My Top 10 of 2023

2023 has been an extraordinary year for music, showcasing an eclectic mix of genres, styles, and artistic visions. This list of 17 albums represents the year’s rich musical landscape, each offering a unique perspective and sound. From the psychedelic choral pop of The Polyphonic Spree’s “Salvage Enterprise” to the introspective and nuanced melodies of Jenny Lewis in “Joy’All,” these albums traverse a spectrum of emotional and sonic experiences. The list includes revered artists like Peter Gabriel with his album “I/O” and new interpretations of classics like “The Endless Coloured Ways (The Songs Of Nick Drake)” by Various artists....

December 23, 2023 · 25 min · Russ McKendrick

Playing with Aider Chat

I had some time, so I thought I would take a look at Aider Chat external link , Aidir Chat is described by its authors as; aider is a command-line chat tool that allows you to write and edit code with OpenAI’s GPT models. You can ask GPT to help you start a new project, or modify code in your existing git repo. Aider makes it easy to git commit, diff & undo changes proposed by GPT without copy/pasting....

July 15, 2023 · 9 min · Russ McKendrick

Revisting Podman

Although it’s been some time since I’ve worked with containers on my local machine, I recently found myself intrigued to discover what’s new with Podman. Setting Up Podman To kick things off, we’ll need to get Podman installed. As my development environment is running on a Mac M2, I’m going to employ Homebrew for this purpose: Install Podman $ brew install podman podman-compose podman-desktop In addition to Podman itself, I’ve also chosen to install Podman Compose and Podman Desktop....

June 14, 2023 · 6 min · Russ McKendrick

Infrastructure as Code for Beginners is out now

I am pleased to announce that my latest book, “Infrastructure as Code for Beginners,” is now available for purchase. Over the last six months, I have fully dedicated myself to this project, channeling my experience and knowledge into providing a resource that simplifies the complexities of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The importance of IaC cannot be overstated in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. IaC ensures consistent and repeatable deployment of cloud-based services, thereby saving time while delivering robust results....

June 4, 2023 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick

Ansible setup with Azure on a new Mac

Following on from upgrading my Macs to all M1-based ones, I get around to finally needing to use Ansible; typically, I would install Python using PyEnv and then run the following … It should just work?!?! pip install --user ansible pip install --user -r https://github.com/ansible-collections/azure/blob/dev/requirements-azure.txt ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection … and away we go, but this time I came across a few problems. The first was the following error when installing the requirements using the remote requirements-azure....

December 28, 2021 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick

VSCode + Bicep on an M1 Mac

Probably a little late to the party with this one, but I have recently upgraded to an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, for the most part, the problems with moving to arm64 are not as bad as I thought - most are annoying little things. However, the biggest one came when I decided to take a serious look at Bicep. After installing the Bicep VSCode extension  external link and opening a test Bicep file, I was greeted with the following message …...

December 4, 2021 · 3 min · Russ McKendrick

Managing Python on macOS Monterey

This week was not only the release of macOS Monterey, but it was also new Mac Book Pro week for a lot of people, including myself. Given that it was alot of effot to install Python on macOS Big Sur I was a little worried that it would take the same amount of effort. As I was starting a with a clean macOS Monterey installation and had already installed Homebew external link I just needed to run the following command to install pyenv external link :...

October 30, 2021 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick

Running Podman on macOS

Last weekend I posted about Docker Desktop Alternatives for macOS, and it looks like I missed one as the week before Podman external link release version v3.3.0 external link which introduced support for macOS by allowing you to launch a Podman managed virtual machine. So, What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode....

September 12, 2021 · 8 min · Russ McKendrick