AUSTRALIAN SMS OTP BURNER
This idea first came to me when Telstra introduced their SMS API a few years back. I kicked off a mini project around it, but couldn’t fully bring it to life due to time constraints. Since then, Telstra has upgraded the API to version 3 and removed the generous free tier that used to offer 1,000 SMS per month. However, they still allow free receiving numbers—1 for accounts without payment setup, and up to 5 for those with. Because sending SMS now incurs a cost, I had to scale back my original plan to include outbound messaging. Still, I managed to stick to the core idea: enabling OTP verification for users who want to avoid spam calls from places like insurance or energy companies.
WIREGUARD SETUP
I spent some time figuring out how WireGuard works and found the guidelines, including the official ones, to be rather complex. So, I’m jotting down my learnings here.
AUSTRALIAN TAX INVOICE GENERATOR
As I embarked on my first contractor gig, I was asked to provide my own tax invoice. Having dealt with countless invoices over the years, I assumed it would be a simple task. To my surprise, most tax invoice generators out there require payment—some even take a percentage of the transaction, like Stripe. Others, for something as basic as a Word or Excel template, ask for your email just to send you spam.
CLOUDFRONT FUNCTIONS WITH DYNAMIC ORIGIN POINTING TO ANOTHER CLOUDFRONT
At re:Invent 2024, CloudFront Functions introduced new features, including the ability to dynamically change the origin host.
HOME ASSISTANT WITH DSM7
https://gist.github.com/maeneak/851e883eca7cddd7114f7eaed201ca9d has a pretty good guide in there.
Create a data directory & docker-compose file:
RUN A DEBUG PROB IN A KUBERNETES CLUSTER WITH GATEKEEPER
When attempting to run kubectl debug <node> -it --image=<image> blocked due to gatekeeper, you can do about the same with normal kubectl run command like below:
CAPTURE BASH COMMAND ERROR IN FILE
Neat trick to capture STDERR into a text file for the next command but also exit with the preserved exit code after then.
LOOKUP CMK FOR A TEST IN CDK
Add a CMK in CDK was easy, then when I looked into a way to reference the resource using findResources, faced constant failure as for some reason CDK can’t really pickup the key based on the alias.
EXTRACT TLD FROM STRING BY BASH
Faced this interesting use case when I need to extract TLD from the provided hostname string.
OLD TWITTER DELETER
My new personal project automatically clean up old tweets.