Tool

I’m a convinced user of OneDrive Personal. Bundled with M365, it’s a cheap option to get 1 TB of cloud storage. Having plenty of cloud storage at hand, I’m also using my OneDrive to run automated backups of my servers. There are various solutions capable of uploading files to OneDrive, including rclone. However, I was looking for a solution which enables me to grant my backup script only access to one specific folder instead of my entire cloud drive – better safe than sorry....

My DSL provider TAL.de offers to assign a static and a dynamic IP address on PPPoE dial in. The dynamic IP address is the primary one, used for accessing the internet. Packets to the static IP address are routed to the router as well. Here’s how to set up things up on a Unifi Security Gateway (USG). By default, USG only allows for one IP address when dialing in via PPPoE....

Over the weekend I’ve been looking around for a free service which monitors my websites. My requirement was that I want to be able to monitor both HTTP and HTTPS sites, I need support for authentication and the monitoring service should be able to check if a specific keyword exists within the watched site (instead of just assuming that a HTTP Status Code 200 is okay). Furthermore, I needed notifications in case of downtimes (Email and Pushbullet is fine for me)....

Several months ago, I wrote a blog post about reducing a PDF file’s size. Since then, I’ve used that technique many times. However, you may want to control the DPI (dots per inch) even more specific. Here’s how to do it: gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.7 \ -dDownsampleColorImages=true \ -dDownsampleGrayImages=true \ -dDownsampleMonoImages=true \ -dColorImageResolution=120 \ -dGrayImageResolution=120 \ -dMonoImageResolution=120 \ -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf Hint: This also works on MacOS. Just install GhostScript using Homebrew:...

Using a single line of GhostScript command on my Ubuntu’s terminal, I was able to reduce the size of a PDF file from 6 MB to approximately 1 MB: gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf You can also use the following parameters for -dPDFSETTINGS instead of /screen: /screen – Lowest quality, lowest size /ebook – Moderate quality /printer – Good quality /prepress – Best quality, highest size Update: Read Part 2 of this blog post for more detailled file size reduction settings....