Why I bought more than 300 old audio cassettes...

This might sound crazy but I just bought more than 300 audio cassettes. But Why?! It all has to do with one of my biggest hobbies. Besides playing games, I also collect them.

But what have old audio cassettes to do with game collecting? Well nothing really… Okay that’s only partially true. It has everything to do with the cases from those cassettes.

I mainly collect original Xbox and Xbox 360 games. These games come in DVD cases so they are well protected and easily presentable. Gameboy games on the other hand came in cardboard boxes, which got damaged over time or just simply tossed in the trash bin.

I have a couple of Gameboy games, mainly Gameboy Advance, but I don’t have a good what to display them. Luckily a reddit user u/NCatfish, has found an ingenious solution. Audio cassette cases can hold an Gameboy Advance game cartridge. So print a pretty label, and voila! You’ve got an custom Gameboy game case you can display on a shelf.

YouTubeRSS Userscript: RSS Buttons for channels and playlists

I have a confession to make. I’m addicted to YouTube, so much that it replaced ordinary cable tv for me. But YouTube has two major issues in my eyes!

Firstly YouTube is owned by Google. Everybody that knows me just a little bit, knows that I try to stay as far away from any Google service as possible. There just isn’t a good alternative for YouTube that is just as popular, so I’m stuck with Google for this one.

Secondly it’s well known that YouTube can’t get their subscription service right. Every now and then there rises a problem with subscriptions, people not seeing new videos in their feed or they just get un-subbed from channels for no reason.

There is a solution to at least one of these issues I have with YouTube. Namely the usage of RSS feeds to maintain your YouTube subscriptions, only Google pretty much hides the links for those feeds. Using these RSS feeds will make it more difficult for Google to track what I’m watching. Because I won’t be using their subscriptions system and I always browse the internet over a VPN.

Mount your STACK drive (WebDAV) on linux

STACK is a cloud service where you get 1TB of free storage, stored in the Netherlands and with 256-bit AES encryption. Yesterday I needed an easy way to get access to my STACK files on my linux server. So, I figured it would be an quick solution to just mount it. This is the method I used.

First of all install the davfs2 package.

sudo apt-get install davfs2

Next create an directory which we can use as a mounting point.

mkdir ~/webmount

Finnally mount your STACK drive, or anny other WebDAV drive.

sudo mount.davfs https://stack-username.stackstorage.com/remote.php/webdav/ ~/webmount -o rw,uid=username

Rember to replace stack-username with your username and username with your linux user, to allow that user to have user-level access to the files. The -o rw part is used to set the webdav as re-writable.

ImgClean.io: Remove metadata from photos

Almost every modern digital camera from an iPhone to a DSLR saves extra information in a picture you take. This information is called metadata. Metadata describes information about the picture itself.

When you share a picture on social media this metadata could tell much more about you than you think. Therefore it’s a good idea to remove any metadata from a photo before you post it online. That’s where ImgClean.io comes into play.

ImgClean.io is a simple webtool that strips all the metadata from an picture, so it’s safe to share on social media. The stripping of the metadata happens client-side, therefore the photo is never uploaded to a server.

I’ve created ImgClean.io as a hobby project and the source code can be found on GitHub.

Hello there! So, why this blog?

As a student and part-time software developer, I often have questions and come along obstacles. This blog will mostly just be a place for me to share my thoughts and solutions to problems. In addition I want to use this blog to write about things I like and care about, like retro games and movies but also privacy and technology.

I probably won’t write posts on a regular basis, because I do not want it to feel like an obligation.

That’s it for now, have a good one!