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

Over the holidays I’ve used some of my time to modernize my JSON pretty printing tool and make it available on flrx39.net too. The new version is available under pretty print json. Please make sure to check back often, as I will keep adding more tools over time. Also feel free to suggest new tools which you think could be useful 😄 I cannot guarantee that I will add all suggestions, but I will consider them. read more

I’ve wanted to get rid of Wordpress for a while now. It’s more of a hassle than anything else, really. And who on earth still uses PHP? Anyway, a while ago I embarked on the journey to find a good replacement. First, I looked at other CMS systems that are similar to Wordpress, but soon realized that they’d all require me to keep them up-to-date all the time, and they’d likely be just about as annoying. read more

Earlier this year we were dealing with an issue in one of our data processing pipelines. Through telemetry we could see where the problem was coming from, but I did wonder if I could model the problem in a simulation too. After all, if we have a tool available to predict certain issues before we implement them, that can be very helpful to adapt the design and/or code upfront. I remembered some lecture from university many years ago, where we were discussing discrete event simulations. read more

Recently at work, I found myself in the situation where I needed to copy some file from my workstation to a jump box. Now of course, on Linux I’d just use rsync or scp. But our IT doesn’t like provisioning Linux boxes and therefore uses Windows for jump servers too, so no luck here. Luckily, I could convince them to turn on and allow PowerShell Remoting, so with some simple scripts I can still easily copy files over without using SMB. read more

I’ve wanted to find a good provider of cheap and secure cloud backups for a while. I’ve compared some cloud drive providers, but didn’t quite like those. They usually have very limited free plans, somewhat pricey paid plans (e.g. 50GB for about 24$ a year for OneDrive), or like in the case of Google no information available at all. By the way, “Google one is coming soon” isn’t an announcement that I want to look at for more than a few days when looking for pricing info. read more