it's like awesome you know

Redirect Twitter and Other Sites to Alternative Frontends Using StopTheMadness

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:44:22 +0000

There are a few browser extensions available for this, with LibRedirect being, I think, the most popular one. They redirect privacy-invasive sites to more privacy-friendly alternative frontends. For example, every time you open a youtube.com link, it redirects you to an Invidious instance instead, opening the same video there.

LibRedirect doesn’t exist for my default browser, Safari, so I wanted to check whether there were any alternatives. There are. However, there’s something even better: an extension I’ve already been using for years, StopTheMadness Pro.

Open Links on Your Local Machine With VScode in a Remote Session

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 09:04:26 +0000

I’m using VScode frequently on a remote machine using SSH, not in Development Containers or GitHub Codespaces, just SSH. I recently noticed, that using playwright in VScode automatically opens the html-report of my tests in the browser on my local machine, instead of making me manually go to a URL or do port forwarding (which VScode fortunately also automatically does for you!)

This apparently works because VScode configures the $BROWSER variable to a shell script that can take a URL and open it in the local browser.

Enable IPv6 in Docker Compose Deployments

Sat, 31 May 2025 08:58:30 +0000

It’s 2025, IPv6 is widely used and deployed. Even countries such as Germany, which usually lag far behind, have a 60% adoption rate of IPv6.

IPv6 adoption rate in Germany between December 2024 and June 2026

Docker IPv6 Configuration

For some reason, Docker has never made it easy to support and use IPv6. However, there is now a way to configure IPv6 in Docker somewhat easily.

Note: This is a simple example of how to enable IPv6 connectivity in your compose deployments. For more advanced IPv6 configuration with routed networks, you can check out this blog post on APNIC.

Configure linkding to Log In With Cloudflare Access

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:46:32 +0000

I use linkding as my self-hosted bookmark manager, it’s easy to set up and maintain as a Docker image, can send any bookmark to archive.org, but also provides a version with a Chromium browser running to create locally hosted archives of any bookmark. Too many sites nowadays change frequently, and either delete content, change addresses without proper redirects in place, and search engines are becoming worse and worse over time. So I’m happy about that feature, especially since the data is also available locally. You can also use it as a read-it-later service and mark bookmarks as unread.

Music Assistant and Home Assistant: Get config_entry_id

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:09:00 +0000

I’m running Music Assistant and Home Assistant to manage my smart home, automations and music playback at home. Both systems integrate nicely with each other through various integrations. I can press a button on a light switch and make Home Assistant turn on a smart outlet, some lights and play music from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, or even files from my local file system on my Sonos speakers. That’s great!

Use Docker (compose) With Different Network Interfaces / VLANs

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 10:31:16 +0000

I have multiple network interfaces configured on my Linux host system to route between multiple VLANs and use different internet providers. I organize most of my stuff with Docker and Docker Compose, and for some of these services and containers, I want to use a different network route to access the internet. One example would be to balance outgoing traffic between multiple providers or have a download-heavy container use a network with a faster or less used connection.

ChatGPT Search in Alfred

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 10:09:16 +0000

ChatGPT Search in Alfred

After writing about how to use perplexity.ai as the search engine of choice in Alfred.app, I’m describing the same for ChatGPT now. I also switched over to ChatGPT for searching instead of perplexity since it surfaces the sources in a more useful way for me, and it also feels like the results are better. YMMV.

When you copy the following URL, open it in your browsers address bar and have Alfred installed, it should automatically open Alfred and add ChatGPT as a custom search. I called it oa for OpenAI, but since I’m using it also as a default search or fallback, the shortcut doesn’t really matter.

perplexity.ai as the Default (Fallback) Search in Alfred

Thu, 30 May 2024 09:39:29 +0000

I want to explore perplexity.ai as a replacement for Google search, but I always manage to not use it because Google is set up as the default everywhere on my system. On macOS, I’m using Safari, which unfortunately doesn’t provide a way to use Perplexity as the default search engine, and I don’t want to resort back to tools such as xSearch to get this functionality.

On macOS, I usually do everything with Alfred, and the default fallback search engine in Alfred is also set to Google. I’ve set up a custom search in Alfred for perplexity.ai a long time ago, but since Google is the default fallback when Alfred doesn’t resolve to a file or application, I end up on Google and barely remember to use my custom perplexity.ai shortcut.

Flash ESPHome on the Sonoff NSPanel

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 14:29:34 +0000

I got the Sonoff NSPanel (EU Version) to connect it to my home-assistant instance by flashing with it esphome. There are a few guides and video tutorials out there to get started. I’d recommend going to this GitHub project.

However, I had some issues flashing ESPHome onto this device since you can’t just connect it using a USB adapter. I’m trying to document how I was finally able to flash ESPhome onto the NSPanel. For everything else, please just use the existing guide(s).

Amazon SES and Mastodon in Docker

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 10:35:48 +0000

I’ve been playing around with hosting my own Mastodon instance lately. If I continue this journey, I might write more about it. However, this post focuses solely on setting up email notifications between Amazon SES and Mastodon running within a Docker environment.

