Notes
| 2023-09-20
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#ansible
Cowsay is one of those packages you just end up installing randomly on just about any client over time.
And if your using ansible you may be in for a little surprise:
Notes
| 2023-09-17
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#django
#python
Django’s CSRF protection is usually a great thing, but when building (API) endpoints meant to be accessed by scripts/third parties it gets in the way of that.
This is how to disable it:
from django.utils.decorators import method_decorator
from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
@method_decorator(csrf_exempt, name='dispatch')
class MyView(View):
pass
from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
@csrf_exempt
def my_view(request):
pass
Posts
| 2023-08-25
(updated 2025-10-26)
| 6 min read
#gitlab
#hugo
#pkm
#productivity
#scripting
#writeup
Series: Tech Behind the Blog
I write an extensive personal knowledge base using markdown, code-server and a variety of other tools. Originally, in 2021, I wanted to have something like Obsidian Publish but self-hosted, so I created it.
Over time my knowledge base evolved more into a second brain, tracking not only my technical notes and journal, but also things like recipes and hikes. With this my publishing pipeline, and the script at it’s core, extended in a multitude of ways.
Posts
| 2023-08-06
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 4 min read
#indie-hacking
#products
In this post I share my process for building the MVP for PodHistory, from idea to launched product and what my next steps will be.
Notes
| 2023-07-22
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#helm
#k8s
Since early 2019 the sprig library used by helm provides a concat function that does exactly this.
Posts
| 2023-06-18
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 4 min read
#opinion
#productivity
This is a guide to a simple self organization/task management system I built for myself over the years.
From time to time I showed it to someone and they got some benefits from it, most adapted it to better fit their needs down the line, which is exactly what you should do with any kind of personal task management in my opinion.
Notes
| 2023-06-06
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#htmx
#slashpage-uses
Go check out their website, it’s incredibly good at explaining itself.
To me, a backend heavy developer, HTMX is the frontend framework I like to use because:
Notes
| 2023-05-10
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 2 min read
#python
When building a Python script that is long running or has to manage some state on termination it is helpful to handle a couple of signals:
SIGINT: The signal sent when pressing Ctrl+CSIGTERM and SIGQUIT: Meant to terminate the process, sent by kill and process managers like systemd or supervisordHandling them is possible with Pythons signals library:
import signals
class SignalHandler:
stop = False
def __init__(self):
# Ctrl+C
signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, self.exit_gracefully)
# Supervisor/process manager signals
signal.signal(signal.SIGTERM, self.exit_gracefully)
signal.signal(signal.SIGQUIT, self.exit_gracefully)
def exit_gracefully(self, *args):
self.stop = True
The simplest example is using the SignalHandler as the condition on the loop
and have code to stop gracefully below the loop.
Posts
| 2023-04-27
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 3 min read
#automation
#opinion
#productivity
Sometimes you have to do a specific task and you are fully capable of doing it manually, however those tasks are also great to flex your muscles and hack something together.
They can be an excellent tool to sharpen your skills with the tools you use regularly, and improve your quick prototyping skills.
In addition, with a couple of iterations, again sharpening an important skill, you could afterwards create a more general purpose tool from a hacky script.
Notes
| 2023-04-22
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 3 min read
#homeoffice
#personal
#slashpage-uses
Since I spend more than 8 hours here most days I created a nice setup for myself. Thankfully I have a whole room just for my home office, so I take full advantage of that.
Besides my main desk I have a secondary desk, a couch, a couple of sideboards, a wall mounted whiteboard and a couple of shelves to display all the techy and nerdy things.
My main desk is a custom build based on a FlexiSpot height adjustable electric frame. The tabletop is a 180x80x2.5cm pressed wood panel in a dark gray concrete look.
Notes
| 2023-04-20
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#apple-silicon
#macos
Think before you enable this, it could be a security risk
Options, then click ContinueUtilities menu select Startup Security UtilitySecurity Policy
Reduced SecurityAllow user management of kernel extensions from identified developers
Notes
| 2023-04-15
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#bash
#digitalocean
#doctl
#infrastructure
#productivity
Posts
| 2023-04-04
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 2 min read
#ai
#opinion
#productivity
Given the recent rise in text-based language models, sometimes called AI tools, I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences in using them, especially in the context of blogging.
