Aaron - aaron.cc

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 outline two potential solutions for fixing this.

Apple

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.

Dev Ops

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

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)

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’

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

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.

Retro Computing

Rollin (1995)

Coming soon