Perfect way to unwind after a stressful day. 🌳 ⌘ Read more

Why I have a minimal website theme
Wouter Groeneveld wrote about his new website theme. His old one was too minimal for his taste, and so he decided on a more fancy theme. ⌘ Read more

🚭
One of the things I hate, yes, I really hate it, is cigarette smoke. I get angry when I smell the smoke of the neighbors who are smoking directly in front of the entrance door of our apartment build, while we are trying to let fresh air in. But situations like smelling smoke at train stations or bus stops make me feel really uncomfortable as well. ⌘ Read more

New Bike Day: My new Cube Hyde Race
On Thursday, or better, let’s say yesterday on Friday, was New Bike Day for me. I finally got my new bike, which I bought after doing a lot of research. ⌘ Read more

Even though I wonder how they finance it (reading their post suggests, there will be a paid option later), DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat is probably a good privacy-friendly way to try out the different LLM models for chats. You don’t have to register, you don’t have to pay, you don’t have to change settings that your chats aren’t saved or used for training. ⌘ Read more

It’s nice to see a cloud provider lower prices, which seems very uncommon, as all the prices (cloud, domains, …) usually go up all the time. And it’s also my provider of choice, which means I will have to pay less for my virtual server in the future! 😄 ⌘ Read more

My fluctuating interests
It seems like my interests fluctuate a lot. I have a topic that interests me, do a lot of research, learn many new things, get excited. And then suddenly another topic pops up, which at the same time reduces my interest in the previous topics. ⌘ Read more

I took this photo yesterday in the evening. The pond in the park is always so picturesque. 🖼️ ⌘ Read more

My May ‘24 in Review
May is now also over and we are getting closer and closer to summer and the middle of 2024. Time to take a quick look back. ⌘ Read more

Adding more context to my blogroll
The hosted Miniflux finally contains my newly contributed feature to save descriptions for feeds. The exported OPML also contains them, and that’s why I’m finally able to show some context on my blogroll. ⌘ Read more

A spontaneous bike tour
This morning I was in a bit of a bad mood and got the idea that I needed to do some exercise again. I had taken a break for a week due to a cold. I also wanted to get out a bit because the weather was good. Then it was a spontaneous but perfect decision to go for a bike ride again. ⌘ Read more

Blogroll Network Map
Robert Alexander built a pretty cool Blogroll Network Map. Based on scraped blogrolls, it builds and visualizes a map of blogs. It contains almost 500 feeds, a lot to explore for boring days! ⌘ Read more

App recommandation: Google’s Reading mode
Unexpectedly, I found a seemingly not so new app (it was first released in 2022) that I wish I had known about earlier. Google’s app Reading mode. ⌘ Read more

The power of control
You know, I’ve found a pretty effective way to reduce my addiction to certain websites: blocking them at the DNS level using NextDNS. It’s a trick I picked up after realizing I was spending far too much time on Hacker News (my addiction to that is gone for quite some time already!). And now? I’ve extended it to a forum I used to frequent multiple times a day. ⌘ Read more

This blog has no Onion Service anymore
I had Tor support in GoBlog for over three years now, but I decided to disable it on my blog (and the GoBlog blog) for now. Several times, Tor randomly started using a lot of memory on my VPS and even crashed my block one or two times. It could have been the Go library used to integrate Tor, or something else in the Tor code itself, I don’t know. ⌘ Read more

Feeling extra special at 25 with this amazing strawberry cake made by my girlfriend. Grateful for her love and culinary skills on my birthday! 🍓✨ ⌘ Read more

From my father, there’s still an old Commodore 64 he used when he was young. I kept it since I thought I might try some retro-computing. But now (some years later) in the process of cleaning up my flat and throwing out things I no longer need, I tried to connect it to the TV, but somehow didn’t get it working. It might be the wrong cable, the wrong adapter, or just a faulty graphics unit in this device. I will just sell it on eBay untested. In the end, I think I wouldn’t enjoy that device much anyway. I grew up w … ⌘ Read more

My April ‘24 in Review
New month, new monthly review. This time for April. And a short review, because not much exciting has happened. ⌘ Read more

I finally found the perfect 5G router setup!
I have written a lot already about my search for the perfect 5G router. It’s time for a new update, as I think I have finally found a great solution. ⌘ Read more

A few sheep are mowing the lawn in the park. And there is at least one lamb too! 🐑🐑🐑 “määähhh” ⌘ Read more

What a week!
What a week! This week I was on vacation, but I didn’t relax at all. I worked harder than on workdays. Since my mother and I finally emptied all the furniture from the apartment I grew up in and moved out of two years ago (I even moved again after it). ⌘ Read more

Looking at the commit history of Tailscale’s tailscale-android repository on GitHub, there are plenty of hints that a revamped Tailscale Android app (even with dark mode!) is coming soon. 👀 ⌘ Read more

In the summer of ‘22 I upgraded my perfectly working soundcore Liberty 2 Pro to the Liberty 3 Pro because they have ANC and have been using them ever since. But since the L2P are still working perfectly, I connected them to my phone again and use them sometimes. Too sad to let them rot in the closet, and I guess nobody wants to buy used in-ear headphones. ⌘ Read more

My March ‘24 in Review
With March, another month and even the first quarter of 2024 are now over. So it’s time to take a quick look back. What happened in my March 2024? ⌘ Read more

