The 'politsei' problem, or how filtering unwanted content is still an issue in 2025 :: ./techtipsy
Filtering profanities is ducking hard.| ./techtipsy
I had a few old ThinkPad batteries lying around. They were big, bulky and not holding much of a charge. Inside those were standard 18650 Li-ion battery cells. I have two TOMO M4 power banks around, and they are fantastic for reusing these old 18650 battery cells inside them. You can even mix and match cells without a worry because they are individually addressed, meaning that any issues with battery charge levels and voltages differing between cells are not a concern. Unfortunately the TOMO M...| ./techtipsy
Filtering profanities is ducking hard.| ./techtipsy
I use Uptime Kuma to check the availability of a few services that I run, with the most important one being my blog. It’s really nice. Today I wanted to set it up on a different machine to help troubleshoot and confirm some latency issues that I’ve observed, and for that purpose I picked the cheapest ARM-based Hetzner Cloud VM hosted in Helsinki, Finland. Hetzner provides a public IPv6 address for free, but you have to pay extra for an IPv4 address. I didn’t want to do that out of princ...| ./techtipsy
Out of all the technological hype cycles over the last decade, there is one that stands out the most to me.| ./techtipsy
Today I learned that Kagi uses Yandex as part of its search infrastructure, making up about 2% of their costs, and their CEO has confirmed that they do not plan to change that. To quote: Yandex represents about 2% of our total costs and is only one of dozens of sources we use. To put this in perspective: removing any single source would degrade search quality for all users while having minimal economic impact on any particular region. The world doesn’t need another politicized search engine...| ./techtipsy
Add that to the list of reasons to avoid Hibernate.| ./techtipsy
A big career change is scary, but I've seen it happen successfully, twice. Here's what I've observed.| ./techtipsy
How a few bad experiences turned me from a brand evangelist to someone who has sworn off of Fairphone products in the foreseeable future.| ./techtipsy
I was itching for a new project, so I got one. I'm very happy with it so far!| ./techtipsy
I don’t like laptops with loud cooling fans in them. Quite a controversial position, I know. But really, they do suck. A laptop can be great to use, have a fantastic keyboard, sharp display, lots of storage and a fast CPU, and all of that can be ruined by one component: the cooling fan. Laptop fans are small, meaning that they have to run faster to have any meaningful cooling effect, which means that they are usually very loud and often have a high-pitched whine to them, making them especia...| ./techtipsy
I moved recently, and so did my home server. You might have noticed it due to the downtime. This time I have built a dedicated shelf for it, which allows for more flexibility and room for additional expensive ideas. The internet connection is a fiber line, which is fantastic for a place that’s generally considered to be in the countryside. I had to hire a guy at the last place in Tallinn (capital of Estonia) to pull a fiber line from the basement to the apartment, with my own money, so I’...| ./techtipsy
After looking into an incident involving Kubernetes nodes running out of memory, I took a trip to the office kitchen to take a break and get a cup of the good stuff. My teammate got their drink first, and then it was my turn. Why is there a Windows 98 themed pop-up on the screen? Things that I never expected to see on a coffee machine. I wanted to get my coffee, so I tapped on the small OK button. That may have forced the poor coffee machine to start swapping, for which I felt a little bit gu...| ./techtipsy
Around 2003, my mother had a laptop: the Compaq Armada 1592DT. It ran Windows Me, the worst Windows to ever exist, whopping 96 MB of RAM, and a 3 GB hard drive. My mother used it for important stuff, and I played games on it. Given the limitations of the 3 GB hard drive, this soon lead to a conflict: there was no room to store any new games! I did my best to make additional room by running the disk cleaner utility, disabling unnecessary Windows features and deleting some PDF catalogues that m...| ./techtipsy
