marco's blog

Fri, 01 May 2026 12:48:19 +0200

I’ve decided to put this blog to rest for now. I might write in German every now and then over at racemat.de.

🐟 So long, and thanks for all the fish 🐟

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:35:04 +0200

I switched from Zwift to Rouvy some time ago for reasons. Today, now this: Ride Into a New Chapter

Not interested either

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:31:54 +0200

The truth is I’m just not interested in pretty much all the things I cared about before. Phones, laptops, operating systems, who’s the CEO of what and whose company turned over a trillion dollars this quarter, none of it does anything for me at the moment.

I’m feeling almost exactly the same way right now. However, I don’t think it’s simply because of my age. What really troubles me is somehow the sense that I’m betraying the world a little bit whenever I keep enjoying those things. The current state of Big Tech and the political leadership of the countries involved is what’s draining my enthusiasm. I’ve simply lost any joy in it.

Tree Trunk

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:22:49 +0200

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:33:44 +0200

Finished reading: Reset Thriller : die Wahrheit stirbt zuerst by Peter Grandl 📚

Thoughts on AI and Privacy

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:26:57 +0200

It still baffles me that so many people are willing to completely give up their privacy out of fascination with the possibilities of AI. Personally, I don’t think it’s proportionate to feed all my notes and thoughts to Claude Code, for example, just so it can clean up my Obsidian Vault. I mean, the tech giants may promise to respect their users' privacy, but hey, these companies illegally downloaded the entire knowledge of the world, so why should they respect my privacy in particular? As long as it’s not possible to accomplish something similar locally on my computer, this technology is out of the question for me - even if the temptation is great.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:51:32 +0200

Project Hail Mary: Loved the book and enjoyed the movie. 🎥

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:12:48 +0200

Finished reading: Die Mitternachtsbibliothek by Matt Haig 📚

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 20:31:30 +0200

Finished reading: Die Känguru-Rebellion Der fünfte Band der Känguru-Reihe by Marc-Uwe Kling 📚

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:53:53 +0200

TIL that when using WireGuard to connect remotely to your home network, and you have configured Pi‑Hole as a local DNS server in your Fritz!Box, if the IP address of the Pi‑Hole server changes, it is not enough to update it in the Fritz!Box; it must also be reflected in the WireGuard configuration on every client you use it with. Once this becomes clear, many things suddenly become so much simpler and easier to get running again 🤦‍♂️.

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:42:59 +0200

Successful products:

Every time I stumble on articles or posts discussing tech products, I’m perplexed when someone uses the word “successful” to describe a product with a lot of users. There’s a better word for products like that, and that’s “popular”.

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:08:23 +0200

TIL that on macOS Tahoe, you can use an user default to turn off menu icons:

defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool false

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:44:42 +0200

I really appreciate Apple’s attention to details and software quality.

Itsyhome

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:12:22 +0200

Your entire smart home in the macOS menu bar. Cameras, lights, thermostats, locks, and more - just one click away.

Itsyhome, the Home Assistant app I knew I wanted but didn't know existed 🥰.

Screenshot Itsyhome Home Page (2026-02-19)

itsyhome.app

RSS: Phantom Obligation

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:06:09 +0200

Enjoyed reading Phantom Obligation.

An answer might be Current.

Thanks canion for the heads up.

I haven’t tried the app yet, but its concept seems interesting. In my RSS reader, I already have one special folder for a while - it’s called ‘People’. Here, I’ve gathered a few selected blogs that I always read. Often, I just click on the title to directly go to their website so that I can enjoy the whole package and not just read the text. Additionally, I’ve disabled the Notification Badges¹ for my RSS reader and force myself to click on ‘Mark All As Read’ more often.

Update 2026-02-19T11:19: There are quiet a few people in my fediverse bubble who are not that enthusiastic about Current. So maybe it would be a good idea to wait a little while before paying $10 for an app that might need a little bit more work 😅.

Actually I have turned off the badge for almost all my apps and finally also the vibration alarm (it’s always muted anyway). I’m about to get along with a dump phone, which actually feels quite nice. ↩︎

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:26:43 +0200

Finished reading: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow 📚

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:00:22 +0200

Watched: The Last Viking 🍿

I love this kind of movies and this one, too.

Defaults 2025

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:37:46 +0200

Another year has passed, and it’s time to update my app defaults. A lot has happened in the world since Andrew, Martin, and Jason of Hemispheric Views listed their defaults for the first time. I’ve tried to ditch big‑tech companies and move my data and services to more open platforms, some of them self‑hosted.

