Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter

Top 10

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:28:16 +0100

I have been maintaining a few top 10 lists for several years now, and I thought I might as well publish them. Here they are:

Movies

The Great Escape
Starship Troopers
12 Angry Men
My Name is Nobody
Adams æbler
Pusher (1-3)
The Devil’s Rejects
Green Room
From Dusk Till Dawn
Funny Games / Keoma (hard decision)

Books (in german)

Ken Follett - Die Säulen der Erde
Stephen King - Es
Stephen King - Sie
Noah Gordon - Der Medicus
Michael Ende - Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer
Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer und Huckleberry Finn
Franz Kafka - Die Verwandlung
Kurt Vonnegut - Schlachthof 5 oder Der Kinderkreuzzug
Tonke Dragt - Der Brief für den König
Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Die Physiker

Songs

System Of A Down - Chop Suey
The Raconteurs - Steady As She Goes
Muse - Citizen Erased
Poison The Well - Slice Paper Wrist
Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms
Nachtgeschrei - An Mein Ende
Baroness - March To The Sea
Bloodhound Gang - Along Comes Mary
Destiny - Skies Dressed In Black
Letzte Instanz - Traumlos

Albums

Poison The Well - The Opposite Of December
Destiny - The Tracy Chapter
Narziss - Solange Das Herz Schlägt
Nachtgeschrei - Ardeo
Walls Of Jericho - With Devils Amongst Us All
The Offspring - Smash
Emil Bulls - Angel Delivery Service
The Black Dahlia Murder - Nocturnal
Muse - Showbiz & Origin Of Symmetry
Rage Against The Machine - Evil Empire

Broken Royal Kludge Keycaps

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:17:00 +0100

I am a big fan of 75% keyboards. After my long-used Logitech G Pro slowly began to give up the ghost, I decided on a Royal Kludge M75. But that turned out to be a mistake.

When I opened the package, two keys immediately fell out. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the mounts in the keycaps were broken. The keycaps from my old keyboard fit quite well, so it wasn’t a major problem at first.

After I reported the defect to customer support, I received a package with a full set of new keycaps in my mailbox about three weeks later (shipping from China). So far, so good.

Since then, about once a month, a keycap has broken in the same way, fortunately always a different one so far. Nevertheless, it’s extremely annoying and I’m now going to look at the Keychron V1. It can also do QMK!

How to quit Vi

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 23:13:54 +0200

Have you ever had the problem of not knowing how to exit VI without restarting your computer? No problem, here’s a very simple solution:

1. Press ESCAPE on your keyboard
1. Type the following:

:!kill -9 $(ps ax | grep vi | head -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 1)

1. Press ENTER on your keyboard

See? It’s not that difficult.

What the Movie

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:31:42 +0200

At the beginning of my training as an IT specialist, I started playing What The Movie. Now, after 16 years, I have solved 10,000 so-called “feature films” and decided that I am done!

https://whatthemovie.com

My Mastodon relocation adventure

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:16:26 +0200

The time had finally come: Mastodon (Bare Metal) on my old Ubuntu 20 container could no longer be updated from 4.3.9 onwards. Ruby was too old, PostgreSQL was too old. So I moved the entire system.

Copying data from the old system to the new one:

systemctl stop mastodon *
su - mastodon
pg_dump --format=custom --no-acl --no-owner --clean mastodon_production > mastodon_production.dump
scp mastodon_production.dump $new_host:
scp -r live/public/system $new_host:
shutdown -h now

The new system is Alpine Linux with Docker Compose:

cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon live
cd live
git checkout v4.3.9
cp .env.production.sample .env.production
docker compose run --rm web bundle exec rake mastodon:setup

Fill the .env.production file with the generated values, then continue with the database and the data:

docker compose exec -ti db /bin/bash
su - postgres
psql
\c postgres
drop schema public;
create schema public;
grant all on schema public to postgres;
grant all on schema public to public;
\q
exit
exit
docker exec -i mastodon-db-1 pg_restore -U postgres -v --clean --no-acl --no-owner -d postgres < /root/mastodon_production.dump
mv /root/system public/
chown -R 991:991 public
docker compose up -d

Switch server in Nginx proxy, done.