Yes, you read that right. I’m a prolific open-source influencer now. Some years ago I set up a Google Alert with my name, for fun. Who knows what it might show one day? On 7th of February, it fired an alert. Ooh! Turns out that my thoughts on Ubuntu were somewhat popular, and it ended up being ingested by an AI slop generator over at Fudzilla, with no links back to the source or anything.1 Not only that, but their choice of spicy autocompleteconfabulation bot a large language model complete...| ./techtipsy
I’ve written about abusing USB storage devices in the past, with a passing mention that I’m too cheap to buy an IODD device. Then I bought one. I’ve always liked the promise of tools like Ventoy: you only need to carry the one storage device that boots anything you want. Unfortunately I still can’t trust Ventoy, so I’m forced to look elsewhere. The hardware I decided to get the IODD ST400 for 122 EUR (about 124 USD) off of Amazon Germany, since it was for some reason cheaper than ge...| ./techtipsy
When you’re dealing with a particularly large service with a slow deployment pipeline (15-30 minutes), and a rollback delay of up to 10 minutes, you’re going to need feature toggles (some also call them feature flags) to turn those half-an-hour nerve-wrecking major incidents into a small whoopsie-daisy that you can fix in a few seconds. Make a change, gate it behind a feature toggle, release, enable the feature toggle and monitor the impact. If there is an issue, you can immediately roll ...| ./techtipsy
I liked Ubuntu. For a very long time, it was the sensible default option. Around 2016, I used the Ubuntu GNOME flavor, and after they ditched the Unity desktop environment, GNOME became the default option. I was really happy with it, both for work and personal computing needs. Estonian ID card software was also officially supported on Ubuntu, which made Ubuntu a good choice for family members. But then something changed. Upgrades suck Like many Ubuntu users, I stuck to the long-term support r...| ./techtipsy
In November 2024, my blog was down for over 24 hours. Here’s what I learned from this absolute clusterfuck of an incident. Lead-up to the incident I was browsing through photos on my Nextcloud instance. Everything was fine, until Nextcloud started generating preview images for older photos. This process is quite resource intensive, but generally manageable. However, this time the images were high quality photos in the 10-20 MB size range. Nextcloud crunched through those, but ended up spawn...| ./techtipsy
I was in a pinch. I needed to make a full disk backup of a PC, but I had no external storage device with me to store it on. The local Wi-Fi network was also way too slow to transfer the disk over it. All I had was my laptop with an Ethernet port, a Fedora Linux USB stick, and a short Ethernet cable. I took the following steps: boot the target machine up with the Fedora Linux installer in a live environment modify the SSH configuration on the target machine to allow root user login with a pass...| ./techtipsy
In December 2024, I did something that I had never done before: I participated in a short (~6 hours) Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It was the nerdiest thing ever, and I loved it! The setting After another day of keeping a critical production service up, the whole team met up at Kvest to play Dungeons and Dragons, as a team event. The game room was small but cozy, with ambient lighting, music and countless figurines on shelves setting the mood, and situated in the basement of the building, ad...| ./techtipsy
Good news, everyone! Doing IPv6 networking stuff on Docker is actually good now! I’ve recently started reworking my home server setup to be more IPv6 compatible, and as part of that I learned that during the summer of 2024 Docker shipped an update that eliminated a lot of the configuration and tweaking previously necessary to support IPv6. There is no need to change the daemon configuration any longer, it just works on Docker Engine v27 and later. Examples If your host has a working IPv6 se...| ./techtipsy
I’ve recently made an effort to reduce the amount of tech stuff that I own. Lack of space, lack of time and the guilt of storing perfectly functional hardware unused in a box were the main motivators. This has resulted in experiments with my assortment of USB flash storage that I’ve acquired over the years. They’re too old and cheap to be worth selling, so why not run them to the ground? I’ve always liked the idea of USB sticks. They’re small and the good ones are actually surprisin...| ./techtipsy
