💬 Micro

Just another addition to my ever-growing collection of headphones: the new Anker (soundcore) Liberty Buds 2. Just available for a few days, but just in time, the battery of the charging case of my Liberty 3 Pro starts to show its age and doesn’t want to charge fully anymore. I’m not yet 100% sure if I will keep them. But I heard so many good things about the noise canceling (finally on a level or above other premium in-ears) with Anker’s new Thus chip that I just need to try them. I mean, I am quite sensitive to noise during traveling. Just on my trip last weekend, I wished I had a way to better isolate myself from the environment in the noisy train. So maybe it’s my compact new travel companion?

Tim Hårek really sent me down a rabbit hole with all the self-hosted services he lists on his latest blog post. There are some interesting links I put on my reading list. The first one I actually looked into, though, was Pocket ID. It’s a nice little OpenID Connect provider. A great homelab alternative to Keycloak, which I have to deal with at work sometimes.

It supports login with passkeys and can be configured with many other self-hosted services like Paperless-ngx, Forgejo, Nextcloud, KitchenOwl, and, since today, also GoBlog. Basically one passkey to rule them all. And it enables passkey support for the apps that don’t support them yet.

But it was also interesting implementing OIDC client support in GoBlog. It gave me the chance to fix a few bugs and recover my knowledge about OIDC in general.

Not too long ago, I switched from two Hetzner Cloud VPS to one netcup VPS, with integrating my mailserver setup into my hosting setup. It works fine so far. To keep things simple and because I’m back on Ubuntu on my laptop, I decided to just go with Ubuntu on the VPS as well.

But stumbling over bootc, I can’t stop the thinking of whether I should switch to a bootc setup. The whole OS is configured via a Containerfile, automatically rebuilt and updated with continuous integration. Using tools like Docker or Podman, I’m already familiar with.

It’s quite appealing to me and might be one of my next weekend projects…

My sites had a few TLS problems during the last few days. It was due to some Actalis certificates being revoked and OCSP failing for them. I don’t really know why Caddy wasn’t able to renew all of them correctly, but it should be fixed now.

While I like Actalis for being the only real European free TLS certificate provider, they bother me a lot by sending hundreds of emails all the time (like for every single cert when it is expiring), so I need mail rules to mass delete them. Maybe I missed some important mail in-between.

I bought a DJI Mic 3 to improve my audio quality during calls. Better audio input, and I can also use normal headphones like my Soundcore AeroFit 2, so I also have better audio output compared to my Aftershokz OpenComm or the Anker PowerConf S330. I bought a set with two senders and one receiver and the charging case for a good price from Amazon Warehouse. The package was still sealed, so it’s practically new. The receiver can easily be connected via USB to the laptop, and then I can use one of the senders, and should one go out of battery, I can easily change it. Does anyone use a similar setup? 🎧️🎙️

Whether I stroll through the park, cycle through the countryside, or simply take a short break on a bench outdoors, the sight of the green nature has an incredibly calming effect on me. My mood improves instantly. And the best part: all those options aren’t far away. 📷🌳

Yesterday evening, I finally did the last step and shaved off the remaining few millimeters of hair on my head. This morning, I took the chance and prompted a new avatar that represents my current style. I know, AI-generated stuff everywhere sucks, but I really like this one, and it looks quite accurate. 👨🏼‍🦲

I knew of the existence of paperless-ngx for a long time. A new YouTube video now finally gave me the push to set up an instance on my VPS. It’s configured to use Bunny.net storage using S3 and rclone for the media files, and a restic backup is configured to regularly back up the bucket to Scaleway. Now I just need to upload all the documents and start to scan all those papers. 🖨️

I usually do my bike tours after work or on the weekend during the day. Yesterday, I did it in the evening. It was very nice, and some views (sadly, the camera on my bike phone isn’t that great) felt quite epic. I also managed to drink enough carbohydrates to not feel weak, but unfortunately it made me sleep badly afterward.

Today I took my camera again and tried some other motives in nature. This swan was one of them. I activated RAW images and tried to do some lite editing, first with Darktable, but then I chose RawTherapee, as that tries to adjust the settings to match the camera style. There’s so much to learn. I feel so overwhelmed by all the things I don’t know yet. But I also like it. Learning new skills is always great. And having fun with a new gadget as well. 😄