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.
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.
Choosing the right software
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
- I want a reliable solution that syncs files as-is,
- that does not corrupt them
- and does not cancel uploads all the time.
- Additionally, I want to be able to access my files on the go using a mobile app, as well as having files on my local hard disk to also be able to use it offline, just in case I have no network connection.
- Files should be stored again as raw files on the file system so that I can back them up easily.
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.