Indicated are unchanged entries (🔒) and updated entries (✨). I still use the various categories as written by Andrew:

🔒 Mail Client: Mail
🔒 Mail Server: posteo.net - still a secondary account on iCloud with custom domain
🔒 Notes: Obsidian - Notes.app is empty now
✨ To-Do: Pen and Paper - still use Remind Me Faster w/ Reminders.app (NextCloud) to capture things on the go and transfer them to my Bujo later
🔒 iPhone Photo Shooting: iOS Camera
✨ Photo Management: Photos - looking into ente and Immich (self-hosted) in parallel
🔒 Calendar: Calendar - Data moved to NextCloud; using a couple of other apps besides, like Grila or Dato
✨ Cloud file storage: Koofr, Filen.io, and NextCloud - this is a mess, have to consolidate; some app data still on iCloud because of lock-in
✨ RSS: Classic Reeder and NetNewsWire with FreshRSS (self-hosted) - left Feedbin behind, was using it with Unread in between
🔒 Contacts: Contacts - Data moved to NextCloud
🔒 Browser: Safari
✨ Chat: iMessage, Threema, and Signal - still have WhatsApp installed, but don’t start conversations there and try not to use it at all; access to contacts, pictures, etc. is blocked
✨ Bookmarks: Linkding (self-hosted) - switched from Anybox
🔒 Read It Later: Readwise Reader - evaluating Readeck (self-hosted)
🔒 Word Processing: Pages (MS Word at work) - trying to get familiar with LibreOffice, but it’s so ugly 😢
🔒 Spreadsheets: Numbers (MS Excel at work) - cf. above
🔒 Presentations: Keynote - cf. above
🔒 Shopping Lists: Pons
🔒 Meal Planning: Mela
🔒 Budgeting & Personal Finance: YNAB - already set-up Actual (self-hosted) but did not switch yet
🔒 News: Mastodon, tagesschau.de
🔒 Music: Apple Music - started playing around with Navidrome (self-hosted)
✨ Podcasts: Overcast - back to Overcast; I’ve used Apple Podcasts and Queue in between
✨ Password Management: 1Password - back to 1PW, iCloud Keychain was degraded to “backup”

Update 2025-12-03: removed note to myself

PSA macOS and iOS Apps on Sale

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:05:41 +0200

PSA: Right now is a good time to buy Indie Software for macOS and iOS. There are lists online with hundreds of discounted apps, e.g. indieappsales.com or github and Lou has a Roundup of his AppAddict Reviews on Sale.

But it’s even easier than this. Just buy all the apps you don’t own yet from the Editor’s Choice bundle. You’re welcome ;-)

Down the Self-Hosting Rabbit Hole

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:39:38 +0200

For a couple of years, I’ve had two Raspberry Pis running on my home network. One was for a Magic Mirror 2 server instance with a few self-written Python scripts. A very cheaply acquired Fire Tablet hangs on the fridge and displays its website in Full Kiosk Mode. The other Raspberry run Pi-Hole and filters ads for the entire home network. To become a little more independent from the big tech bros, in the middle of the year, a VPS from Hetzner joined the setup, running NextCloud. It now provides the entire family with cloud storage, calendar, and address book. The NextCloud software and the VPS are maintained by Hetzner; I only have to worry about the NextCloud configuration. I didn’t dare to do more. Self-hosting, I found and still find - without any (professional) knowledge of networks - quite scary.

That changed a few weeks ago. I still find it scary, but I installed a bit of software anyway. It started, as so often, with a post from Marcus. He mentioned OwnTracks and Geo Activity Playground in his article. I was curious, and since I absolutely didn’t want to open up my home network¹ yet, I rented a regular, very cheap VPS for a few Euros a month from Hetzner and installed OwnTracks there. That was almost too easy. But I didn’t want to install Geo Activity Playground as well on the same server as I didn’t know how to correctly limit access and separate both installations. So finally I started to look into Docker. Let’s fast forward a bit; I don’t want to bore you too much.

