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Road from a Spotify-themed side to an Apple Music-infused landscape, symbolizing a switch between services.

How I Almost Switched From Spotify to Apple Music

In this post, I outline how I became excited about ditching Spotify for Apple Music, but then found more and more things that were broken or felt unfinished—or just didn’t work the way I expected them to work.

Copying The Current Safari Tab as a Clickable Link

In this post, I outline how to quickly copy the URL and title of the active Safari tab as a clickable link, a convenient feature for referencing web pages in emails, to-do lists, documentation, and messaging platforms like Slack.

My Journey from EdgeRouter to MikroTik

My Journey from EdgeRouter to MikroTik

I switched from an EdgeRouter 4 to a MikroTik CCR2004-16G-2S+ for my home network. I learned that MikroTik also has its quirks, but overall, I’m pleased with the transition. In this post, I will share a few insights I found particularly interesting.

Fixing Date and Time for Photos and Videos Saved from WhatsApp

Fixing Date and Time for Photos and Videos Saved from WhatsApp

When saving media from WhatsApp, it lacks an Exif timestamp which will make your media appear out of order in your photo library. This post explains how ExifTool can be used to create the Exif DateTimeOriginal field from the filename.

Opening Screenshots From a Vintage Macintosh in Modern macOS

Retro Computing

Opening Screenshots From a Vintage Macintosh in Modern macOS

Apple’s System 6 stored its screenshots in MacPaint format. Learn how to open them in recent versions of macOS.

Restoring WireGuard Tunnel Configurations From a macOS Backup

On macOS, WireGuard stores its tunnel configurations in the login keychain. This post explains how to extract them from a backup.

How to Fix Broken Search in Apple Mail After Upgrading to Big Sur

Upgrading to macOS Big Sur broke search in Apple Mail for me. In this post, I explain different solutions that might fix this.

Using FFmpeg to Create HEVC Videos That Work on Apple Devices

The HEVC (H.265) video codec will produce smaller file sizes at the same level of video quality. FFmpeg can create those files, however, a certain tag is needed for the files to be recognized by Apple software.

Prevent Unencrypted Ansible Vaults from Being Pushed to Git

Ansible Vault is a nice tool that allows you to store sensitive data (such as passwords and application secrets) securely along with your Ansible Playbooks, so you have all your configuration in a single place. Obviously, you don’t want to store unencrypted secrets in your repository, so that’s

Tracking Your Kraken Balances in MoneyMoney

Crypto Currencies

Tracking Your Kraken Balances in MoneyMoney

I wrote a MoneyMoney extension in Lua to track crypto currency balances from a Kraken account.

Removing Personal Information from MP3s bought on Amazon

When you buy MP3s on Amazon, it is likely that they contain a “unique purchase identifier” which can be used to link the MP3 file to your Amazon account. Storage Format and Location This special block of metadata is stored in private frames (PRIV). This makes it harder to be

Web Development

Using Google’s Invisible reCAPTCHA to Protect ve_guestbook from Spam

The first question that comes to your mind might be: “Who uses guestbooks nowadays anyway?”. Well, personally I don’t, but I maintain two sites that were created in the mid 2000s that have a guestbook installed—and people are still using it. It’s ve_guestbook for TYPO3. In

The Windows 95 Boot Screen As an Endlessly Looping GIF

Retro Computing

The Windows 95 Boot Screen As an Endlessly Looping GIF

Just in case you forgot how this looks.

Home Automation

Monitoring an APC Back-UPS With openHAB 2

openHAB doesn’t have a binding for APC UPS devices. Luckily, there are other ways to integrate them into your openHAB setup. In the following, I’m describing how the exec binding can be used to regularly poll the UPS status using the apcaccess command-line utility. The result will look

Retro Computing

Quaak (1992)

“Quaak” is a simple Frogger clone for Windows from the year 1992. I got it from my father on a 3.5″ floppy disk when I was 6 or 7. I played it on my father’s workstation (at his job) and also at home on his 486 laptop running

Retro Computing

Rollin (1995)