Shoot yourself in the foot: Docker, Nextcloud & git [en]

I did something stupid again. I noticed it, when I received notifications from my Prometheus monitoring. The probe that sends HTTP requests to my Nextcloud server was failing. Strangely, no other probes were failing. No high load, no memory exhaustion, no filesystem running full. Manual testing confirmed that all my other web-apps worked as expected, …

Kodi on Raspberry Pi: First Impressions [en]

Background I’ve been living without a proper TV for the past 20 years. Nevertheless, I’m consuming a shitload of video content. Mostly streaming services; the usual suspects. But also select contents from Germany’s public TV stations. So far, I’ve been watching such videos on my laptop computer – I get a lot of screen-time there, …

Shoot yourself in the foot: crypttab edition [en]

I’m running Ubuntu on my laptop, using the standard disk-encryption that the Ubuntu installer provides. (Well, the one it provided a couple of years back, when I last installed from scratch.) This setup uses cryptsetup with LUKS on the main partition. This in turn contains an LVM physical volume, which contains a volume group with …

The Gotchas of Railroad-Safety [en]

They say trains are one of the safest modes of transportation. And while I can think of several horrific train crashes in the past, I generally believe it’s true. But now I’m wondering about all the small things that could go wrong? How common are they? On my last surf-trip, I witnessed this small incident …

Notes on exiftool Usage [en]

Most of the image manipulation and media organization applications that I’m using do not have great support for meta data. Sure, they can display and edit relevant meta data. But they’re not great at filtering, bulk-editing, etc. So I’m using the exiftool CLI to get some of the basic image meta-data straight, before uploading images …

The 80s called and want their communication tech back [en]

Well, they might as well. Because I just got my first fax machine today. No fax hardware though, just a virtual one. My e-mail provider is offering that as a service. Even got my own number (which I had to verify via snail mail) and I can send and receive faxes. It’s 2022 now, and …

Small Money in Tanzania [en]

One thing that stands out here in Tanzania (yupp, I’m still here, greetings from Zanzibar!) is the huge wealth gap. Tourists can easily pay European prices at restaurants and hotels. Wealthy locals drive big SUVs and own generous houses (and other real estate). But many Tanzanians live in tremendously poor conditions, especially in rural areas. …