May 2024 A home server is way more than a server at home. It is a place to experiment, a low-stakes playground for ideas and a great way to make the life of you and your roommates better and worse at the same time. Since my budget envelope for a new home server has been spilling over for some time, I set out to replace current one. Previous setup I’ve had an Intel Celeron J4105-based server for the last five or six years. More...

January 2023 If you find yourself sitting in front of your computer, more or less eager to start writing your Bachelor, Master or PhD thesis and just want a nice, slightly over-engineered template to start: don’t look any further. A peek at the result You might want to have a look at github.com/pascalj/thesis-template and the output thesis.pdf. It comes with a few nice features: It can be built using Nix. Installing all dependencies and producing the final PDF is a matter of running nix build github:pascalj/thesis-template. More...

December 2019 Here’s a cliché of a sport cyclist: expensive gear, team clothes in matching colors, an overly competitive attitude and last but not least shaved legs. Of course it is not true for all cyclists. But go to a professional or even amateur race and you will find these people – and that’s fine. The cliché stopped me from any group events on a bicycle, though. It’s not that I don’t have respect for competitive cyclists and their achievements but I’m certainly not one of them. More...

May 2018 It’s fascinating how sometimes rather small companies disrupt a (niche-)market that is controlled by one or two big players. That is what happened in the bike computer/navigation market. It was almost exclusively controlled by Garmin just a few years back. When I started cycling I bought a bike computer from Garmin. I knew Garmin’s GPS devices from cars and they offered a devices made for cyclists who ride longer, non-competitive rides - the ‘Touring Edge’. More...

October 2017 Often I’m working in quiet places like libraries or shared office spaces. This led to the desire to have my laptop muted everytime I open it. And it should be muted not with 2 seconds delay but instant, no matter the load. Years ago I created a very small piece of software to mute macOS everytime it is going into sleep mode or gets shutdown. It works pretty well for me and since people kept asking about it, I published it to Github. More...

May 2014 You have probably heard of FreeBSD (or any other BSD). Have you used it? If yes: stop reading right here. If no: read on, maybe you want to try it. I know plenty of developers who feel very comfortable with Linux (especially Ubuntu is common these days). They have their developer server and probably production server running on Linux. But why Linux and not FreeBSD? There are several reasons, maybe one applies to you. More...

February 2014 Disclaimer: I reported this vulnerability on September 12th, 2013 and got a response by September 16th. Nothing happened since. I asked for an update on February 4th and haven’t received a response, yet. Update February 12th: The TYPO3 security team released a security bulletin and a fixed version for the issue. Thanks! Object Injection What is object injection and why is it a problem? An object injection vulnerability allows the attacker to instantiate arbitrary objects. More...

July 2013 When you’re working with Vagrant and your production servers are running FreeBSD, chances are that you also want to use FreeBSD as the Vagrant guest OS so the behaviour is consistent. The combination will not work out-of-the-box because FreeBSD doesn’t support the standard synced folder method Vagrant uses. So you need to switch to NFS sharing which needs a host-only (:private_network) network. Once you enable that, Vagrant cannot connect anymore to the virtual machine over SSH and it will look as if the machine halted. More...

April 2012 Last week I was searching for a CMS to implement a relatively simple project. There are plenty of these written in PHP in all flavors one can imagine. From the only-some-pages-Joomla to the enterprise-size TYPO3 and Drupal. Especially the latter are pretty mature. However, they all have a common disadvantage for me: PHP. I don’t want to get worked up over PHP, but compared to Ruby it’s just less fun and fun is an important part of programming to me. More...