Blog

• Linux
• FreeBSD

In my first "real" blog post, I was looking for an alternative to the scp utility. The authors had described the SCP protocol as "outdated, inflexible and not readily fixed" and recommended switching to alternatives like rsync or SFTP.

In the years since I made that post, the scp utility was switched to the SFTP protocol. OpenSSH 8.7 introduced experimental support, and since OpenSSH 9.0, released on 8th April 2022, scp uses SFTP by default. The old SCP protocol is still available via the -O flag.

• iCloud
• Mac
• Nextcloud

Recently, I switched my calendar from iCloud to Nextcloud. Simply moving the individual calendars in the calendar app on my Mac didn't work, so I had to export them as .ics files, then import them again.

There was just one problem: The exported calendars were missing data. Random events, every now and then, dating back for years, were missing with no discernible pattern. Thankfully, I found a working solution in the Apple Support Community.

• Networking

I'm fortunate enough to have pretty fast Internet at home, but it comes with a downside: DS-Lite. This means I don't have my own public IPv4 address, only IPv6. It's a non-issue for outgoing connections (at least in my case, I have heard of reliability issues), but incoming connections are required to use IPv6.

In theory, this shouldn't be a problem either. Practically, IPv6 is still broken in many places, often making it impossible to access the things I'm hosting at home. The solution: Setting up a proxy.

• Mac
• Windows
• QEMU
• VM

This very helpful post by GitHub user niw explains how to use QEMU to run a Windows virtual machine on an M1 Mac.
Currently, I've only got a VirtualBox VM on an old 2012 Mac mini (Intel Core i5-3210M), which is just painfully slow. With help from the post linked above, I can now run a much more usable VM on my M1 MacBook Air.

The post is very detailed and helpful, but I thought I'd add a couple of things I stumbled over:

• The version of QEMU available on Homebrew (6.0.0 at the time of writing) does not work on macOS 11.1 and above due to a bug.
• Downloading and compiling QEMU 6.1.0 is not an option either, patches are needed to support Apple's Hypervisor framework.
• For some reason, the QEMU command-line-interface does not work with relative paths. That was a major headache before I noticed.

• Nextcloud
• Linux
• FreeBSD

Sometimes, I want to dump a file into Nextcloud and have it automatically appear on a website. Since Nextcloud is hosted on my NAS at home, while the web server runs on a VPS in a datacenter, the files will need to be copied over.
How could this be done?
In this post, I am using inotify and rclone to implement what I want.

• ZFS
• FreeBSD
• Linux

Since I started using FreeBSD and ZFS last year, I've always wanted to recursively determine the total space used by a snapshot. After recursively taking a snapshot, the used space can be displayed on each individual dataset, but not all at once.
Now, I have finally found a solution and made a shell script.

• Telegram
• FreeBSD

I don't know what I expected, but hosting a Telegram bot is simpler than I thought. After setting up a jail and getting the bot to work, I'm also writing an rc.d script to control it.

• Podcasts
• Archiving
• Automation

I want to download and archive some podcasts I'm listening to. This isn't 100% reasonable, but audio files aren't that big, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Unfortunately, none of the solutions I found seems to fulfill all of my requirements:

• Save the show notes
• Customize the filenames
• Easy to automate

The next step is obvious: I have to make something myself.

• rsync
• Linux
• FreeBSD

rsync could be an alternative to scp, but its questionable behaviour around slashes may be an issue.

• meta

This is about 15 years late, since everybody just uses social media nowadays, but I've got a blog now. Welcome to my new blog. Maybe now, after being online for five years, this website will finally gain some valuable content.

Of course, using one of the many existing blogging engines would be easy and sensible, so I made my own. Some optimizations are still required, but it is now at a point where I can describe it as "good enough" and feel comfortable making it public.
I have worked on it very … sporadically for a while now, I want to finally use it instead of just wasting time building it. Waiting for everything to be perfect would just lead to it never getting completed.

Expected Content

Surprising to nobody, this is mostly going to be about technology. Maybe there will be the odd post about houseplants or whatever else I come up with, but most content will probably relate to technology in one way or another.
The goal is for this to be an outlet for ideas, thoughts, and opinions, just like any other generic blog.

Posting Frequency

¯\_(ツ)_/¯