We are one week into Russia's war against Ukraine. From here in America, it is hard to understand the reality of a country whose citizens seemed to be going about normal lives just a short time ago. I find it also hard to know what to say to people whose …

I reached a new milestone this month. A minor one in the grand scheme of things, but one worthy of a few remarks nonetheless. This month marks my longest tenure with an employer at five years and 10 months. I've now worked at Index Data longer than I had at …

I've deleted what I originally had here as newsletter-opening-banter. These are serious times. I think the world has radically changed overnight, and roughly 7.9 billion of us are not in positions to do anything about it. To those that are in positions to do something about it and to …

The middle of February already. Time is flying; I hope you are having fun.

The threads this week:

• Privacy-busting Fingerprints in Journal Articles
• Fraud in NFTs
• Improve Your Life

Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already …

This is the web page I wish I had found when I spent the afternoon sorting through why AWS CloudFormation kept telling me:

Resource handler returned message: "Invalid request provided: AWS::CloudFront::PublicKey"

Like me, you might be working on a Serverless.com stack and are trying to restrict access …

The invoice is in. This reengineered blog and the reinvigorated Thursday Threads newsletter cost just US$2.51 last month. All of that cost is in the blog construction and delivery. The cost of delivering the newsletter alone falls well below AWS' always-free tiers of service. Not bad! And as …

In the past few months, I've created about a half-dozen projects using "serverless" infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). (And I'm about to start another one.) Over the course of these projects, I've refined my development environment into something that I think is useful to share, so read on for …

Greetings from the wintery mix that is central Ohio. The local school district called off school yesterday afternoon in preparation for what came today. Also yesterday: Ohio's own "Buckeye Chuck" predicted an early spring. Let's be grateful for snow days (and teenagers who shovel snow) and for predictions of early …

On a whim, last Thursday I put out a poll with the announcement of last week's issue. Out of the three threads, controlled digital lending, gamers and NFTs, and cats, the winner was cats. The sample size was small—five votes—so I'm not ready to …

I was introduced to structured logs at work, and this ol' hacker thinks that is a darn good idea. For a new program I'm writing, I wanted to put that into use. The program uses AWS Lambdas, and the log entries for the Lambdas end up in CloudWatch Logs. Unfortunately …

Wednesday night with a cat on the lap, composing the next day's Thursday Threads. How could life get any better?

Hey...I'm not above using cat pictures to satisfy readers. In fact, I'm going to do it one more time before this newsletter is finished. (Oh, and …

Welcome to issue 80 of Thursday Threads. I'm so happy many of you chose to stick around and greetings to all of the new subscribers. To those that received my email last Thursday giving you a heads-up that a new issue would be coming to your inbox but then didn't …

Late last year, I had my AT&T Uverse residential gateway replaced. For reasons that truly baffle me, AT&T has decided that they are going to run unsupported equipment on their residential customer network. When the replacement was swapped in, my family noticed that video conference calls—Zoom and …

Welcome to the re-inaugural issue of DLTJ Thursday Threads. Counting backward, there were 78 previous issues (all by the most recent still need to be converted from the old WordPress style of formatting) with—all told—several hundred references and commentary. Here at the start of 2022, I'm making a …

Success! Four parts plus a half (or a "re-do"" of part 2):

1. Ramp up automation for adding reading sources to Obsidian
2. Refactor the process of building this static website on AWS
   • Fix the webmentions cache, an unanticipated diversion
3. Recreate the ability for readers to get updates by email
4. Turn the …

So it has been quiet here for a couple of days. Rest assured: the quietness comes from heads-down work, not from giving up. Here are the refactor-DLTJ activities so far:

• Ramp up automation for adding reading sources to Obsidian
• Refactor the process of building this static website on AWS
  • Fix …

Okay, a half-step backward to fix something I broke yesterday. As I described earlier this year, this static website blog uses the Webmention protocol to notify others when I link to their content and receive notifications from others. Behind the scenes, I'm using the Jekyll plugin called jekyll-webmention_io to integrate …

Look at that! Progress is being made down the list of to-dos for this blog in order to start the new year on a fresh footing. As you might recall from the last blog post, I set out to do some upgrades across the calendar year boundary:

• Ramp up automation …

As 2021 comes to a close, I've been thinking about this blog and my own "personal knowledge management" tools. It is time for some upgrades to both. The next few posts will be about the changes I'm making over this winter break. Right now I think the updating will look …

Last month, EDUCAUSE published its Top 10 IT Issues for 2022 with the subtitle "The Higher Education We Deserve". To reach the top 10, EDUCAUSE members were asked to prioritize 17 issues identified by the EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel members. The members of the Issue Panel then broke up into …