The Hidden Blog

As it turns out, I do have a hostname.

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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2022 Birdfeeder: Twitter bookmarks in your email inbox

I’m a heavy user of Twitter bookmarks but I always forget checking them when I would actually have time to do so. I use them to bookmark tweets I later want to share with someone or tweets that point to longer articles when I’m in a hurry.

To change that I decided to work on a new...

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2022 Building Web Extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari

For my new side project I needed to build a browser extension. I was hesitant to build one as the development experience of doing everything in the browser seemed annoying to debug.

After hearing more and more about Web Extensions and even Safari adding support recently I assumed that now is the...

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2021 Review: GL-iNet Beryl MT1300 Travel Router (Apple TV on a VPN)

This is a short review of a new gadget I recently purchased. I sometimes have the need to route my Apple TV’s traffic through a VPN. This can be for simple geolocation issues but also to prevent ISPs throttling IPTV traffic.

The Apple TV currently doesn’t support running a VPN directly...

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2020 Almost Paperless Office

Recently I looked at my increasingly large pile of important documents and decided to make sorting them a small project. After a while it was clear that a lot of them are not important enough to keep around. Invoices, warranty certificates or insurance status updates are likely not necessary to have...

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2020 My Ghost to Hugo migration

If you’ve visited this blog before you might have noticed that it looks a bit different than before. You are not mistaken and the reason is that I spent some time on migrating it from the Ghost blogging platform to a static site generator called Hugo. For this post I tried to document my...

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2020 RSS is luckily not dead yet

I’m a big proponent of using RSS feeds for your daily news intake instead of relying on algorithmically shuffled news streams for a while now. This works especially well if you want to follow smaller blogs and sites with irregular posting schedules that would otherwise just not show up in any...

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2019 Apple ruined iTunes — What now?

I didn’t exactly love iTunes during the last few iterations but even with Apple Music slowly creeping into the interface it was still the same old — powerful — iTunes under the hood.

I could still tag it with my own tools, tags were written to the files, the folder structure was organized...

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2019 Set Apple Touch Icon for any website

There are some websites that I use via the “Add to Home Screen” feature of iOS to make them easily accessible on my Home Screen. The problem is that websites that are running a more conservative tech stack tend to not always cater to new and shiny browser and OS features like dark mode,...

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