Sonicare Brush Head NFC Data

Ever since stumbling over Cyrill Künzi’s article about the Sonicare brush head timer reset (which I’ve written about here), I’ve wondered what else is stored in the data. This is what a dump of the Mifare Ultralight NTAG213‘s memory from a white Sonicare A3 Premium All-in-One head looks like: The memory is organised into “pages”… Read More »

Comparing Audio Streams

I had to compare multiple stream dumps I’ve collected from different places. Each file had a timestamp from when it was generated (i.e. downloaded) in it. So, even the exact same dump would have different timestamps if downloaded twice. Also, some files had embedded cover art and tags while others didn’t have any tags. To… Read More »

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 »