Author: gpanther

  • Donations

    At this point in my life I’m lucky enough that I have some expendable income. So here are a couple of organizations / individuals I donated to recently – maybe this will inspire you dear reader to also donate some – if you have the means to do so: Somewhat related: my employer also offers…

  • Quick notes about installing GNU/Linux on an Asus Chromebook 4

    Quick notes about installing GNU/Linux on an Asus Chromebook 4

    Many have said it and I have to agree: don’t get a Chromebook as “a nice small PC”. They ain’t. Just some problems I ran across: That said, here are the cliff-notes: That’s it folks!

  • First guide on iFixit

    First guide on iFixit

    I wrote my first iFixit guide: Lenovo IdeaPad 530S-14IKB Keyboard / touchpad assembly Replacement. It was moderately difficult (adding images is somewhat unintuitive and slow – you have to click on the image again after you uploaded it and there is no visual clue to indicate that that’s what you need to do), but manageable.…

  • kurzgesagt – trust but verify

    Back in January Kurzgesat announced that they’re doing a sale because they’ll be moving warehouses (see the announcement on Archive.org). This lead me to ask “is that really happening or is this just a marketing ploy to drive sales”? So, I did a small experiment by purchasing something from the shop back in January and…

  • Introducing Quantum Theory: A Graphic Guide to Science’s Most Puzzling Discovery

    Introducing Quantum Theory: A Graphic Guide to Science’s Most Puzzling Discovery

    I found the “graphic guide” book concept intriguing, yet reading through multiple of them, I felt like they are more directories – pointers for further readings – rather than something I could use – while having little idea about the subject – as an introduction or overview into the subject. This idea was further strengthened…

  • Email setup

    I have a couple of goals for my email setup: Which leads me to my current setup: use simplelogin.io from Proton with a fallback to Cloudflare Email Routing. Advantages of this setup Details of the setup The description of the setup is probably shorter than the list of advantages, which is probably a good thing…

  • Remembering the OG ad/malware blocking hosts file

    For the longest time the first thing which I installed on new computers / computers I was asked to “help with” was the MVP hosts file (archive.org link). I credit this file with keeping many, many computers safe and running they way their owners intended to for almost two decades now. Sadly it seems like…

  • Oracle cloud

    As they say – people don’t use Oracle because the IT department chose it :). This is also probably true for for their cloud offering :). Just of the top of my head: Arcane login procedure that doesn’t support 2FA that prompts you to change your (randomly generated, high entry, kept in a password manager)…

  • Useful Cloudflare infos

    Trying to set up CloudFlare Access and it seems that some information are hard to find: The tunnel communicates over 7844/udp (important in case you want/have a restrictive firewall and/or your cloud provider requires to configure the node-independent firewall) The authenticated user is specified by the Cf-Access-Authenticated-User-Email header. Other useful headers can be Cf-Connecting-Ip or…

  • A fresh start with… WordPress 🙂

    In 2016 I wrote A fresh start with Pelican. And now, 6 years later I’m writing this. Lots has changed since then and lots has stayed the same. It still fills me with joy writing texts that may be useful to somebody. So, what’s to like about WordPress? For one, it can do blogs (and…