Notes
| 2023-04-01
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 3 min read
#hiking
#personal
These days I enjoy hiking quite a lot. To make it easier to just “pick up the pack and go” I created two basic packs that are optimized for my needs and the environment I’m usually hiking in, the Swabian Alps.
I have some basics I duplicated and carry in both my packs, these are:
I’m currently using a Terra Peak Flex 20l in red for my smaller backpack. It’s a nice size for shorter hikes and fits me well.
Posts
| 2023-03-19
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 4 min read
#infrastructure
#self-hosted
#sysadmin
Series: Your Own Server
Now that we have talked about the benefits of running your own server and how to run your own server let’s take a look at some things you could run on your own personal server and some things you should better not.
Posts
| 2023-03-18
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 3 min read
#infrastructure
#self-hosted
#sysadmin
Series: Your Own Server
There are many ways to run your own server, from setting up a Raspberry Pi on your desk to renting a physical server at a provider.
In this post, we will focus on setting up a virtual server with DigitalOcean, which is one of the easiest ways to get started.
Posts
| 2023-03-17
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 2 min read
#infrastructure
#opinion
#self-hosted
#sysadmin
Series: Your Own Server
In the world of technology, we are moving further and further away from operating directly on servers, but there are still significant benefits to be gained from running a personal server.
I have been running some kind of personal server for many years now and I strongly believe anyone working in technology can benefit greatly from doing so. Here’s why:
Posts
| 2023-03-12
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 3 min read
#indie-hacking
#products
In this post I will go over the MVP building phase of Honeypot Login, from idea to launched product and what my next steps will be.
Notes
| 2023-02-01
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#1password
#cheatsheet
The 1Password CLI op works either in connection with a client app, like on the Mac,
or standalone, useful on a server.
# Login
eval $(op signin)
# Get favorites
op item list --vault "Private" --favorite
# Get a specific item
op item get <ID>
# !! Important: Sign out at the end
op signout
Helpers to more easily work with the op cli.
1login() {
eval $(op signin)
}
alias 1signout="op signout"
1search() {
term=$1
if [ -n "$2" ]
then
vault="$2"
else
vault="Private"
fi
echo "Searching for '$term' in vaut '$vault'"
op item list --vault "$vault" --long | grep "$term" --ignore-case
}
1get() {
op item get $*
}
Notes
| 2023-01-13
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#code-review
#merge-requests
Things I do to be a good code reviewee.
Notes
| 2023-01-12
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#linting
#yaml
#yamllint
Setting up a new repository for YAML linting today I was running in a bit of an issue with yamllint.
I was using a YAML list to specify ingores, as mentioned in the documentation:
ignore:
- "*.dont-lint-me.yaml"
- "/bin/"
- "!/bin/*.lint-me-anyway.yaml"
This however did not work with the above mentioned error message. After a lot of debugging I found that they released a new version recently which introduced this feature.
My solution was to update my locally build container image to the latest version, as of writing 1.29.0, in which this feature is introduced.
Notes
| 2023-01-11
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 2 min read
#hy-fit
#rant
#tenswall
This is somewhere between a rant about the app and backing services no longer working, a collection of information I could find out about it and a possible search-result for others facing the same issues and not really finding anything online just like me.
The company seems to no longer exist.
I have switched to the eufy smart scales, which are made by Anker, a reputable manufacturer.
Notes
| 2023-01-01
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 3 min read
#argocd
#python
A simple Python client to interact with ArgoCD.
Notes
| 2022-12-08
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#linux
#ssh
#wsl
If you use ssh-agent with an encrypted ssh key it does not persist when you open a new terminal window.
Use keychain instead.
sudo apt install keychain
.bashrc or .zshrc
# Repeat this line for all keys you want to unlock and use this way
/usr/bin/keychain -q --nogui $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa
source $HOME/.keychain/wsl-sh
Notes
| 2022-11-25
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#productivity
#tools
Tools I use and recommend.
Extremely simple and affordable website publishing, I use it for landing pages and quick MVPs
My first choice for personal servers and simple MVP deployments with their App Platform
My go-to git-server and allrounder CI/CD, both on premise in the enterprise and in the cloud for my own projects
They provide a great service, best described as a PHP-webspace, but for Python
Posts
| 2022-11-01
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 3 min read
#notification
#open-source
#productivity
#self-hosted
#sysadmin
Running any kind of personal infrastructure sometimes requires your attention based on certain events or failure states, no matter how much you automate tasks.
