There is a whole business segment out there of people making money writing blogs. Either they earn money directly from ads, affiliate links, subscriptions or donations, or they grow the blog to a certain viewership and then sell it to someone who needs a platform to promote their product. There are marketplaces for this like Flippa and Motion Invest, to name two, and Youtube channels like Income School to teach you how to do it. And albeit the multiples for selling such a blog are relatively low at around 2-3, if you can grow the blog fast enough and maybe do more than one at a time, it’s still a profitable business.

At the same time, there are tens of thousands of users on Stack Overflow, answering the millions of new questions per year for free. These people are not getting paid but receive a different kind of reward: recognition. Apparently, a strong enough motivator.

But with the advent of AI and their liberal use of copyrighted material, or just plain piracy, both kinds of incentives might be threatened: If on one hand AI scrapes your content so people don´t need to visit your page to create clicks or recognize your name, and on the other hand the AI might create the kind of content you provide directly without needing your input, then why put in the time and effort to create content, especially when you depend on the ability to sell it for money? Consequently, there are various signs that content creation on Stackoverflow is dropping: 1, 2, 3, and also Blog sales are contracting.

So you want to follow the hype and generate some images with Stablility AI`s shiny new Stable Diffusion 3.5 model (SD 3.5). You find the model on Hugging Face, and hey, there is a code example to try it out. And it works!?

Absolutely not!

Inconveniently there are a lot more steps to take and considerations to make before your python script will generate an AI image, especially on consumer hardware with little VRAM. This article shows how to really do it, even on a laptop GPU with only 6GB of VRAM. As such it is an adapted collection of other material available on the web.

So, let’s get you your:

Docker Desktop just got more pricey again. Let’s explore some ways to replace at least part of its functionality like running docker containers and doing networking. This guide will be for the Windows operating system, as it is the one where users will most likely use Docker Desktop.

We will use the Hyper-V virtualization solution already present on Windows and show how to integrate your Docker Desktop replacement into your environment.

I bought me a Tesla Model 3 in August of 2023. I did it mostly because I was bored but also to take advantage of the government subsidies that were available at that time. Hey, if the government wants to spend my taxes, they should spend it on me.
Right of the bat: The car is good. It has its flaws like most cars but also a lot of nice features to make up for it. Some quirks also arise from the new EV technology and neither Tesla nor the car itself can do anything to fix it.
But there are strong opinions on EVs from both supporters or opposers of the technology. Here I want to share my observations on some of the most common prejudices and also share some learnings of my own.

So they sent you an Excel sheet with a bunch of contacts and two days later your call history looks like you are taking part in a code decipher challenge? Maybe you should have converted them to contacts in your phone? Ok, so you tried but that didn’t work: Apple Addressbook fails silently, you cannot trust the web services with customer data and after paying for some apps on the internet you discover that some of them cannot even open Excel sheets without failing. And of course no one will type hundreds of contacts into their phone manually.

But there is another way: just automate it yourself. It’s remarkably simple using Python. In this article we demonstrate how to read an address list from an Excel sheet in xlsx format (Excel Standard since 2007) and output vCard 3.0 files one can import to their phone or EMail/PIM app of choice.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 are trained on vast datasets that include man pages, readmes, forum questions and discussions, source code and other sources of command line tool documentation. Given a set of requirements one can query a LLM to predict a command line that will perform the required task.

please-cli is a wrapper around GPT-4 that can help you translate your requirements into a shell command. Let’s start with an example:

benjamin@asterix:~# please convert a.jpeg to avif and upscale it to 200%
💡 Command:
  convert a.jpeg -resize 200% a.avif

❗ What should I do? [use arrow keys or initials to navigate]
> [I] Invoke   [C] Copy to clipboard   [Q] Ask a question   [A] Abort

Well, looks promising and the code actually works. please-cli also gives you some handy shortcuts to immediately invoke or copy the code. You can also inquire directly about the command.
In the following sections we will look at some other examples and wether we can find limitations of the script generation.

For weeks now I had a sync exception from my DAVx app, indicating a problem when syncing my CalDAV calendar from SOGo. As Thunderbird was not affected I managed to ignore the problem for quite some time. But then I noticed that some newer appointments are not synced anymore. So I had to investigate.

