Homebrew is an open-source package manager for Apple MacOS not too different from the well known linux package manager like dpkg, rpm or the FreeBSD pkg. Some commands which I need regularly even though not often are composed in the following list. # search for a homebrew package $ brew search <expression> # get the newest version of homebrew package $ brew update # Show updated homebrew packages $ brew outdated # Upgrade all updated homebrew packages on your system...

I'm running my rusty old ThinkPad T430s Laptop as (quite capable) homelab VM host under Linux/KVM running playground VMs. And because I'm accessing this machine only remotely over RDP I don't have use for the internal laptop display. After looking around what is the best way to turn the internal laptop display off I've settled for a simple solution using the linux command vbetool. For this to work please ensure that no display manager (like GDM, LightDM) is running after...

Utilising cloud services make it easy to deploy Node.js applications online, without the need to setup an own virtual private server (VPS) and install and configure the needed operating system and/or runtimes in it. It's also an important tool for the realisation of web solutions based on micro services. In this article, I'll show how to run a minimal Node.js application inside Docker and deploy it to Microsoft Azure using the Azure Container Registry and Azure App Services. Prerequisite locally...

One of the most used tools in the data science field (alongside R) is Python with its enormous amount of libraries like NumPy, pandas or SciPy. Alongside these there is also the web frontend Jupyter that makes it easy to create interactive Python notebooks which are locally served on your system. If this is not your cup of tea, there are several existing hosted solutions like Google Colaboratory For compatibility reasons MacOS has only Python 2 installed per default (even...

When working on data science problems you'll probably come in touch with the well known statistical software package R. While R, due to its long history, is an extremely versatile & powerful system for almost any analytical task, it's not known for its user-friendliness and can sometimes be challenging to setup locally. RStudio is a very usable frontend which can be installed and used on different platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOS) locally. This works mostly well but offers some potential downsides...

There are situations where you obtain JSON data from an external source (e.g. via a REST-API) which contains date and time Information in the ISO 8601 format which looks like this: 2020-10-27T13:47:25.662Z If you now want to output this date/time information in a readable manner in Django you can either manually reformat the strings of this data to the format you prefer using python string operations: "2020-10-27T13:47:25.662Z" => "2020.10.27 13:47:25" This works but there is a more flexible way to...

To be able to develop with Node.js or to deploy Node.js application on a server there has to be a Node.js runtime installed on the server. While Node.js is available in the Debian package repository, it's not the most current version. Let's install Node.js in a more current version from an external apt repository. For this we'll use the apt repository from Nodesource which is also recommended by nodejs.org itself. In this case we'll install Node.js in the version 12....

Creating & keeping backups of your data is essential and often not done because of the hassle associated with it. Using the powerful & easy command line tool HashBackup you can create encrypted local and remote backups in different storage destinations like WebDAV, Amazon S3, Backblaze B2. Remote storage backups protect you against the loss of the local backup data due to hardware failure or an on-site disaster. HashBackup can write to different remote storage destinations. In this article we...

When running different systems on your internal network (e.g. as services on your homelab) it would be nice not to have to memorize the IP addresses of all the servers. You can achieve this by either using the given DNS functionality of your router (e.g. on a tomato router firmware) or by setting up an internal DNS server yourself using the BIND9 DNS server. Let's see how to quickly do it on Debian 10! Prerequisite a Debian 10 system running...

You want to host your own blog or a website for your personal project, but you don't want to use shared hosting? Host your website on an own Virtual Private Server (VPS). You can use any of the many cloud service providers (like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Linode, digitalocean) to spin up a VPS which will serve your content. This content could be dynamically created by a content management system (CMS, like WordPress) or as static HTML files...

If you're a MacOS user then sometimes you need to run Windows for some particular reasons like special website tests (in the native Edge web browser). An easy & free way to do this is by using VirtualBox to run Windows 10 on your MacOS computer. You can achieve this using the free virtualization software VirtualBox and the time limited (90 days) evaluation version of Windows 10 (Enterprise). Prerequisite MacOS running VirtualBox: for the virtualization of Windows 10. fast internet...

I've been using my personal domain for a long time for all my e-mail needs and been thinking about using it for hosting a personal weblog, too. But, as so often, real life interfered and I actually have not found the time for doing it. Until now 🙂 I'll write in this blog about different IT topics like cloud computing, linux, some programming and REST-APIs.