The Portable Document Format (PDF)1 is a great example of how an originally brilliant concept for displaying print documents has been ruined over decades. Initially conceived as successor to PostScript,2 it has degenerated into a universal container format. Text, images, vectors, scripts, fonts, form data, even complete 3D models there’s hardly anything, that can’t end up in a PDF, including Doom. Read more

Today on public holiday (in Germany) I polished my Nautilus script collection and uploaded it to Codeberg.1 For everyone who enjoys automating recurring tasks such as OCR on PDFs, creating animated WebP images from a selection of pictures, or encoding videos in h.265. The script collection will be updated from time to time. Read more

A Bash script I’ve used for many years got some love recently and I’ve uploaded it to Codeberg.1 The HTTP Limiter is my answer to the bots, scrapers, and pentest tools that constantly hammer on my public facing hosts. Though “hammer” might actually be an understatement. Read more

Over the weekend I have increased security and automatized processes - that’s lame! This can be anything or nothing, too vague and unspecific. Well technically correct and with a touch of cynicism: “I translated bash scripts to YAML.” Okay, let’s agree on: I consolidated numerous bash scripts for automatically renewing certificates, reduced complexity, eliminated potential security risks when transferring certificates from outside reverse proxies to inside hosts, and made everything more transparent with both Ansible and Git. Read more