DAVx allows you to export debug information, where the error is shown as:

SYNCHRONIZATION INFO
Account: Account {name=benjamin@example.com, type=bitfire.at.davdroid}
Authority: com.android.calendar

EXCEPTION
at.bitfire.dav4jvm.exception.DavException: Received multi-get response without calendar data
	at at.bitfire.davdroid.syncadapter.CalendarSyncManager$downloadRemote$1$1$onResponse$1.invoke(CalendarSyncManager.kt:9)
	at at.bitfire.davdroid.syncadapter.CalendarSyncManager$downloadRemote$1$1$onResponse$1.invoke(CalendarSyncManager.kt:1)
	at at.bitfire.davdroid.syncadapter.SyncManager.responseExceptionContext(SyncManager.kt:13)
	at at.bitfire.davdroid.syncadapter.CalendarSyncManager$downloadRemote$1$1.onResponse(CalendarSyncManager.kt:18)
	at at.bitfire.dav4jvm.Response$Companion.parse(Response.kt:308)
  ...

A few lines later the log file specifies the remote source as:

REMOTE RESOURCE
https://example.com/SOGo/dav/benjamin/Calendar/personal/event_293017175@meetup.com.ics

I tried to delete the calendar from my device and set it up again, but to no avail. After a bit of digging I got the impression that something was wrong with the calendar entry. Unfortunately the log file doesn’t say anything about the calendar entry other than the link. So I can’t look at the entry in Thunderbird or the SOGo web interface.
But I am running my own SOGO instance so I am able to check the SOGo database entry.

SOGo organizes data in a series of tables named sogo${username}${hash}. The c_name of every table corresponds with the event name from the URL. So we can look for the event and it’s content in the tables:

MariaDB [sogo]> select c_content from sogobenjamin0010de46299 where c_name like '%2930%';
+-----------+
| c_content |
+-----------+
|           |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.005 sec)

Apparently the event just has an empty c_content field which is what threw off DAVx. As I don’t know anything else about the event and there is nothing to restore, I just deleted the entry from the table:

MariaDB [sogo]> delete from sogobenjamin0010de46299 where c_name like '%2930%';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.012 sec)

After that DAVx was able to sync again without issues.

Thanks to everyone who attended my talk on how to set up a dockerized mailserver at GPN21. I enjoyed your input and hope you were able to get something out of the talk.

You can find the code that I promised here: https://github.com/GevatterGaul/gpn21-mailserver-talk-code-dump

See you next year!

We already know how to stream from you Raspberry Pi. But where should we stream to? If you want to distribute the stream or make it available on the internet, serving it from a server is an option that also gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to post processing. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have much processing power and if you want to do something fancy, chances are it won’t work on a Pi.

In this article we set up a Raspberry Pi to stream to a server somewhere on the internet which then sharpens the stream, adds a logo on top and makes it available on a minimal webpage.

There is also a demo webcam showing the Turmberg in Karlsruhe, Germany:

After setting up a Postfix and Dovecot Server and securing it with Rspamd and ClamAV we are still lacking a nice web interface to send and receive mail with. This is where SOGo comes in.
SOGo is a fully fledged groupware server providing a mail client, calendar, address book, CalDAV, CardDAV, Microsoft ActiveSync and more. There are freely available nightly builds of SOGo which we will use with our SOGo Docker Image to create a groupware server on mydomain.com.

In this article we discuss the necessary configuration to set up SOGo and provide Ansible roles for SOGo and some other services not yet covered in other articles.

Prerequisites

We assume that you have a host that is accessible via Ansible and that you are running Traefik as well as the internal Docker network described in the Traefik article. We will outsource our user database to an Apache LDAP Server. You can of course use another LDAP server. Make sure to adapt the SOGo LDAP configuration. You also need a SMTP and IMAP server like the Postfix and Dovecot Server from a previous article. Spam and virus filtering is not required for this article, but highly recommended.
We will not target full Unicode compliance with our setup to keep it simple. There is a guide in the SOGo docs on how to make SOGo Unicode compliant. We will mention it a few times where applicable.