qrys.ch – about what my curiosity has found

Running a Pi-hole securely on Azure

On December 2, 2020 By Marcel In Azure, Customization, Raspberry Pi

Pi-hole is a popular DNS resolver, advertised as a black hole for Internet advertisements. I use it as a DNS filter for parental control as well as an ad and tracking domain filter. As a …

A global Dark Mode for your browser

On June 26, 2020 By Marcel In Customization

The other day, I wondered how to enable dark mode on any of those bright shiny websites. Before long, I found darkmode-js. Here’s how to use it with Tampermonkey.

Mass converting and image processing of scanned 35mm slides

On March 22, 2020 By Marcel In Photo

I have scanned all my slides into TIFF images. Now, I want to improve the color curves a bit and convert them into shareable JPEG files. Marking the files As a first measure, I wanted …

Digitizing my 35mm slides, finally

On March 21, 2020 By Marcel In Photo

Finally, I took the time for digitizing all those slides I had packed up in boxes and magazines some time ago. It’s more than 3200 slides and I wanted to avoid the costs of a …

Using the exiftool on a Synology NAS

On February 28, 2020 By Marcel In Customization, Photo, Programming, Synology

How to use the exiftool on a Synology NAS

Managing WhatsApp photos using the exiftool

On February 22, 2020 By Marcel In Linux, Mobile Phone, Photo

I tried to leverage the exiftool to help me manage my photo library, especially my received WhatsApp image files. These image files are quite heavily, lossy, compressed when sent and stripped of nearly all useful …

A Raspberry Pi-based weather station, publishing to an MQTT topic

On February 3, 2020 By Marcel In Programming, Raspberry Pi, Sensor

This is mainly an iteration of a previous post A Raspberry Pi-based weather station, posting to WordPress (see there for details on the sensor) but this time publishing to an MQTT topic. Setting up the …

Running Spotify on a Kid’s phone, without the age restriction

On January 30, 2020 By Marcel In Android, Customization, Mobile Phone

How to let your kids (under age 13) use spotify. And a what to allow in a pass-rule for a firewall at the same time.

Remote access to a Microsoft Windows 10 Azure Virtual Machine (VM) with TeamViewer

On January 11, 2020 By Marcel In Azure, Linux

Since I have set up my first Azure Windows VM, I wondered how to best access it. There are many options, with their own limitations: RDP (requires an internet-facing open port) Bastion (requires quite involved …

Running NxFilter on a headless Raspberry Pi Zero W

On January 5, 2020 By Marcel In Customization, Linux, Raspberry Pi

Note: This post is mostly a revisit of my older post Running NxFilter on a headless Raspberry Pi, using the Zero W model and the current NxFilter version. NxFilter is the best free solution for a …