Over the years I have used E-Mail, Telegram bots and a variety of other tools for this purpose. However all of them have the drawback that they mix with other kinds of information and are not easilly usable in scripts.
Notes
| 2022-10-24
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 2 min read
#archiving
#audible
#ebook
Notes
| 2022-09-29
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#git
Sometimes you may want to commit only the files you have changed and not any newly created files,
this can easily be achieved by this command: git commit -a
Notes
| 2022-09-29
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 2 min read
#personal
This is a list of interesting blog posts, talks and such things that I found over the years.
Some of them may teach you something relevant, some may just further your general understanding of tech. From personal experience they can lead you down the rabbit hole really fast, enjoy with care!
Posts
| 2022-08-22
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 5 min read
#devops
#management
#opinion
#post-mortem
#process
Incidents happen, and we can and should always learn from them, to be better prepared for the next time things go wrong.
A great tool to do that is the post-mortem, it is a process designed to recap the incident, learn from mistakes and improve the system as a result.
Notes
| 2022-08-21
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 2 min read
#personal
This is my checklist for publishing a new post on my blog:
hugo new content/posts/<slug of post>.mdhugo server -bind=0.0.0.0
Notes
| 2022-08-17
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#gitlab
#python
Export a CSV formatted report of projects in user-namespace on a GitLab instance.
This is especially useful if you think about limiting or disabling this feature.
Posts
| 2022-07-18
(updated 2025-10-23)
| 6 min read
#devops
#infrastructure
#microservices
#monoliths
#software-architecture
Ever since diving into the software development world I was troubled by a duality:
On the one hand I have built and operated many services described as monolithic with relative ease, on the other hand I’m always told I, and others, should build microservices because they are better in a variety of ways.
With this post I’m going to compare both software architectures by looking at the key benefits often associated with microservices and additional considerations I think are important.
Notes
| 2022-07-08
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#git
#productivity
A simple changelog system on top of git commit messages.
The main idea is to generate “release notes” from a diff in commits before a release. It can easily be run manually or as part of a merge/pull CI pipeline.
In this case it looks for commit messages starting with one of these [ADD], [REMOVE], [INFO]
and just outputs those, but those patters can be adjusted to fit any existing commit schema.
Posts
| 2022-04-06
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 2 min read
#debian
#powershell
#windows
#wsl
The other day I was playing around in WSL with a colleague of mine and we did this:
Posts
| 2022-04-04
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 3 min read
#containers
#debian
#docker
#podman
#wsl
The problem: Docker itself can’t be run in WSL2 as it requires the docker daemon, usually run though systemd.
The solution: Podman works just fine and can easily be installed, although we will need to configure some things to make it work properly.
Posts
| 2022-04-03
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 2 min read
#indie-hacking
#personal
Starting on the first of March 2022 I no longer work full-time in my day job.
That sentence has been about a year in the making and makes me both happy and a bit scared about the future.
Posts
| 2022-03-16
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 2 min read
#bash
#curl
#monitoring
Using some output redirection and the --write-out parameter we can produce a script that simply outputs the status code of a curl request.
Notes
| 2022-01-14
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#automation
#cicd
#yaml
#yamllint
When adding yamllint to an existing project it can be hard to fix all the errors at once.
I wrote a simple script to create a rules block that simply ignores all rules that currently trigger for a file. This works by generating a rules block ignoring paths.
Notes
| 2022-01-13
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#powershell
Older Versions of Windows 10 and all Windows Server 2012 systems have no local user management commandlets.
This is a working polyfill to allow scripts using local user management to run on old systems.
Notes
| 2021-11-06
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 2 min read
#django
#minio
#python
#s3
In production I would consider it best practice to use a S3 solution for serving assets. Namely static files and user-generated media.
This describes my setup on how to do this locally too.
The main benefit for me is that there is less of a difference between environments and I can test S3 specific features in my app.
I will assume a already working Django project and MacOS with [[brew]] installed, but brew specific parts are easilly replicated on different systems using their native package managers.
Notes
| 2021-08-30
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#windows
#windows-terminal
#wsl
The path you are in when opening a new WSL tab is determined by startingDirectory.