Sort dates from json in Hugo

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 22:11:54 +0100

I manage concert data on a Hugo homepage in a JSON file. A distinction should be made between upcoming and past concerts. In addition, the date should be reformatted after sorting. Here is a bit of crazy code for this:

data/dates.json:

[
    {
        "date": "2024-03-01",
        "name": "Cool Pub",
        "city": "Pubville",
        "url": "https://..."
    },
    {
        "date": "2024-12-24",
        "name": "Punkfest",
        "city": "Punkcity",
        "url": "https://"
    },
    {
        "date": "2025-03-15",
        "name": "Rock in Town",
        "city": "Rocktown",
        "url": "https://"
    },
    {
        "date": "2025-08-28",
        "name": "Open Jazz Festival",
        "city": "Jazzville",
        "url": "https://"
    }
]

As you can see, the concerts are simply sorted from top (earliest) to bottom (latest).

Now the fun part.

themes/layouts/_default/home.html:

<div class="list">

    <div class="box">
        {{- $date_now := time.Now.Format "20060102" }}
        {{- $concerts := .Site.Data.dates }}
        {{- range $concerts }}
        {{- $date_concert := time.AsTime .date }}
        {{- $date_concert := $date_concert.Format "20060102" }}
        {{- if gt $date_concert $date_now }} <!-- greater than -->
        {{- $date_string := time.AsTime .date }}
        {{- $date_string := $date_string.Format "02.01.2006" }}

        <a href="{{ .url }}">
            <div class="concert">
                <p class="date">{{ $date_string }}</p>
                <p class="name">{{ .name }}</p>
                <p class="city">{{ .city }}</p>
            </div>
        </a>

        {{- end }}
        {{- end }}
    </div>

    <div class="box">

        <p class="title">Past concerts</p>
        {{- $date_now := time.Now.Format "20060102" }}
        {{- $concerts := .Site.Data.dates }}
        {{- range $concerts }}
        {{- $date_concert := time.AsTime .date }}
        {{- $date_concert := $date_concert.Format "20060102" }}
        {{- if lt $date_concert $date_now }} <!-- less than -->
        {{- $date_string := time.AsTime .date }}
        {{- $date_string := $date_string.Format "02.01.2006" }}

        <a href="{{ .url }}">
            <div class="concert">
                <p class="date">{{ $date_string }}</p>
                <p class="name">{{ .name }}</p>
                <p class="city">{{ .city }}</p>
            </div>
        </a>

        {{- end }}
        {{- end }}
    </div>
</div>

Maybe someone could use it. Don’t forget to rebuild the page after a concert!

Fun with printers

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 10:28:30 +0100

I manage printers professionally, which we buy from a company, let’s call them „ABC Printers“. The printers are basically Lexmark MS331dn, which have been given a new label.

We bought the printers at the end of 2022 with a 24-month maintenance contract. During this time, I once had a technical problem that I couldn’t solve myself, as all administrative functions on the web front end are protected with a pin. When I asked if I could get this pin, they referred to the maintenance contract, which excludes this.

Today I had the motivation to contact them again, as the maintenance contract expired some time ago. The following phone call:

Me: »I would now like to have the pin so that I can manage the printer myself.«
Employee: »We don't give out these pins because we have maintenance contracts.«
Me: »But the contract has expired.«
Employee: »But we wrote to you about this at the beginning of 2025 and haven't received a reply.«

Ouch. After a few minutes of discussion, he then asked a technician to contact me to remove the pins. It happened, everything was fine.

However, I still had a small technical question about the following printer data:

Time in On-Mode: 43031:52:44
Installation Date: 2022-10-26

Let’s calculate that: 43031 hours divided by 24 hours divided by 365 days == 4.9 years. Wait, what? The printer had been running for more than 2 years before we bought it?

The ABC employee assured me that they never sell used printers, but couldn’t rule it out with Lexmark. He then contacted Lexmark and received the following reply:

This may have the following reasons:
 * The date-time settings on your printers are incorrect
 * The date-time settings were incorrect during quality control

The date on the printer is set via NTP and is correct. I don’t know what Lexmark’s quality control does. My guess is… yeah, you got it.

Simple HTML Form bot detection

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 08:30:19 +0100

I recently had to integrate a contact form on a homepage, which naturally attracted a few bots after a very short time. Since I don’t want to use reCAPTCHA for reasons and I don’t like all the other external solutions, I came up with the following solution:

HTML:

<form action="/cgi-bin/mail" method="POST">
    <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Name" required>
    <input type="textarea" name="message" placeholder="Message" required>
    <input type="text" name="botcatcher" id="botcatcher"> <!-- This is NOT required -->
    <input type="submit">
</form>

CSS:

form {
    input[name=botcatcher] {
        display: none;
    }
}

JavaScript:

document.getElementById("botcatcher").value="imnotabot";

As bots are usually script-based and do not parse JavaScript, this field should only be filled if a visitor submits the form with JavaScript enabled. I know that there are also people out there who have JavaScript disabled in their browser, so a manual check of the messages is still necessary. So far, however, the detection rate is over 99%, so this is almost negligible.

Hugo homepage as page bundle

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 10:40:59 +0100

My aim was to divide the start page of a Hugo site into blocks, with each block being a separate Markdown file. The same principle should also work (optionally) for normal pages. Here is the code with which this is possible.

Content structure:

content/
  home/
    _index.md
    block-1.md
    block-2.md
  about/
    index.md
    block-1.md
    block-2.md

Note the different index file names (with and without underscore). The homepage is per definition a leaf bundle while the other pages are branch bundles. More details here.

The block order can be defined in the header of the content files:

+++
order = 1
+++

themes/theme/layouts/_default/baseof.html:

{{ block "main" . }}
{{ end }}

themes/theme/layouts/_default/home.html:

{{ define "main" }}
  {{ with .Site.GetPage "/home" }}
    <article class="first">
      {{ .Title }}
      {{ .Content }}
    </article>
    {{ range sort .Resources ".Params.order" }}
      <article>
        {{ .Title }}
        {{ .Content }}
      </article>
    {{ end }}
  {{ end }}
{{ end }}

themes/theme/layouts/_default/single.html:

{{ define "main" }}
  <article class="first">
    {{ .Title }}
    {{ .Content }}
  </article>
  {{ range sort .Resources ".Params.order" }}
    <article>
      {{ .Title }}
      {{ .Content }}
    </article>
  {{ end }}
{{ end }}

Unify OpenScape sucks

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 22:35:25 +0100

I have to work with a Unify OpenScape Business X5 for my job. The plan is to switch to an open source solution by the end of the year, but that doesn’t stop me from giving my opinion on this pile of rubbish.

And because it works so well with points, here are a few:

The Unify OpenScape Business X5 consists of two devices, each of which has its own IP address. Due to a reorganisation in the network, the subnet mask was changed from /24 to /20. This change should of course also be made on the two interfaces of the system. However, when I try to do this via the configuration of the interfaces, I get an error message on the first interface that the subnet mask must be identical to that of the second interface. Er, what do you mean? Am I supposed to open two browser windows and change both in the same microsecond? Of course not. The trick is to go through the setup wizard again and make the adjustment there. No shit sherlock!
The system is capable of SIP, but not in one of the core functions, the agents. Agents are extensions that can connect to the queue in order to receive calls from our hotline. If you’re thinking, cool, I can just install any SIP client in my home office and connect to the system via VPN: you’re wrong. Agents can only work via their own HFA protocol. Thanks for nothing.
Let’s stick with HFA. There is exactly one usable client (Communication Client), but it stopped in development somewhere between 1990 and 1995. Configuring it is a PITA.
The usual: do you want to use function X? No problem, here’s your licence. Only costs two souls and lunch at the Ritz.
Back to the queue. It regularly happens that the queue is full of callers but not a single agent rings. You then have to sit it out, after a few minutes the queue continues. And that has nothing to do with idle times. Support has still not been able to find the error.
Call Forwarding. I regularly switch between three devices. The first is my office phone, so no call forwarding. The second device is my smartphone and the third is my landline at home, which I use in my home office. To configure call forwarding, I have to open Edge, log in to the web interface, click on ‘Setup’, click on ‘UC Suite’, click on ‘User directory’ and search for my number. From a predefined list of destinations, I can switch between ‘At home’, ‘Away’ or ‘No forwarding’. It is not possible to create my own names. It is also not possible to change the diversion using the practical speed dialling function.
Edge! No joke, this is the only browser in which the web interface works reasonably well. Admittedly, I haven’t tested Internet Explorer.

Conclusion: Hands off this junk.

Rant over.

My rant on Signal

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:22:50 +0100

After my Matrix experiment failed in my private environment, I am now a 100% Signal user again. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to complain about Signal, on the contrary. There are a few things that are really wrong, which I would like to list here:

Disc space on iOS. The bug has been open since 2021 (!) and has not been solved satisfactorily. Signal currently occupies 6 gigabytes on my iPhone, and the trend is rising.
Signal can be used on a maximum of 5 devices, after that it’s over. This is certainly sufficient for the normal user, but I am working on more devices. Why such a limit at all?
I don’t want to receive notifications on all devices. However, the behaviour of Signal when notifications are switched off is that it constantly asks me if I want to switch on the notifications. So there is only the diversions via iOS itself.

Sometimes I wish I had Jabber back!

Rant over.

Tolino is broken

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:34:20 +0200

I got two Kindles (2nd generation) a long time ago, which prompted me to finally start reading more again. Basically, it worked quite well; I installed Calibre, imported books and moved them to the Kindle from there.

However, I quickly wanted a more up-to-date device that wasn’t from Amazon. I decided on the Tolino Vision 6 and after playing around a bit, I discovered a few things that really annoyed me:

when the device is tilted, an icon appears on the right edge with which the orientation can be changed. This wouldn’t be so bad if the icon didn’t obscure the text underneath. Actually, I don’t want this function at all, but I can’t switch it off.
the power button reacts very spongily. After the ‘click’, it has to be pressed a little harder to make it react.
the book view in the software is worse than on the old Kindle. I can’t see which page I’m on when turning pages and the alphabet at the bottom is absolutely useless because it’s too small.

My conclusion: I’m not giving up hope that one day there will be a manufacturer who produces a good and open device so that you can install another reader without jailbreak if you don’t like the one that came with it. As far as I’m concerned, the guarantee can be cancelled, I’m not particularly interested in that.

Rant over.

Element is broken

Stefan 'gideonstar' Ritter — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been a Signal user for many years and am reasonably happy with it. But soon my son will be of an age where he will also get a smartphone and I will have different requirements than I do for myself. For example, I want a messenger whose server I can host myself and which is not linked to a telephone number. Also I want to keep him away from Telegram and WhatsApp groups for as long as possible.

For this reason, I installed a Matrix (Synapse) server again after a long time and created three accounts. And of course I want to use Element. But after a few days I just can’t understand the following things:

No aliases are possible for contacts. Either my name is “Stefan Ritter” or my name is “Papa”. In our case, “Papa” is of course fine, but as soon as I want to reach contacts outside the family, that would of course be rubbish. Is it really that difficult to implement? Are Spaces and emojis really much more important?
There is no possibility to adjust colours. In contrast to Signal (where this is possible to a limited extent), it is much more difficult to distinguish who has written what in Element. And again: is that so difficult to implement?
This stupid piece of software has 2 sidebars! Who came up with the stupid idea of making them unhideable?
I can sort my contacts and rooms by activity or alphabetically. The funny thing is: Element doesn’t remember this for 3 minutes!
On iOS, I’m used to taking a photo, pressing “Share” and selecting an app. Why the hell is Element not showing up? Well, because of…
You can search for rooms and specify a server for them. If you now think that you will be shown rooms on this server: nope. Rooms on completely different servers appear in rows.
Multiaccount! Come on, it can’t be that I have to install Fluffychat at the same time.
It doesn’t even remember its position and size O.o

In conclusion, I can only say that although Element is usable, development is focussed on completely absurd things. Why don’t you first make a good messenger with useful functions before you start building in some bullshit?

Rant over.