The time trap anti-spam technique

As a maintainer of several websites with contact forms, I’ve fought my battles with spam bots. This can easily be solved using a CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA, but I’d rather use those options as a last resort. Honestly, CAPTCHA solutions are a personal annoyance.

This writeup outlines the time trap technique that has been very effective for regular use. By regular use, I mean the website you’re protecting isn’t big enough for a spammer to target specifically.

Privacy 101: Getting started with a Pi-hole

If you value your privacy, a Pi-Hole is a great addition to your network. It is basically an ad blocker for your entire network. A Pi-Hole will block ads and trackers for all network traffic, which also covers devices that generally don’t come with an ad blocker, such as your mobile phone, smart TV or other smart devices.

The installation of a Pi-Hole isn’t exactly plug and play and most tutorials on the web assume you know how to use a Raspberry Pi. I’ll try to start from the beginning and this should be doable with a bit of interest in computers. I won’t recite other tutorials, but I’ll share my notes and information to get you started in 10 steps.

Vue.js on .NET Core - the easy way (with Visual Studio Code on Mac OS X)

At TIQ, we quickly fell in love with Vue.JS for its simplicity, flexibility and speed. That’s why we switched from AngularJS to Vue.js for our newest version. We also moved from .NET MVC to .NET Core.

But with all this new stuff, we were a bit confused how to make .NET Core and Vue.js play nice together. It took some time for us to get this set up well, so hopefully you’re able to cut some corners with this post.

Encrypting disks like Debian

If you’re like me, you’ve set up full-disk encryption during your installation. But what if you want to encrypt your backups and USB sticks too?

In this post I’ll share how I did it.

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