This parameter needs to be a valid Windows path, which isn’t great if we want to end up in /home/kamner inside WSL.
The nice thing about WSL is that it will resolve windows paths into their equivalent WSL/linux path if possible.
For example, C:\Scripts would resolve to /mnt/c/Scripts.
Using this and the neat trick that the WSL filesystem is exposed as a a hidden fileshare ([[technology/windows/wsl-hidden-fileshare]]) we can get to where we want.
Notes
| 2021-08-30
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#windows
#wsl
WSL file systems get exposed as a hidden share network share:
\\wsl$\<WSL Name>\<path\to\file>
For example, my Debian home folder is at: \\wsl$\Debian\home\kamner
Notes
| 2021-08-13
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#dns
#linux
#netplan
#sysadmin
When using netplan it is easy to force .local DNS requests to go to you nameservers instead of being only resolved locally (the default and standard).
This also works with all other strange .WHATEVER domains you may have lying around in your organization.
Snippet from netplan configuration:
nameservers:
addresses:
- X
- Y
search:
- local
- myotherstupiddomain
Notes
| 2021-08-12
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 2 min read
#ansible
#linux
#logs
#mongodb
MongoDB does not rotate it’s log on it’s own.
To get it to ratet we will use logrotate.
First, we need to configure some things in mongod.conf to get the desired behaviour when we utilize logrotate.
systemLog:
destination: file
path: /var/log/mongodb/mongod.log
logAppend: true
logRotate: reopen
Afterwards, we can create a logroatet configuration going in /etc/logrotate.d/mongodb.
/var/log/mongodb/mongod.log
{
rotate 5 # Keep the last 5 rotated logs, so 6 files including the currently active
size 10M # Rotate once the log reaches 10MB in size, depending on your envrionment you could instead use daily, weekly, monthly, etc
missingok # It's ok if the log file does not exist
create 0600 mongodb mongodb # Permissions and ownership for the roatetd logs
delaycompress # Don't compress on first rotation, so we have the current log and log.1 uncompressed
compress # Compress everything else
sharedscripts # Run this script only once and not for every matching file
postrotate # Script to run after rotating
/bin/kill -SIGUSR1 $(systemctl show --property MainPID --value mongod.service)
endscript # End of script
}
The postrotate script simply finds the PID of mongod.service: systemctl show --property MainPID --value mongod.service
and sends it a SIGUSR1 which is the signal MongoDB expects if you wish to rotate the log.
Notes
| 2021-08-11
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#cron
#linux
#sysadmin
grep -vH "#" /var/spool/cron/crontabs/*
grep -vH "#" /var/spool/cron/*
Notes
| 2021-08-10
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 1 min read
#container
#dns
#linux
#sysadmin
Usually at least one of those is present on any system
But sometimes the usual suspects don’t work, especially in container-land. After trying them you may try some more involved/unknown things:
Part of glibc, this will probably work on nearly every system.
getent hosts example.org
Or, if you specifically want to query A or AAAA records.
getent ahostsv4 example.org
getent ahostsv6 example.org
Given this depends on glibc it is more of a alternative then another real solution.
Notes
| 2021-08-10
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 2 min read
#freshservice
It is possible to customize almost all of the user portal but you better know what you are doing. Otherwise you may end up like me, spending way more time than you ever should on customizing this damn portal.
Let’s hope this one helps you, otherwise feel free to reach out to me on Twitter.
Place a variation of the below at
Admin > General Settings > Helpdesk Rebranding > Requester Portal Branding > Customize Portal > Layout And Pages > Portal Pages > General Pages > Portal Home
Notes
| 2021-08-09
(updated 2025-10-25)
| 4 min read
#gitlab
#hugo
#obsidian
#pkm
#productivity
#writeup
The idea at the start was simple.
Do something like Obsidian Publish , so read frontmatter and if it contains published: True put it up on a website to view.
I started with taking a look at different static site generators but after a bit of testing I ended up back at Hugo, which I already use for ps1.guru and a few other projects.
Posts
| 2021-08-09
(updated 2025-10-22)
| 4 min read
#gitlab
#hugo
#obsidian
#pkm
#productivity
#writeup
Series: Tech Behind the Blog
The idea at the start was simple.
Do something like Obsidian Publish , so read frontmatter and if it contains published: True put it up on a website to view.