When the App You Love Dies, Build Your Own — Introducing LibrisLog

When the App You Love Dies, Build Your Own — Introducing LibrisLog

Posted by Raffael on Posted in Downloads, Personal stuff, Programming, Web Tips Tagged , ,

I was a happy Dante user. For those who don’t know it, Dante was a solid Android book tracker. Scan a barcode, look up metadata, track your reading progress. Simple, effective, and most importantly: it worked. Until it didn’t.
Adding books by title or barcode? The search API the app relied on had stopped responding, so neither ISBN lookups nor name searches worked anymore. Backups? Gone too. Dante had gone quiet: No updates in a long time, and the features that depended on external services had stopped working. I get it, though. Focus shifts. I’ve been there myself. I recently handed one of my own projects over to a new maintainer because I couldn’t keep up anymore. But understanding why doesn’t make it any less frustrating when it’s your bookshelf that’s stuck.
And that’s where the real pain started. Getting my own data out of Dante was a nightmare. There was no export function anymore. […]

Personal note: Passing the Torch on the Open-Source Project QRCoder

Personal note: Passing the Torch on the Open-Source Project QRCoder

Posted by Raffael on Posted in C#.Net, Personal stuff, Programming Tagged ,

Anyone who has searched this blog in recent years for solutions to generate QR codes in .NET will inevitably have come across my project, QRCoder. I launched the library in October 2013, not primarily because I lacked other tools at the time, but as a personal programming challenge: My goal was to implement the official DIN/ISO standard for QR codes natively in C# from scratch myself. To understand the algorithms, to learn something new.
Over the years, this experiment has grown into a very successful open-source project that has now been downloaded millions of times via NuGet and is used in numerous commercial and private projects worldwide.
After 12 years, I decided in September 2025 to hand over the active maintenance and administrative management of the project. In this brief post, I would like to explain the background behind this decision and introduce the new maintainer.
The Reasons for the Transition
Maintaining […]

Speed up the Alexa app on Android – no more sluggishness

Posted by Raffael on Posted in Android, Tutorials Tagged , , ,

You know how it is: you open the Alexa app on your Android smartphone, click through the menus—and every “click” feels like it’s in slow motion. Whether you’re controlling smart home devices or looking for a simple setting, instead of a quick response, using the app becomes a test of patience.
I had exactly this problem. And the solution is as simple as it is curious.

The culprit: Contacts permission

In most cases, the cause of performance issues is not your smartphone or your internet connection, but rather an app permission. More specifically: access to your contacts.
In my case, the app apparently tried to scan through my 1,000+ contacts every time I changed pages. On a second smartphone with fewer contacts, it worked much faster. The fact is, as long as the permission was active, the app became a test of patience.

The solution: revoke […]

Set up Namecheap.com DDNS in Synology DSM

Posted by Raffael on Posted in Test Tagged , , , , , ,

namecheap-ddns-synology-dsm-en

Today’s article is about how to update DNS entries for domains from Namecheap.com via the Synology DSM function DDNS (Dynamic DNS). Since Namecheap.com is neither available as a provider in Synology DSM, nor do the formerly common intermediary services work, this is only possible with a small workaround. And this is exactly what I would like to show you today.

You need the following things for today’s tutorial:

A domain at Namecheap.comA Synology NAS (or a custom NAS with XPEnology)A webserver with PHP support

In the next paragraph we will outline the actual problem again in detail. If you are only interested in the solution, you can skip the following paragraph…

What is the problem with Synology DSN and Namecheap?

Namecheap provides a url/web service that you can call to set a […]

Crash course VPN: PrivadoVPN in test

Posted by Raffael on Posted in Test

Over the last few years, the topic of VPNs has become more and more important. At least that is my personal feeling. Whether for daily surfing or as a sponsor for almost every second YouTuber – VPN providers are now continuously running across our path. Reason enough to test one of these providers again.

Today’s article is about Privado. First of all, to pay tribute to the idea of transparency: I received the account used for the test from Privado free of charge for 30 days. I did not receive any further compensation. Before we start with the actual test, let’s take a quick look at the topic “VPN”. If you already know what a VPN is for and what advantages/disadvantages it has, you can skip the following paragraph.

Why VPN?

First, let’s look at a definition. Wikipedia says…

A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and […]