I recently realized that I'm more capable than ever to actually turn one of my childhood dreams into reality. Creating my own video game, that is. When I was a young teen I always dreamt of making my own game. I started by doing some first experiments in Visual Basic, but as I didn't have any experience in programming I didn't get very far. That lasted until I discovered Game Maker, which made things quite a bit easier for me. I was hooked, especially after I've gotten the book "The Gamemaker's ...

At home I'm using the open source media center Jellyfin hosted on a homeserver to stream series to different clients and keep track of watched episodes. It works rather nicely except for some minor hickups on the Fire TV app. One problem of hosting your media at home, though, is that you can't access it remotely by default. Thankfully, you have a few options to fix that issue. Option 1 - The direct approach The easiest approach would be to open up the port of Jellyfin (8096) on your router s...

Our Android team at LOOP has envied the iOS team for a very long time now. Not because of their toolchain or the small amount of devices they need to support, no it is a much more simple thing we were lacking that the iOS team had: a tool to properly share your mobile device's screen on a PC. While the iOS team could simply use AirPlay to show the screen of their iPhone to the client, a native protocol which works flawlessly most of the time, we had to resort to some shady third party solutions...

Two-factor authentication has been around for quite a while now and I guess almost everybody who spends some time on the internet has already encountered it in one form or another. The basic idea of 2FA is to increase the security of your account by forcing you to authenticate yourself using a second factor. This is normally done by requiring you to enter a code that you received via a different channel. So far I've encountered three different ways to retrieve said codes: Using an application...

Recently I switched my domain name (though flosch.at will still continue to work for a few months) as well as my main mail address & provider. This change came quite rapidly, but I think in one way or another it makes sense as a next step from where I started. In this blog post I'll try to layout the reasoning behind my decision. The realisation It all started when a colleague of mine recently started to research e-mail providers, which value his privacy more than his current one (which ar...

I recently switched my hosting provider from HostSailor to Scaleway (using their VPS solution). Mostly because of the cheaper prices, as well as because they are Europe based (finally I can pay in Euros!) and the fact that they provide SSD servers instead of normal HDDs, which results in a performance boost. But I also made the switch because of the operating systems they provide, most notably: Arch Linux. Unfortunately, though, I had to find out, that their Arch Linux image is currently brok...

Letsencrypt has launched its public beta, and I (more than a year after my last blog post) have finally found something to talk about again. But first things first. Some of you might not even know what the hype around Letsencrypt is about or what Letsencrypt itself actually is. So I'll try to explain shortly why it is something to have an eye on. Encryption on the internet You have hopefully already encountered several sites on the internet that use encryption (recognisable by the leading ht...

Probably no one recognized the changes I've made in the last few months, but the website now switched to a different CMS under the hood. In fact it isn't really using a CMS anymore, but a static site generator called Metalsmith. The CMS I was using before, was called Pico and it actually served me quite well, but I still had some issues with it. One of these issues isn't actually Pico's fault and most likely even a reason to go for Pico to some: Pico is using PHP. Don't get me wrong, PHP can be...

Since I've started using Linux I'm constantly trying to switch to open source alternatives whenever it's possible. One of the services I really rely on, but haven't replaced with a matching open source counterpart is Last.fm. I totally love the features Last.fm offers: most of all I enjoy the music tracking & statistics and I dig its recommendation system. But since I'm more or less forcing myself to switch to free software, I was always on the lookout for a new replacement. About 2 year...