Recent Blog Posts

I run a few of my workloads on VMs in Azure. Some of them deal with data and content that changes over time, and accordingly I like to have the data backed up periodically. Microsoft provides the AzCopy tool for uploading files to Azure blob storage alright, and it works very well with managed identities assigned to VMs (and other services in Azure). But some of the same properties that apply to data also apply to the backups of that data: their value diminishes over time, so keeping backups for an extended amount of time is pointless. read more

With the advent of publicly available LLMs and embedding models, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone: I’d learn a bit about using such models, and I’d build a tool that lets me use a semantic search on my photos. I keep those photos on a NAS in my home network, and frequently back them up using bart - my back-up and restore tool. So all I really need is a web site for showing the photos and letting me search them. read more

I’ve been running a honeypot for a while just to see what creepy things crawl around on the internet. One of the things I wanted to see is what credentials are probed when trying to sign in, so I equipped the honeypot with a fake WordPress login page. Today, I’m writing about these credentials. For my evaluation I’m looking at data only from the past 6 months, more or less. On average, almost 80 attempts to login are made every day. read more

One of the things I like about golang (and Rust too, by the way) is that it’s quite simple to build really small container images by statically linking the executables, and using scratch as the base image. I’ve done this a few times in the past, and was doing it again just recently. Except that this time around, I ran into issues: the container would crash soon after it started. read more

I recently had to switch phones, because my old phone conked out. I had an app on that phone that I used for short-lived MFA codes for various logins I use. That app was a poor choice, because it didn’t allow for a backup of the secrets used for the code generation, so I had to go to the relevant logins and one by one remove MFA, then add it again. read more

Over the years I’ve accumulated a few Raspberry Pis of different versions, each of which I’ve used for certain things, some of them I’ve retired or upgraded to newer versions. Consequently, I have a few Raspberry Pi 1 and 1B still around, and they’re not doing much aside from collecting dust. I also have an old Raspberry Pi NoIR camera that I haven’t been using much. Over the years I’ve tried different things, including PIR-triggered recording of the camera feed, sort of to build a device that records what’s happening when the infrared sensor is triggered. read more

First, let me state this more precisely: this is a post about generating c# code for ASP.Net Core from an Open API definition at build time using NSwag. If you’re looking for steps to generate code by using the NSwag toolchain manually, you won’t find that here. If you’re looking for a way to generate an Open API definition from an existing ASP.Net Core app using the NSwag toolchain, you won’t find that here either. read more

Earlier this year I’ve started using K3s regularly for local testing of Kubernetes workloads, APIs, tools, and more. I’ve grown quite fond of k3s for multiple reasons: it’s very easy and fast to install, very easy to use, and so far I have not found a single service designed for K8s that wouldn’t work on K3s. I’ve run it both on Linux machines as well as on Windows machines through WSL2. read more

One of the things I have been working on at work over the past few months is an open source implementation for .Net of the standard-to-be for HTTP message signatures. I’ve ended up calling this NSign which granted is a bit broad – the libraries deal only with HTTP signatures – but I found that the name quite fitting. The general idea of HTTP message signatures is that clients and/or servers can create and verify digital signatures or message authentication codes over HTTP messages, that is either request or response messages. read more

Hashes are everywhere in the digital world: checksums for file downloads, version control systems, fingerprints, password databases and verification, message authentication, digital signatures, blockchains etc. As a developer, I often find myself in the situation where I quickly need to verify a hash, or generate a hash for some reason or other. That’s why I built the flrx39 hash tool: it lets you quickly evaluate some popular hashes in the browser. read more