I had some trouble sending out emails successfully and it took a while to figure things out. With this post I just want to add to the confusion by providing my working configuration.

Quick Bookmarks / Clippings in Obsidian

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Save Quick Bookmarks / Clippings in Obsidian

I was looking for a quick and easy way to save links from the page I’m currently on and save them to a single file in Obsidian. Ideally with some tags, so I can find them later on. While I like the idea of saving the whole web page as well, export it as a PDF or PNG so it can be read when I’m offline or the page is gone. While this sounds good, I figured that an offline archive of a website or project probably doesn’t help me ultimately, since, well, it’s offline and I rather want to use things which are still updated and maintained. Just my two cents on this.

Keyboard Maestro- Lowercase File(s)

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Keyboard Maestro: Lowercase File(s)

Here’s a short Keyboard Maestro Macro which allows you to select file(s) in macOS Finder and rename them to lowercased filenames. There’s not much else to it otherwise. I configured it as a selection within the Keyboard Maestro Menu Bar icon, or to use it via the global trigger.

Scrape Cloudflare Tunnel With Prometheus

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Scrape Cloudflare Tunnel With Prometheus & Display Data in Grafana

Now that I’m using Cloudflare Tunnel or cloudflared as my ingress for Kubernetes, I wanted to gather some metrics from these pods, just to get an overview of what’s going on there. cloudflared exposes a metrics endpoint which can be scraped by Prometheus and fed into Grafana to have some fancy graphs.

Here’s a guide on Grafana.com how the two tools work together.

Encouraging The Office Quotes on an e-Paper Display

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Encouraging The Office Quotes on an E Ink Display

I got an E Ink Display sometime last year and connected it to a Raspberry Pi Zero to use it as a low-power device to show the weather information for the day, perhaps some other stuff like calendar appointments. The list goes on.

There are a few projects out there to get started with this whole thing.

Cloudflare Tunnel as a Kubernetes Deployment — Ingress

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Cloudflare Tunnel as a Kubernetes Deployment / Ingress

Cloudflare Tunnel is a great tool to expose web applications to the internet, proxied through Cloudflare. You don’t need to open any incoming ports or allow-list IP-Addresses. It works on a Raspberry Pi at home with an Internet connection behind a NAT, meaning you don’t even need to have a public IP address to expose your services through. It also makes for a great ingress deployment for a k8s/k3s cluster to expose services. With Cloudflare Tunnel, I got rid of my nginx or traefik ingress controller and just expose everything through the cloudflared daemon.

iTerm 2 & tmux & ssh

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

iTerm2 & tmux & ssh

iTerm2 offers nice tmux integration, I’m trying to get into the habit of automatically using tmux for all remote SSH sessions, in case my internet connection disconnects while I’m running commands on a remote machine. If I get disconnected, I can easily go back to the task I was doing when I’m back online.

This is another friendly reminder to my future self to always do this. I had this happen way too often: executing a long-running command on a remote machine, being disconnected from the SSH session and to have to start over. I use the following command to either jump into an existing tmux session, or create a new one if there’s none:

Tailwind CSS Set a Minimum Font Size

Thu, 19 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tailwind CSS: Set a Minimum Font Size

I always like to use the latest and greatest things out there for my side projects, or rather the new things I’m learning about. These days, it’s Tailwind CSS to make websites look nice. Specifically also libraries on top of Tailwind CSS which provide components to make things even easier to work with, such as daisyUI or HyperUI.

When you follow the instructions how to get everything in place and install things, either provided by one of the component libraries, or Tailwind CSS itself, you find yourself in a good position to start. Now, if you’re not too deep into all of these frameworks and 3rd party solutions and just want to tinker around like I do, I had a bit of trouble to find the right place how to override default settings or set them globally. For instance, I wanted to set a minimum font size for everything, while still having the option to update individual parts of the site. Let’s do this now.

Kubernetes Custom DNS

Mon, 02 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes custom DNS with CoreDNS

I had some DNS trouble with Kubernetes (k3s) on Oracle Cloud. Unfortunately, the iptables didn't work reliably, and since the Oracle Infrastructure is just my test environment I didn't mind patching the Kubernetes DNS Server CoreDNS which is used by k3s.

Export the CoreDNS ConfigMap as YAML

To get the CoreDNS Configuration as a YAML, you can run this command:

kubectl get configmap -o yaml -n kube-system coredns > coredns-configmap.yaml

now, you can either modify the config yourself, or take the example below to use Cloudflare’s DNS Server (see the line with forward . tls://)

Limit CPU Frequency on Linux

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Limit or Set CPU Frequency on Linux

I got a Linux home server to run some background tasks, do the occasional streaming, experiment with some things and so on. The idea is to keep it running 24/7 while keeping power consumption as little as possible. That’s super easy with a Mac (just turn it on, and you’re good to go) and I guess to a certain extent also with the Raspberry Pi, since there’s just so much energy the small pc can draw. However, from time to time I need a bit more power than the Raspberry Pi can provide.

