Miscellaneous

How to get rid of Cookie-AdTracking – easily

TL;DR: Delete cookies when closing the browser, allow-list only the sites you want to stay logged in. It’s really that easy.

I recently checked my browser settings and was “surprised” to find more than 3.000 cookies. Most of them from sites I didn’t recognize, many from obvious ad-tracking companies. These companies, with whom I have no business, were all able to track my online activity. Seriously? 3.000 companies being able to track me? Okay maybe some of them were not valid anymore – but still – that’s just ways too much.

Good bye posting on LinkedIn?

“Why am I posting on LinkedIn?”

That question recently just came to my mind.

My inital idea was to change from LinkIn posting to posting on another, work/IT related Mastodon-account – just for the sake of getting off a commercial platform. But then I started asking myself the “whys” …

How to filter / hide / ignore News in an RSS feed

Recently I realized that there are certain topics in my news / RSS feed that I ALWAYS scroll over. I’m just not interested in them. Like news about certain brands, manufacturer or products. I wondered, if there is no easy way to simply NOT see them in my feed. I mean I filter by only looking at keywords in the title. Really super simple.

How to fix: Jabra Elite 75T volume too low / decreasing

Problem: Recently I faced the issue with my Jabra Elite InEars that while I was using them, the volume started to continually decrease until I had to max out the volume on the phone. Yet the sound was still barely loud enough to hear it. After not using them for a while, sound was okay again (still quiet but better) until volume started to decrease again while using.

The internet is FULL of advice about Bluetooth settings, resetting the phone, entering developer mode etc. Yet it was ways easier.

Exclude OpenAI GPTBot from future crawling a website

In order to tell OpenAI to stop crawling a website and thus not use the content for training GPT, OpenAI now supports to disallow GPTBot from accessing your site.

The Information can be found on the GPTBot – OpenAI API website:

Completely disallow GPTBot:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Allow/disallow certain parts of a website:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /directory-1/
Disallow: /directory-2/

For WordPress sites, I can recommend the Virtual Robots.txt – plugin.

How to fix: Jabra Elite 75T different volume of in-Ear headphones

I often just use one of the in-ears of my Jabra 75T. Recently I figured out that when I use both in-ears headphones, the right one was significantly louder than the left one. After a quick hearing test, I was convinced that it is not a problem with my hearing but with one of the headphones.

After some back and forth, the easiest solution was:
Simply hard reset the headphones in 2 simple steps.
If resetting does NOT solve the issue permanently: Try cleaning a specific part!

AI Text Generation and Blogging: How AI-Assisted Writing Can Revolutionize Your Blogging Experience

Blogging has become a popular platform for individuals and businesses to share their ideas, opinions, and experiences with the world. However, blogging just occasionally can be a challenging task. It requires getting into the writing flow, writing cohesively throughout an article, crafting a proper introduction, and ensuring the use of correct grammar and vocabulary. For non-native English speakers, it can be even more challenging to write in a language that is not their mother tongue. The lack of proper vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure can hinder their writing ability and prevent them from expressing their thoughts effectively.

AI Image Generation and the Future of Photography and Graphics Industry

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been transforming various industries, and the photography and graphics industry is no exception. With the development of AI image generation tools, it is now possible to create realistic images that are indistinguishable from those captured by a camera or created by a human designer. While this technology holds immense potential for businesses in terms of cost and time efficiency, it will also bring about significant changes in the industry and its related sectors.

My critical view about “the Metaverse”

Recently the term “Metaverse” is across like in every IT related news. Noone really knows what it is but it seems to be the hot shit you have to be into! And it seems to be THE ultimate solution for so many odd problems AND a totally new business market!

The “metaverse” topic has followed me now a couple of months and I had a couple of discussions already about my critical view about the topic. And if it was worth discussing so often – it might be worth writing it down as well. 😀

Samsung Soundbar does not connect to SmartTV

When you own both a Samsung Soundbar (HW-[something]) and a Samsung Smart-TV, you would assume that they work in nice harmony. Which they usually do! Just once in a (seldom) while, the both just don’t connect any more and it seems there is no way to connect them again.

Recently we ran into the same trouble. It required a lot of forum reading, searching, reading support pages. Especially as it requires sound-resetting both devices and does not require hard-resetting the TV (loosing channel list, favourites et. al). As it was a real pain to figure it out, I wrote down my process.

The following steps worked for me the last time I had to try it.

Soundbar (maybe this is not required?)
- turn off
- press (and hold) the stop button until the soundbar displays “init, ok”
TV:
- Remove soundbar from the config:
  Menu > System > Device manager > Soundshare > remove Soundbar
- turn off the TV
- disconnect from power
- wait ~3 min
- reconnect & power on
Soundbar:
- Power on
- switch to TV mode and wait for connection
- MAYBE reset soundbar: press & hold “play” until it displays “reset”

Hope this helps! Leave a comment if it helped you or if there’s a faster way to reconnect both devices.