Imagine that you have an unencrypted drive containing your private data and one day it starts throwing a bunch of errors. You have backups of the data so you’ve got that part covered, but would you feel comfortable sending the drive in to be warrantied? You have no control over who has access to that drive, and due to the drive failing you can’t format it as well. Do you take the financial hit and buy a new drive, or send it in regardless and risk someone looking through your files? I’v...| ./techtipsy
For a few months, I had issues with my Wi-Fi network. The 2.4 GHz network would be fine, but the 5 GHz one would suddenly stop working and completely disappear from the available Wi-Fi networks. OpenWRT upgrades also didn’t improve the situation. This was very annoying. After some discussions with a friend, I learned about Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS). Apparently some channels on the 5 GHz Wi-Fi spectrum are also used by weather and military radars, and those take priority. If such int...| ./techtipsy
In 2011, I was finishing 9th grade. As a gift, I got to choose a laptop in the 400 EUR range. I ended up picking an ASUS Eee PC 1201PN. It was new and the first computer in my life that was 100% mine, but awfully slow for a lot of tasks. It was so slow that I ended up giving Linux a go as a result. Linux! I didn’t even know computing all that well around that time! A few years later, I bought a ThinkPad T60 off of someone I knew for about 40 EUR. It was about 8 years old at that point, but ...| ./techtipsy
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1 Common justifications include better scalability, cost savings, standardization and being super modern and stuff. It’s the future! In my personal experience, Kubernetes is far from the magical uptime machine that a lot of people think it is, and migrating it to it comes with a lot of hidden costs and potential downtime. I’m not a Kubernetes expert, but I’ve been involved in a few Kubernetes migratio...| ./techtipsy
I had the opportunity to test the resiliency of my home server setup due to a scheduled power outage on 2024-09-13. It was also Friday the 13th. I’m not superstitious, but I’m a little stitious. My setup usually consists of the home server, a Wifi AP/router combo box, a converter box for the fiber line, and a CyberPower UT850EG UPS. The planned power outage was communicated a week in advance and was supposed to take up to two hours. It ended up taking about 1 hour 20 minutes. The CyberPow...| ./techtipsy
It’s been over 4 years since my first post on this blog. During those 4 years I’ve written over 90 posts, received over 1 million clicks, a dozen legitimate reader e-mails and thousands of spam e-mails. And I love it! I’ve found that writing can be very fulfilling and I encourage you to at least give it a try. This post covers the reasons why I write, how I write and some tips on how you can get started writing one yourself. Blogging is so 2004 2024. Why I write I’m a software develop...| ./techtipsy
I helped a family member upgrade to a newer iPhone and make some room so that the internal storage does not run out. They had Nextcloud installed on the current phone, but due to limitations of the Nextcloud iOS app, the backups only take place if the app itself is open, meaning that we had hundreds of photos and videos that were not yet backed up.1 The network was slow and I was in a time crunch, so I opted to copy the media off of the phone by connecting the iPhone to my laptop over a Light...| ./techtipsy
I’ve officially worked as a software developer since August 2016, and by now I have a fair share of stories to tell from those years. But those are stories for another time. Today I’d like to focus on where it all got started. The early days I never considered myself good with computers, or a nerd, or anything like that during my childhood. All my computing experiences can be summed up in a pretty short list, and most of the memories are around computer games. I was simply too busy pettin...| ./techtipsy
I probably shouldn’t have written down my notes on the eGPU setup I had years ago. I’d be lying if I wasn’t considering remaking this setup with everything I’ve learned 6 years later. Oops. I got access to an allegedly-faulty AMD Radeon RX 480 and an NVIDIA GTX 1650 for free thanks to my friend, so I ordered the EXP GDC Beast v8.5c, two sorts of 6/8pin power cables, and a 12V 12A DC power supply. The idea was to take a ThinkPad T430, bolt a GPU to it, and use it as a stationary workst...| ./techtipsy
