Lerks Blog

Downtime To You (me)

If you tried connecting to this blog in the last few days, you might have noticed some downtime…

How to securely set up an encrypted Debian server (IMHO)

Welcome to another IMHO post.

This time I am going to write about setting up servers. From zero to serving stuff. Additionally I’ll try to describe basic security measures that I think are a good base for a secure deployment.

Developing Ghost themes (IMHO)

As you might have noticed this blog is was using Ghost, which is a JavaScript based blogging software that uses Handlebars templates for theming. In this post I’ll show how I set Ghost up locally to develop themes with as little pain as possible.

Setting up Mastodon for development

I have been coding on my own Mastodon instance since 2017, the main thing I’m doing is customizing the styling. For this, it is a good idea to have a local development instance because redeploying (and rebuilding the assets) takes too long for a simple change like a different border color for some elements. In this post, I will show how I set up Mastodon for development.

Turning a PC on and off using an ESP8266

In this post I’ll show how you can control the power state of your computer remotely using an ESP8266.

Setting up an encrypted MQTT server on Debian/Ubuntu using mosquitto.

MQTT is a messaging protocol intended for smaller applications (in “footprint”, not necessarily scale) which is available since 1999 but is currently receiving a lot of attention since the rise of the internet of things and the need to send small messages as simply as possible. In this tutorial I will show how to install a mosquitto server on Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

Building Apps for ODROID-GO using ESP-IDF

In this post I’ll describe how to write your own programs for the ODROID GO, a handheld gaming console featuring an ESP32.

Automagic Minecraft Server Backups With Map Renderings Using GitLab CI and GitLab Pages

I recently set up a Minecraft server again, I usually do this by simply running the downloaded .jar file in a screen session. This time though, I did it a little bit better. In this post I’ll describe what I consider to be the perfect setup.