The IT Blog

Is it worth joining Mastodon?

These days I just hit the mark of 1500 followers on my photography account @hikingdude@mastodon.social on Mastodon.

That’s really – great, satisfying, surprising. Choose whatever you want. For an influencer on other platforms (the Entertainment media) this might not be a lot. But.. Wait…

Not Surprised TikTok Is Addictive? You Might Be Surprised By How Fast!

I don’t think anybody will be surprised to hear that social media can be addictive. Well, “fine” so far. But what did indeed surprise me was what I heard recently when I heard the c’t “Haken dran”-Podcast (german only).

How to fix: Jellyfin Library Scan Hangs

Just recently I wrote about How to install Jellyfin on a RaspberryPi. It all started promising until – after adding a couple of movies – the Library Scan suddenly hung. Unfortunately I didn’t dig too deep into all kinds of logs (which I certainly forgot but which might have given a hint).

75% of Software projects fail – why?

A lot of software projects cost more than expected, take longer to finish and / or deliver a result below expectation.

SmartTVs going from bad to worse?

When we bought a new TV a couple of years ago, I was really to use all the Smart features from our SmartTV. But after a while the discomfort has outweighed the features. Recently we had the opportunity to “test” a newer SmartTV in a hotel and I must admit – it hasn’t gotten better! But I was surprised that the rabbit hole was even deeper and darker than I would have expected …

How to fix: Android Connected, No Internet with Pi-Hole

Since quite a while I was running a Pi-Hole DNS server in my network to block ad- & tracking requests for all devices in the network (more info about Pi-hole are on Wikipedia).

All was great until at some time our Android devices suddenly couldn’t connect to the WiFi anymore. They reported “Connected, No Internet“. All other devices, connected via LAN or WiFi were just fine: PCs, FireTV Stick, other PIs – no issues. When I disabled the use of PiHole, they were able to connect again.

How to replace Synology Video Station with Jellyfin

Unfortunately Synology has discontinued their support for Videostation starting from DSM version 7.2.2 as can be read in the Release Notes for DSM | Synology Inc.:

#6 Video Station is not available on DSM 7.2.2. Refer to this article for workarounds to stream videos to end devices.

Time to evaluate the alternatives …

The NPS Is Dead – How we killed it with Incentives

I suppose most people in IT have encountered the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in some form. If you’re unfamiliar with it, just check out the Wikipedia article.

In brief, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction. It’s calculated by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service on a scale from 0 to 10. The score is then derived by subtracting the percentage of detractors (those who score 0-6) from the percentage of promoters (those who score 9-10).

It sounds good, and for a time, it served its original purpose well!

Brasil’s Twitter/X ban shows once more an over centralized system

If you haven’t heard about it, on August 31st 2024 Brasil banned Twitter/X nationwide (see BBC, NYTimes, TheVerge).

There are numerous debates about the whys etc. But for this post I don’t care. My point here is: it once more shows the massive downside of such a centralized system.

How to get simple DNS Protection

Malware sites are the plague of the century! And it’s so easy to fall for them. Phishing, hacked website content, or malware-ads – one click and you are on a website you shouldn’t be.

One way to deal with the issue is to block malicious domains at DNS resolver level. The advantage is that you do not have to do any modification at the devices!