We recently started using the slide function of iPython notebooks. Basically it allows you to partition your notebook onto different slides, slide fragments and subslides. Those can be exported to reveal.js There is already a great viewer for notebooks on http://nbviewer.ipython.org. To save some steps in exporting, converting and adding reveal.js, I took the idea and added a slide viewer. Anyone can use it to link to their slides on Github, Gist or any other place.

Ansible is a great automation solution. I mainly use it to provision servers and launch Docker instances on them. Sometimes I need container attributes, like PID or Port to configure Nginx or monitoring tools. While the Ansible documentation gives you some hints, I didn’t find it 100% obvious on how to solve this. Basically all your newly-created containers will end up in a list called docker_containers. It has the same structure as docker inspect.

I really like the password generator, built into Apple’s keychain and System preferences. Passwords are secure and memorable. Only problem is that accessing it takes many steps. Running it from the command line would be much faster.

It’s well documentedthat Apple/iCloud has a very obscure filtering policy. Emails are delivered to the server and then disappear.

Introduction 🔗Are you already hosting your own mail- or webserver and do you enjoy the flexibility, control and freedom self-hosting gives you? Besides the many advantages like better privacy and the power to customize it gives you personally, you can also offer your services to other people. Even tough there are a large number of budget hosting companies, many customers are willing to pay for better support or the comfort to have you around for questions.

Despite some notions that SSDs or HFS drives don’t need defragmenting, I have often read and experienced myself that defragmenting your Mac every few years will clearly make it faster. I had some trouble running iDefrag and would like to share a little trick I learnt. Basically it will refuse to run a full defrag, while your system drive is mounted. Restarting didn’t help. Here is what I did in the end:

I noticed an increasing number of phising emails from ‘Telekom’ and ‘DHL’ making it into user mailboxes. ClamAV anti-virus together with Sane Security Phising checks does a good job in stopping zero-day phising emails. On a different account, DKIM Email signing seems to be preferred by Google these days. So time to add that too. Let me know if you notice any problems with that.

Many times I get upset with websites, who display accounting data in a table, but don’t offer a way to download it. This includes banks, payment processors, etc. Even if they offer it, there is a chance it’s the wrong format for your purpose.

When you have a large number of blogs to look after, it can be a challenge to keep on top with security updates for plugins and WordPress Core. At the same time the bad guys are getting faster and faster to exploit these kinds of holes.

After years of preparation, we are proud to present a usable product of a stochastic optimization library. The core Java libraries were programmed by Nils Löhndorf. I contributed the iPython interface and other ‘glue’. We are excited to find out which uses people will find for this technology. Check out the website: http://www.quantego.com/