Even though there are like one million guides on how to secure macOS properly, I decided to throw in my 5c on this topic. In contrast to many other guides, I’d just like to provide you with the best practices that I also use. This one is about the essential things that I always do when getting a new Mac to provide better security while preserving almost all macOS features like iCloud document saving or Time Machine usage.
During a setup change I had to temporarily move my incoming mailserver to Gmail and while I am now back in my own mail server, I again had this major headache of configuring the my DNS (using BIND) because I always forget the dots in the end of CNAME and MX records because usually I dont create nameserver records for external domains… So anyway here is the final configuration I used in Hetzners Domain Robot:
In this article I will show you how to set up your own RSS feed aggregator with sync support for many third-party clients through the Fever API as a replacement for Apple News/Google News/Feedly. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
I fiddled around for a while with the News app for Nextcloud, ttr-rss and a few other alternatives, but ended up with Miniflux (now in version 2) because it is simple and lightweight and provides the most important thing for me, a Fever-compatible API without any plugins. Fever is a self-hosted but closed-source and paid RSS feed aggregator that has integration in quite a few third-party clients. Luckily, Miniflux provides a API that implements the Fever specs, meaning that it can be used with clients that support Fever, in my case this is Reeder for macOS and iOS, probably the best news reader you can get ;-)
As it turns out, the Apple Time Capsule only uses SMB protocol version 1 and NTLM for authentication. While this works with macOS without any changes, it often creates problem when trying to mount the the Time Capsule’s SMB share on a Linux system. With this parameters, mounting should work out of the box, given you have the cifs-utils (Debian/Ubuntu) installed:
sudo mount.cifs //10.0.0.1/Data /mnt/timecapsule/ -o password='yourpw',sec=ntlm,uid=<local user>,vers=1.0
If you have any problems or further insights, feel free to leave a comment.
In this screencast we’re exploring the way Git saves files, directories commits and tags in it’s internal data structure, how we can inspect them and how they related to each other.
This video is meant to provide additional information for people that already use Git and want to know how it works under the hood.
Actually I like this approach to learn things and I think I’ll do another screencast on this topic, maybe providing additional information about how pack files and garbage collection works, how branches are stored and how integrity of data is ensured by their filenames.
Current macOS versions are weird… Often when I connect my MacBook Pro to the two screens on my desk, the wallpaper on one of that guys is either gone or changed to a different one.
After many attempts to search them in my bunch of 2k wallpapers, I eventually gave up and wrote a script that sets the wallpaper on all my screens like this:
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to set picture of every desktop to ("/some/path/wallpaper.png" as POSIX file as alias)'
This is a simple call to osascript (Open Scripting Architecture… script) which evaluates the AppleScript provided by -e.
UPDATE Apr, 17 2018: Update imapsync to run as standalone docker container to make deployment easier.
In this article I will show you how to set up a fully-featured mail server including webmail as a Docker container. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
Let’s be honest: Setting up a mailserver really is a pain in the ass. Always. There are so many components involved, on a pretty standard setup starting from Dovecot and Postfix to Amavis, OpenDKIM, ClamAV, postgrey and much more. Getting all those components working together and, even more important, create a secure configuration for a mailserver is a work that often takes days to weeks until you have a final setup. And if you have gotten everything running, it’s a mess to update because you are in dependency hell, versions will conflict and stop working while in production.
In this article I will show you how I set up my photo synchronization using Nextcloud. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
One of the most important things in my setup is a solid and reliable way to synchronize Photos and videos I take. In one of the previous parts of this series I set up my Nextcloud instance. So this this time is easy: It’s just about getting all of files out of the new Photos.app and uploading it using the ownCloud sync client.
In this article I will describe how I set up my Nextcloud instance aiming to replace iCloud Drive. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.
The goals for a file syncing infrastructure are simple
As it turns out, Nextcloud offers a solid file syncing mechanism. There are many people that say it is somehow unreliable and slow. I cannot reproduce that properties, for me it works great - maybe because I’m not syncing files of the size of modern hard drives. For me, it’s more about documents, images, some videos shot on my phone and so on.
Some years ago I already played with ownCloud, trying to set up my personal cloud and get rid of third party services for keeping my stuff in sync across multiple devices. And while I already liked it at that time, there still were things I couldn’t do with it, so I eventually gave up on it.
Some months ago I decided to give it another shot and installed ownCloud (which is now migrated to Nextcloud) as well as some other services aiming to replace iCloud, the cloud service by Apple that I used until then. But this was not only about curiosity and being independent of third-party services, it also had real-world values, including better troubleshooting and a more file-aware synchronisation of data, getting rid of the vendor lock in, better service quality (e.g. syncing Photos to iCloud is a pain in the ass 4 out of 5 times).