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.

Review: Cyberpunk 2077

This game is an interesting one. It was infamous after its release and I haven’t been in the habit of paying attention to new game releases for a long time. For the most past that’s because for the longest time in my life I didn’t have a powerful enough gaming PC and my disposal (also no gaming console) so I couldn’t have run them anyway. Now that I own a Steam Deck I’m in a sort of narrow window where somewhat recent AAA games are available to me which is why I tend to look around the Steam Store a bit more nowadays....

September 18, 2023 · 10 min

Why I dislike Rockstar Games now

Dear reader, I recently had an experience so bizarre that I feel like sharing it with the world wide web for all the good that will do. Take it as my way of blowing off some steam. Without further pretext here goes… A while ago I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) on Steam. I own a Steam Deck and read many good things about the game and that it runs pretty well on the Deck....

September 15, 2023 · 13 min

How To: Rip BluRay discs on Linux

I recently gained a renewed interest in moving my media from discs to hard drives so I can integrate them with my media server. For music and DVDs this is fairly straightforward, although there is a hoop to jump through if you’re on Fedora because it doesn’t come with all the proprietary codecs and whatnot preinstalled. However, all you need to do is get your hands on the RPMFusion repo and install libdvdcss and you’re good....

June 13, 2023 · 2 min

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 amounts of integration with various third-party services, clouds, phone apps and whatnot....

February 8, 2023 · 5 min

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....

February 8, 2023 · 6 min