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Docker: MongoDB connection slow

I’m working on an application where I use Docker and docker-compose to orchestrate a NodeJS container running my backend and a MongoDB container for my database. Using Docker for Mac, I’ve seen drastic slowdowns when initially establishing the database connection. When I used a Linux host, everything was extremely smooth. Since Docker for Mac creates a xhyve-based virtual machine running a Linux with the Docker daemon inside, I initially thought that this is just the usual slow in-VM performance compared to running Docker natively on the host system.

Convert MKV to MP4 on macOS

I recently started to convert all of my movies from MKV to MP4. The main reason for this is that I want to be able to play back videos from all my Apple devices without the need for additional software, like VLC or IINA.

For many people not that deep into video file formats I want to explain what the supported formats for video on macOS are and how to get there from almost any source material.

NodeJS: Interactive shell with hot reload

I’m currently working on a project in NodeJS. It’s an REST API server for a web application. Since it supports multi-tenancy but all tenants are created manually, I needed a quick and easy way to be able to call the createTenant method whenever I need it. I could have written a command-line tool that would do it for me, but actually I needed something like rails console for Ruby on Rails apps: A shell where I can just execute code in the context of my app.

byeCloud: Firefox Sync Server - UPDATE

In this article I will show you how to set up a Firefox Sync Server as a Docker container. In my case this will replace iCloud Bookmark / Tab synchronization. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.

I’ve evaluated different solutions to synchronize tabs and bookmarks, but none of them seemed to satisfy my needs. Firefox Sync almost does. Originally, I wanted to use Chromium with some plugin that would allow me to self-host a bookmark sync service. While there is a working solution called Unmark which also has a Chrome extension that works in general, the open source version lacks HTML bookmark import functionality and seems not to be the best possible software quality after a quick review (in fact I implemented a HTML bookmark to Unmark JSON converter to import my bookmarks but even their JSON import code drove me crazy).

byeCloud: Replace iCloud Keychain with KeePass

iCloud Keychain has always been a love-hate relationship for me. I loved the simplicity of just being able to generate passwords right from the registration form of every page while it would also autofill passwords when I try to log in again. But I hated not being in charge of telling this thing to sync. Sometimes when I got a new device, the Keychain would just not start synching. Or passwords that I just created wouldn’t show up. Not to mention secure notes created in Keychain Access.app on the Mac that would not be visible on iOS.

byeCloud: GitLab with Docker and Traefik

For some months now I’m running a private GitLab server. I really enjoy using it, especially with all the great features like the Docker Container Registry and GitLab Pages to host static pages, even with own domains. Normally I would prefer a more lightweight solution, such as Gitea but GitLab has so many advantages that, at least for me, this is currently the only way to go. However, it felt tedious setting it up, even with Docker. You have to configure GitLab to serve stuff using plain HTTP, provide different ports for different apps to be able to create own vhosts in the reverse proxy and so on. So I decided to quickly write up what I did to get it working. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s a much easier way to do it but I couldn’t find it. Additionally, in the meanwhile I switched from Caddy as a reverse proxy to Traefik since it can attach directly to the Docker daemon, listens to changes in the domain configuration, request new HTTPS certificates on the fly while new containers are spawned and - best of all - I don’t need a separate configuration file. So the guide this time is still using Docker and docker-compose, but Traefik instead of Caddy. But you can basically use any reverse proxy to set it up, like nginx-proxy.

Resize all images in subdirectories

For a project I was working on, I had a folder structure full of images and wanted to compress them to a specific maximum resolution in-place while retaining the aspect ratio using ImageMagick. The crucial point, as so often, were spaces and special characters in the folder names, making it really hard to use bash loops etc. to make this work. With the NULL character trick, luckily this works pretty well.

Sign your Git commits with PGP

In the last days I tinkered a bit with things in Git that I haven’t tried yet. One was signed commits. Signed commits help other people to know that it’s actually you who committed changes. So when people trust you as a person, they can also trust your code because they can verify that it’s been actually done by you.

It’s pretty easy to set up and once configured, everything else will just happen automatically.

Download encrypted HLS content with ffmpeg

I maintain an archive of videos, especially documentaries from public media libraries from tv channels etc. on my NAS. Whilst I can use youtube-dl for the most part, it’s rather difficult for sites that use HTTP live streaming (HLS) to stream their content. In the most cases this is even AES-128 encrypted, which makes it difficult to download it. But since there’s players that support playback, it’s obviously possible to decode the stream on the client side. ffmpeg is the swiss army knife for video/audio encoding and muxing and therefore the perfect utility for downloading encrypted HLS content.