Fix Kubernetes / k3s DNS on Oracle Cloud

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m running k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes / k8s environment, on the oracle cloud free tier. However, Oracle does deploy some weird iptables rules onto all of their distributions which one should not delete, otherwise the system will not boot since it can’t mount remote file systems. I’ve done this by accident with ufw rules to deny certain traffic. With this change, I deleted all existing rules and couldn't start the instance anymore. 🤷‍♂️ There's more about this topic here.

Some hidden RSS feeds

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Some Hidden RSS Feeds

AbsolutVision

I still heavily rely on RSS feeds, unfortunately, a lot of them have vanished over the years. However, some of them still exist, and are just hidden away, so that not even an RSS reader/parser can find them. This post is just a friendly reminder for my future self to get some of these feeds back.

Reddit Feeds

I still get a lot of value from Reddit, there are nice apps for mobile devices and the old interface is still available. I guess when the old interface is gone and apps won’t work anymore, I’ll re-think if Reddit is worth it.

Dynamic Social Previews for Your SPA and HTMLRewriter

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Dynamic Social Previews for Your SPA With Functions and HTMLRewriter

A couple of weeks ago, we wanted to implement Social Previews into a Single Page Web Application while still having the capability to update the shown preview images based on the query string or route people were visiting.

Essentially, we wanted to display different images for both urls:

Social Previews

First, we had to learn about the Open Graph Protocol, and that Open Graph is the solution to share images across various social media channels and have them present nicely with an image for the link you’re sharing.

Import or Cross-Post Medium Articles Into Jekyll

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I like publishing articles on my Medium Page, I get nice benefits to engage with the community, statistics, a good user interface, and tons of other stuff. I do most of my writing in iA Writer, which also has support for medium.com to publish directly.

Import Medium RSS Feed

However, I also want to import all of my writing into Jekyll to make it available on another page as well. I don’t just want to blindly duplicate content on the web. Jekyll conveniently provides an RSS importer, which I make use of to import my medium.com feed into my own Jekyll blog.

Cloudflare Workers KV Migrate Between Accounts / KV Namespaces

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had to move a Cloudflare KV Namespace from one environment to another, you could use this also to migrate Keys between accounts. To do this, I created a new API Key in the Cloudflare Dashboard with a Read-Only scope of my Workers and KV Namespaces, then I created a new Worker where I wanted to store the entries. This should be the Worker where you want to migrate to.

Authorize Discord Bot with Cloudflare Workers

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Authorize Discord Bot With Cloudflare Workers

Verify Discord Interactions

It took me a while to get my Discord Bot running on Cloudflare Workers. I didn’t want to pull in all the existing frameworks for just one simple, single command I want on my Discord server.

I went out on a quest and tried to configure a Discord Bot on my own with the available Documentation. It was super, duper, I mean, really, super hard to get the right information from the Discord Developer Documentation. I don’t know how such a rich ecosystem of Bots can exist with so many missing pieces in the docs. It might also just be me. But hey, I’ve got it working eventually, and if anyone comes across the same issues: Read on.

Some GitHub Actions Tips

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m using GitHub Actions frequently enough to know where to look for things and which features are available, but infrequently enough to forget how things are done. Good thing, all my actions are available in GitHub, so I can look things up when I need to.

GitHub Actions are great for a CI/CD and automation platform, integrate great into GitHub itself and offer a generous free tier even for private repositories. I have some trouble with the documentation and just don’t find anything in there or have trouble understanding stuff. So I’ll collect some things here to find them again in the future.

Put Your Kindle Vocabulary Into Anki Cards

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When you use a Kindle and select a word to get the translation or definition, every word can be saved into a local kindle Vocabulary or Dictionary for further reference or to train your language skills, this feature is called vocabulary builder.

Out of curiosity, I recently opened this list to find out that I really looked up a lot of words and all of them were put into the database. I wanted to extract all these words, get the translation and put it into Anki Flashcards to go through them from time to time. Or not. Anyway, the Vocabulary is a Sqlite3 database, so it can easily be read and put through a service such as Google Translate or DeepL.

Tailscale and Plex- Setup Wizard not Running

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tailscale and Plex: Setup Wizard not Running

This is mostly a reminder for my future self in case I’m going to set up Plex via Tailscale again.

I set up a VM and installed Tailscale on it to have it part of my mesh VPN to access it from all my devices without exposing it directly to the internet. Alongside Tailscale, I installed Plex as well to access my media files.

Get Cloudflare IP Address Ranges in Terraform Without Authentication

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Cloudflare provides a Terraform Provider to automate nearly everything, including fetching the IP Ranges Cloudflare’s Reverse Proxy is coming from so you can put their IP ranges into a firewall to allow no other traffic.

I’ve got a cloud instance at Linode and Hetzner and wanted to configure their cloud firewalls so that only Cloudflare IP Addresses are allowed to connect to certain ports and no other addresses. The Cloudflare cloudflare_ip_ranges modules can be used to get the IP ranges used by Cloudflare to create firewall rules automatically.

