The Hidden Blog

As it turns out, I do have a hostname.

2023 New music in my email inbox

In the past years I came to the realization that I don’t discover new music any more. Now I see new albums if they show up on my “Listen Now” view in Apple Music and stream them there.

Many years ago I was a heavy user of Gazelle-based websites. These have the advantage that they...

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2023 Taking a look at Nostr

After hearing about Nostr from multiple people over the past weeks I decided to take a look and learn more about it. I found nostr-resources.com, usenostr.org and github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr to be helpful to get an initial overview.

Running a nostr relay

As a next step I looked into setting...

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2023 Fixing failed installation of EPSON printer driver

Recently I ran into the issue where installing an EPSON SC-P900 printer driver on macOS (before and after the update to Ventura) always failed with a generic “Installation failed” message.

I started my investigation by looking at the installation log with the following command while...

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2022 Convert video for Twitter

If you want to post a video on Twitter there’s a few rules that are important for the video to be accepted.

Unfortunately the interface will only show “The video file is not compatible” while only the actual API request in the background will tell you exactly what is wrong. If you...

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2022 Push notifications from AppSignal with Pushover

I’m using AppSignal to monitor Birdfeeder. Birdfeeder’s job is to send your Twitter bookmarks to your email inbox so you don’t forget about them.

On the technical side it’s a Rails app which relies on Sidekiq to process background jobs. Bookmarks have to be fetched, accounts...

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2022 Building container images in Kubernetes with kaniko

A few weeks ago I rebuilt a GitLab CI pipeline at JustWatch. One part of that was to move the step building the container images in the Kubernetes cluster from artificer to kaniko.

I wrote up a short guide on the JustWatch blog in case you are curious.

2022 Listening to a movie as an audiobook

Today I was reading a comment on HN that piqued my interest.

I used to rip the audio of my favourite movies and listen to them like audiobooks. Because I was usually familiar with the visual parts, I could enjoy the dialogue and the music in a different way.

This sounded like a simple enough task...

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2022 Migrating from self-hosted Postgres to DigitalOcean

Until now Birdfeeder was powered by a self-hosted Postgres instance which is used by various other side projects. It was running out of space and decided to migrate to a managed Postgres instance on DigitalOcean (Affiliate link, giving you $100 in credits).

The reason for going managed was that I...

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2022 Check Postgres table dependencies for cascade

Currently I’m working on a better staging setup for Birdfeeder. A big part of that is syncing the production database to the staging database while cleaning out user specific information. An easy way to do that is to use SQL to truncate the users table.

When I tried to truncate my users table...

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2022 Birdfeeder Tech Stack

After sharing some information about how Birdfeeder collects your Twitter bookmarks and sends them to your inbox we are going to take a look at the technical foundation of the project in this blog post.

Spoiler: It’s a boring Rails app and it’s good that way.

Collecting the bookmarks...

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