“Hello Fresh - Duck A L'Orange”
Jan 22, 2021
When my wife signed up for Hello Fresh my hope was we would try new and interesting recipes. Mix things up a little. This week’s order included Duck A L’Orange and I will say this is my favorite recipe I’ve had from Hello Fresh so far.
We’ll start with preparation. It was easy to put together. Mashed potatoes? Straight forward. Mixing the sauce? Easy. Baking the duck? Except for their time estimates being wrong, easy.
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“Hello Fresh - Shawarma Spiced Chicken”
Jan 20, 2021
I’ll say up front the Shawarma Spiced Chicken is very much up my alley. Early into our Hello Fresh journey, I would say it is probably my second favorite recipe.
Hello Fresh says this is a 30 minute recipe. My timing was longer than 30 minutes but close enough that with a couple of tweaks to my execution, I’d have gotten it down to 30. Cooking jasmine rice was the longest step of the process at 15 minutes and was hands off.
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“Hello Fresh - Italian Chicken and Pepper Sandos”
Jan 18, 2021
Over the course of 2020, our eating habits became routine. Like most people, we didn’t eat out very frequently, we didn’t go to many grocery stores to pickup food, and so our dinner meal became stagnant. To counter this, my wife signed up for Hello Fresh. I will post reviews of some of the meals we try which will hopefully assist some inquiring minds as to what to order.
Hello Fresh’s Italian Chicken & Pepper Sandos includes some chopped chicken breasts, peppers, onions, and bread as the main components.
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Ansible Meraki Modules 2.0
Aug 27, 2020
Ansible 2.9 added support for collections which are modules located at the Ansible Galaxy repository instead of the mainline code. This change allowed for a more rapid pace of development since there were lower release requirements and no need to synchronize releases with Ansible’s release schedule. Version 1.0 of the Meraki modules was released on January 4 and since then, I have released 8 subsequent versions, many of them with new features.
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CoreDNS in Kubernetes with Helm
Aug 3, 2020
Since my last post I have moved almost everything in my home lab to a three-node Kubernetes cluster. I ported my DNS environment without major changes but with PiHole running as a pod within Kubernetes. PiHole is not only primary DNS for my personal devices but it’s also authoritative DNS for the home environment. Authoritative DNS isn’t PiHole’s core competency so it doesn’t do it well and was causing some complexity.
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Playstation Vue's Demise
Dec 3, 2019
I have subscribed to Sony’s Playstation Vue service for at least 5 years. It’s been what my wife and I use for streaming live TV. Vue was one of the first streaming live TV services on the market and was a predecessor to Youtube TV and Hulu’s Live TV offerings. Last month Sony announced they will discontinue Playstation Vue as it was no longer financially viable.
Playstation Vue always had a marketing problem.
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2019 Honda Accord Hybrid - 10,000 Mile Followup
Sep 1, 2019
A few days ago, I unceremoniously rolled over 10,000 miles on my 2019 Honda Accord. The mileage went faster than I’d hoped as I am on pace for a couple thousand more miles a year than I wish. But 8+ months into owning the car, it seems like a good opportunity to follow up on my initial review.
Overall, I am very happy with the car and have very few complaints.
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Mocking HTTP Requests
Aug 16, 2019
Unit testing has a feature called mocks. Mocking allows a test to replace a piece of code with another piece of code so the results are deterministic. For example, a database should be up 100% of the time but there may be network problems preventing the database from being reached. Mocks can be used to fake the response from the database so tests can be run.
Meraki uses HTTP response code 429 to tell the client their rate limit has been reached.
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My Kubernetes Journey
Jul 5, 2019
Kubernetes (aka. k8s) has been one of the hottest topics in the infrastructure world for about two years. It wasn’t until late last year I really got on the containers bandwagon via Docker. But Kubernetes was something else that I didn’t want to touch. I thought it was overkill for my modest needs at home and too complicated to delve into without some solid time for setup and education. Stars aligned when I received access to some labs at work and the gift of a quiet week due to the 4th of July falling on a Thursday.
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Ansible 2.8 Meraki Modules and Beyond
May 25, 2019
Ansible 2.8 was released and it sets the table for some big changes in future releases. Specific to the Meraki modules, there are quite a few changes worth understanding.
New Modules Three new modules were added: meraki_content_filtering, meraki_static_routes, and meraki_syslog.
meraki_content_filtering allows for full configuration of the content filtering settings for MX appliances. I intended on releasing a facts module for it but that wasn’t merged in time for 2.8. Content filtering settings can be edited but not queried.
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