Delete Unresponsive Bulb From Ikea Tradfri Gateway

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Delete Unresponsive Bulb From IKEA Tradfri Gateway

A couple of years ago I bought into the IKEA Smart Home ecosystem with their Tradfri product line and ended up with a lot of lightbulbs, plugs and even the air purifier. Unfortunately, the system hasn’t been reliable at all, very often devices go unresponsive for a couple of minutes, hours, days or even forever. That’s why this blog post exists.

For some weird reason, one IKEA lightbulb went into an unavailable state in the IKEA Home App and wasn’t associated to any room, it was just part of the list of devices. There was no way to remove the bulb or re-assign it somehow. Funnily enough, Apple’s HomeKit Home App could still see and work with the bulb, but the IKEA remote couldn’t. This situation was just a mess and super confusing. When hitting the Tradfri remote, the light bulb was ignored, when using the Home app or Siri everything was fine. At some point, I just wanted to reset this thing without deleting everything. Good thing, it’s possible with some command line utilities.

Grafana Authentication with Cloudflare Access

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My Grafana Installation is running on a Kubernetes Cluster, and I wanted a way to access the Grafana Dashboards over the internet without exposing the Ingress or web server directly. Since the site is using Cloudflare for DNS, I wanted to protect the login page with Cloudflare Access and only allow a couple of users by e-mail address to login.

Cloudflare Access provides JWT Tokens and an endpoint to read this information, Grafana also has authentication documentation on JWT authentication, but apparently the integration is broken.

Custom Subdomain for Cloudflare Pages Preview Deployments

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Cloudflare Pages support custom domains to serve Static and Dynamic content. When deployed using git, it also supports to build and deploy so-called Preview deployments based on other branches in the same git repository.

Having preview deployments is a great way to check upcoming changes to a frontend application before having it in production to not disturb users using it currently and test out changes for development teams or a small amount of users. These preview deployments get their own unique subdomain to check them out online. Unfortunately, preview deployments don’t support custom domains at the moment. This means you can’t have something like beta.example.com for your preview deployment.

Cloudflare Workers: Import / Include HTML Files With esbuild

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re starting from scratch, Cloudflare Pages might be the better solution to do this since they also can run functions now.

If you need more logic in your Workers or have an existing one and want to include some HTML as well, read on.

I’ve got a Worker and want to serve an HTML form when a GET request is made and want to do some other logic when the form is submitted as a POST request.

Scrape RabbitMQ Metrics With Prometheus in Kubernetes

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

… without all the complicated fuzz around it. This is probably only interesting to you if you’re running a Kubernetes cluster with something like k3s and want some monitoring and metrics from RabbitMQ without installing extra Kubernetes PlugIns and all these things.

I’m running the kube-prometheus-stack from the prometheus-community github repository. They have a helm chart available to make installing easy.

install kube-prometheus-stack

I’m just going with the default things here:

kubectl create ns monitoring
helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm install -n monitoring monitoring prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack

RabbitMQ ServiceMonitor

Now, to make Prometheus scrape the metrics from RabbitMQ, first make sure that you’re running the RabbitMQ management container image, right now this would be: 3.9-management. The releases are available on Docker Hub.

Stream Video From Raspberry Pi to a RTMP Server

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Stream Video From Raspberry Pi to an RTMP Server

Enable the Camera with raspi-config

I wanted to do some testing with video streaming from my Raspberry Pi to RTMP output. This is what most streaming platforms, such as Twitch and YouTube provide to send streams there.

I didn’t want to send my stream to a public endpoint, so I used Cloudflare Stream.

Enable Camera Support on the Pi

I assume that Raspberry Pi OS is used (the light version works fine).

restic failed- nonce is invalid error

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

restic - failed: nonce is invalid error

I’m using restic to back up a few of my servers to Backblaze’s b2 storage. Occasionally I also clean up after old snapshots to keep the bill low for my files. For some reason, restic wasn’t able to delete a snapshot, and I just got this error message when running restic prune to remove all unreferenced files from snapshots:

repository 112911b9 opened successfully, password is correct
loading indexes...
loading all snapshots...
finding data that is still in use for 95 snapshots
[16:29] 3.16% 3 / 95 snapshots
decrypting blob bc103b4a84971ef6459b294a2b98568a2bfb72cded09d4acd1e16366a401f95b failed: nonce is invalid
github.com/restic/restic/internal/repository.(*Repository).LoadBlob
 /restic/internal/repository/repository.go:204
github.com/restic/restic/internal/repository.(*Repository).LoadTree
 /restic/internal/repository/repository.go:728
github.com/restic/restic/internal/restic.loadTreeWorker
 /restic/internal/restic/tree_stream.go:37
github.com/restic/restic/internal/restic.StreamTrees.func1
 /restic/internal/restic/tree_stream.go:164
golang.org/x/sync/errgroup.(*Group).Go.func1
 /home/build/go/pkg/mod/golang.org/x/sync@v0.0.0-20210220032951-036812b2e83c/errgroup/errgroup.go:57
runtime.goexit
 /usr/local/go/src/runtime/asm_arm.s:841

I don’t know what exactly happened, but apparently restic wasn’t able to decrypt a blob stored in b2. Does it mean they had a failure and restic wasn’t able to recover? Did restic make some mistake? Did I? Don’t know. It’s worrisome, and I couldn’t find anything meaningful online.

