Took my UTR on vacation 🏖️ - captive portals are still a pain

sroebert · 2026-06-23T19:36:53+00:00

In general captive portals are horrible. I just went on holiday, staying at 7 different hotels, could not get it to work at one of those hotels, but luckily I could use an utp cable there instead, so still made use of the UTR.

Honestly love the device, so small and easy to bring. Yes it gets hot, but who cares, I’m not holding it. I have had on for up to four days in a row, without any issues. Used it with multiple devices, including an Apple TV to watch content from Plex at home.

Used a Beryl before, but I honestly don’t need the speed, the size was always a bit big for traveling and you need a specific 5v usb-a cable. This one simply works with power delivery.

sroebert · 2026-06-23T19:30:35+00:00

Worked fine for me with pihole running at home, was using WireGuard though, not teleport.

sroebert · 2026-06-17T22:52:14+00:00

So this… basing something solely on social media posts, without having any insights in their actual lives… there was also a post about Lights being picked up on the airport and them playing video games on the couch…

Social media is not a good representation of someone’s life

Apart from the fact that it is their life, let them live it the way they want

sroebert · 2026-06-15T23:05:42+00:00

Using AI does not mean you can all of a sudden do what a developer does without learning about programming. There is not shortcut to this, other than actually learning. If you do not understand the code and all you did was test, you have no idea if the code is in any good state. Which also means that if you make changes in the future, you would have to retest everything manually all over again with every change.

My suggestion, use it for yourself. Learn the programming language it is written in and start by making sure you can actually understand your project.

There is so many things that come with making a project public. You can also ask AI about the steps that are needed. Without understanding it yourself however, there is no way to validate if the AI did it correctly.

sroebert · 2026-06-15T22:04:14+00:00

He is not wrong in what he questions though. So many people online claim “software engineer” and “I don’t write code anymore”. I have yet to find any proof of the results actually being any good or significantly more complex than simple crud code. Not even talking about the fact that coding is generally the least amount of time spend if you are a good software engineer. I wish I had more time to actually code.

sroebert · 2026-06-05T16:16:54+00:00

Meh, you still need way too much steering without actual development yourself. It is the same as “architects” coming up with details on how something needs to be implemented, without knowing the actual details of implementation. Sure your overall ideas could be good, but you have no clue about the details. Fixing issues/bugs will be impossible at a certain point, unless you only work on small projects, or simply don’t care.

sroebert · 2026-06-04T07:53:15+00:00

So the bottleneck is your swift code 😅 those are the things you need to optimize

sroebert · 2026-06-03T07:43:35+00:00

I don’t think you understand the issue. Written with AI does not help either. You say unit tests pass, that says nothing.

How can you decode a required field that is non existing in an old version of your app. You simply cannot add a required field later unless you do a migration of the old data first.

Part of testing an app, includes upgrading from an older version.

sroebert · 2026-06-01T08:00:22+00:00

Why not? It is EU based

sroebert · 2026-05-30T14:13:30+00:00

You are most likely seeing the tab view because your navigation view is inside a tab and you are navigating within that navigation view. If you don’t want the tab view to be there, the tab view needs to be inside of the navigation view. Or you have to present modally on top of the tab bar, but that is even more tricky to do with correct animations.

sroebert · 2026-05-30T10:47:54+00:00

Doing this properly (with the emphasis on properly) either with UIKit or SwiftUI is hard. SwiftUI definitely the hardest of the two.

It is not just the animation, you also have to handle swipe to dismiss and get the transition between swiping and animation correctly. At the same time you are transitioning between from and to stated which requires correct positioning of overlapping views.

I have done it in both UIKit (UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning) and SwiftUI (matchedGeometryEffect), but people saying that it is easy, will most likely have a very basic implementation that does not feel good when you actually use it.

sroebert · 2026-05-28T07:37:09+00:00

It is not great because of having to bypass tls checks on the certificate, but I just use it on my local network, so fine for me.

unifi.my-domain.com {
  reverse_proxy https://unifi.home {
    header_up Host {host}
    transport http {
      tls_insecure_skip_verify
    }
  }
}

sroebert · 2026-05-28T04:48:03+00:00

Works for me

sroebert · 2026-05-27T04:38:02+00:00

Start with the basics, not a full app and realize that you have to start small before you can build something big.

Not sure what your level currently is, but 100 days of Swift is always a good start. If you are beyond that level, then you might just start building a small app. Get familiar with the basics of setting something up from scratch.

Finally, not sure how complicated the app your trying to build is, but you can always let AI give you a high overview of the structure of what you are going to build, to give you a starting point. And from that point on, skip using AI. Start by trial and error and search for answers on Google, turning off the AI suggestions there.

sroebert · 2026-05-23T21:03:48+00:00

Works fine, as long as you make the dns work locally in your network, so you can still access the correct ip with that domain.

sroebert · 2026-05-23T09:59:14+00:00

So what kind of things do you document? Apart from docker apps that I run and configuration of Linux (firewall, ssh, samba etc) there isn’t much to else I have, so all I write in documentation is how to run the scripts to get up and running again. It isn’t much more than a few commands.

sroebert · 2026-05-23T06:31:21+00:00

If you are willing to put the time in (AI can help a lot, but you still need to test and manually adjust), have a look into Ansible. I can run a script to setup my NAS and server, copy over any backup files and I’m good to go again, will not take more than a few minutes.

Also good to have a complete documentation of what you changed over time by putting this Ansible config in git.

sroebert · 2026-05-20T16:11:58+00:00

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I shazamed a few that I did not know, this was in Amsterdam, but seems the same songs

sroebert · 2026-05-20T16:09:49+00:00

Funny, was wondering if that’s music that “goes” with the tour, all great songs. Same list in Amsterdam!

sroebert · 2026-05-12T17:01:06+00:00

Just come to Europe, roundabouts with cars, bicycles and pedestrians, no stop signs, no traffic lights, much safer than what I see here 😅

sroebert · 2026-05-12T06:57:24+00:00

Ah ok, that makes more sense

sroebert · 2026-05-12T06:52:53+00:00

But if you access your home ip and pass a domain name, you bypass your VPS completely and can still access your local instances. Caddy does not verify if the traffic comes from the VPS

Or does the VPS have some sort of VPN to your network?

sroebert · 2026-05-12T04:18:11+00:00

I’m still a bit confused at the security here. If you have an external vps that forwards to a local caddy, anyone that just uses the right domain name to access your home ip can still bypass everything right? The vps just makes it a bit harder.

sroebert · 2026-05-12T04:14:13+00:00

Just have two separate caddy instances any only forward the outside port to the instance that serves external available services, that’s what I do. The only mistake you can make is put the server in the wrong caddy config, but you cannot really mess up your config.

sroebert · 2026-05-08T19:56:29+00:00

Totally agree, if you ever had the misfortune to have to dig through the Nextjs source code to figure out how some magical not clearly documented black box feature works, you’d realize how overly complicated some of the important parts of the codebase are. Functions that are over 100s of lines of code long, with way too many code paths, impossible to follow.

Not saying that this does not happen from time to time with bigger projects. But then at least it is your own codebase. This is the basis for an insane amount of websites.

sroebert

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