Posts on Jonas' Blog

Wake-on-GPIO

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:00:00 +0100

Alternative title: How to spend an afternoon at Bastli.

Wake-on-LAN has a few issues that I personally don’t like. The primary thing that I don’t like is that it relies on the mainboard and network interface to be not-quite-shutdown. This leads to some unnecessary power draw while the PC/server is supposed to be shut down.

In addition to that, the way WOL works bothers me. Basically, the OS needs to shut down in a very specific way and instruct the NIC to wait for WOL-packets. Every single time. It is not a one-off configuration option that is stored on a NIC (at least not on my hardware). This leads to WOL not working when a PC didn’t experience a clean shutdown. This happened to me multiple times, sometimes because power went out for a bit, other times simply because the PC crashed.

Advent of Controlled Media Usage

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 20:38:00 +0100

One blogpost ago, I wrote about Stuff I’ve spent entirely too much time on. That title was of course in jest, as I think I’ve spent a (somewhat) reasonable amount of time on VPN and DNS, given that it makes my setup quite a bit more secure and also makes certain things simpler.

There are, however, things I have also spent a lot of time on, where I’d say “yes, that is actually a waste of time”.

Stuff I've spent entirely too much time on during the last 2 weeks

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:25:00 +0100

This blog post comes in two variants, based on a simple condition.

Are you my thesis supervisor: I’ve done lots of thesis :) this blog post is finished now.
Otherwise: keep reading

Recently I stumbled upon my old NAS. It’s been turned off since a while, and I really had no clue what’s on it. However, I decided I should integrate it in my “homelab”. The homelab I had at that point consisted exclusively of one old desktop computer at my parents place. Further, the computer is directly connected to the ISP router, and essentially everything I accessed was over the public internet (with good credentials of course).

(Ab)using rust macros to create parametrized modules

Tue, 14 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The (very niche) Problem

Some time ago I came across this blogpost which describes the agony the author went through to provide both a synchronous and an asynchronous version of their library.

What the author opted for in the end is a library that either generated async or normal code depending on the presence (or absence) of a feature flag. Importantly however, this would not work to enable both synchronous and asynchronous code generation at the same time (since synchronous code is emitted at the absence of the “asynchronous” flag).

Customize your Firefox Search

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Recently I have been plagued by search results polluted by low-quality and/or uninformative results. One website annoys me in particular, which I will refer to as mediocre.com. Hence, I would like for these articles to never appear in my search results again.

Firefox luckily allows you to configure your search, but it is not as user-friendly as one might hope.

First we need to allow custom search engines at all:

a little ssh trick

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

I finally took time to set up my SSH properly. Due to the nature of my setup, I needed to use non-default ssh ports.

Kind of annoying, isn’t it? You have to specify the port ever time you connect, like so:

ssh user@host -p port

Worse even, if you have multiple ssh certificates, you need to specify that as well!

Luckily this problem has a very easy solution :)

SSH Configs

You can create a config file at ~/.ssh/config and save your frequent connected servers there.

My Favourite Programming Language

Thu, 18 May 2023 11:07:00 +0000

As hopefully many people are aware, C and C++ have a notion of “Undefined Behaviour”. Few people seem to realize what that means though, so I wanted to write a funny program to illustrate it.

Most people just seem to think that if Undefined Behaviour happens, then just some values might be random. However, I think it’s much worse than that.

At the moment I am using gcc version 13.1.1 20230429, so if you want to reproduce results I would recommend sticking to that (or very similar) compiler versions.

Self Hosting Gitea

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 22:13:00 +0000

Some time ago I decided I want to take matters into my own hands and host my own code. I was aware of a few git hosting services: GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and Gitea.

GitHub was no option, as you can’t self-host that.

I was not very familiar with GitLab, and it looked clunky, big, and slow to me.

BitBucket I was not a fan of due to it being product of an Australian company. See here why that might not be a good thing

A new beginning

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 21:35:00 +0000

Hello! :3

This is a new beginning of my blogging adventures. Maybe I’ll find more time and be less lazy than last time.

Also, I got a fresh domain. (which looks very sus but idc)

New blog posts should be coming soon.