IKEA Not So Smart Home

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0100

IKEA Smart Home / Tradfri: Every couple of days or weeks doing things like this making one reconnect to the home hub, and in the worst case they want you to set up the whole home again from the beginning.

Then there’s Philips Hue for example: Set it and forget it. Rock solid for 4+ years.

While Hue stuff is expensive compared to IKEA, it just works. Either go with the reliable things or keep the home stupid instead of having to deal with a new configuration at unexpected times multiple times a year.

Synology DSM 7 Upgrade

Sun, 08 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0100

I made the mistake and updated my Synology NAS DSM Software to their big new version 7. For some reason, I assumed that the update would go smooth since I didn’t do any fancy things with my Synology NAS except using it as a dumb storage hub. I was never a friend of putting all the things they offer on there without a lot of knowledge how things are going on under the hood in order to fix anything or god forbid debug something.

Cloudflare Workers: Iterate / Loop Over KV Namespace

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Loop / iterate over KV keys in Cloudflare workers. In this example, I limited the output for the list request to 2 on purpose to check if everything works as expected.

async function listAll() {
 // list all keys from a given NAMESPACE,
 // in this example the output is limited to two on purpose
 // to make it paginate. The default is 1000
 let entries = await NAMESPACE.list({ limit: 2, type: 'json' })

 // get cursor, if returned
 let cursor = entries.cursor

 let loop = []

 // get entries from first call above
 let output = { ...entries.keys }

 // as long as `entries.list_complete` is false, loop over the next block
 while (!entries.list_complete) {
 let next_value = await NAMESPACE.list({ cursor: cursor, limit: 2, type: 'json' })
 // update `entries.list_complete` to break the loop
 // as soon as we've got all keys
 entries.list_complete = next_value.list_complete
 // update cursor for the next call
 cursor = next_value.cursor
 loop.push(...next_value.keys)
 }
 // merge keys from very first output with all the subsequent keys
 // from paginated calls
 output = { ...output, ...loop }

 return output
}

Cloudflare workers KV docs

Fix oh-my-zsh & Term Copy / Paste Backslashes

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0100

tl;dr:

search in your ~/.zshrc file for source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh and prepend this:

DISABLE_MAGIC_FUNCTIONS=true

Open iTerm 2 Preferences, Profile Tab, Terminal Tab, untick this: Terminal may enable paste bracketing
profit

This has been an annoyance for months or years now, and I never got around to fix it, since it was never too annoying, but rather just annoying. Let’s fix things! What exactly?

I’m an oh-my-zsh user and when you copy and paste things into the terminal, it’ll automatically put backslashes in front of various characters to make them work when executing the command, this usually happens when you’re pasting a URL into your terminal when you want to test something with curl for example.

Read Fritz!Box DSL Link Speed

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0100

When you live in an internet 3rd world country like Germany, chances are you’re using a Fritz!Box and have a bad or slow internet connection. In my case, the speed varies from time to time and it requires a restart of the router to get back to normal. There are a few projects out there to monitor internet speed on a Raspberry Pi, putting everything into a Grafana dashboard and so on.

Trying to Fix iCloud Drive Syncing Issues

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0100

You probably don’t know that iCloud Drive didn’t sync some files until you need them and were sure you put them in there. Well, that’s Apple’s sync story ever since I started using .Mac a long time ago. It just never worked. With .Mac and iDisk it was way worse, they also had the option to sync items in the Dock etc. and it was always a mess, good thing they got rid of it.

Fix Discourse Browser Search

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0100

tl;dr: hit cmd + f / ctrl + f twice

discourse is the 2020+ hipster forum software everyone uses for the communities nowadays. I somewhat like it but it’s also mostly confusing to me.

What’s just super annoying is, that it hijacks the default shortcut for the browser’s search function cmd + f / ctrl + f. discourse thinks it’s smarter than you, but it’s just not, at least not for my use-cases. but hey, there’s a way to fix this, just hit cmd + f twice and it’ll fallback to the default browser search.

iterm2 Disable Command + Return Shortcut

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0100

iTerm 2 is awesome but using the shortcut command + return to enter fullscreen mode is just super annoying to me since I hit it way too often when I don’t mean to.

If I want to go into fullscreen mode, I’d rather prefer the native or standard way of most macOS apps: control + command + f.

I’m sure I found this solution at some point on StackOverflow but I need it as a reminder here. I’ll probably end up on stackoverflow again in the future… but hey.

(Waveshare) ESP32 Driver Board With Micropython and V2 7.5inch Display

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0100

There are some micropython drivers out there for the waveshare display(s), here’s one and here’s a fork for the V2 7.5" display.

