It still works!
Two years ago, when my girlfriend and I moved together, I rented a VDSL router, a FRITZ!Box 7590 AX. In my second flat, I still had a FRITZ!Box 7490. But one and a half years later, I replaced the wired Internet connection in the second flat with a cellular based one, and the 7490 had no use anymore. ⌘ Read more

Two years with my new laptop 💻
It’s now about two years since I got my new laptop and replaced my Surface Go and my desktop computer with it to be more flexible when commuting. Here’s a small recap on why I’m so happy about my companion. ⌘ Read more

My October ‘24 in Review
October has also been over for three days now, so it’s high time to take a (very) brief look back. ⌘ Read more

It’s been seven years since my father passed, taken from us far too soon at the age of 51. I was only 18 then, and while time has softened some of the pain, his influence remains a constant part of me. He was a person full of curiosity and passion, qualities I feel he passed down to me in his own way. ⌘ Read more

Hiking in the Alps!
Yesterday, we returned from a 5-day vacation in the Bavarian Alps, and it was absolutely wonderful! ⌘ Read more

Bitwarden finally released the native Android app (written in Kotlin) with version 2024.10.1. I used the beta since it was released and Vaultwarden updated to support it, and I can definitely say it’s a huge improvement to the previous Xamarin version. 👍 ⌘ Read more

Hiking in the Alps?
As my girlfriend finally finished her last exams last week, and now we have time for enjoyable activities again, we used yesterday to do another hike in the surrounding area. ⌘ Read more

Memos
With the current drama around WordPress and Automattic, I was searching for alternatives to Simplenote, the app I am currently using to save my notes and keep them synced. ⌘ Read more

Walking through the park. 🚶‍♂️ I’ll definitely miss this nice area once we move away from Kassel! 🌇 ⌘ Read more

Hetzner has Object Storage in beta now. I got access to it, but one thing is holding me back from using it: A fixed price (5,95 € per month per bucket), even if there is nothing stored in there or way less than the included 1 TB. Why not bill based on actual usage, like most other services are doing it nowadays? I guess I will keep using Scaleway Object Storage and Cloudflare R2. ⌘ Read more

IndieWeb Carnival: multilingualism in a global Web
This is my first entry to an IndieWeb Carnival, and the topic this time is especially interesting: multilingualism in a global Web. ⌘ Read more

My September ‘24 in Review
And another month has passed. With September, 75% of the year is already over. Christmas is coming soon! 🎄 ⌘ Read more

My first passkeys implementation 🔑
Something I wanted to implement already for a long time, but always seemed too complicated for the occasional programming session here or there, was support for WebAuthn or Passkeys for GoBlog. I noted it down two years ago and also already started to work on the implementation, but never got around to finish it. ⌘ Read more

On removing content
I recently read this short post by Kev Quirk. It’s about removing content from the web. While Manuel Moreale is against deleting content from the web, Kev thinks he would probably delete things if he feels bad about them. ⌘ Read more

A weekend with my family
This past weekend, I visited my family in the south of Germany. I wasn’t there for quite some time. On one day, we went to Biel in Switzerland, walking through the Taubenloch (“pigeonhole”, a canyon right next to the city) and sitting on a boat that took us across Lake Biel. It was quite picturesque. ⌘ Read more

This time from the other side. 🌳 ⌘ Read more

Another weekend with a bike focus
The cycling season is not over yet. ⌘ Read more

Another weekend with a bike focus
The cycling season is not over yet. ⌘ Read more

Where the Eder flows into the Fulda
Just in time before it gets cold and rainy again next week, I took advantage of today to go for a short bike ride. Upstream along the Fulda, over to the Eder and then to where the Eder flows into the Fulda. This was the short (49 km) of the two versions I had planned for this. The longer version is almost 90 kilometers long. Let’s see if I can still do it this year… ⌘ Read more

Yesterday, we rented a shared car and drove 50 km to the Edersee near Kassel, where we hiked a bit. There’s a castle up on one hill and the view was spectacular! It was definitely an active weekend. 😊 ⌘ Read more

My August ‘24 in Review
And now another month, and soon the summer, has come to an end. Time to take a (this time very) brief look back at August. ⌘ Read more

My August ‘24 in Review
And now another month, and soon the summer, has come to an end. Time to take a (this time very) brief look back at August. ⌘ Read more

Instead of doing another Freeletics workout this week, I took advantage of the great weather outside and challenged myself with some uphill biking. It definitely pushed me to my limits, but it was worth it! And it worked, even though my bike only has eight internal gears. ⌘ Read more

How I stopped a malicious IP from hammering my Gitea instance
Some IP from the US seemed to crawl my Gitea instance (running on the same small VPS as my blog and other self-hosted services) non-stop, which caused high CPU usage. I already wondered why the terminal was lagging so much and why Gitea had such a high CPU usage. ⌘ Read more

Instead of doing another Freeletics workout this week, I took advantage of the great weather outside and challenged myself with some uphill biking. It definitely pushed me to my limits, but it was worth it! And it worked, even though my bike only has eight internal gears. ⌘ Read more

How I stopped a malicious IP from hammering my Gitea instance
Some IP from the US seemed to crawl my Gitea instance (running on the same small VPS as my blog and other self-hosted services) non-stop, which caused high CPU usage. I already wondered why the terminal was lagging so much and why Gitea had such a high CPU usage. ⌘ Read more

