Open tabs — December 2022

The end of the year is a nice time to review my open tabs on my phone and computer to see what’s worth saving and what is not. So here is another round.

Note that I do not necessarily endorse the articles or applications I link to. Most of the links to tools are here specifically because they seem interesting to me, but I have no actual experience with them—hence the need for a reminder on this list.

I have tried to group the links somewhat, but other than that they are listed in more or less random order.

Development

Autodocumenting Makefiles

A nice trick to document your Makefile. This article was also discussed on Hacker News.

gron

From the README: gron transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep for what you want and see the absolute ‘path’ to it. It eases the exploration of APIs that return large blobs of JSON but have terrible documentation.

asdf

A version manager for e.g. Ruby, Node.js, Python.

Shell Script Best Practices

Some rules of thumb for writing shell scripts which were also discussed on Hacker News.

How to change git default branch from master

I had to (or wanted to) switch from using the name “master” for my main branch to something else (“main” in most cases) for a couple of Git repositories. It is not hard, but if you do not do it often, it is convenient to have a guide like this to make sure you do not forget anything.

Blogs

Bitfield Consulting

I’m linking the whole website here since it has a bunch of nice Go related articles but also interesting articles in the blog.

Kristiāns Kronis' blog

I have a couple of articles on this blog still open to (finish) reading, like Using Ubuntu as the base for all of my containers, Moving from GitLab CI to Drone CI and On burnout.

Valentine’s blog

Informative blog of which I still want to read the last two articles in the OpSec blog series.

linuxserver.io blog

A blog by the community that maintains “the largest collection of Docker images on the web” (their words).

Security

The Personal Infosec & Security Checklist

Actionable best practices to harden your security posture.

Personal security checkist

Tips for protecting your digital security and privacy.

A Defensive Computing Checklist

Another list of tips on how to make your digital life more safe.

Router Security

A site with the focus on the security of routers. From the same author as the previous link.

Aegis-icons

Unofficial set of icons for the Aegis Authenticator application.

Pentester’s Promiscuous Notebook

Notes by and for a pentester.

Homelab

BaptisteBdn/docker-selfhosted-apps

A GitHub repository with guides on how to run a bunch of applications via Docker.

Dockerholics Application List

Another list of applications you can host yourself using Docker containers.

Awesome-Selfhosted

Yet another (the?) list of applications you can run yourself.

Awesome Sysadmin

A list of Free and Open-Source sysadmin resources.

Watchtower

Automatically update your Docker containers if newer images are available.

Diun

If you do not like the idea of automatically updating your containers with Watchtower, you might want to look at this Docker Image Update Notifier application.

Drone

I’m already running a Gitea instance and a Docker Registry. Drone might be a nice third component to automatically build projects and e.g. create Docker images and push them to my internal registry.

Khue’s Homelab

Khue Doan has a project to provision, operate and update his homelab. As such it is a nice inspiration.

Grafana Loki

A log aggregation system that looks like a useful addition to my setup, since I’m already running Grafana to visualise some metrics.

Vector

This also looks like a interesting tool to collect logs.

Step Certificates

I am already using a private certificate authority to create certificates for the services in my homelab, but it would be nice to have a self hosted ACME server to do the tedious work. This tool might be what I need.

Entertainment

Elevator Saga

Fun game where you program an elevator/set of elevators to meet certain criteria.

Movie of the Night

While officially a movie/series recommendation engine I use this site regularly to check if I can stream a movie or series in my country and if so, on which service it is available.

OSMC

An interesting looking open source media center, which you can run on a Raspberry Pi or on their devices, like the Vero 4K+

The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance: Inside North Korea’s Global Cyber War

A book about the Lazarus Group, tipped in Darknet Diaries episode 119.

The Silver Ships Series

A book series by Scott Jucha, tipped in the Security Now podcast. (The series is mentioned in episode 887 for the first time.) I’ve finished the first book and loved reading it!

Open Circuits

A lovely book about electronic components with beautiful pictures.

Miscellaneous

Schrijf een persoonlijk manifest voor richting in je werk en leven (Dutch)

I’m not sure I’ll ever write such a personal manifest, but just reading this article gave me enough food for thought to make some decisions.

How to Use File History in Windows 10

Useful article for people that want to backup and restore files on Windows machines.

Restic

I’m in the process of testing this backup tool to see if I want to switch over to restic from my current rsync based script to backup my Linux machines to an external disk. If I go that route, I’ll also have to have a look at restic-tools.

Creating Fully Reproducible, PDF/A Compliant Documents in LaTeX

When I was perparing my CV and a cover letter, I wanted the resulting PDF to be more accessible. This article gave me useful instructions on how to achieve that.

Using Neopixels with the Raspberry Pi

I’m toying with the idea of upgrading my home office with some LED strips. Perhaps I’ll use Neopixels and a Raspberry Pi (or similar board) to do this.

Things your manager might not know

An article about how you can help your manager (help you).