However, both don’t work with the ESP32 Driver Board from Waveshare (they call it Universal e-Paper Raw Panel Driver Board, ESP32 WiFi / Bluetooth Wireless) with the connector for the display already built in, so you need to make some changes to your code to address the correct pins.

I’m super new to this, learned this in a couple of hours and ~~probably~~ don’t understand a thing, but… it works. Take that, world!

Email to Discord Webhook with Amazon SES and AWS Lambda

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0100

tl;dr

create discord webhook
save incoming e-mails to amazon S3 using SES
trigger lambda function for each new e-mail, send it to discord

This is a poor man’s solution for an email supported feedback system feeding into a discord channel using Amazon SES and AWS Lambda to handle e-mails and move them around.

If you want something quick and easy, there are ways to connect e-mail to discord with automation tools like Zapier, IFTTT, Integromat and so on. But hey, they cost money and we’re cheap. Right? At some point I need a cup of coffee and can’t spend it on another service.

Homebridge Reliability

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0100

tl;dr: restart it every day and you’re probably good to go.

homebridge is an awesome project to bring unsupported devices into Apple’s HomeKit to extend its functionality. I’ve got an IKEA Tradfri / Smart Home Hub at home and use it mostly with Ikea light bulbs which integrate natively into HomeKit. However, I also ended up with some Philips Hue bulbs, especially the Iris and Lightstrip. It’s possible to pair them with the IKEA Hub but they’re not exposed into HomeKit which makes the whole thing useless. This is where homebridge comes in.

Cloudflared / Argo Tunnel on a Raspberry Pi Zero

Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 +0100

this super quick n dirty list will download and install go, set the path for go, clone the cloudflared git repository and compiles cloudflared to finally move it into /usr/local/bin

this is just required for the raspberry pi zero, for the rpi 3 and up the binaries provided by Cloudflare work out of the box.

please adapt the first 2 lines with the version you actually want to install. The cloudflared tags can be found here and the current go version here.

host header override cloudflare tunnel

Tue, 11 May 2021 00:00:00 +0100

I have a router at home which checks for the host header of the incoming request, meaning I need to access the routers web interface either by IP or the name given from the provider, such as `router.local`. However, I also want to access my router via Cloudflare tunnel securely, which is awesome if I need to help out family and friends.

I have a raspberry pi zero setup, with Cloudflare tunnel (you need to compile it for the pi zero) and I’m pointing a public host name to my router’s IP address. Now, when I want to access the router, I get an error message that I’m not requesting the page from the right origin, since it’s the public hostname I just configured. Let’s change that in the cloudflared.yaml config file:

kubectl debug

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0100

TIL: debug kubernetes pods when they use some image without shell access, like distroless or scratch.

copy the container you want to debug to another pod with the busybox image to get a shell. also, include --share-processes to even get the processes available on the debug container.

kubectl debug -it logging-fluentbit-m2v94 --copy-to=fluentdebug --image=busybox --share-processes

don’t forget to remove things afterwards:

kubectl delete pod fluentdebug

all the docs are available here and this might be the better source after all, since things change … like daily.

nextcloud reverse proxy http/https mismatch (SSO, LDAP config)

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Let’s say you’re using nextcloud with a reverse proxy in front of it and only the reverse proxy handles SSL, but you’re still communicating via plain http with your nextcloud instance. Probably not something you should do, but will probably end up doing, especially if it’s just for home usage or some other quick and dirty setup.

You might run into problems as you as you’re going to configure nextcloud with an SSO, LDAP, AD provider since they expect that the right metadata and IdP urls are matching exactly. Your nextcloud will respond with http whilst the IdP such as Okta expects https for some good reasons.

kubernetes ingress-nginx CORS with multiple origins

Fri, 02 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0100

ingress-nginx doesn’t support CORS with multiple origins, this has been an issue for quite a while. If you just have one domain, you can use a simple two-line annotation to allow cors rules for this domain.

However, if you’ve got multiple domains (let’s say localhost for development and your own domain) and maybe even socket.io for websockets, try this in your ingress annotations block:

 nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/configuration-snippet: |
 if ($http_origin ~* "http.?:\/\/(.*\.)?(localhost:8080|example\.com).*$") {
 add_header "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" "$http_origin" always;
 add_header "Access-Control-Allow-Methods" "GET, PUT, POST, OPTIONS" always;
 add_header "Access-Control-Allow-Headers" "DNT,X-CustomHeader,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type,Authorization" always;
 add_header "Access-Control-Expose-Headers" "Content-Length,Content-Range" always;
 }
 if ($uri ~* "/socket.io/") {
 add_header "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" "" always;
 }

The snippet above checks if the origin request contains either the origin http(s)://localhost:8080 or http(s)://example.com. If it matches it’ll add the requested origin as a cors header, if there’s no match, no headers will be added.

autofs - mount directories when needed

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100

I totally forgot about autofs to mount NFS shares on-demand aka when I need to access them. I also forgot that I created this little page about it already, so I need to post it here again. Hopefully this will be a reminder for me in the future.