Telegram Premium allows you to convert voice messages to text. But Telegram Premium isn’t officially available in Germany. So why not develop your own solution? That’s exactly what I did this morning: I created a Telegram bot that takes the voice message and transcribes it using OpenAI’s Whisper API. The bot runs as a serverless container on Scaleway. The source code is published on my Gitea instance. ⌘ Read more

Home Server Offline ☹️
Today, I woke up and noticed that my home server, located in my second flat, and also the router, all behind a 5G connection (that was showing as working fine on the provider’s website), were offline. No VPN connection anymore, and also Tailscale showed the nodes as being offline. I’m glad that I had automatic backups and was able to easily restore the three important services from that server on my VPS, without the need to travel to the second flat first. ⌘ Read more

Nice weather, good mood. 😌 Spring is definitely my favorite season! 🌷 ⌘ Read more

Scaleway Serverless Jobs
Scaleway continues to build a European AWS alternative. Today, I tried one of its new products: Serverless Jobs. ⌘ Read more

Due to OpenAI’s move to prepaid billing, I (finally) had to pay for using the OpenAI API. But this also allows me to finally use the gpt-4-turbo-preview model as I have reached tier 1. Now the AI-generated summaries on this blog will be created using this new model. 😄 ⌘ Read more

“Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown”
Reading about Freenom and .tk domains brings back memories: The first domains I registered were free .tk domains because I was too cheap to pay for domains as a high school student and also had no credit card to do so. ⌘ Read more

Extended content warning
I realized recently that I wrote some cringe (to put it mildly) posts in my late adolescent phase. On the one hand, I would of course like to banish these posts from my blog, after all, my opinion has changed completely in some cases since then. But on the other hand, it would be a shame to let this part of my personal development simply disappear. ⌘ Read more

Four years ago on this day, the government decided to close all schools and universities because of Covid-19. It was hard to get toilet paper or pasta because people started hoarding. Crazy what happened in those four years. ⌘ Read more

What should I do with my new domain?
I recently complained about domain registrars. But I also recently registered a new domain: j7s.me. A numeronym of my first name. And the .me TLD to show that I am a person. (And it is a short domain that was available.) ⌘ Read more

I received my blood results last week and have since been taking high dose vitamin D pills (also B12 and folic acid once a week) to improve my extremely low levels (~9 ng/ml). ⌘ Read more

ooh.directory
Recently, I came across ooh.directory. A blog directory that lists blogs from all sorts of categories. (My blog is listed there, too). ⌘ Read more

My first week with a safety razor 🪒
I’ve tried a few shaving methods since I started growing a beard in puberty. I started with a Gillette Mach 3, various no-name shavers because the cartridges are cheaper, and two electric shavers. ⌘ Read more

My first week with a safety razor 🪒
I’ve tried a few shaving methods since I started growing a beard in puberty. I started with a Gillette Mach 3, various no-name shavers because the cartridges are cheaper, and two electric shavers. ⌘ Read more

Today I learned that there is furniture made of cardboard! What a crazy idea… ⌘ Read more

My February ‘24 in Review
February has come to an end. It’s time to take a brief look back. ⌘ Read more

Where’s the perfect domain registrar?
Why is there no pure domain registrar? ⌘ Read more

Where’s the perfect domain registrar?
Why is there no pure domain registrar? ⌘ Read more

I was just looking at SSD prices and wow, have they gone up! Last year in May I ordered a Crucial P5 Plus with 1 TB for 79,99 €. In the late summer of last year, the price was as low as 59,90 €. But now the lowest price I can find is 92,81 €, the second lowest is 134,28 €. 😱 Seems like I should wait a bit before buying a new drive to back up all the tape videos… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Reading Coach
My English pronunciation can be improved — a lot. But now I can use Microsoft’s Reading Coach. This is a new AI tool for practicing reading (in English). ⌘ Read more

Using non-Apple hardware usually has one big advantage: Much better upgradeability. ⌘ Read more

Trying Spaceship.com
Some time ago, I somewhere read about Spaceship.com, a new player in the domain registration business, and registered an account to try it out. Some things kept me from transferring any domains to it (don’t really remember anymore, though), but it was also still in the beta phase back then. ⌘ Read more

My January ‘24 in Review
And now January of 2024 is over. Time to take a quick look back. ⌘ Read more

Preserving Memories: My Adventure with Digital8 Tapes and FireWire
The last few days, I dived into a new topic in my spare time: Archiving videos from old Hi8 and Digital8 videotapes onto my hard drive. ⌘ Read more

I can’t really explain why this is happening, but I noticed that my home server is now idling at 7 watts instead of 13 watts as before. I checked powertop, and it seems that the CPU is staying at C7 (pc7) for about 85% of the time, which seems to be the most power efficient state. ⌘ Read more

I can’t really explain why this is happening, but I noticed that my home server is now idling at 7 watts instead of 13 watts as before. I checked powertop, and it seems that the CPU is staying at C7 (pc7) for about 85% of the time, which seems to be the most power efficient state. ⌘ Read more

Reviving Memories: A nostalgic bike ride past my University
It was a bit cold and quite windy today, but otherwise the weather was beautiful with a clear and sunny sky. ⌘ Read more