It’s dead My laptop that is. It isn’t (wasn’t?) the latest or greatest, but I could utilize open source LLMs on it and run Unreal Engine 5. It is/was an Asus RoG Strix G15 with an AMD Ryzen 9 (8 co...

flowchart TD A[Packer Build<br/>Phase 1] -->|Produces Image<br/>VDI/AMI/Azure Image| B[OpenTofu Deploy<br/>Phase 2] B -->|Boots VM with<br/>cloud-init seed| ...

Part 2: Building and Deploying the Environment (Step‑by‑Step) This section walks through the exact steps to build and deploy a modular Azure environment using Bicep. The goal is simplicity: follow ...

Building Cloud Foundations with Infrastructure‑as‑Code: A Practical Introduction Using Azure Bicep Part 1: Why IaC Matters, What I’m Building, and How Bicep Fits In Cloud engineering has matured t...

Overview UTMStack is an all‑in‑one threat management platform that integrates SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) with XDR (Extended Detection and Response). By correlating log data, t...

Prerequisites A fresh Ubuntu Server 24.04 installation Basic knowledge of Linux command-line interface Root access to the Linux system Snort3 already installed from source (see Part 1) on ...

Part 1 - Installing Snort3 on Ubuntu Install Ubuntu Server - Use VirtualBox to create a VM with 4GB RAM, 80GB HDD. Set the NIC to be NAT during install for internet access and SSH. Update After th...

I’ve been extremely busy with a remodel project lately, so I have not been able to focus on my “lab” as I wish. However, that phase is complete and I now have more time and will resume my hard hat...

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with ESP32 boards and ESPHome to bring smarter environmental control into an insulated storage area in our garage. This post walks through how I set up temperature a...

Overiew In 2024, I built a POC IoT device that would detect if a person was wearing a hard hat or not. It would then send a message via MQTT to another device that would display “GO” if they were w...