The ThinkPad T430 has a few options for running it with an external display: VGA port, which is pretty much obsolete at this point mini DisplayPort connector on the laptop itself DVI or DisplayPort on a dock The mini DisplayPort port has annoyed me for as long as I’ve had this machine. Most places where I’ve had to present something only offer an HDMI cable, which means that I always have to carry a dongle around, and I keep forgetting to bring one everywhere I happen to go. Until now. I ...| ./techtipsy
This blog is running on a home server (again). I have once again gained access to a competent internet connection1, and I think I have figured out the IPv6 setup as well2, leading to this change. The IP address is dynamic, there are occasional power outages and I might just mess up my configuration and bring it all down, but I get to brag about this setup so it all balances out. --- it’s fiber, baby! ↩︎ the software support for IPv6 is a goddamn mess and I regret learning about it. ...| ./techtipsy
I’ve reached a point in my setup where most of the devices that I use are based around the coveted USB-C port. This meant that I had a valid reason to get a few extra because I didn’t yet have a stockpile of good USB-C cables. That’s when I found out that there exist cables that have little screens on them that show the power consumption of the connected device. This is a great little addition to my power consumption monitoring addiction. It’s also a simple way to understand if your d...| ./techtipsy
I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads. I picked it up some time around my university days because I liked collecting ThinkPads at the time, and it was a nice complement to my existing ThinkPad T60 and T430. 20 years difference, but they still look similar. The battery is dead, but everything else still works. Checking a few online listings, I’m surprised that I can still find batteries sold for this model. Probably old stock that’s been sitting around...| ./techtipsy
My current ISP provides an internet connection over a copper wire. To use it, I have a crappy modem (Technicolor CGA2121, DOCSIS 3.0). It’s running in bridge mode, meaning that all it does is convert the signal running over the coax cable into plain old Ethernet. My main networking device is a TP-Link Archer C7 v5. It runs OpenWRT. This router/Wi-Fi AP box connects to the modem and handles everything, including getting a public IPv4 address from the ISP.1 After a power outage or my ISP doin...| ./techtipsy
Those of you who follow my blog using the RSS feed might have seen that new, incomplete posts popped up around the time I published my FOSDEM 2024 post. Oops. I recently tried looking for an alternative to writing blog posts in IntelliJ and out of all the options I stuck to MarkText. Well, it does things a bit differently and what was once a front-matter containing all sorts of metadata, including the one that prevents publishing a post if it is a draft, turned into a code block, and Hugo hap...| ./techtipsy
There are two reasons why I haven’t written much lately, and one of them is that I was cooking up a talk about self-hosting, more specifically my own self-hosting adventure (the other one is the Steam Deck, more about that in the future). That's me! The talk took place on May 25th 2023 at k-space, a hackerspace in Tallinn, Estonia. This talk was livestreamed and you can watch the recording by clicking on this link.| ./techtipsy
Yesterday was election day in Estonia and the results are in, which is why I remembered that one time I looked at my website on the Wayback Machine. This domain used to point to a Wordpress site that hosted content for a candidate in the local elections, at least around 2011-2014. For international readers: “Õunapuu” is a relatively common last name in Estonia. Special characters in domains weren’t that widely adopted back then, which is how you end up using “Ounapuu”. The site is ...| ./techtipsy
2023-02-16 update: this post is not about the “GB vs GiB” issue, or the “lost disk space” that you notice after formatting the device in an OS. Please read the article in full before making inaccurate comments online. For many years, I have used two SanDisk Ultra 16 GB USB flash drives as OS installation media. Since I do not trust Ventoy yet, and alternative “one stick that does it all” solutions have had odd bugs from time to time, I prefer having separate physical USB sticks fo...| ./techtipsy
