For some years already, I try to rely for this website on less external resources and avoid ad-powered services to improve the privacy for my dear readers.

Recently, I removed the comments provided by Disqus from this blog, because Disqus introduced too much data sharing with many third parties. Norway just fined this year Disqus 2,5 Mio Euro for tracking without legal basis.

Please find hereafter some tips on how to export comments from Disqus and display them in a privacy-friendly way in your Jekyll blog.

Orient Cruise: Dubai

21 Dec 2021 in Travels on Cruise, Orient, United arabic emirates

I’ve been for a week in December 2021 on a cruise in the Orient. Let me share my impressions and thoughts of this journey.

I dedicate this text to Vincent and Sara. If we cannot share the experience, so let me share at least the story.

Prologue

Also in 2021, holiday plans fell victim to yet another Covid-19 wave. Eventually, I waited until mid December and booked in face of the next emerging Covid-19 variant Omicron the least adventures holidays of my adulthood: a week-long all-inclusive cruise in the Orient with every aspect handled in due care by a world-class global-scale tour operator.

For the sake of completeness, let me quickly recap the outbound connection to the destination. I got a Rail&Fly ticket to a nearby airport in Germany. The Airbus A380 to Dubai, a huge airplane with two floors, was approximately occupied 30%, maybe less. I use Atmosfair.de for CO2 compensation. Not sure who would need to pay for all those empty seats around me. The time difference between Germany and Dubai is 3 hours. I arrive after about 6 hours of flight and a short sleep of about 3 hours at 6 o’clock in the morning. On top of mandatory PCR tests to get on the flight, it seems that Dubai tests just again all tourists upon arrival. No need to wait for the result – it is delivered about 3 hours later to you via SMS. I wonder what happens in the case of a positive test. I didn’t find out as my test was fortunately negative. 😁

The tour operator takes care of the transfer to the cruise ship. They also handle all subsequent paper work to enter the destination countries, that means here the United Arabic Emirates (UAE) and Oman. For this purpose, they require all passengers to hand over their passports before getting on board of the ship. After some hesitation and some questioning, I resign and hand out my passport, too.

Once on board of the ship, I drop off my luggage, eat something and head out to explore Dubai on my own.

Please find a 2021 update below and furtherdown a comment from 2024!

Some companies offer their employees to access their corporate computer work space remotely using a remote desktop connection. The company Citrix provides software for such a connection. To connect, the employees need the software Citrix Workspace on their terminal devices. The company provides on their download page also files for Linux including openSUSE. Unfortunately, their version 1912 from 12 December 2019 did not just work on my openSUSE Tumbleweed 64bit computer (and earlier versions I tried neither).

Road Trip from Germany to the Retreat in the Alps

04 Mar 2019 in Travels on Germany, France

At the beginning of March, I started my retreat stay in the French Alps to take care for myself and rest. Before the great rest though, I had to get from Brussels to the Alps: My first road trip.

The black slope for all road trip novices. Photo by Raul Taciu.

If the mountain won’t come to the prophet, then the prophet must go to the mountain.¹

If the mountain is very far away, the prophet is well advised to rather ride by horse, Uber or even take a plane. I was lucky to get the chance to use the car of the family. Unfortunately, this car was not in Brussels, but in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. Though, a car is much smaller and more mobile than a mountain, it was again me who had to go get the car.

With some advice from StackOverflow, I wrote a short node script that I placed in the file $HOME/bin/get-cookies.js with the executive bit set via chmod +x $HOME/bin/get-cookies. It relies on the library puppeteer to control a browser instance of headless Chromium, which must be installed first via npm i puppeteer.

Then, you can call get-cookies.js https://google.com to get all installed cookies upon request of the page given as a parameter (here: https://google.com). Note that Puppeteer creates its own Chromium user profile which it cleans up on every run.

Source Code of ‘get-cookies.js’

#!/usr/bin/env node

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

const url = process.argv[2];

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: true, args: ['--disable-dev-shm-usage'] });
  try {
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });

    var cookies = await page._client.send('Network.getAllCookies');
    cookies = cookies.cookies.map( cookie => {
      cookie.expiresUTC = new Date(cookie.expires * 1000);

      return cookie;
    });

    var persistantCookies = cookies.filter(c => {
      return !c.session;
    });

    console.log({
      persistantCookies: persistantCookies,
      persistantCookiesCount: persistantCookies.length,
    });
  } catch(error) {
    console.error(error);
  } finally {
    await browser.close();
  }
})();