I use it to automatically mount exposed nfs shares on my Synology NAS to be mounted on my Raspberry Pi when I need to access files. Usually I just do a backup of my Pi every couple of days automatically and the shares will be mounted or when I access my media library through the Pi on the Synology. Otherwise the NFS share(s) are not mounted.

cloudflared Argo Tunnel with Docker

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100

It’s a bit hard to use Cloudflare’s Argo Tunnel with Docker when you don’t have any configuration in place already, I’m trying to break down the steps here.

create a volume:

First start by creating a docker volume to hold the configuration data:

docker volume create cloudflared

now the annoying thing comes to play, fix the permissions for the volume. I guess and hope there’s a better way but I just don’t know of any other. Get the path of the docker volume, you can use docker volume inspect cloudflared for this to get the path, usually it’s in /var/lib/docker/volumes

annoying pin number requirements

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100

phone: 6 digit pin
bank A: 4 digit pin
bank B: 5 digit pin
bank C: max. 6 character long alphanumeric pin
bank D: 6-12 character long alphanumeric pin
bank E: 4 digit pin, do not use the same number twice

This is so annoying. Also, I should probably get rid of 4 bank accounts.

Cloudflare DNS over TLS (DoT)

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100

I already configured my pi-hole server to use Cloudflare DNS over HTTPS but I also wanted to configure my router to use other DNS services such as 1.1.1.1 and/or 8.8.8.8 in an encrypted way. My router (a fritz!box) doesn’t support DNS over HTTPS but DNS over TLS.

I couldn’t find the Cloudflare DoT endpoint easily on the web, so this post is just a reminder for my future-self:

Use this for DoT:

pi-hole in docker & cloudflared DNS-Over-HTTPS (DoH)

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100

If you’ve followed this tutorial to set up DoH for pi-hole but happen to run pi-hole in a docker container, you’ve probably got some trouble resolving DNS entries since they’re using 127.0.0.1#5053 for the DNS configuration. This doesn’t work when pi-hole is running in a docker container since the cloudflared daemon is either running on the host system or within another docker container.

Ideally, you’d run cloudflared in another docker container and get the IP address fixed somehow and use this one in pi-hole. but since we’re at home and kinda lazy, we just followed the tutorial and need another way to use DoH.

hetzner dedicated server with btrfs

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100

This is just a reminder for my future self on how to set up a hetzner dedicated server with btrfs in rescue mode. I think the examples they provided were a bit confusing, at least to me.

We needed a filesystem without the notion of inodes since we were dealing with millions of super teeny-tiny files and ext4 wasn’t suitable for this without lots of modifications since we were also using kubernetes with a managed storage controller and couldn’t adapt the ext4 formatting options.

hetzner cloud server ipv6 & wireguard

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100

another quick reminder to my future self, when I’m about to create a new hetzner cloud server and my ipv6 wireguard connection doesn’t work with vpn solutions such as algo

change the ipv6 interface /etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init.cfg from eth0:0 to eth0, like this:

root@wg: cat /etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init.cfg
# This file is generated from information provided by
# the datasource. Changes to it will not persist across an instance.
# To disable cloud-init's network configuration capabilities, write a file
# /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-disable-network-config.cfg with the following:
# network: {config: disabled}
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
 dns-nameservers 213.133.99.99 213.133.100.100 213.133.98.98

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet6 static
 address 2a01:4f8:c2c:beef::1/64
 gateway fe80::1
 post-up route add -net :: netmask 0 gw fe80::1%eth0 || true
 pre-down route del -net :: netmask 0 gw fe80::1%eth0 || true

this way, algo and wireguard recognize the correct networking interface to use ipv6 properly.

rancher kubernetes with wireguard network interface

Sun, 24 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0100

this post will be more like a reminder for my future self, when I’m about to install Rancher for the 10th time in a row on a given day and it’s driving me crazy about networking.

I’m using a Wireguard VPN to connect multiple kubernetes nodes together to have an internal network since they’re spread across different cloud providers or they’re with a provider who claims to be cloud native but doesn’t know about the concept of a VPC.

smart home camera annoyances

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0100

I got this eufy Apple HomeKit compatible camera and finally got it connected to HomeKit after a few weeks of trying. During the set up process HomeKit offered a recommended scene to turn on the light in the same room where the camera is. Since it’s in the entrance area I liked the idea to use motion detection to turn the light on and off automatically, so I don’t have to use the light switch when I’m leaving or arriving in my apartment.

apple homekit

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Day 1: I’m HomeKit, everything is awesome
Day 183: I’ll remove a few bulbs from your good morning scene, okay? But I won’t remove them from your good evening scene to annoy you
Day 192: I’ll forget about your kitchen lights
Day 194: Instead of having a nice warm light in the morning, what about just plain old white at the brightest setting for your good morning routine?