I hate buying things that are single-purpose, which is why I ended up with this setup. Take a speaker, a battery, put them together, and what you now have is a portable speaker. Since I had access to both, I felt no need to buy a separate portable speaker for use in social events. The fact that this JBL soundbar supports Bluetooth was what sealed the deal. Just make sure to keep the setup a fair distance away from any bigger bonfires, liquids and bugs, and you should be good to go.| ./techtipsy
This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops: changing the CPU. The CPU we're replacing in the T430: a 45W Intel i7-3820QM. Loosen the CPU by turning the screw with a flathead screwdriver. A CPU socket in a laptop. Make sure the golden triangle aligns with the marking on the socket, and pop that new CPU in. A bit of 98% alcohol goes a long way. Background One of the modifications that you can do to a ThinkPad T430 laptop is changing the CPU to a more powerful quad core...| ./techtipsy
I stumbled upon this post in /r/thinkpad, which got my attention. It showcases an ExpressCard to M.2 NGFF adapter that they purchased from AliExpress. The adapter has a similar purpose to the one designed by thinkmods.store, with the added bonus that it could fit longer NVMe SSD-s if you didn’t mind them sticking out of the case. You could also order one instantly, so I did. For those interested, the title of the listing at the time of writing of this article is “ExpressCard interface to ...| ./techtipsy
After playing around with fan curves on my ASRock DeskMini X300 based home server, I noticed one interesting thing. At least it was interesting to me. Background I had one goal: to try to see if I could turn it into a semi-passive PC by only turning the fan on when the PC was under load while keeping it off for as long as possible. Running the fan only when necessary means less noise and less dust accumulating on the heat sink. No dust, no maintenance required. The cooling solution used is th...| ./techtipsy
As some of you might own, I’m still rocking a ThinkPad T430, a laptop model originally released in 2012. It’s not the fastest laptop out there, but it is plenty fast for a number of tasks, even most software development work. I also try to keep my machines up to date and properly backed up. On my laptop, this means having around a couple of scheduled tasks, such as restic backups. They don’t really take up a lot of time, but if an intensive scheduled task starts while you’re having a ...| ./techtipsy
There really isn’t much to say here, nor is there a rational reason behind this. I just see it as an opportunity to send a signal and test the capabilities of my UPS. I’ve prepared for this moment with my self-hosting setup, let’s see how well it holds up. Hopefully better than the electrical grid. Winter is coming. :harold:| ./techtipsy
I have the Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones. They’re good for consuming content. Audio calls with your colleagues? Forget about it. Thanks, Bluetooth. #notsponsored by Värska, it's just very hot right now. This is the setup I have to go with, and it has all to do with how Bluetooth works. Your options with Bluetooth headsets are the following: high quality sound output, no audio input low quality sound output, low quality audio input (HSP/HFP) That’s it. Choice of codecs exposed by Fedora 36. ...| ./techtipsy
Overview of basic analytics during that one time my blog post got traction on HackerNews, and the steps I took to prepare for just this occasion.| ./techtipsy
You have offsite backups of your most important data, right? Right???| ./techtipsy
I gave the Fairphone Fairbuds XL a go to see how well they stack up in real life. Unfortunately, not that well.| ./techtipsy
I've thought a lot about the performance, cost and power consumption trade-offs of home servers. Maybe too much.| ./techtipsy
Turns out that using stable and performant computers as a home server is way too boring for me.| ./techtipsy
Fedora Linux is a great Linux distribution, but it has a few quirks that can impact your experience. Here's how to fix them.| ./techtipsy
I had dumb ideas during my university days as well, but the budget was smaller.| ./techtipsy
It runs Linux and you can peek under the hood if you want to, but that's not the point.| ./techtipsy
Turning a 15-year-old Canon PIXMA MP250 printer into a network printer was much easier than I initially thought.| ./techtipsy
How a few accidental key presses revealed the presence of media playback control keys on my ThinkPad L390 Yoga.| ./techtipsy
My obsession with measuring the power consumption of my devices reached a whole new level.| ./techtipsy
