Oliver's Blog

Internet

The Fediverse: A vivid and modern approach to today’s Social Network-landscape

When I once discovered Mastodon, the Fediverse was already a nice approach in helping to rebuild the polluted Social Network-landscape. But, based upon the ActivityPub-protocol, Mastodon isn’t the only player giving hope for federated and decentralized networking.

Nextcloud

How to migrate your Nextcloud database-backend from MySQL/MariaDB to PostgreSQL

From the early beginnings, I used MySQL and - later - MariaDB as my database of choice.

Thoughts

Mastodon - more than an alternative to Twitter and definitely here to stay

Whether Twitter is doomed since Elon Musk’s takeover or not (changes for federated services have never been that good!), it’s always an option to think outside the box. One possible alternative already glowing in the web for a certain time is Mastodon.

Thoughts

The best way to predict your future is to create it

While the past is gone and the future still is still ahead, Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote can be a synonym for a proactive way of influencing events that are still ahead.

Software

Dark Noise: Simple. Fast. White noise, refined!

When Anthrax released their famous album „The Sound of White Noise“ back in 1993, aiming for silence and harmony wasn’t the main focus. Today, Dark Noise is a tool willing to phase down the pace of everyday life by providing natural sounds on all Apple-based OSes, striving for calmness.

Mullvad VPN and The Tor Project team up to release the Mullvad Browser

Privacy is essential for everyone and so should be the individual browsing experience. In addition to their great VPN-service, the folks at Mullvad now enter the browser market - backed by a strong cooperation.

Internet

How to create individual DNS-profiles for Apple-devices

With DNS being the Internet’s phone book since many years, a World Wide Web without the service is beyond any imagination. Talking about censorship, blocking specific is a common medium these days.

Microsoft

Microsoft is accelerating Teams, final version scheduled for release this June

Digital Savior during the pandemic, resource-wasting monolith: While opinions conflict in regards of Microsoft’s collaboration platform, a severe speed bump may finally stop harming CPU and RAM while using Teams.

Internet

The Fediverse officially connects with WordPress

The Fediverse in on the rise and I already argued why Mastodon is here to stay, being a new home for all those fugitives from other, self-destructing Social Media-platforms.

Security

It’s about time to do spring cleaning with your passwords and accounts again

By using a password manager like Bitwarden after switching over from its various ancestors, this task comes quite easy and can elaborate one’s own account security to a new level - let me give you some inspirations on this (mandatory) process.

Internet

Twitter officially bans third-party clients

It has been a tough ride so far since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, the lovely microblog-service for many, many years.

Environment

Climate crisis is no future tale anymore

The world is on the verge of demise and while we still discuss whether to maintain a 1,5°-target or not, a small village in the German Rheinland-area is a synonym for the malfunction of politics and especially of politics here in Germany.

Linux

How to install PHP 8.2 on Debian 11

Although Debian is a modern Linux-distribution based upon stability, it sometimes misses actual packages like the latest PHP-iteration.

Life

What if… ?

During the pandemic, a lot of rather moderate things happened in everyone’s life but sometimes you aren’t prepared for additional struggle in terms of human connections coming after the two-year-COVID-streak.

Privacy

How to implement Snowflake with Docker on a Synology-NAS

In many areas, we have unlimited access to the Internet while other regions or single people are blocked from venturing through the web freely. Snowflake is a possible solution for anyone striving towards anonymization and bypassing censorship.

Microsoft

Microsoft dumps custom domains in Microsoft 365 Single and Family

Despite the bond with GoDaddy as a registrar, one of the biggest pros for paying (home) customers was the use of a custom domain serving your private Microsoft account’s E-Mail-address.

Microsoft

Microsoft Office is dead, long live Microsoft 365

According to a company FAQ, Microsoft is going to execute the biggest rebranding in the office productivity-sector in more than 30 years.

Thoughts

Great minds discuss ideas - average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people

The pandemic has shown that, sometimes, extraordinary efforts are needed to keep things running. While people separated in many ways, other consolidated to form an even stronger (work-)force, despite the general conditions and underlining Eleanor Roosevelt‘s original citation.

Gaming

Google Stadia is dead, long live Cloud Gaming!

It was all over town since Google closed down two Stadia-related studios in February 2021. Now, the moniker „Stadia“ itself follows, being put onto the graveyard with the #killedbygoogle-hashtag.

Nextcloud

Nextcloud teams up with Webex App Hub

One of Nextcloud‘s biggest pros is surely the own ecosystem which enables you to extent your private cloud with lots of useful applications.

Veeam

How to backup Microsoft 365 with Veeam and Wasabi

When two vendors form a technological alliance, many others simply benefit from this. Screening this picture in technology, the combination of Veeam and Wasabi is a perfect match to securely backup Microsoft 365-related data.

Nextcloud

Nextcloud and European Governments aiming at building a Digital Sovereign Office

There must be an Office beside Redmond’s variant and, so far, Nextcloud embraced the Open Sourced-based version of Collabora Online and ONLYOFFICE quite well. Anyway, there is still space for improvement so an European initiative should fix what still seems to be broken.

Music

New releases: Five Metal-albums to even heat up the August temperatures

As a longtime fan of rather extreme Metal music, I am always thirsting for new material. As this August faces one of the biggest release-cycles in 2022, I want to share five outstanding albums here which purify the musical year so far.

Docker

Deploying Portainer on a Synology-NAS

Various Synology-devices support Docker, a lightweight software containerization solution. Although this works quite well out of the box, more flexibility can be added by yet another tool: Portainer.

Microsoft

Microsoft announces Apple Silicon-optimized Teams-client

Although Microsoft was quite fast with bringing native Office desktop-apps to Apple Silicon in no time, it was quite a long journey for Teams to catch up.