Latests posts on blog.notmyhostna.me
A few years ago I've released Birdfeeder, my (back then) Twitter bookmark manager. The problem it solved was that I constantly bookmarked interesting places or ideas on Twitter and then never looked at them again. It was initially not that straight forward to build and needed a browser extension to fetch bookmarks. After a few weeks of building, Twitter coincidentially launched a new bookmarks API…
For managing my music I rely on beets to keep my library tidy. Over the years I've built up a big pile of unsorted music that often contains albums or artists I don't really want to import any more, but keep for other reasons. That always made beets import a bit of a hassle as it had to analyse each album before I could hit "Skip". That could take some time, as it also does audio fingerprinting in…
I've been using Swarm / Foursquare and previously also Gowalla (The original and the sadly failed relaunch a few years ago) since 2012. The history that I have in the app is my main reason for using it. While I'm not a check-in maximalist that checks into every subway station or the office, I do it regularly enough to have all important place collected in there. Sometimes it's also just fun to see…
Editing Grafana dashboards ~is~ was always such a hassle, if you decide to edit the JSON you'll have to do the "Delete" / "Import" dance in the Grafana UI, or if you decide to edit in the UI you have outdated files in your repository and you'd have to download them periodically. Recently they released a new feature in preview called Git Sync which solves all of these issues. You set up a repositor…
Over the past years I've accumulated a bunch of self-hosted software on my server (Miniflux, Plex, Radarr, Sonarr and the usual suspects). Since Tailscale became a thing I don't expose them on subdomains any more like and usually just access them through a bookmarked "Server" folder in Safari. This folder became crowded over time and also required...clicks so today I decided to improve that. I'm…
As part of my quest to make things in my daily life more complicated I stumbled upon Paperless-ngx a few times already. This weekend I finally went ahead and set it up on my Synology NAS (In Docker and with sqlite as the database) and was pleasently surprised. It was very simple to set up and with Tailscale and Swift Paperless for iOS I now have access to all my documents that are safely stored at…
Recently I had the use case that I needed to access a device which was located in the local network of my home A, from my computer located in the home B. If this would be a server or some kind of computer where I could install the Tailscale client that would be easily solvable. In this case it was a UniFi webcam (Upcoming blogpost alert!) that I needed to access from the other network. The only…
The new year has started and I was once again looking for a simple calendar to do some yearly planning. I've tried to find something for this use case for a while now and all the apps or templates I've tried didn't have all the features I wanted: See every day of the year, with enough space to add something Make it easy to mark "ranges" for periods where I might want to stay abroad or go on…
I've recently written about an issue that I have been experiencing with Synology Drive on macOS for many months. These days when you are running into an issue with some app or any paid(!) or unpaid service of a big tech company you are usually already prepared to just find another solution as support is generally non existant. If you are blessed with a response they will usually just feed you…
In a recent discussion on HN I've mentioned that self-hosting databases is still a bit of a pain compared to running one on a cloud hoster. Someone asked "why" so I thought I'll just quickly write it down here. Running something like Postgres on a server is easy. You either install some package and start the service, or you run it in Docker. This is just a small part of the task though, after that…
Update January 2026: This issue is being fixed in a future version of Synology Drive for macOS, see more details in this blog post . In the past few months I had a lot of weird issues with my new (and with a clean install of macOS) computer. I especially noticed that while running brew update . It would just have issues connecting to the internet and immediately re-running the command usually…
I've switched all my backups to Backblaze a while ago but I was pushing back the task of removing the old backups from Amazon Glacier. These were done through Arq Backup a while ago, from a different machine. I had a monthly reminder for that task (The Amazon billing notification) so I finally set out to do that, dug up my old credentials and logged in. To my surprise I realized that you can't…
I've had these snippets in Tot for a while now, but then reminded myself that I've set up this blog to quickly share things for future-me too. Maybe they are useful for someone else stumbling upon them. Quickly get an approximate count of a large table by using the index: SELECT reltuples::bigint AS estimate FROM pg_class where relname = 'bigtable'; Explanation why splitting off a frequently…
Additionally to this blog I'm also contributing to another blog that I'm running with Manu called Annoying.Technology . It's based on Hugo, a static site generator, which makes it very easy to deploy and automate. The downside is, that writing a blog post with images is always a hassle as you have to manually adjust file paths and write your text in an editor which is usually not optimized for…
A few weeks ago I visited Penang Island, a Malaysian island in the Strait of Malacca. I collected a few places that I've really enjoyed below. Penang Hill , fun to go up by the funicular . Explore the "Habitat", a bit cooler air up there and nice views + monkeys. Ferringhi Bay , lots of little restaurants on that beach or close by if you keep walking along the coast. Yong Pin Restaurant , one of…
After rendering my latest video I realized that my trusted Intel Mac Mini from 2018 is slowly getting closer to retirement. I've decided to upgrade to a new Mac Mini but after already being familiar with the markup on the storage upgrades I've decided to do it myself. As usual the good people from iFixit have a detailed walkthrough, it's a very simple operation and in the end if you upgrade from…
This weekend I've finally sat down to create a new video for my YouTube channel Infrequent Updates again. I collected a lot of videos over the past months so it took me a while to get started. As you can see the video is also a bit longer than usual and as always finding the music turned out to be the most time consuming part again. In the end there's a lot of things that could be a bit better but…
A few months ago I bookmarked Arun's post about Shanghai . Then a few weeks ago I stayed there myself for a bit and had the chance of exploring the city on my own feet. One place I especially enjoyed was the area around Columbia Circle that is also featured in the blog post, lots of small stores, coffee shops and shaded streets to explore.
The past week I have been working on my first real plugin for Kirby that is not just a helper function. The main goal is already stated by the name and comes from the indie web scene: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere . For now I'm mostly active on Mastodon, but I was also aiming at making my dormant Bluesky account look a little bit more active without always having to manually…
For the new "Photo Post" entries I've recently added here I wanted to have a way to reference them from my text posts. Ideally there would be a preview of the images and an easy way to open the full photo post directly from that inline module. Here's an example of the final result: It turns out this is all relatively easy with Kirby. All we need are the following bits:…