I now have - and it’s all still very much in flux - a dedicated VPS running OwnTracks and another one running Docker. It took a while, but eventually, I understood this YAML syntax for Docker Compose and how to integrate drives, networks, etc. Now, Portainer.io, Watchtower, SWAG, FreshRSS, Linkding, and Dawarich ² are running on it. I also looked at Actual Budget, ntfy, Wallabag, and KOReader Sync ³ and successfully installed and configured them. Everything runs with its own subdomains, secured with the Hetzner Firewall, backed by regular backups, and snapshots. I learned how to disable shell logins via passwords, generate SSH keys and put them on servers, how to close ports with ufw, and a few other things. Inside the SWAG container, fail2ban is running, and I’ve blocked foreign countries using the DBIP-SWAG-Docker-Mod and also tried to keep bots out. Thanks to FreshRSS, I canceled Feedbin. I’m currently reading my RSS feeds on my Mac and iOS with NetNewsWire (or Reeder Classic), as I don’t like the integration with Unread as much - I can cancel that subscription too. Linkding is so incredibly close to pinboard.in - I immediately felt at home. I love not having to wait for Anybox to finish syncing anymore.⁴ Geo Activity Playgrounds⁵ is now running peacefully in a Docker container on a new Raspberry Pi 5, with 16 GB Ram and a 256 GB SSD connected via M.2 hat, in my house. Portainer, Watchtower, and additionally Immich, Pi-hole, MagicMirror 2, Calibre-Web, Dashy, and Readeck are also running on it. If I want to access it on the go, I do it via VPN through my Fritz!Box. The two dedicated Pis for the ad blocker and MM2 have been retired and can now be used for other tinkering projects. BTW Calibre-Web is absolutely great, Dashy is fun, and I will switch to Readeck as soon as Readwise reaches Phase 4 of Enshittification.⁶ And I’m now looking at Immich in parallel. If I manage to break away from Apple Photos, it will probably be with its help.

tl;dr I’ve learned a lot about self-hosting in the last two weeks, installed and tried out many services, and will now hopefully slow down, see how stable everything runs, and will certainly move one or two services to another server or turn them off again - we’ll see.

What projects are you self-hosting? 😇

I did not want to run my iPhone with a VPN 24/7. ↩︎
I’m still thinking about and trying out whether this might be an alternative to OwnTracks. I can’t get the former to run with user management etc. in a container and therefore have to operate a dedicated server. I’m not sure if it’s worth it in the long run. ↩︎
Actual Budget: I find it a bit scary to self-host my financial data on my own server; I’ve managed it so far on the Raspi in the local network; ntfy: Runs great, but I don’t have a real use case yet; Wallabag: too ugly, Readeck seems much better; KOReader Sync: still need to figure out how to secure it properly, unfortunately doesn’t start on the Raspi. ↩︎
The Linkding iOS clients aren’t great, but you can also simply upload your bookmarks via a shortcut. ↩︎
It’s funny, the application that started it all would actually need a more powerful server/computer with my 4,000 imported routes; but the installation on my Mac aborted with an error message, and sometimes it’s helpful just to be a little patient. ↩︎
The same applies to Actual Budget in relation to YNAB. ↩︎

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 23:15:53 +0200

Watched: Rushmore 🍿 - enjoyed it

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 16:12:45 +0200

Babo: The Haftbefehl Story (2025)

LM Studio

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0200

Run local LLMs like gpt-oss, Qwen3, Gemma3, DeepSeek and many more on your computer, privately and for free.

LM Studio is the app I now use for running local LLMs.¹ In LM Studio I mainly use gemma‑3‑12b, mostly for alt‑text generation, and the gpt‑oss‑20b model. Both run fine on my Mac equipped with 32 GB of RAM.

Screenshot Homepage LM Studio (2025-11-09)

lmstudio.ai/

I switched from Ollama because LM Studio is much more versatile, and I don’t get their “sign‑up, log‑in, and run remote LLMs” options for a software that was designed for offline usage. ↩︎

Print and Play - Dungeon Pages

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 17:46:08 +0200

In the latest Hiro report, I read about an app called Roll N' Write for iPadOS. I had never heard about these print and play games and was wondering what they were about. I found the idea compelling, although I’m not a big RPG guy. I’ve downloaded the app, which looks decent, but as I am not a heavy iPad and Apple Pencil user anymore, I was more interested in the paper version. Especially because I recently found joy using pen and paper for some things in my life. The app’s screenshots featured Dungeon Pages. Right now you can get the core set for free on this Kickstarter page. So, I’ve printed a dice tray, bought some normal dice, and laminated some sheets. I still have to defeat my first boss dungeon - the game is quite hard. I had lots of fun playing it whenever I felt I could waste some time doom scrolling through the socials. I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of this whole new universe yet, but I think I might try 52 Realms next.

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:20:57 +0200

TIL that you can’t connect to your Fujifilm camera with your iPhone via its local wifi if you have a VPN service running in the background 🤦‍♂️. So, don’t blame the camera, blame yourself.