Hi, I'm Ben

Vaultwarden (Bitwarden) mit Docker auf Synology NAS selbst hosten

You can find the English version of this guide here: Self-Hosting Vaultwarden (Bitwarden) on Synology NAS with Docker

Passwort-Manager-Dienste sind in den letzten Jahren deutlich teurer geworden. Gleichzeitig ist mein Vertrauen in kommerzielle Anbieter - insbesondere aus den USA - gesunken. Als jemand, der Wert auf digitale Souveränität legt, war es für mich an der Zeit, die Kontrolle über meine Passwörter zurückzugewinnen. Ein Jahr habe ich Proton Pass ausprobiert - aber ich bin nicht wirklich zufrieden: die Features in der App sind eingeschränkt, und die Synchronisation mit Browsern funktioniert nicht immer. Die Browserintegration und die Erkennung von Passwortfeldern scheint noch in den Kinderschuhen zu stecken.

Self-Hosting Vaultwarden (Bitwarden) with Docker on Synology NAS

You can find the German version of this guide here: Vaultwarden auf Synology mit Docker selbst hosten

Password manager services have become significantly more expensive in recent years. At the same time, my trust in commercial providers - especially from the USA - has decreased. As someone who values digital sovereignty, it was time for me to regain control over my passwords. I tried Proton Pass for a year - but I’m not really satisfied: the features in the app are limited, and synchronization with browsers doesn’t always work. The browser integration and password field recognition still seem to be in their infancy.

Create Self-Signed HTTPS Certificates with a Custom Root CA

Once you’ve established your own Root Certificate Authority, the next step is issuing server certificates for your local services. This guide walks through creating HTTPS certificates that are automatically trusted by all devices where your Root CA is installed.

Create a Custom Root Certificate Authority for Self-Signed Certificates

When running multiple services in a local network—whether for smart home automation, home labs, or development environments—HTTPS encryption becomes essential. Instead of accepting browser warnings for every self-signed certificate, creating your own Root Certificate Authority (Root CA) provides a clean, professional solution.

Automatically discover tools for Azure OpenAI Realtime API

Azure now provides a unified Realtime API for low‑latency, multimodal conversations over WebRTC or WebSockets. If you’ve used the earlier preview versions (for example the GPT‑4o realtime preview), the new generation model is simply called gpt-realtime and the API follows the same event-driven pattern: you open a session, configure defaults via session.update, stream input, and receive streaming output (text, function calls, audio, etc.).

Test ILogger in .NET the easy way (with an in-memory logger)

Logging is part of the contract of many components: when things fail, when branches are taken, when work completes. If a class owns logic, it should own its log output too. That makes logs worth testing–especially for diagnostics, reliability, and supportability.

Azure Document Intelligence – Fix: ContentSourceNotAccessible (Invalid data URL)

Problem

Training custom models (for example, delivery notes) in Azure Document Intelligence initially worked fine. Suddenly, both training and auto-labeling started failing with “Internal Server Error”. In the model details, the following appeared:

Provision Microsoft Fabric with Azure Bicep

Overview

Microsoft Fabric consolidates analytics workloads (including Power BI) on a tenant-wide capacity. These Fabric capacities (SKUs F2–F2048) can be provisioned declaratively with Bicep like any other Azure resource. This post covers:

Use SSH for Git Authentication in Azure DevOps

If you work with Azure DevOps Git repos, SSH is often the simplest, most secure, and most policy‑friendly way to authenticate. Many organizations disable Personal Access Tokens (PATs) for security reasons, which breaks HTTPS cloning and pushes. If you’ve seen this error when using HTTPS, you’ve run into such a policy:

Raspberry Pi WS2812B Lightstrip Unit Testing Strategies with .NET

Testing hardware-driven projects pays off quickly. Compared to driving a single LEGO motor, controlling a WS2812B lightstrip involves timing constraints, color math, frame buffers, and update sequencing–lots of places where regressions can hide. A focused unit-testing approach helps keep this code reliable and fast to iterate on. For more background on the general pattern, see the Build HAT article: Raspberry Build HAT: Unit Testing Strategies with .NET .

Raspberry Pi WS2812B Lightstrip Control with .NET

In this beginner-friendly guide, you’ll learn how to control a WS2812B (aka “NeoPixel”) LED light strip with a Raspberry Pi using .NET. We’ll enable SPI on the Pi, wire the strip correctly (including best practices like a level shifter and a series resistor), and write a small .NET 9 app using the Iot.Device.Bindings library to animate colors. We’ll also publish the app as a self-contained linux-arm64 binary so no .NET runtime is needed on the Pi.

Raspberry Build HAT: Unit Testing Strategies with .NET

If you go beyond hobby tinkering and aim for reliable, maintainable software, you need tests. Hardware projects are no exception. In fact, the closer you get to IO, timing, and device state, the more you benefit from having a fast feedback loop and repeatable verification.

Raspberry Build HAT: Controlling LEGO Engines with .NET

In this beginner-friendly guide, you’ll learn how to control LEGO motors connected to a Raspberry Pi via the official Raspberry Pi Build HAT – using a simple, pure .NET application. We’ll use the Iot.Device.BuildHat NuGet package, which provides a friendly .NET API for the Build HAT. No Python required. We’ll also publish the app as a self-contained .NET 9 binary for linux-arm64 so you do not need to install .NET on the Raspberry Pi. This approach is easy to set up, reliable, and a great starting point for your own robotics projects.

Azure DevOps Path Exclude Trigger: Comparing 'docs', 'docs/', 'docs/**' and 'docs/**/*'

When configuring path-based triggers or excludes in Azure DevOps pipelines, the pattern you use can have a significant impact on which files or folders will trigger a build. There are subtle but important differences between the patterns docs, docs/, docs/** and docs/**/*.

Scheduled Builds for Cloudflare Deployments with GitHub Actions

Static site generators like Hugo do not have a built-in mechanism to automatically publish content–such as blog posts–at a specific time. If you want a post to go live at a certain hour, you need to rebuild and redeploy your site at that moment. This means you have to trigger the build process yourself, which can be inconvenient or easy to forget.

Automatically deploy GPT-4.1 Mini in Azure OpenAI via Bicep

The official Microsoft documentation on deploying Azure OpenAI models is generally helpful, but specific examples are often still missing, especially for new models such as gpt-4.1-mini and newer SKU types such as DataZoneStandard. Anyone who wants to provide a current model such as the gpt-4.1-mini programmatically is therefore quickly faced with unanswered questions.

From ASP.NET Core to Hugo: My Blog's Migration to Cloudflare

Like many developers, my blogging journey started with WordPress. More than 20 years ago. It was convenient, widely supported, and quick to set up. But over time, the drawbacks began to pile up: security issues, constant updates, performance tuning, plugin juggling, costly – the overhead was real. I wanted something more streamlined, something that gave me control without stealing my time.

Running a Local Docker Registry with PowerShell

Setting up a local Docker registry is a great way to manage and share container images in your development environment without relying on external services like Docker Hub. This guide walks you through setting up a private Docker registry on your machine using PowerShell on Windows.

Task.Run vs. TaskFactory.StartNew

When working with asynchronous or parallel code in C#, you’ll inevitably encounter two common ways to start tasks: Task.Run and TaskFactory.StartNew. At first glance, they seem similar - but they behave differently and should be used appropriately depending on the context.

Setting up GitHub Copilot for Better Commit Messages in VS Code

Look, we’ve all been there. It’s 11 PM, you’ve just fixed a nasty bug, and you’re about to commit with “fix stuff” or “update things”. Six months later, you’re staring at your git history wondering what the hell you were thinking.