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Disclaimer: Ripping BluRays with Handbrake is discouraged by its developers. They recommend using MakeMKV instead which is more robust in this respect since it’s built for the task. By now I’ve adopted this workflow myself. I recently gained a renewed interest in moving my media from discs to hard drives so I can integrate them with my media server. For music and DVDs this is fairly straightforward, although there is a hoop to jump through if you’re on Fedora because it doesn’t come with all the proprietary codecs and whatnot preinstalled. However, all you need to do is get your hands on the RPMFusion repo and install libdvdcss and you’re good. ...

I’ve wanted a digital frame at home for a while now. I’m notoriously bad at organizing pictures, even worse at sorting, printing, arranging or displaying them. So when I found out that digital frames were a thing it seemed like this would be a natural solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the commercially available ones either don’t have the features that I want (e.g. some way to connect with my images stored in my Nextcloud) or feature worrying amounts of integration with various third-party services, clouds, phone apps and whatnot. I’m absolutely not inclined to yield control of my pictures to some provider who is supposed to sell me a device for displaying them but maybe that’s just me. ...

For a few years now, I’ve hosted a small server at home. Nothing too exciting, I’d say. It all started with a Nextclound instance (see here) and sort of evolved from there. After a while I discovered docker and the amount of services saw a dramatic, albeit short-lived uptick. I tried out all kinds of things, like uptime-kuma, FreshRSS, miniflux, portainer, watchtower. At some point I came across what used to be bitwarden_rs and is now called vaultwarden, a self-hostable reimplementation of Bitwarden. I had been using keepassXC and had heard good things about Bitwarden in general so I decided to try it out and liked it so much that I ended up using it instead and depended on it for daily use. ...

It’s been a few months so I thought an update on my last post on the Steam Deck is in order. So let’s get to it, shall we? The Good First off, the things I liked about the Deck the first time around are still valid. I still think the experience of gaming mode is very cohesive, the option to choose and modify control schemes is extremely handy, I can run AAA games at quite decent frame rates and settings which makes for a beautiful experience on an 800p display. ...

I’ve got a new job. I started working as a developer for a software consulting company last October and wanted to finally take the opportunity to write about it all. My last job didn’t end particularly well. I had been doing it for two years and became increasingly frustrated with my work without ever quite realizing it or why that was. I was in a position where I was unable to take a step back and reflect on my situation, why I was unhappy with it or what needed to change. I just noted that my motivation became less and less. ...