Everything in the park is covered under the white magic! ❄️ ⌘ Read more

I’ve made the sad observation that numerous people started to blog during the pandemic, but stopped in 2021 or 2022. Today, I cleaned up my feed subscriptions in Miniflux and removed many feeds that saw no activity for a long time. At least, I can’t remember of a site I subscribed to that completely disappeared. ⌘ Read more

Using GitHub Actions to backup OneDrive to S3
My ideals of using open-source software are fading a bit, and I’ve been using OneDrive to synchronize my files for quite some time now. It’s cheap and works reliable at least. ⌘ Read more

The water is still frozen and there’s some snow on top of the ice. ❄️ ⌘ Read more

Forgot to post this… Frozen ❄️🥶 ⌘ Read more

Seeing a video like this from Jeff Geerling about the MNT Reform Laptop, I am both amazed and puzzled. It’s probably a cool project to work on such an open hardware and source project as a hobby. And it’s great that there’s still the alternative to proprietary hardware. But has this any other use than just being a toy for people that have more than a thousand bucks to spend on such a thing? Especially given that it’s the opposite of powerful. Thinking about it more, the only thing that comes to mind are people wh … ⌘ Read more

Muscles are made in the kitchen
This Christmas, I got a cool gift – a door pull-up bar. I wanted it because I do (Freeletics) workouts two or three times per week without any equipment (except some resistance bands I got a while ago), and I thought pull-ups would add some variety. Plus, I heard they’re good for working out different muscles like the back, arms, and grip. ⌘ Read more

I just noticed that I can cancel my annual Amazon Prime subscription and get the remaining time refunded. It was a very hidden option, but I just chose it. Delivery to package stations is still free. Let’s see if I can survive without Prime. In the last 12 months, the only Prime feature I have used is delivery. And I ordered about 40 times, but often just for convenience. ⌘ Read more

Happy New Year! 🍀 ⌘ Read more

My December ‘23 and my 2023 in Review
About Last Month ⌘ Read more

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or just a great day! 🎄🎅 ⌘ Read more

I appreciate living in a city with a university and multiple libraries nearby. Whenever there is too much noise from construction works at home, I can simply go to the library and enjoy a quiet place. 😌 A 5G cell tower is also within reach, enabling fast internet access without the necessity of logging into the eduroam Wi-Fi network. 🤓 ⌘ Read more

Today, while remotely accessing my home server, I noticed that the network was a bit slower than usual. It turns out, there’s no 5G connection and only an LTE connection with another cell tower more far away. I checked the service provider’s website and there’s actually a problem with a base station nearby. ⌘ Read more

Today, I finally finished the reworked MicroPub endpoint in GoBlog using the indielib library by Henrique. It killed about 400 lines of my spaghetti code. 😅 ⌘ Read more

Today, while remotely accessing my home server, I noticed that the network was a bit slower than usual. It turns out, there’s no 5G connection and only an LTE connection with another cell tower more far away. I checked the service provider’s website and there’s actually a problem with a base station nearby. ⌘ Read more

Finally vacation! No work until (including) 2024-01-07. 😎🎅🎄🎆 ⌘ Read more

Migrating to a Fedora CoreOS VPS
It seems like I was successfully able to migrate from my Alpine Linux VPS to a new VPS having Fedora CoreOS installed. 🎉 ⌘ Read more

Beyond the deadline: What I learned from a recent taskforce experience
The taskforce I was part of the last weeks is finally done! The deadline for the production deployment was met and today also a knowledge transfer took place. I’m happy to not have to fear weekend work or do overtime in the evening anymore, and hopefully return to a more regular workload again. ⌘ Read more

“HTML compression on popular websites”
Danny van Kooten did an interesting experiment and checked the top 10 thousand websites whether they are compressing their HTML. About 8% of them do not apply any kind of compression, resulting in many terabytes of unnecessary transmitted data, not helping to save energy. ⌘ Read more

My November ‘23 in Review
It’s that time of the month again for a new recap. November has passed, so let’s see what happened in the last 30 days… ⌘ Read more

