I’d been looking for a way to renew my Let’s Encrypt TLS/SSL certificates via AWS Lambda (using DNS authentication by updating Route 53) rather than web authentication. This project started since I wanted to separate out my mail server from my web server, and while I suppose I could run Apache (or whatever) on the mail server just to be able to request certificates it seems kind of silly, and this sort of automatic run-a-piece-of-code-occasionally scenario seemed like the perfect chance to use AWS Lambda.

I expected this to be a common & solved problem, but in my searching around the Internet I didn’t really see exactly what I was looking for. There were some solutions out there, but they seemed overly complicated for just “renew my certificates every two months”, and some were out of date (not even updated to the ACME v2 protocol). So I figured I’d need to write at least some code myself.

I’m pleased to announce the creation of GUID as a Service, bringing creation of Globally Unique Identifiers into the “cloud” era. This has been a fun hobby project to learn about AWS API Gateway and Lambda, and so I figured I’d make a little thing and share it with the world, just because I can.

Java Stopwatch

At WPI, for a homework assignment in CS2136 in the Spring of 2000, I created this stopwatch program written in Java. I left it on my web site, and didn’t think much of it. But every once in a while, I’d get a random email from somebody I’d never heard of saying how much they liked the stopwatch. At one point, I was even the top result on Google for a search on “java stopwatch”. It came down when I lost my web space at WPI, but I’ve put it back up here, in case more people continue to find it useful. Java has come a long way since I wrote this though, and nowadays most people have a more powerful Stopwatch in their pocket already.

I put together a web site with the information I’ve learned about refusing unwanted mail.

Refuse Your Mail: You don’t have to take it anymore.

Maybe this will be the start of a huge nationwide trend that’ll make a difference in Postal Service policies and get major media coverage.

Or maybe it’ll just be a cute site only read by me and a couple Random Strangers on the Internet.

(Edited afterward: This was originally posted with its own domain name, but that has since expired, and it’s now on a subdomain of cooperjr.name.)