How a small PAdES signing tool grew into slim-pdf: smartcards and KeePass as key sources, a ribbon GUI, form filling, OCR with each system’s own engine, text search, and why the license ended up as GPL-3.0.
How a document scanner without eSCL/AirScan led to slim-scan: a pure-Python WSD client, a GTK 4 desktop app, image clean-up on the scanned pages, a SANE backend, and two upstream bugs in the epsonds driver.
Building an OAuth2-secured MCP mail server against a real Dovecot/Postfix mailbox surfaced four separate Keycloak client registrations, a Default-vs-Optional scope trap, and a genuinely counter-intuitive Audience-mapper gotcha behind a mysterious active: false.
I recently tried to migrate my database backup strategy to portabase. It has a (c)lean interface and can handle the most common database types (postgres, mysql/mariadb but also mongodb or redis). While setting up things looked promising (once you configured the agent it regularly checks connections using the provided credentials and shows the results). This […]
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Debugging MCP servers
MCP communication MCP servers and clients can talk to each other in different technical ways: Type Description Transport URL stdio In/output using stdio stdio SSE Server-Sent Events Network (HTTP) /sse Streamable HTTP Streamable HTTP Network (HTTP) /mcp Classic MCP Alternative: mcpo (openapi.json) Tools like openwebui prefer to use open APIs (like openapi) to achieve the […]
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eduMFA/privacyIdea - convert TOTP secrets
eduMFA (privacyIDEA) only accepts hex‑encoded TOTP secret keys; this post shows why, and how to convert between hex and Base32 with ready‑to‑use Python scripts.
While trying to get some of Qwen’s latest models up and running on my AMD iGPU I encountered some crashes. The errors were misleading, but in the end it turned out to be out of memory errors, so I started to think about how much memory different components of a LLM use. The data in […]
I just installed a desktop machine with brand new Ubuntu 26.04. One of the things I missed was the possiblity to paste selected text by pressing the middle mouse button. The fix for Ubuntu default desktop (Gnome) is as easy as: Of course the first command is only needed to check the default setting (which […]
Beware! This is still work in progress – I’ll need to re-run all steps on a clean install to verify everything really works as expected! I also assume, that you’re familiar with DNS-based ACME and that the required infrastructure is already in place. Installation of cert-manager Based on this description. Check installation: Creating first ACME […]
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Adding persistent storage to k3s
Basics Kubernetes/k3s is using the Container Storage Interface (short CSI) to provide persistent storage. More details about that can be found here. Options By default k3s/rancher ships with a storage class called “local-path“. According to k3s documentation an alternative is “longhorn” (see here). But there are plenty of other options based on NFS, Ceph (both […]