Three days, two flats, one epic bike tour
I finally did, what I planned to do for a long time: Biking from my first to my second flat. I did it in three days. 214 kilometers with 1750 meters uphill. ⌘ Read more

Automatic Komoot export
While I like Komoot and use it to navigate and record all my tours, whether that are bike tours or hiking trips, it sucks that there’s no option to export all your data. There’s also no official API to easily implement such functionality. ⌘ Read more

After work bike tour
I admit it, I should rename the subtitle of my blog from “Thoughts of an IT expert” to “My bike tour log”. Even though it was 29° C outside today, I wanted to do another bike tour after work. 42 km through the surrounding area of my hometown. I discovered new places and noticed that it actually feels colder next to trees. It was much fun! ⌘ Read more

Why I am using an Android phone instead of a Wahoo
In my last bike trip report, I mentioned that I would review the Wahoo bike computer I ordered once I had a chance to try it out. Well, as it turns out, I sent the Wahoo back and found a solution that works better for me. ⌘ Read more

Today, after the daily standup (without standup though), I went to pick up my girlfriend’s exam paper. But instead of using car sharing or the bus, I decided to go there by bike. This time with my older city bike. Faster than the bus, cheaper than car sharing. And it was a nice break from work. Hurray for flextime and working from home, which makes this possible for me! ⌘ Read more

Reduce – Reuse – Repair – Recycle ⌘ Read more

Lowlands bike tour
On Thursday, I made another bike tour. Not in the low mountains, but in the south of the North German Plain. With more distance compared to the last time, I had way less incline and that makes a big difference. ⌘ Read more

My Juli ‘24 in Review
And now July is over. Time to take a quick look back. ⌘ Read more

Telegram worries
Telegram was always my favorite messenger, as it provided a fast and user-friendly experience on multiple devices. But one and a half years ago, I already started doubting my decision to rely on Telegram. ⌘ Read more

Summer vacation ‘24
A week ago, we returned from our summer vacation: This year, just like four years ago, when there weren’t many other options due to COVID, we went for 1.5 weeks to my grandmother’s vacation apartment in Lübeck-Travemünde. ⌘ Read more

Walking in the sunny park is like balm for the soul. 😌 ⌘ Read more

Same spot as always. 📸 ⌘ Read more

GoBlog can show GPX tracks as SVG now
After my bike tour on Monday, I first felt the usual exhaustion, but later that evening and night, more symptoms joined and showed me, that I, again (third time already this year), caught some infection. Nothing too bad, but it forced me to relax and recover the last two days. ⌘ Read more

Post-vacation bike tour
Today was my first workday after summer vacation, and with the weather being pleasant – not too hot, and no rain – I decided to finish work a bit early and go for a 39-kilometer bike tour through the surrounding area. ⌘ Read more

Hello, little deer! 👋 ⌘ Read more

Before going to sleep, a quick walk around the block. 🌔 ⌘ Read more

It took me so long to find the cause of a memory leak in GoBlog. I thought it was smart to use a cache for prepared database statements. But I didn’t read the documentation and didn’t know that prepared statements need to be closed when they are no longer needed to free up the allocated resources. 🤦‍♂️ I finally fixed it by removing the prepared statement cache altogether. Less code, fewer problems in the future, and the cache wasn’t much of an improvement anyway. I also learned about the usefulness of memory profil … ⌘ Read more

I have a question for the IndieWeb community: What can we do against Webmention spam, except filter it out, when it fails validation? I receive hundreds of invalid Webmentions a day, and even using a filtering DNS server doesn’t seem to help much. But I also don’t want to waste network traffic to access all those spam sites. Is there any good block list I can check first before doing the request for validation? I thought about Akismet, but the API has no such option to only check the submitted URL. ⌘ Read more

Another day, another bike tour 🚴
Another day, another bike tour. Today’s tour is on the same route as my planned tour between my two apartments. The first half of the tour was easy regarding elevation, the second parts challenging. But I made it, and I didn’t even have to get off the bike to walk instead of biking. 💪 ⌘ Read more

Another day, another bike tour 🚴
Another day, another bike tour. Today’s tour is the first part of my planned trip between my both flats. The first half of the tour was easy regarding elevation, the second parts challenging. But I made it, and I didn’t even have to get off the bike to walk instead of biking. 💪 ⌘ Read more

Early bird bike tour
I couldn’t sleep anymore, so I decided to do a little bike tour. It’s so quiet in the morning and I saw some new places in this town and its surrounding. Tomorrow I plan to do a longer trip again. ⌘ Read more

My June ‘24 in Review
Another month has passed and with it the first half of 2024. So on this cool (after a few hot days) evening, it’s time to take a look back at the past month. ⌘ Read more

It seems like I finally fixed a memory leak in GoBlog yesterday, that sometimes made my blog crashing. How? I used Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5 Sonnet to write me a new HTTP compression middleware that compresses HTTP responses using zstd or gzip when possible. I needed to instruct a few changes and modify some code lines as the initial implementation was wrong, but thereafter, it finally seems to work better than my original implementation that probably leaked some objects anywhere. Claude also helped me to write uni … ⌘ Read more

First tour with my new bike
Yesterday, I finally took my new bike for a longer ride. Instead of 30 km like the last time, this time I chose another way about 36 km the other way along the river. And instead of getting on the train back home, I went both directions with pure muscle power. ⌘ Read more