MP3s and Audiophiles

Audiophiles love their oxygen-free copper cables and expensive equipment and often proclaim that MP3 is far inferior to lossless audio. (And, that a needle dragged over tiny grooves in vinyl is the best.) Many tests have been done, but almost all of them have the issue that participants either outright knew which version was which… Read More »

FediVerse Replacements

Here are some FediVerse-compatible alternatives to the current big player monoliths: Monolith Federated Blogger Plume, WordPress with ActivityPub plugin, WriteFreely Discourse, phpBB, Vanilla, etc. NodeBB eBay, Gumtree, Kijiji, etc. flohmarkt Facebook Friendica (with optional Bookface theme), Hubzilla Instagram Pixelfed Reddit Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin Snapchat Pixelfed TikTok Loops Trakt.tv NeoDB Tumblr Misskey, wafrn 𝕏 (Twitter) Mastodon,… Read More »

Pi-hole not resolving local DNS entries

I’ve got Pi-hole running in a Docker container on my Synology DS415+ for several years now. No issues at all. However, after the recent 7.1.1 Update 9, suddenly, my local DNS entries in Pi-hole stopped getting resolved. It always resorted to external DNSes for those. As I host a few services at home, I’m using… Read More »

Alternatives to GeoCaching

My Journey Back in the mid noughties, I’ve acquired my very first GPS receiver and discovered GeoCaching. And it was a great hobby to have. There were various elaborate Multi-Caches and even the bog-standard “Traditional” Caches often were properly sized Tupperware boxes and contained exciting gewgaws. One memory I cherish was a box buried between… Read More »

UK Extended keyboard layout in macOS

While Windows comes with the UK Extended keyboard layout and only needs a very simple adjustment to add the German ß letter, macOS doesn’t seem to have the layout at all. Sure, there are Apple’s ideas of the “perfect” British keyboard layout, namely “British” and “British – PC”. But neither one matches the actual UK… Read More »