Some days ago I had the idea to dig around in my mailbox and see what people have sent me over the years. As I was especially interested in the attachments (pictures) I googled a bit and found out you can quickly extract stuff from a mbox (used by a Dovecot SMTP server). Here's what I cobbled together. #!/usr/bin/python import mailbox import dateutil.parser from datetime import datetime mbox = mailbox.mbox('/home/USER/mail/MAILBOX') def extractattachements(message): if message. Read more

tl;dr If you want to try out a Linux-based OS on your MacBook/Notebook: try Manjaro.

When I need to build a website, I typically use Hugo to generate the .html from .md. However, one thing is a bit inconvenient: deployment. If not done right, you have to do that manually (edit -> hugo -> rsync). Alternatively, and much better, you can use the Hugo-Gitlab|Hub-Netlify-toolchain I described earlier. These day, I needed a website for a new research project of mine and didn't want to ship the site with Netlify. Read more

Since a couple of years I use OpenVPN to access my home network from remote and also to protect my traffic when I am traveling and have to use WiFi networks I do not completely trust. Unfortunately, the iOS VPN client does not work for me anymore so I needed an alternative. My Fritz Box (German home WiFi router brand) actually supports an IPSec VPN. However, iOS's VPN client is horrible. Read more

Last year in June I set up geofence on my home server to ban all access not coming from DE. In January I noticed that things did not work anymore. A bit of research revealed, that the company that provides the needed GeoIP tables decided to stop shipping them in format A and only offered the tables in format B. So neither the script that downloads the tables (xt_geoip_dl) nor the script that converts the tables (xt_geoip_build) into the binary format that xt_geoip can digest to block connections attempts worked anymore. Read more

Recently I stumbled upon [Pihole](https://pi-hole.net), which is a tool that blocks advertisements and web trackers. The nifty idea of Pihole is that it is no web proxy as Privoxy but it acts as a DNS server in your network...

Since a couple of weeks I'm giving a lecture in the Master's course for Informatics at our university. One of the biggest differences of giving a lecture vs. giving a conference talk is that the lecture is more interactive. Or in other words: I ask my students stuff and they ask me stuff. Well, students are students and for this reason they do not use the first $n rows of the lecture hall. Read more