byeCloud: News with Miniflux

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.

Mount Time Capsule SMB from a Linux host

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.

Screencast: How Git stores data

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.

macOS: Change wallpaper by CLI

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.

byeCloud: Building a mailserver with modern webmail

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.

byeCloud: Syncing Photos with Nextcloud

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.

byeCloud: File syncing with Nextcloud

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.

byeCloud: Replacing iCloud with self-hosted services

Introduction 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.

AirPods finally work as headset on the Mac

Just as a short update: Starting from the newest AirPods update, they also finally work as a headset on the Mac. Before there was a issue that caused audio quality to drop when using the AirPods both as headphones and microphones at the same time.

Show macOS notifications from shell scripts

macOS has the osascript command line tool that allows you to run embedded AppleScript right from within shell scripts. As AppleScript also has capabilities to show notifications, you can utilize this to show messages in the macOS Notification Center. Here is an example: osascript -e 'display notification "Something happened" with title "Test"' If you have any further tips that will help people supercharge their shell scripts on macOS, feel free to leave them as a comment.