Bing Image Creator

Did you know that SSH can match “things”? I sure didn’t!

Tonight I wanted to grant SSH access to a service account that didn’t have a home directory, but was required to use keyauth. After a bit of research on the internet I added a new config file to /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d.

Match Group homeless
  AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/authorized-keys/%u

%u automatically resolves to the current user.

I also needed to create the group homeless and add my service account to it. And, of course, I also needed to add the public key to the referenced file above. (So, if your service account is called pinkie, you’ll need to add the key to
/etc/ssh/authorized-keys/pinkie).

Until today the issue with Apples new apps to synchronize with my iPhone is still not fixed. I wasn’t able to find any other users with similar issues, but also have to say I didn’t dig very deep. I choose the brutal way and simply removed all apps and installed the previous iTunes version 12.13.0.9 (thanks to theapplewiki.com).

My iTunes library was still complete, which was nice, but synchronizing to the iPhone still yielded the same old error: Preparing to Sync. Since killing the MDCrashReportTool.exe is easy enough, I decided to write a quick Autohotkey script for it.

At the end of December 2023 I decided to switch back to CDs and stop using Spotify. The idea was triggered by the announced price increase and I thought, that for all the money that I spent on it per Year, I can actually buy a few CDs that I then own. During this thought-process I also remembered a very foolish decision from a few years ago:

In the years before music streaming services, I collected all my MP3 files in folders sorted by artist and album. It was the logical thing to do, because CDs contained one artist and album (apart from Bravo Hits and Dream Dance ᕕ(⌐■_■)ᕗ ♪♬). Then Spotify came and I had access to virtually everything – that changed my listening behaviour. I moved from a sorted folder full of artists and their albums to playlists. Since I didn’t have my folder collection anymore, I sometimes didn’t know what music to listen to. In the end I almost only listened to one particular playlist. Thinking about this today, makes me feel limited somehow. I stopped listening to whole albums, and just played the few songs that I really liked. If you only ever play the really good ones, they can get boring over time.

Eigentlich hatte ich mir angewöhnt in Englisch zu schreiben, dass geht einfacher von der Hand. Aber der Hashtag #WMDEDGT ist Deutsch, also bleiben wir dabei.

So, worum gehts jetzt? Ich las bei assbach.de den #WMDEDGT - Dezember 2023 und fand die Idee so gut, dass ich sie direkt nachahmen wollte. Und dann habe ich auch noch gelernt, dass die Idee schon >10 Jahre alt ist! Wow, danke Frau Brüllen.

Jetzt aber mal los:

I received the film and there were actually some okayish pictures on it. However, due to several distractions I didn’t take time to reflect on those images properly.

As a reminder for my future self: If one clones a repository to a new location, the submodules are not cloned automatically. They need to be initialized and updated once, in order to show the proper content.

git submodule init
git submodule update

If the theme is a submodule and the customizations are in a different branch, one needs to switch to that particular branch as well. D’oh!

git checkout live

Due to circumstances I got my hands on an analogue Minolta from the 90s. A Dynax 9xi. There was a 35mm film already loaded inside and almost full (24/36) as well. I took a walk through one of the historic parts of the city and finished the film. After a bit of research - many thanks to analoge-fotografie.net - I decided to try my luck with Safelight Berlin. They offered a good price and seemed caring all-in-all. I received an email that the film arrived in their lab today, so I will know more in about two weeks time. I think the film inside the camera was from ~2005, fingers crossed that I will get something out of it!

I recently stumbled upon restic and since I haven’t really setup a backup of my windows machine¹, I wanted to give it a try.

I love it 💛 The software is straight to the point, not bloated and using it in a terminal is a bonus for me!

However, there was one pitfall with windows paths (and I’m not even surprised by this):

• When you select the folder for the backup, you can choose absolute or relative paths.
• The backup snapshot will always show the absolute path.
• Additionally, the path in the snapshot view will be displayed in Windows style (with a colon and backward slashes).
• The path in the actual backup will vary depending on your backup command and can only be displayed with ls

# Backup C:\Users\restic_demo\Git with an absolute path (ID b713711c)
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ backup C:\Users\restic_demo\Git\

# Backup C:\Users\restic_demo\Git with a relative path (ID da8fe3c7)
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ backup .\Git\

# Display restic snapshots
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ snapshots
repository ebfaab05 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
ID        Time                 Host        Tags        Paths
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
b713711c  2023-09-30 21:47:58  Horscht               C:\Users\restic_demo\Git
da8fe3c7  2023-09-30 22:03:19  Horscht               C:\Users\restic_demo\Git
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

# Display snapshot files and folders for b713711c
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ ls b713711c
enter password for repository:
repository ebfaab05 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
snapshot b713711c of [C:\Users\restic_demo\Git] filtered by [] at 2023-09-30 21:47:58.6977882 +0200 CEST):
/C
/C/Users
/C/Users/restic_demo
/C/Users/restic_demo/Git
/C/Users/restic_demo/Git/blog.bdw.li
/C/Users/restic_demo/Git/blog.bdw.li/.git

# Display snapshot files and folders for da8fe3c7
PS C:\Users\restic_demo> restic -r .\Backup\ ls da8fe3c7
enter password for repository:
repository ebfaab05 opened (version 2, compression level auto)
snapshot da8fe3c7 of [C:\Users\restic_demo\Git] filtered by [] at 2023-09-30 22:03:19.7184899 +0200 CEST):
/Git
/Git/blog.bdw.li
/Git/blog.bdw.li/.git

I no case would I be able to restore the data using the path from the snapshot view C:\Users\restic_demo\Git. It took me a few confused minutes to figure that out. And I didn’t find anything about it in the docs. At last in the Github issue #2792 was a side note that mentioned the proper paths.

I’m using Mailstore Home to archive my personal emails for a while now. And while I didn’t find any specific documentation on command line options, you can actually use /c archive --id=$n to automatically start the archive process on application start. I currently archive three mailboxes and my scheduled task looks something like this:

MailStoreHome.exe /c archive --id="1,2,3"

At the end I still have to close the Mailstore Window manually. There are tools like AutoIt, that you can use to hide the GUI, but I don’t mind closing the window myself. The task runs right after my login and I just let it do it’s thing in the background. It usually doesn’t take longer then a minute anyway. If you do mind the window, check out the article on andysblog.de¹.