Author Archive

SONOS sans App

Coarse Fabric, black, this is the front grill of the speaker

SONOS speakers seem to be decent hardware. So when a friend mentioned the IKEA branded, SONOS produced Symfonisk speakers, I had to take a look. At 130€ for a single speaker, they are not exactly cheap, but they are certainly a lot cheaper than anything SONOS would usually offer. The build quality is good, audio quality is supposedly good. But the important question for me is: can I use them at a decent level of privacy? Is it possible to make these speakers useful without the SONOS app and a SONOS account and without sending usage information over to SONOS every couple of minutes? Let’s find out!

Read the rest of this entry »

Removing Git Credentials (Windows)

I found myself in an environment where I need to be able to log out users automatically.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spotify CarThing Internet Access

The Spotify CarThing was discontinued late 2022 and subsequently heavily discounted. I got a friend of mine to send one to me, because at that time it was pretty apparent that there was a good chance of this being very hackable. First order of business for me was: internet access.

Here, we’re setting up a Raspberry Pi with a Socks-Proxy, a local webserver and the relevant settings on the CarThing itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

Securing a QNAP NAS

I recently bought a new NAS, after my old one turned ten. I am very satisfied with the reliability of my old QNAP which is still supported with software updates. This makes me a happy customer, and so I did not see any reason to switch brands. After initial setup (networking, firmware update, disabling most services) I did not get around to finishing its setup for a few days. It basically sat there from late May 2020 to early July 2020. Somehow it contracted QSnatch in that timeframe. I’ll explain what I did differently after that.

Read the rest of this entry »

tcpdump docker traffic

Tiny howto, so don’t need to look this up as often. In order to tcpdump your own docker traffic, you will need to identify the appropriate interface first:

# docker network ls
NETWORK ID      NAME                      DRIVER              SCOPE
15a300de        bridge                    bridge              local
88d8d7d1        nextcloud_default         bridge              local

From that, we get the network ID. This will be included (at least partly) in the interface name, so we’ll just take the first few characters and grep:

# ip addr | grep 88d8b
9: br-88d8d7d1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default

this gives us the full interface name (ok, basically this is just “br-” followed by the network ID).

We can then just use tcpdump any way we like:

tcpdump -i br-88d8d7d1


Author

Claudius Coenen is a tech-enthusiast. He's writing on all kinds of topics, including programming, technology, gadgets and media.

This site features his occasional articles, findings, documentations.

Categories

Connect

RSS Recent Bookmarks

Legal