I'm just as surprised as you are.| ./techtipsy
Incident? No, I prefer to call it a 'premature deprecation event'.| ./techtipsy
I voted with my wallet and bought a Fairphone 5. Here's what I've learned after 58 days of use (and counting).| ./techtipsy
I had the opportunity to speak at a career day for the first time!| ./techtipsy
I'm sleep-deprived, completely exhausted, but incredibly excited about the whole experience. Here are my notes, impressions and a lot of pictures about FOSDEM 2024.| ./techtipsy
It turns out that you can't trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.| ./techtipsy
Sometimes the best solution is the one that works well enough and can be cranked out quickly.| ./techtipsy
How one toggle in the game settings allowed me to enjoy a notoriously difficult game.| ./techtipsy
Setting up a Steam LAN cache has never been this easy, so I went ahead and did some testing with different configurations.| ./techtipsy
Does not apply if you like spam. No, not that one.| ./techtipsy
I went to the hackathon, built some useful stuff and only did stupid things about 4 times!| ./techtipsy
All of this could have been avoided if I didn't insist on making backups of my Steam Deck.| ./techtipsy
It's a jet engine with an integrated furnace, but at the same time it fits into the Linux compatibility sweet spot. Not great, not terrible.| ./techtipsy
You can't ignore maintenance, be it in software or other aspects of life, and here's why.| ./techtipsy
A short ramble about something I realized over the years with my self-hosting setup.| ./techtipsy
All the reasons why I find this particular power bank to be really neat and why it could realistically be the last power bank I buy.| ./techtipsy
I got a LattePanda V1 and gave it a go as a Raspberry Pi replacement for my self-hosting setup. Here's how it went.| ./techtipsy
The ThinkPad as a server is back, this time with a couple of adjustments.| ./techtipsy
A short story about using a popular tool in ways that you might not have thought of.| ./techtipsy
I tried out HoloISO, the project that brings the Steam Deck experience to PC-s, on my ASRock DeskMini X300. Perhaps gaming on Linux isn't dead after all?| ./techtipsy
I've tried out newer laptops before and it was nothing short of a disaster. Is this HP any different, or do I need to go back to my ThinkPad T430 again?| ./techtipsy
I take a severely underpowered computer and make it do something useful.| ./techtipsy
An illustrated overview about the process of clearing the supervisor password from a ThinkPad T60, based on guides that some smart and persistent people have written.| ./techtipsy
Some assembly required. No, not _that_ one.| ./techtipsy
Small and very efficient, but not quite ideal for all use cases. At least it hasn't caught on fire yet!| ./techtipsy
I ramble about a tool that is great for taking regular snapshots on the btrfs filesystem.| ./techtipsy
If you have ever felt frustated with the Bluetooth experience that your ThinkPad T430 offers you, especially after upgrading the WiFi adapter to one that also has Bluetooth capabilities, then this article might help you out.| ./techtipsy
I took a spare ThinkPad T430 and put all my home server workloads on it. Here's how it went.| ./techtipsy
A quick and dirty experiment: can the integrated graphics on an AMD Ryzen 4000 series APU run Beat Saber?| ./techtipsy
Short story about a fun and simple way to shoot yourself in the foot, Kubernetes style.| ./techtipsy
Oh, snap(per)!| ./techtipsy
UPS, I did it again 🎵| ./techtipsy
Something is better than nothing.| ./techtipsy
A short explanation about what drives me to experiment with new hardware setups in my self-hosting hobby.| ./techtipsy
This pegboard can fit so much compute power on it!| ./techtipsy
I gave in to my impulses and bought myself a small single board computer to be my power-efficient home server, here's how it went.| ./techtipsy
I ended up going to a small museum run by a passionate enthusiast in the beautiful countryside of south-east Estonia while on vacation, here are my notes on it.| ./techtipsy
Quick overview from someone who does this thing as a hobby, focusing on PCIe connectivity, fan control and the poor state of AM4 socket and UEFI upgrades.| ./techtipsy
Honey, I shrunk my desktop PC!| ./techtipsy
Alternative title: "Honey, I completely changed my server setup again!"| ./techtipsy
Hosting your own Wikipedia instance has never been this easy!| ./techtipsy
Quick rant about the state of PC-s in 2021 regarding power and resource usage.| ./techtipsy
