This weekend is all about housekeeping. The reason: PureBasic v6.4 was released two weeks ago.1 So I spent the morning updating my open source projects built on it. No new features, just recompiling and testing. I also took the opportunity to bring the documentation up to date. The way you would expect from a well-maintained Git repository, including my offer of professional business support for real added value. Updated projects at a glance: QR Code Detection A QR/barcode scanner for standard webcams or RTSP streams. It provides a virtual keyboard and essentially replaces dedicated hardware, while offering significantly more flexibility.2 Read more

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, you still had to dive deep into the hardware to get decent software. This meant checking hardware-related register values to get mouse coordinates via interrupt 33h, for example. 1 Or write inline assembler within Turbo Pascal procedures or PowerBASIC functions. Those were the programming languages I grew up with. Later, others came along, but I never really got used to them. I am a “BASIC guy” as I write in my README on Codeberg.2 Read more

The simple, unspectacular things in life bring you ahead the curve. This bash script, for instance, removes all comments from a configuration file. In order that no empty lines remain instead, these are subsequently removed afterwards. What remains is the essence: what really counts. The usage is straightforward: Just add the desired config file(s) as parameters and you’re done! #!/bin/bash # Beseitigt alle Kommentar- und Leerzeilen aus einer Configfile # Sichert Datei mit Erweiterung .backup und # erwartet Dateiname oder -liste als Parameter for FILE in "$@" do # Erstellt Sicherungskopie(n) cp --backup=numbered $FILE $FILE.backup # Entfernt alle Kommentarzeilen > Arbeitsdatei sed -e 's/#.*$//' $FILE > $FILE.tmp # Entfernt alle Leerzeilen aus Arbeitsdatei sed -i '/^$/d' $FILE.tmp # Ersetzt Ausgangsdatei mit Arbeitsdatei mv $FILE.tmp $FILE done; This simplifies automation and above all the search in page-long comments within a config file. However, be careful! Behind every line theres much of wisdom: Everything after a # sign is mercilessly removed, really everything! Take the following line as example: Read more

One issue left from my CSS-Hacking-Session last month: The Dark-Mode of this Website. Well, today I finally managed to activate the dark side of the force. Enjoy!

I finished the weekends’ flow with the integration of a live streaming menuitem. Not expecting to have an insane huge audience with this blog, I dare to hold small but maybe interesting live sessions at irregular intervals. These might include installation evenings with unknown software, hacking sessions in programming projects without NDA. Definitely some gaming or flight simulator sessions and for customer meetings I would like to be able to show my server’s dashboard: “Look, by clicking here, this curve goes up there”. Read more

Friday afternoon, a long bank holiday weekend lies straight ahead. Time to fix a few issues in this blog. Basically just minor ones and for the most visitors irrelevant. But for me important details, making the difference to the standard modular websites. Yellow Textmarker One of these inconspicuous details is the highlighting with a “yellow textmarker”. I have been annoyed more than once when highlighting is done in the standard system colours. For a viewer, exactly the opposite happens: The highlighting worsens the readability and the contrast as the following picture shows: Read more

This weekend, Jochen T. contacted me with an interesting question about Hugo and the theme I am using for this blog: I don’t understand how I can create a “normal” feed, I have searched for help, but found nothing. My feed only contains the categories “micro”, “blog” or “page”, but I would like to have a feed with the individual posts in full text (like you). Due to the fact that others might have the same question, I answer this in the public of course after prior request and approval by Jochen. Read more

Yesterday evening somebody desperately fought in despair with Packer, the younger sister of Vagrant. The goal was to create a testing farm of n machines for Virtualbox and make them accessible via SSH for further automated software testing/rollout. For me, this is much easier by using a simple bashscript. This morning I’ve made one even before the very first cup of coffee. #!/bin/bash # Pfad zur Master .ova Datei MASTER_OVA="$HOME/projects/testingfarm/DebianBuster.ova" # Anzahl der gewünschten VMs AMOUNT=2 # Name der VMs (Index und Datum werden noch angefügt = NAME-n-YYYYMMDD) PREF_VMNAME="debian" # Anzahl der CPUs PREF_CPU=1 # Zugewiesener Speicher PREF_MEMORY=1024 # Datums-Suffix THE_DATE=$(date +%Y%m%d) # Logdatei zum prüfen THE_LOG="$HOME/projects/testingfarm/$THE_DATE-$PREF_VMNAME.log" # -- Bitte ab hier nichts mehr manuell anpassen -- echo "Beginne Erstellen der Testumgebung... (Start: $(date +%T))" > $THE_LOG for ((i=1; i<= $AMOUNT; i++)) do vboxmanage controlvm $PREF_VMNAME-$i-$THE_DATE poweroff >> $THE_LOG vboxmanage unregistervm $PREF_VMNAME-$i-$THE_DATE --delete >> $THE_LOG vboxmanage import $MASTER_OVA --vsys 0 --cpus $PREF_CPU --memory $PREF_MEMORY --vmname $PREF_VMNAME-$i-$THE_DATE >> $THE_LOG vboxmanage startvm $PREF_VMNAME-$i-$THE_DATE --type headless >> $THE_LOG done echo "...fertig! (Ende: $(date +%T))" >> $THE_LOG The script creates n boxes based on its .ova MASTER. I assume that all network settings (if bridged, NAT or anything else) are specified there. Alongside with a transferred SSH-ID for Ansible, if necessary. The whole setup can of course be done without a master by using createvm inside the for-loop, your mileage may vary. Read more

At the beginning of the (first?) Corona lockdown in March 2020, I was advised during an nightly Jitsi meeting by a befriended admin from Hamburg about giving Hugo a chance. Probably just after I dropped a rant about Rapidweaver, my previous static site generator on the Mac. Making of blog.jakobs.systems The idea needed to grow for almost half a year, till August, when I finally found a test balloon for Hugo: My personal blog and if everything succeeds, my official website, which is slowly getting rusty. Read more