Hi there 👋

My name is Rick. I am a tech enthusiast who sees life as one big project, one of which we are all a small part.

  • I am a student software engineer at Avans from the Netherlands, with the mindset of not just doing something, but doing it well.

Autostarting, auto-updating, rootless Podman containers

I doubt I’ll be alone when I say that my server setup is a mess. It is a monolith of different services slammed together on the same machine. Some run on the bare metal, some run in a VM, some run in containers. Recently I put some work into migrating my applications away from bare metal and into containers. While that effort is not complete just yet, it has already broken on me after podman-compose stopped creating pods per compose file....

January 16, 2022 Âˇ 7 min Âˇ Rick

Windows 10 on old Macs without Boot Camp

Installing Windows 10 on older Macs is still possible but may be tricky because Apple doesn’t officially support this. Boot Camp Assistant has an internal list of Windows 7-only Macs in its Info.plist. With some hackery and foolery you therefore are able to trick it into installing Windows 10 on an otherwise unsupported Mac. Partially. I prefer to take the manual route and taking full control over this process. There are a number of hurdles to overcome....

February 28, 2021 Âˇ 8 min Âˇ Rick

A Touching Scenario

Recently I purchased a supposedly faulty A1342 MacBook6,1 (‘09 13" white MacBook). The listing mentioned it “would no longer turn on” and the seller tried various things to get it back to life, to no avail. Let’s diagnose and fix it! Diagnosis: First boot Unboxing the laptop from its original box (what a find!), it indeed did not turn on. The SIL (Sleep Indicator Light) would flash a few times, which according to Apple’s website meant the battery was faulty....

January 30, 2021 Âˇ 6 min Âˇ Rick

Unforbidden Grounds

Someone who has checked out this site before might have noticed it, for the longest time, had a dreadful “403 Forbidden” error. Oops. The reason for this is pretty simple: I never bothered to set up a site and configure Nginx with it. It tried to access static content, failed because there was no index.html, tried a directory listing, also failed there because it is not configured to allow this and well, there we are....

January 30, 2021 Âˇ 2 min Âˇ Rick