamoDB tables, SNS topics or SQS urls. Their names aren’t hard coded, and shouldn’t be hard coded otherwise you have a singleton stack. Sometimes you’re just a bit too impatient to spin everything up using the SAM cli, and don’t want to debug docker issues, so this helps.

Europe 2023 - Vienna 2023 August 03

The next stop on my grand tour of Europe is Vienna because it was relatively close to Prague, and I didn’t need to hop a flight there. I took a train in and a train back. It’s slightly better than Amtrak, but somehow feels more chaotic when boarding. I guess it’s just the number of people boarding at one time it feels that way. Vienna is a very cultured city. It was the seat of power for the Hapsburgs and AustroHungarian empire. There’s operas and ballets, but of course I didn’t do that. I was there to walk around, see the sights and explore the museums.

Europe 2023 - Iceland 2023 July 05

Iceland is a gorgeous if a tad expensive country to visit, which I’m glad I had the opportunity to visit on my Europe trip. It’s my last stop and probably the most outdoorsy part of my trip. It’s the outlier on this whole trip. As I’ve mostly done cities and spent time in urban areas it’s a nice change. It’s also funny because the weather can change at the drop of a hat, and I packed incorrectly. I should have brought more long sleeves and warmer outfits, because when it rains it pours and blows like crazy. It also does not get dark here so bring a sleep mask if you’re sensitive to light.

Europe 2023 - Berlin 2023 June 29

I’m doing a grand tour of Europe this summer over 5 cities. The first stop on my trip was Berlin, Germany. It’s a city with a very rich history and amazing culture. We visited a beer garden, tried to get into a club, and visited some memorials. The beer was good. I didn’t have a single bad beer there, but it was very plain - no sours or experimental things besides raspberry. I tried curry wurst and 2 kinds of potato salads. Anything with potatoes is heavenly, I had the best potato’s soup. It’s got some fantastic food and was a reasonably priced city. The east west divide was also really interesting with most of the historic stuff occuring on the east side. The divide is still really obvious in architecture and feel.

This is a PSA about RClone! It's Awesome! 2023 April 10

rclone is a life saver. You might think that’s hyperbole, but it’s not. Rclone is this file storage Swiss army knife it speaks many protocols between the various online storage providers allows transfer between them. I just helped my sister download a massive set of photos shared with her from Google Drive that were refusing to be zipped and downloaded. We were waiting for a while to download these files, until I said let’s just go and use rclone. It’s not exactly a tool that is friendly to expose to the average nontechnical user, but when you need it you need it. So I went ahead and set it up to connect to her Google Drive.

Atlanta Trip Journal 2023 March 17

I recently visited Atlanta to fulfill a couple of desires related to things I’ve seen on YouTube and Reddit, mostly for food and drinks. Atlanta is one of the few places with Trader VIc’s still in business. Trader Vic’s is known for their tropical tiki drinks. The various southern foods are also very enticing. I was going to go after I left my last job, but I was very sick with RSV when I was going to go in early October, so I went this month on Saturday to a Tuesday as a nice weekend trip. This is a record of everything I did out there, and the places I want to visit the next time down. It’s a city with more than just the busiest airport in North America.

Tire Pressure & The Polar Vortex in Jupyter Python 2023 February 05

I had low tire pressure yesterday due to the polar vortex, so I added additional air to my tires to about 34PSI at 22F, today it is much warmer at nearly 50F and the PSI went up more than I expected. Also the PSI doesn’t seem to change as much from Spring to Summer, when the weather can swing up more than 20 degrees from night to day. I decided to write some python to try to figure this whole thing out using the Ideal Gas Law. Also no attempt was made to account for the weight of the car, and how that adds pressure to tire.

Book Review - 'Randomize' By Andy Weir 2023 January 27

I recently finished reading “Randomize” by Andy Weir. He is probably one of my favorite authors and comic creator (He used to have a web comic, and its awesome). His writing generally blends the right amount of real world science and entertaining characters for a technical audience. It’s a really good short story about how quantum computing will affect the gambling industry. It’s also part of an anthology called “Forward about various future technologies.

Letter Writing and Politics 2023 January 05

One of the most important things you as a civically engaged person can do is write your local politicians at all levels of government a letter about the things that annoy and upset you. If you come with solutions, and rational arguments you will get results by showing that these matter enough for you to take time out of your day to condense your thoughts into a well defined format.