Hi, I’m Benedikt

Welcome to this obscure spot of the interweb that I call mine own!

This is where I write up thoughts, observations, notes for myself and/or others and the like. If you want to get to talking to me about anything I write, there is a “Reply by Email” button at the end of each post. If you’d like to suggest changes, you can use the respective button above each post, it will lead you to the repository where the code for this site is hosted where you can file an issue. You can also hit me up on mastodon and yell at me there.

How To: Create a Digital Frame with MagicMirror

I’ve wanted a digital frame at home for a while now. I’m notoriously bad at organizing pictures, even worse at sorting, printing, arranging or displaying them. So when I found out that digital frames were a thing it seemed like this would be a natural solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the commercially available ones either don’t have the features that I want (e.g. some way to connect with my images stored in my Nextcloud) or feature worrying amount of integration with various third-party services, clouds, phone apps and whatnot....

Self-Hosting or How I learned to stop worrying and love the Cloud

For a few years now, I’ve hosted a small server at home. Nothing too exciting, I’d say. It all started with a Nextclound instance (see here) and sort of evolved from there. After a while I discovered docker and the amount of services saw a dramatic, albeit short-lived uptick. I tried out all kinds of things, like uptime-kuma, FreshRSS, miniflux, portainer, watchtower. At some point I came across what used to be bitwarden_rs and is now called vaultwarden, a self-hostable reimplementation of Bitwarden....

Second Impression of the Steam Deck

It’s been a few months so I thought an update on my last post on the Steam Deck is in order. So let’s get to it, shall we? The Good First off, the things I liked about the Deck the first time around are still valid. I still think the experience of gaming mode is very cohesive, the option to choose and modify control schemes is extremely handy, I can run AAA games at quite decent frame rates and settings which makes for a beautiful experience on an 800p display....

My New Job

I’ve got a new job. I started working as a developer for a software consulting company last October and wanted to finally take the opportunity to write about it all. My last job didn’t end particularly well. I had been doing it for two years and became increasingly frustrated with my work without ever quite realizing it or why that was. I was in a position where I was unable to take a step back and reflect on my situation, why I was unhappy with it or what needed to change....

How To: Find Which Package Provides a Given File

Don’t you just hate it when you’re in your terminal and want to run some commands, only to discover that you don’t have the appropriate package installed (yet)? Maybe you recently reinstalled your machine and haven’t fully set it up yet or there is a mismatch between your personal and work machine. Whatever the case, you quickly want to install the package and get on with it. But what if the name of the command isn’t the name of the package?...