Words, code, and information security in Portland, Oregon

This is the website of Erik L. Arneson. I am a freelance writer and software developer in Portland, Oregon.


Blog Posts

  • Slides on a Stick with Raspberry Pi Zero W

    If you give presentations often, you will know that one of the biggest headaches is managing slides. You have to figure out software, hardware, and connectors. I’ve usually resorted to bringing a USB thumb drive with my slides in PDF and ODP format, but then I came across an even better idea: the Raspberry Pi Zero W (or RPi0W).

  • Arduino Planetary Hours library

    I am finally announcing my PlanetaryHours library for the Arduino. This library uses the sun_rise() and sun_set() functions from the avr-libc time.h library to calculate planetary hours.

    Download v1.0 Here

  • Driftwood Public Library Follow-Up

    Driftwood Public Library is great! I had a wonderful time in Lincoln City speaking about secret societies and cryptography. Links to my slides are below.

  • Upcoming Lectures at Driftwood Public Library

    Driftwood Public Library in Lincoln City has selected Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore for their 2017 Everybody Reads event. They’ve invited me to give two lectures. This is going to be fun!

  • Raspberry Pi GPIO with Erlang

    Raspberry Pis are super cool. One of the neat things about them is that they have a ton of general purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, so you can use them to control all sorts of external devices. Unfortunately, most of the examples and applications are written in Python. I know, a lot of people really love Python, but it’s just not my cup of tea.

  • OMSI Science on Screen Wrapup

    My talk at OMSI last night, “Computers and the Dawn of Modern Cryptography,” went really well. It was a great crowd and there was a good Q&A session afterwards. I’m going to keep this post really brief. First, there will be slides for my talk. Following that will be a brief bibliography if you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating topic.

  • OMSI Science on Screen: The Imitation Game

    On March 28th, I will be giving a lecture called “Computers and the Dawn of Modern Cryptography” at OMSI as part of their Science on Screen program. I’ll be speaking and answering questions just before a screening of The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. I am really excited about this opportunity! Please come down to OMSI for an informative lecture and an excellent film.

    Buy Tickets Here

  • From StartCom to Let's Encrypt

    This past Fall, a bunch of big names removed StartCom from their trusted SSL Certificate Authority list. As a result, when I renewed my SSL certificates this year, I went with Let’s Encrypt. It was a pleasant experience, because Let’s Encrypt uses a command-line client called Certbot that does most of the heavy lifting for you.

  • Installing Ansible 2.2.0 on a Raspberry Pi

    Ansible is a powerful IT automation tool with lots of modules and active development. Unfortunately, the only version available for stock Raspberry Pi is old. I wanted to use some of the newer modules and features, so I needed to install at least version 2.2. This tutorial will walk you through installing Ansible 2.2.0 on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian “jessie”. The version of Raspbian I did this on was tagged “2016-09-23”.

  • Using Amazon S3 as a Nette Service

    Nette is a popular web application framework for PHP. It is mostly pretty well documented and easy to use. Recently, I needed to upload media from a Nette application to Amazon S3. This is how I created an S3 service for my Nette application. You will need to be familiar with Nette and have an existing Nette application to follow along.

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