Admin on Flo's Thoughts

FastMail Configuration Follow-Up

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 19:05:47 +0200

Just a quick update on my FastMail Configuration post: After I wrote that post I ran into some sync issues. Mail.app on OS X had massive problems listing the contents of my folders (and even listing those folders themselves), especially with folders located directly within INBOX.

I had a lengthy conversation with Yassar from the FastMail support team about this issue. We finally figured out that it seems to a bug in Mail.app and he later told me, that they tried to work around this for quite some time. He showed me some posts (1, 2) on their blog regarding similar issues going back as far as 2008.

FastMail Configuration

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 18:57:51 +0200

Yesterday I wrote about my move to FastMail and how smooth that went. I mentioned, that the only caveat was the fact that I had to manually configure the clients to work with FastMail’s IMAP and SMTP servers. This is not as simple as for Google Mail or Yahoo and required me some fine-tuning. So I thought it might be a good idea to share my configuration.

Update: Turns out, there was another issue. I wrote about that one in a (link: /blog/fastmail-configuration-follow-up text: separate post).

Password Protected Pages With Jekyll

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 15:04:06 +0200

When I moved to Jekyll I didn’t have a way to password protect pages. Actually, I didn’t really need it so it wasn’t a real concern to me and I did not yet look into it. Until today. I was contacted by Osama of TimeSvr who asked me about this and so I thought it might be a good idea to share what we came up with.

Since we only needed to protect pages within a certain context we decided that .htaccess protection would be sufficient enough.

Synology Backup Strategies

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 11:20:07 +0200

Yesterday I read Marco Arment’s piece about his attempts to backup his Synology NAS. They all rely on external services like Amazon’s S3 or Backblaze. Since I’m happy about every bit and byte that I can store within my own realm, I don’t feel to comfortable sending literally all my data off to the cloud in some random country with random laws I have no clue about.

Luckily, I have two Synologys that I operate and maintain (one at my apartment and one at my parent’s house). This offers a different approach: I could basically backup my NAS systems to one another. Unfortunately, they are not the same size and the larger one has about four times the capacity of the other one. So this leaves me with a hypothetical one-way backup solution (which is not what I want to achieve). If I upgraded the smaller one I might be able to set up a two-way backup solution.

Merging My Two Apple IDs

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 11:29:46 +0200

Last week I finally got rid of my secondary Apple ID. Having two for different tasks bugged me for a while. The first one I used for purchases on the iTunes Store back in the days and the second one was newly created when MobileMe was brand new. Somehow the newer one turned out to be the one I used for contact and calendar syncing, for backups and all the good stuff that iCloud has to offer these days. In an ideal world, I would only have one Apple ID which does all the jobs.

The Terminal

Thu, 04 Sep 2014 11:06:57 +0200

If you ever find yourself inside a Terminal window go ahead and read Craig Hockenberry’s great collection on Terminal tips and tricks.

Searching Jekyll

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 23:39:57 +0200

Using a static site generator like Jekyll for your personal blog brings a few new challenges in some areas. Searching, for example is not possible in pure HTML. There are a few different options to find posts on your website, though.

tl;dr Link to heading

jekyll-lunr-js-search is great, just head over to GitHub and get started.

External Search Engine Link to heading

Both Google and DuckDuckGo offer search engines for your own website which are more or less easy to integrate in your own site. Unfortunately, DDG did not seem to index my site {% post_link 2014-07-02-moving-to-jekyll since I installed Jekyll %} and this plugin a few weeks ago.

Migrating from SVN to Git

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:40 +0200

At least since reading the comments on my post about combining Dropbox and SVN suggesting I should move to a decentralized versioning system for my development projects I developed an eager want to do so. To be honest, I was afraid the migration would turn out to be a royal PITA.

Last weekend, investigating this problem again, I found this article by John Albin who wrote a set of scripts to make the entire process fairly simple. The final output of those scripts are the bare Git repos that can be used to serve the projects to your clients. After moving them to your server you should be able to clone that data.

Moving to Jekyll

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:48:05 +0200

Listening to Brett Terpstra’s podcast Systematic, I found out about the static website generator Jekyll. After hearing and reading about it for a while I startet wanting to try it for my own website.

There are some great tutorials out there that describe the basic setup of a new Jekyll website, like Jekyll From Scratch by Mike Greiling, so I don’t want to talk about that. What I want to talk about, though, are the bits and pieces that these tutorials were missing for my very own situation. There might be some more people with a similar setup. There were three major questions I still had after reading the different tutorials:

Moving to a New Disk

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:08:40 +0200

After I installed the SSD into my iMac I wanted to restructure all the data I have a bit. The system should go on the SSD while all my data that’s currently stored in my home folder should go on the HDD. Lazy as I am, I did not want to re-install OS X and all the apps I’m using and let Time Machine copy all my data back.

I decided to do a clean OS X install from the Mac App Store and let the Migration Assistant do the rest. Naturally, not all of my data would fit onto the 128 GB SSD. So I decided to just import my settings, user profile and stuff but not the data itself. The plan was to then just move my home directory from the old disk to the root and configure my user account to use that directory as my home. Unfortunately, the 1 TB disc was not able to hold a copy second copy of my home directory. So I changed plans a bit.

Moving

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 23:51:04 +0200

Those who follow me on Twitter might have noticed that I’m currently in the middle of a move from Nuremberg back to the country side. Which is awesome. :) But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

A few years back, when I was still doing .NET stuff, I registered my name domain florian-heiber.de and a .NET webspace (with centron) to set up a BlogEngine.NET blog on there. A while later I registered my other domain flohei.de just to have a nice and short domain name for my personal email. The A-Record for that domain moved from one hip new service to the next. The last one was Tumblr.

Magic Triangle

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:52:44 +0200

Wer mich auf Twitter verfolgt hat vielleicht mitbekommen, dass ich mich in letzter Zeit mit der Integration von Macs in eine Active-Directory-Umgebung etwas intensiver befasst habe. Das lag daran, dass ich die Administration der Macs an unserer Fakultät übernommen habe.

Zur effektiven Verwaltung der Rechner wurde ein Xserve angeschafft, der als Open Directory (OD) fungieren sollte. Dieses OD wurde mit dem Active Directory (AD) der Hochschule, in dem alle User vorliegen, verbunden. Grund für den Verbund ist das Fehlen einiger Einstellungen im Schema des AD. Diese können mit dem OD und den sogenannten Augmented Records für die einzelnen Mac-User nachkonfiguriert werden.