Thank you HomeKit. I didn’t do any changes over these mentioned days, I was just turning things on and off, nothing else. Not even a power outage as far as I’m aware. Oh, by the way: I can’t add my new camera to HomeKit. I think day 195 should be the removal of all things HomeKit.

zerotier: connect two synology nas

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

I wanted to use synology’s hyper backup system to remotely back up one nas to another in an offsite location but I didn’t want to deal with things like dyndns and opening ports on one router, forwarding them etc., so I explored some new, fancy VPN solutions. I ended up with: zerotier

sign up at zerotier.com
download the package for your synology nas, they provide packages, but you have to install them manually through the package center
ssh into your synology nas (you might need to enable ssh in the control panel of your nas)
log in as your user via ssh, become root by entering sudo -i (enter your user password again)
execute zerotier-cli join your-id-from-zerotier on both nas devices
in the web console you’ll see the private ipv4 addresses of each nas very soon and you can set up hyperbackup with these private ip addresses
profit

state of file syncing software in 2020

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0100

tl;dr:

Google Drive: Added a file on my phone two days ago, still not available on my Mac. Had to restart the app.
Microsoft OneDrive: It seems to sync but clicking the menu bar item brings up a beach ball all the time, not really reassuring.
iCloud Drive: Added 3 screen shots to a folder, one showed up on my iPhone. It’s been a few weeks, still missing two screen shots. Well.

13 years after Dropbox launched, Dropbox is still the only file syncing software which just works.

git-backed hosting for your notes

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Git is a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development. It is designed for coordinating work among programmers, but it can be used to track changes in any set of files. Its goals include speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.

wikipedia

Git is perfect to store plain text notes, you can easily go back in time, restore complete files, parts of it. It’s super efficient when we talk about text files and with things like Git Large File Storage (LFS) it’s even possible to store large binary files within git.

linux desktop

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0100

tl;dr: linux on a desktop is way too complicated.

Let’s say I have to use Linux as my desktop environment, here are just a few observations I made. Beware: I’m looking at this from an users perspective. Not a developer, not a … I don’t know.

installation Link to heading

Ubuntu 19.10 live boot environment makes some clicking sounds, the installed version of ubuntu 19.10 just has a “dummy device” as my audio input/output. No sounds at all. Okay…

firefox multi-account container

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100

tl;dr: separate all personal data to individual containers in one firefox instance? install:

scroll down to the 1. 2. 3. and so on list, change the settings and have fun

the firefox multi-account containers extension is awesome to separate cookies, account and tracking related stuff into separate containers. one can use it to log in to multiple google accounts or to separate a facebook login and the facebook tracking from regular browsing. containers preserve privacy better since they limit all the personal data to this one container.

journaling

Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0100

I don’t like New Year’s resolutions but it was between the years when I decided to do something about my note taking stuff, journaling and/or outlining. I want to get this stuff together and finally stop thinking about it so I can actually do things. Hey! what an idea…

To start things off, just keep it simple. I still want to start Bullet Journaling with pen and paper and I’ve got a nice notebook already for it but for now I’ll just stick to a plain dead simple markdown file called journal.md. It’s stored in a git repo but could also just be in a Dropbox or iCloud folder somewhere. Just have it accessible for you at all times.

Secure ShellFish and Syncthing: my very own dropbox replacement

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100

finally, I think I came to a good solution to have my data in sync, available on all my devices and under my control. turns out, it’s super easy! I want to take control over my files, I want to decide where I store them and I also want to have it either in sync across all my devices or at least easily accessible (on my phone). last but not least, I want the solution to be cross-platform or platform agnostic since I don’t know when and if I switch from a to b.

obviously the best note taking setup

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100

it took me a while to get here and it’ll probably be outdated before I publish this post, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

my requirements for a note-taking app/solution:

full-text search
as platform-agnostic as possible
- iOS, macOS, web, Linux
text files, no format you can’t easily keep for years to come like google docs
- attachments would be great, however
control of my data, meaning that I can access it at any time without being reliant on a 3rd party

using a service like notion or Evernote or even google docs would probably nicely give me most of what I want, except for the control of your data part, which is crucial for me nowadays. you just never know when a service goes away or they somehow lose your data.

about

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

this blog was supposed to be a public journal documenting me moving from Germany to the United States, writing about things I experienced there. Now, a couple of years later, I’m back somewhere else and have written nothing. In the meantime, I also had other ideas, so I’ll use this just as a public blog like everyone else did back in 2010.

other stuff:

scribble.fyi: scribble.fyi - my spin on a pastebin site
man.ilayk.com: this is a page where I keep short and concise learnings regarding various macOS and linux tools. how to use them, some commands I always forget about, and what they do, etc.
r2m.ilayk.com: reddit2markdown - an attempt to convert reddit posts, comments, and wikis to markdown
saveify.ilayk.com: saveify - three easy controls for spotify: play the previous/next song, like/dislike a song
aaia.ilayk.com: aaia - a as in alfa - convert a word into the phonetic alphabet version to spell things over the phone
sim.ilayk.com: sim, somehow I manage - a random list of The Office quotes
id.ilayk.com: id - generate random ids, I probably needed that at some point for an iOS shortcut

contact: