Posts on Solutr.com

Did It! Switching From 1Password to heylogin

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:03:04 +0200

The switch was a long time coming. I’m going to be honest here, 1Password has a lot of good things going for it, you can integrate MFA, encryption keys for SSH, GPG, it integrates with HIBP, it syncs all across any of your devices, it has a fantastic UX, it is well certified securitywise, and for what it does it is pretty good.

However it costs money (even for private use) and I want to reduce my footprint with US based cloud offers. I know this might sound a bit ironic given this site’s hosting provider, but I digress.

AI Safety Warning by Simon Wardley and AI

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:01:40 +0100

Here I share a Linked.in post by Simon Wardley in full and added a little Markdown formatting.

I do this to be able to show it to persons that do not consider Linkedin a platform worth having an account on (and giving the platform several bits of personal information along the way).

Having used conversations with various AIs to create more harmful advice, I then asked each of the AIs to use their conversation to create a suitable warning that should occur before any discussion starts. The one from Claude is not bad.

About the Increasing Wealth Inequality

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 23:00:55 +0200

I’ve had that interesting discussion again. The discussion almost every time starts with something along the lines of “Eat the rich!” and then people basically start to ask “Who do we eat exactly?”.

I personally would start with the closest person to you, that earns your yearly salary from passive income within a day. If you can’t find a person within a 300 mile radius, throw a barbecue for yourself (you know, just to get more intel from others, for your friends, not for eating you, please don’t do that).

Fediverse Global Switch Day on 2025-02-01 and a few thoughts on my expierience entering it

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 15:56:01 +0100

I just read an a post on Mastodon with some welcome illustrations to promote the Global Switch Day on the first of Februrary 2025.

There are a lot of Fediverse based alternatives for services that are by now heavily affected by enshittification.

Here is a list of the replacable commercial platforms with their Fediverse alternative and (if you are interested), where I live on them.

Plaform	Fediverse Alternative	My Home
X/twitter/bsky/threads	Mastodon	@maub@23.social
instagram	Pixelfed	@maub@pixey.org (barely used)
reddit	Lemmy	@maub@slrpnk.net
Facebook	Diaspora	jakap@nerdpol.ch
WhatsApp	Signal/Element(*)	maub.23 / @maub:ccc-ffm.de

(*) neither of those is officialy part of the Fediverse, but both offer reasonably secure e2e encrypted communication with no corporate interference to your privacy.

Dunn's Law of Information

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 16:29:19 +0200

Here’s the law in full rescued from its original wiki page.

“What you don’t know, you don’t know - and you can’t make it up”.

This law is attributed to former Raytheon vice president Bruce Dunn. Although Bruce used it in the context of evaluation of evidence for scripture, it is highly applicable in the case of cluster failure where all that is observed is inability to communicate.

Because in this case, one knows very little - except that we can’t communicate with the given node. Nevertheless, the temptation is great to pretend to greater knowledge.

Playing with Jan.ai

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 15:19:52 +0100

It was about two weeks ago when one of my coworkers asked me, if I was already replaced by AI. I was baffled.

Jan.ai looks quite like me, it is friendly, it uses the waving hand emoji (👋) as a logo and it genuinely seems a great way of experimenting with a lot of different open source LLM’s. So i tried.

I have used this as a soundtrack:

Billy Idol - Dancing With Myself (Youtube)

What it might cost to run a service like Twitch.tv

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:10:42 +0100

Today I watched a German reaction video revolving around several unfortunate developments in the gaming industry.

Whilst a lot of absolutely valid points were made, one of them was “the server costs of twitch can’t be that relevant to their business”.

Now, I’m working in cloud infrastructure and I know, that live video streaming is one of the most expensive digital services you can offer.

So I did a bit of research and a few calculations. On my day off. Because I’m an Idiot.

Imposter Syndrome Is Only Toxic to Yourself

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 21:04:21 +0100

I have just watched a video about a narcissist made by somebody exposing that person together with the person the narcissist copied and then had the audacity to hint to her followers on multiple occasions that it is the other way around.

The thing I’m taking issue with is not anything the creators in the video are talking about. It’s one of those stupid duty calls moments. It is that @nerdcity at one point in that video - very likely on accident - says the word ‘imposter syndrome’ to describe the behaviour of the narcissistic person. That triggered me in particular, because I identify as a person suffering from the imposter syndrome.

I did a few things again.

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 19:18:23 +0200

So, a few years ago I made a small flask-app, just to keep myself entertained. This was a few years after I did another minimal webapp in React. Since I just migrated to a new set of servers I thought, I fluff those apps a bit. Bring some color into them, upgrade to the latest versions, fix a few bugs and so on.

Now I’ve got a set of interesting applications, all managed in the same flask-container, delivering some features that you might find useful.

File Permissions/Ownership Bug in Docker 20.10.25-0ubuntu1

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 01:35:07 +0200

UPDATE 2023-08-28

The bug is now fixed, you only need to update to the newest version of docker on affected systems!

ORIGINAL TEXT

Yesterday night I have tried to build a container running a python-application as non-root user and I stumbled onto a bug currently tracked as #2029523.

Example Dockerfile:

FROM alpine:latest

ENV BUSTCACHE=2

RUN adduser -S -D -h /home/test test && ls -al /home/test

WORKDIR /home/test

COPY --chown=test:nogroup foo.txt foo.txt

USER test

RUN whoami && ls -al . && touch bar.txt

The file foo.txt is a plain text file containing only the single word ‘bar’.

Hello World From Hugo

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 15:33:08 +0200

Hi,

This is my first post on my new Hugo website. I’ve relaunched this old PicoCMS page in favor of probably the most used static generator at least in my corner of the internet.

I included a few old posts from my old blogger.com blog called ‘iamnodev’, since I am planning on retiring that one.

I fiddled a bit with this theme in particular to get things going and I am quite pleased with the results.

Testing certificates with openssl

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 18:40:00 +0100

Nowadays I have to check ssl-configurations quite often and have to accomodate a blur of different CA’s intermediates and wildcard certs.

So for the most basic stuff I reccomend taping Julia Evan’s openssl cheat sheet somewhere in plain view until you can type the commands from it blindly.

But in some cases I needed to…

verify a certificate from your disk against your systems CA

You download or receive a certificate from somewhere, but before installing it, you want to see if it really works:

S3 API too slow? xargs to the rescue.

Fri, 13 May 2016 18:23:00 +0200

My days as a BigData engineer grew darker in the past few days. Now almost all critical data that our aggregations, partners and customers want to access is located in a bucket on Amazon’s S3. Since that gets horribly expensive for the vast amounts of data we create on a daily basis, we lean towards not keeping much more than a month of active objects in the bucket, to meet our SLA’s regarding backup and recovery, we keep them for about a year in Glacier afterwards.

Python3,float and math, what the hell?

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 11:20:00 +0100

So it was late at night and I was hacking away at my touch-controls for my UnicornHat. I was trying to set the brightness in nine steps between 0.1 and 0.9. When all of a sudden, this happened:

>>> foo=0.1
>>> foo+=0.1
>>> print(foo)
0.2
>>> foo+=0.1
>>> print(foo)
0.30000000000000004

So according to my internal senses this looked not very precise. But according to the almighty Stackoverflow and one of my beloved coworkers who can indeed speak ASM fluently, this is in fact very precise (for a float). Since a float is merely a value, lets say, close by the one you wished it to be.

When you're generating queries from resultsets of other queries ...

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 20:15:00 +0200

I just hit a point in an app I am currently developing, where I found myself generating queries from the resultset of another query.

Because, what can possibly go wrong, right?

$selectors = array();
$query_phase2 = "SHOW KEYS FROM `".$row['table']."` WHERE Key_name = 'PRIMARY'";
$query_phase3 = "select `".$row['field']."` from `".$row['table']."` where ";
if($result = $GLOBALS['dbconn']->query($query_phase2)) { 
    while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        if(array_key_exists($row['Column_name'], $data)) {
            $qextender = "`".$row['Column_name']."` = '".$data[$row['Column_name']]."'";
            array_push($selectors,$qextender);
        }
    }
    $query_phase3 .= implode(" and ",$selectors);
    if($result = $GLOBALS['dbconn']->query($query_phase3)) { 
        if($result->num_rows > 1) {
            $return = array();
            while($row = $result->fetch_array()) {
                array_push($return,$row[0]);
            }
        } elseif ( $result->num_rows == 1) {
            $return = $result->fetch_array();
            return $return[0];
        } else {
            return "";
        }
    }
}else { return array('danger' => 'query failed('.$GLOBALS['dbconn']->errno.'): '.$GLOBALS['dbconn']->error);}

DDoS and Online Gaming

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 10:36:00 +0200

I just stumbled across an enormous outcry about another attack by the “LizardSquad” against DBG’s (former SOE) Games that were allegedly the outcome of a few angry posts on Twitter by DBG’s CEO John Smedley. (Storylink)
Along with the usual “fixit fixit fixit” there was also a lot of guesses thrown out about the size of the genitals of a 14-year old fin. What startled me though is the sheer lack of knowledge when it comes to the gamers themselves. So please, let me help and explain how this magical and dangerous DDoS stuff works.

The day perl became a bit disgusting or why PHP got the better CGI enviroment

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 14:10:00 +0100

I just viewed a very nice #31c3 talk about a well known issue with certain functions within two very widely used perl-modules (DBI & CGI).

When I heard the arguments brought to the presenter from the audience within the Q&A, I thought to myself, well, they’re right. All of these attack vectors are in theory something that could have been prevented by just flatten arguments (as you always should). Then again, this makes for a really, really messy programming style that does not come easy if you were programming any other programming language prior to perl.
Lucky me, I started programming with perl. I think within the third script I used the first own functions and within my fourth script I realised that it is probably best for everyone to start all your functions this way:

Installing JAVA JDK/JRE on Debian/Ubuntu with ease

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 11:51:00 +0200

I recently commenced the third installation of JAVA on one of my Debian-Boxes and couldn’t remember any of the exact commands, had to google again, ended up with 8 open tabs all saying something different and so wrote this small bash script to set up all necessary alternatives with “update-alternatives” automatically.

Please note that there has to be either icedtea or openjdk installed to make all parts of this script work.

Truth and Lies about Big Data

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:59:00 +0200

I recently got certified with cloudera (CCAH) and found myself the only one in class who really uses Hadoop. I often stumble upon people trying to sell Big Data appliances to brand owners “to store and monitor their social network XXX” where XXX may be replaced by any word that tickles or frightens brand owners.

My personal opinion is, if you are a brand owner or not, doesn’t matter, data matters. And only data generated and maintained within your own company matters. If you want to throw away lots and lots of money, than you can start storing data which is freely accessible to anyone.

Tweeting to my friends in IRC

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 22:08:00 +0100

Just finished a script, that enables me or anyone else who cares to send tweets directly to a IRC-Channel. The script is powered by the best IRC-Client ever made, perl, and Net::Twitter::Lite.

Update [2023-08-18]: Nobody should use twitter or perl or irc any more ;)
Update [2013-06-15]: upgrade to Net::Twitter::Lite::WithAPIv1_1
Update [2013-01-12]: second update today added the setting “_count” and some cleanups with vars and setup
Update [2013-01-12]: drastically reduced the amout of requests to the API

P.S.: you can also follow me on twitter, but beware that almost half of my tweets will be neither about programming nor in english ;-). Follow @matschundbrei, if you don’t care!

Ease up HTTP-GET with perl's LWP::UserAgent

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:22:00 +0100

I was just writing a small script for automatizing something via a REST-API and I had to manually add an authorization to all my GET-Requests, which really annoyed me. (it was not Realm-sensitive, so I couldn’t set up auth in the UA itself).

So I wrote this small sub I would like to share:

#getrequests shorthand
sub getReq {
   my ( $url, $username, $password ) = @_;
   my $req = HTTP::Request->new( GET => $url );
   if ( $username && $password ) {
      $req->authorization_basic( $username, $password );
   }
   my $res = $ua->request($req);
   if   ( $res->is_success ) { return $res; }
   else                      { warn $res->status_line; return undef; }
}

All you need to call a HTTP-Base-Auth’d site now is:

A Journey through the web

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:46:00 +0200

Today I do not have very much to do at work. I am not moaning about it, I would just like to point out that my actual team has a very strict “don’t change anything that works before a holiday or the weekend”-policy, this is a very good policy, but it leads to personal downtimes on fridays and the days before holidays for obvious reasons that I like to fill with personal development. So I began learning something about screen and the modelines which are used in it. I found a comment from someone which was pointing out his zshrc which one should look up for a funcion namend “screen_title”. I immediatly searched the web for his name and zshrc, and the only thing that came up was his blog. Unfortunately I was sucked in by his latest post, pointing out a presentation on slideshare and completly forgot about my intention visiting this site. From this presentation forked some talks about databases and bigdata and complexity that I would really like to share. Let’s start at the beginning. My interest for Hadoop as a technology was mainly generated by a stong powersource, namely the catalog of videos over at Cloudera and a whitepaper by Greenplum which was pointed out by Dmitriy Ryaboy in his video about Pig at twitter.

Generating proper XML with Perl

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:50:00 +0100

Once upon a time I was asked by one of our javadevelopers if i can send a csv in proper xml to one of his webservices. Of course I can. As usual i decided to use perl and Text::CSV to read in the CSV as well as LWP::UserAgent to send the xml to the (soap-)webservice.

After having a second look on the code, where I put in several nodes at the fourth level of the xml-tree, managing all the intents just via print, I found myself doing something like this: