Goodbye Sailfish OS and Jolla

Already in September 2017 I migrated away from Sailfish OS and I am now now using an Android phone. For me, this is the first time I left the niche market of alternative phone operating systems to go mainstream. Originally I used a Nokia dumb phone and then in 2009 got the Nokia N900 as my first smartphone with Maemo as OS, which was so much joy, easily extensible due to the open platform, and had a sliding keyboard. After a few years I continued with the Nokia N9 with the now abandoned Meego. The N9 was released shortly before the Nokia phone department was switched to produce Windows phones for Microsoft. However, a group of former Nokia developers formed Jolla, a company producing an alternative phone operating system called SailfishOS.

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Arcade Fire – Creature Comfort



Wird mal wieder Zeit für Musik und einen #songoftheweek. Über Arcade Fire hatte ich vor langer Zeit auf Facebook im Rahmen von 7 Days — 7 Songs schon mal geschrieben und damals hatte ich den Song “Afterlife” (2013) empfohlen. Auch diesmal beschäftigt sich Arcade Fire wieder mit dem Tod, allerdings geht es in “Creature Comfort” nicht um das, was danach kommt, sondern um Depressionen und Suizid. Irgendwie aber doch ein durchgängiges Thema dieser Band, wie die Lyrics verlauten lassen:

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Upgrading a VM from macOS 10.12 Sierra to macOS 10.13 High Sierra in VirtualBox

For testing purposes, I have a VM in VirtualBox currently runnning macOS 10.12 Sierra. Now that macOS 10.13 High Sierra is in Beta, I wanted to upgrade my VM to this new release. However, this proved to be difficult with the usual ways. This blog post will describe how to upgrade a Sierra VM to High Sierra.

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How to run rsync on remote host with sudo

Sometimes I want to transfer files including ownership. This is not possible as normal user as the chown(2) system call requires special privileges, that is: uid == 0. However, I do not want to open ssh access for root, but go with the usual way to elevate my privileges: sudo.

I will go through common solutions presented on the web and explain why these do not work at all without significant modifications on the remote host and then present a working solution using X11-Forwarding that is less invasive.

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10 Years of Music History on last.fm

Only recently I noticed by chance I have been scrobbling for more than 10 years now. The verb “to scrobble” means submitting the name and artist of songs you are listening to to the last.fm web service, which was originally started as a research project for music recommendations called Audioscrobbler. I joined the site in August 2006 and they have been collecting all the tracks I listened to in their database ever since.

My last.fm Profile, scrobbling since 29 Aug 2006

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