When being en route or traveling around, I often use Android’s Hotspot feature to connect my notebook to the outside world.
This worked completely fine for the last years.
Since the update to Android 15 (or maybe Android 14 I cannot say for sure), connecting to the Hotspot worked but almost all websites stopped loading. Fetching emails via IMAP worked but basically everything based on HTTPS resulted in timeouts or at best in partial loads after a long time.
…This is about the default configuration of the LEDs on router devices with the Freifunk / Gluon firmware (https://www.freifunk.net). For example, on my “TP-Link TL-WR841N/ND v9” the WAN and wifi LEDs are constantly blinking as there is constant traffic on the according devices. As this is by design in the Freifunk network, I’m not interested in the blinking. It is just distracting.
…tl;dr: this post is about the free choice of routers to be used on home broadband connections in Germany. Since August 1st, a new law enables customers to receive credentials for the DSL connections as well as for VoIP services in order to use end devices (i.e. routers) of their choice. Since all of the following information are specific to one German local provider, NetCologne, the rest of the post is in German.
…Since quite some I’m using Logstash (actually the whole ELK stack) for collecting, enriching and storing log events from various servers and applications.
While Logstash is great for this job, sometimes it cannot parse some log events because the events have an unknown formatting or my parsing rules don’t match well enough.
…Here is a simple script to quickly get an overview of the SSL certificates used on various websites, e.g. to check expiration or issuer. For me, this helped a lot while migrating website certificates to Let’s Encrypt.
…I recently needed a Windows binary of libgit2 to build some Geany code against the library. Since I could not find any reliable and trustworthy source for Windows builds of libgit2, I had to compile it myself. In order to save others from this, I want to publish the result.
…I recently sort of locked my workstation while I tried to query a SOAP webservice at work about for 24000 entities. While my request was as simple as “list all entities you know” to the server, its response was heavy, obviously.
…While being quite happy with my new Firefox OS phone so far, the biggest stopper for me was that, like all Mozilla products, the root certificate of CAcert was not included and so I could not access sites using certificates assured by CAcert.
…This is a little build script for Xfce4 to fetch and compile the sources from GIT (master). Short instructions:
You should start with an empty directory, where you put this script. Edit the script and modify the list of packages or modules, you want to install.
…There is a command line tool called di which basically combines the information of df and mount.
I like this tool very much because it quickly prints lots of useful information about the existing filesystems on system and about their type, usage and mountpoint.
…Some time ago I tried to get the current balance of my prepaid mobile phone plan in order to implement some kind of notification if it is lower than 10 Euro. Unfortunately my ISP doesn’t offer any API to get this information automatically, so my first attempt was to send a POST request using cURL to login to the website of my ISP and then parse the HTML to gain the current balance.
…If you didn’t notice it already, Geany 1.22 is out.
As usual, Geany got new features, more and updated translations and of course several fixes.
Read the release announcement on Geany’s website.
…A little heads up: Geany 1.23.1 has been released.
This is a bugfix release to address two regressions in the previous 1.23 release.
On Windows, after 1.23 it was no longer possible to open files from the command line because we added a change to change the working directory on Windows to the installation directory of Geany. This should have solved issues with plugins loading resources using relative paths. Unfortunately, it broke also opening files from the command line if relative paths were used.
…Have you ever wondered how your ReadMe you are just writing will show up on the GitHub website?
I did, a couple of times actually.
And it is just annoying to make a change, commit, reload the website, check, make another change, commit, …
…If you are using GnuPG, you may receive new signatures or do other changes to your GPG key and want to upload it to keyservers and/or your webserver to make it easier for other people to find it.
…A couple of times I searched for an efficient way to monitor the UBC failcounts of OpenVZ containers on a hardware node with Zabbix. Most solutions I found on the net were about using items for each UBC and container and watch for changes in the failcounts. But I never liked those many items, each item needs to read /proc/user_beancounters, process it and send the value back to the Zabbix server.
…Introduction
I’d thought it might be useful to share some information and experiences about the “public relationship” work happening in Germany for the Xfce and Geany projects.
In the last years (since about 2010), a few guys of the German Xfce community organized Xfce presentation booths at various Linux conferences (Froscon near Cologne, OpenRheinRuhr in Oberhausen, Chemnitzer Linux Tage in Chemnitz). In the meantime, these guys (including me) perform also booths for Geany and Midori next to the Xfce booth, simply because we are all the same people knowing the projects quite well.
…I recently had the problem that I had on a system the private part of the SSH key but its public part got lost. Generating a new key pair wasn’t pBEGIN TRANSACTION;ossible as the public part was still installed on other systems foBEGIN TRANSACTION;r proper public key authentication and I could not change this.
…hide_cursor.c is a small tool, to hide or show the mouse cursor
on an X display. The source code is based on a tool from Nevrax
(www.nevrax.com). To compile it, just type something like:
While viewing the logs of geany.uvena.de, I noticed one of the logged search keyphrases was “die moldau friedrich smetana”.
As this classical music composer and his most popular symphonic poem “The Moldau” is in no way related to Geany, it’s quite surprising that a very popular search engine lists geany.uvena.de as the first hit in the results list.
…Similar to my search for an efficient way to monitor UBC values on an OpenVZ hardware node, existing methods of monitoring a memcached server available on the net didn’t make me happy.
…While more and more ISPs and hosting providers start offering IPv6 subnets alongside with usual IPv4 addresses in dual-stack mode, there are still IPv4-only areas.
Luckily, the ISP providing my internet link at home, offers native IPv6 since a few weeks in some kind of beta phase for interested users. And so far I can say it works great even if the ISP provided modem/router can’t handle IPv6, so I used my Raspberry Pi as DSL modem since there is just a Linux running on it, IPv6 on the router and the LAN is no problem at all. Yay.
…I just stumpled upon an error while customizing the Admin in a new Django project where I first used Django 1.6:
Database returned an invalid value in QuerySet.dates(). Are time zone definitions and pytz installed?
After using my favourite search engine to get an idea what this means and ensuring I had pytz installed, I didn’t find anything which solved my problem.
…