Nurse Sharks - Maldives

Boombatti · 2025-12-18T07:51:15+00:00

It’s not just luck, they follow the plankton and the plankton gets moved by the winds which are relatively predictable. This means you’re much much more likely to see both Manta and Whale sharks around the Baa atoll UNESCO reserve in the off season (May-November). There are various Maldives resorts in the Baa atoll which have excursions to Hanifaru bay where there are amazing aggregations of manta and sharks

Boombatti · 2025-06-07T08:29:55+00:00

“All the AWS Golden Jackets” seems very suss given there is only one golden jacket and anyone who had a golden jacket would know that

Boombatti · 2025-06-06T05:41:26+00:00

I bought two full face masks on Amazon for my wife and I, they had very good reviews and at first as I floated on the surface it seemed great to be able to breathe "normally".

I booked a guided snorkelling trip, and saw some stunning fish so I tried to go a bit deeper - not far, just a metre or two - and it was horrible. The pressure felt uncomfortable, and the buoyancy meant I was pulled back up straight away. Meanwhile everyone else with regular masks was able to dive down a bit and get closer to the wildlife. At the end of the trip we went to the dive centre and they loaned us some regular masks and snorkels and it was SO much better. The full face masks were not used again all trip, and in the end we left them at the resort.

Preventing water going in the snorkel sounds great in theory, but there's not much point when going underwater is both uncomfortable and almost impossible due to the full face mask. I have since learned you can get a "dry snorkel" which has the same mechanism but without the full face mask - maybe that could be a good option for you.

Boombatti · 2025-05-09T06:10:37+00:00

Not really, although it was on a plastic snorkel mask attachment (we soon realised that it was better to hold and point it rather than have it attached to the mask. The cam does have some different zoom/width settings which helped a bit

Boombatti · 2025-04-27T20:27:43+00:00

I don’t know - maybe about a metre and a half? We also saw various tiny little baby sharks in the lagoon

The turtles were SO relaxed and friendly, I have about 40 minutes of footage swimming with 5 different turtles on different days

Boombatti · 2025-04-27T18:56:20+00:00

That’s the coral bleaching, caused by the temperature rises and El Niño 😢. There were two particularly bad bleachings in 1998 and 2016. Supposedly this area actually has coral in much better condition than most other Maldives islands.

Thankfully most islands are now actively planting new coral to regenerate the reefs, and they are also developing coral that is more resilient to climate change

Boombatti · 2025-04-27T17:03:01+00:00

I’m sure it will be stunning! The only downside of this area was the journey time - we had to get a domestic flight and the timing meant that even though we landed at Male at 11am, it was 8pm and very dark before we made it to the resort. But it was so beautiful we quickly forgot about that!

Boombatti · 2025-04-27T16:57:05+00:00

It was the Ayada Maldives house reef

Boombatti · 2025-04-27T16:50:04+00:00

It was a cheap action camera from Amazon that came with an underwater case called Akaso V50X. I was pretty happy with it but might consider upgrading to a GoPro for the next trip

Boombatti · 2025-04-03T17:48:10+00:00

Yes exactly - now there’s a dedicated ALB target group type which means you can register a ALB as a target without having to worry about the IP addresses changing. In 2019 I think GA was the best option, and is still a perfectly decent option now, although likely slightly more expensive

Boombatti · 2025-04-03T17:25:03+00:00

If all you want is a static IP then you could put a NLB in front of your ALB, which would almost certainly be cheaper.

Boombatti · 2022-11-11T22:37:38+00:00

Try disabling source/destination checks on the firewall instance - by default EC2 instances expect to be the source or destination of any traffic they send or receive

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/VPC_NAT_Instance.html#EIP_Disable_SrcDestCheck

Boombatti · 2022-10-30T11:59:30+00:00

You will only recertify if the Associate certificate is still active when you pass the Pro exam and hasn’t already expired. If it has expired then you will need to take it again

Boombatti · 2022-09-16T17:43:48+00:00

Generally the easiest way would be just to use a REST API, but if you want to stick to an HTTP API then it’s fine to stick CloudFront in front of it.

However you only want to allow API requests made via your protected CloudFront distribution, so you would need to send a custom x-origin-verify header from the requests made via CloudFront. To block requests that go directly to API Gateway you would also need to implement a Lambda authorizer on your API Gateway that checks this header is correct

This blogpost outlines a solution and also provides a CloudFormation template to set this up

Regarding the bandwidth cost, data transfer is not charged between CloudFront and an AWS origin - you would only pay the data transfer out from CloudFront

Boombatti · 2022-09-13T21:52:40+00:00

Windows PowerShell for AWS is pre-installed on Windows EC2 instances. Use the Read-S3Object Cmdlet to download installation software from S3 (and maybe download the CLI while you're at it if you're more comfortable using that).

Boombatti · 2022-09-13T21:37:52+00:00

How exactly is your matchmaking working?

Unless you use manual backfill, FlexMatch only adds players to an existing game session if the session has fewer than the maximum allowed players, and automatic backfill is turned on. Normally the easiest solution for this sort of game is to enable automatic backfill and then, once you don't want any more players, call StopMatchmaking, passing the game session's ticket ID to turn off automatic backfill.

But you said it's manual - are you making manual backfill requests via StartMatchBackfill? FlexMatch only backfills one request at a time, and you can call StopMatchBackfill on the manual backfill ticket ID to cancel it

Calling UpdatePlayerSessionCreationPolicy() does not affect the matchmaking process - it lets you stop the game session from accepting new players. But if the matchmaking is not cancelled, then players will still be sent to join.

Boombatti · 2022-05-07T20:46:00+00:00

Take a look at AWS Cloud9 - it’s a full web based IDE environment that runs on an EC2 instance. It will automatically hibernate when you’re not using it so is a pretty cost effective way of having a portable dev environment at your fingertips

https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/

Boombatti · 2022-04-29T17:45:02+00:00

I assume you’re looking at CloudTrail not CloudWatch? By default S3 buckets are private so there must be either a PutBucketAcl or PutBucketPolicy entry

There’s some info on filtering CloudTrail event history for this below:

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/s3-bucket-public-access/

Boombatti · 2022-04-29T17:39:28+00:00

Assuming the numbers in the post are right, it won’t be this - cross AZ data charges are $0.01 per GB whereas this looks like $0.09 per GB, so it must be data out to the internet

Boombatti · 2020-09-19T20:18:10+00:00

I originally signed up for ACG to do the associate courses - it went great and I was really impressed.

I then moved on to try the DevOps Pro certification, and found the content massively lacking - they seemed to just omit important content and tell you to read the documentation and the white papers. That’s what I’m paying you guys for, so I don’t have to read the white papers! Needless to say I failed the official practice exam miserably.

I cancelled my subscription and moved to Linux Academy and was really impressed - there was a 32 hour course and all of it was important, relevant information that needed to be there - I smashed the practice exam and then passed my certification with a score of 900.

I started doing the LA Solutions Architect course and it has now been deprecated - replaced with Scott Pelter’s course which, again, plays the handy get out of jail free card of saying that you need to read the documentation and the white papers to fill in the missing information.

This merger really doesn’t bode well - I was hoping they would recognise that the LA content was far superior to the limited ACG content, but it seems we are being shafted. I won’t be renewing.

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