An article in c't prompted me to install an instance of Bitpoll, which is a scheduling service similar to Doodle. The general idea is that if you want to put on an event but don't quite know when, you use the service to generate a poll listing the possible dates and send a link to the poll to everyone you want to involve in the decision. People can then mark the times which are convenient (or inconvenient) to them, and you can use this information to decide on the actual date.
Read moreNew Jitsi Meet
With the monthly FSCDC e.V. committee meeting coming up tonight, I took some time to update my Jitsi Meet installation to the current version. There were some inexplicable issues with the one I had (which is by now several years old), mostly during our committee sessions where two parties could join a discussion but when the third arrived, everyone would be kicked off. This was more of a nuisance than a show-stopper, because with some perseverance we usually managed to get a conference going with everyone, but still …
Read moreBlog Improvements
I took some time to tweak the templates for my web site (just because). There are various behind-the-scenes changes as well as some usability improvements.
Read moreFarewell Feedly, Welcome FreshRSS
For the longest time I've been using Feedly as my RSS feed aggregator. This is a reasonable service if you don't mind the ads that are randomly interspersed with your feeds, the persistent attempts at upselling you the paid version, the slow encroachment of AI features that I for one don't want, and so on. Plus the fact that a US company gets to see which RSS feeds I consume. Time for something new …
Read moreTræfik and SSLLabs: Reach for A+
Web server security is an ongoing issue these days. Fortunately thanks to Let's Encrypt getting good-quality X.509 certificates for HTTPS is no longer a problem, but we still want to keep our servers up-to-date with the latest developments. For HTTPS-based web sites, the free “SSL Server Test” offered by Qualys' SSL Labs is a very helpful resource that lets you assess and optimise how your HTTPS server serves its resources. The test scrutinises your X.509 certificates, evaluates your server's support of TLS versions and possible vulnerabilities, checks through the available key exchange mechanisms and reports on the available cipher strength. All of this is compiled into a report-card type grade; obviously what you want to see there is “A+”.
Read moreJitsi Meet in the Hetzner cloud, with Terraform and cloud-init
With the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in full swing, “social distancing” is the order of the day. Since we're not allowed to get together with our friends and family, video conferencing is surging, and one popular free tool for that is Jitsi Meet. We've had a bunch of video chats on Jitsi Meet and have always been wondering whether the server(s) provided by Jitsi and shared by presumably thousands of conferences are a bottleneck that impacts the conference user experience. Here's how I've set up a private Jitsi Meet server on a Hetzner Cloud virtual machine.
Read moreTales from the PinguCloud, part 1: NFS and WireGuard
[As I've mentioned before, I'm in the process of moving my various web sites from the dedicated server I've been renting with a few pals to the Hetzner Cloud. I'll be blogging about the experience here when (and if) exciting things happen. –A.]
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