I captured the first real snow this winter this morning ❄️ ⌘ Read more

Yesterday, I used a rental car to avoid problems with Deutsche Bahn. Today, trying to do another trip with DB, the train is 50 minutes delayed. Karma? 🙃 Or it’s the weather again, DB’s infrastructure isn’t working well at temperatures below 0 °C. 🤷‍♂️ ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Loop
It looks like Microsoft cloned Notion and calls it “Loop”. ⌘ Read more

Completed my second Freeletics Hell Week and with it my second training journey! 💪 ⌘ Read more

Today, while being in the second home over the weekend, I finally installed the 5G router setup (ZTE MC801A + GL.iNet Beryl AX). Now my home server (staying in this flat because it has a good place here) is behind a cellular 5G connection. There’s running nothing important on it, but let’s see how reliable this new setup will work over a longer period. Today so far all works fine. And if there will be problems, I still have a few months time to find solutions. ⌘ Read more

Colin just reminded me, that it’s the third GoBlog birthday of this blog! I am still genuinely content with it, despite the apparent loss of my blogging momentum since then. ⌘ Read more

My default apps and services in late 2023
To join another trend, here’s my list of default apps and services in late 2023. ⌘ Read more

I quickly played with OpenAI’s new Text-To-Speech model to check if it’s an alternative to Google’s API. And wow! English is fantastic and even German is not bad. Just some syllables in German have a weird English accent. But even then, it’s still good. But sadly, it’s also a bit costly. Let’s wait a few months until it gets cheaper and better, and you can enjoy my blog’s “Read aloud” feature even more. 😉 ⌘ Read more

On subscriptions 💸
Manuel Moreale, Kev Quirk and some others (in response to them) listed their subscriptions and what and why they are paying for them. ⌘ Read more

My October ‘23 in Review
Another month has come and gone, time to take a look back. ⌘ Read more

The last week was really rainy, so I didn’t leave the flat much. And now walking at sunset time, everything looks so pretty. ⌘ Read more

Almost a full yearly cycle since my first post. The leaves are starting to get colorful again. 🍂 ⌘ Read more

Fun fact: Since I started tracking my train journeys in mid-May, I’ve already spent almost 7 whole days on trains. 🚄 ⌘ Read more

I acquired a new, fancy domain for a new side project. A site with tips on how to save money on purchases is something I would like to start. The search for a CMS reminds me of why I built GoBlog: all available options are not optimal. But GoBlog also isn’t optimal for this project for various reasons, as it shouldn’t be a typical personal blog. And now I have this really cool domain and question my plans. 😅 ⌘ Read more

Update Tailscale on the GL.iNet Beryl AX (GL-MT3000)
I’ve been toying with my recently received GL.iNet Beryl AX (GL-MT3000) for some days and I have to say, it’s wonderful! It provides all the features I need in combination with my 5G router (like support for IPv6). I was also able to set up a VPN connection using Wireguard to the other home that will keep a wire-based internet connection with a public (but changing) IPv4 address. As it also works perfectly fine with an LTE stick or mobile tethering, I’m quite tempte … ⌘ Read more

No hello
Thanks to Tim Hårek Andreassen, I finally have a link I can send my coworkers whenever they send me a “Hi”, “Do you have some time?”, “Can I call you?” instead of asking their question right away or even just mentioning the topic. And there’s also a German version, great! ⌘ Read more

Long term career thoughts
When I read this article by Herman Martinus, creator of Bear Blog and some other projects, about how he stays motivated as a solo creator, it triggered some thoughts about my own career. ⌘ Read more

5G chaos in my head
One of the reasons I like blogging is that it sometimes helps me organize my thoughts. There’s a lot of chaos in my head before I write them down, and after, my head is sometimes calm. ⌘ Read more

My September ‘23 in Review
Now September is over, and it’s time to take a brief look back at the past month. ⌘ Read more

The field near my second home… Walking here reminds me of when I walked here a year and a half ago, debating whether to accept the new job offer. It feels like an eternity ago. But it was a good decision! ⌘ Read more

A better Postman alternative: Hoppscotch
I used to use Postman for both personal and work projects. It was great for making HTTP requests without having to create curl commands. But now, Postman requires a login, which I hate. I don’t understand why a login is needed for such a simple tool. ⌘ Read more

“The Frustration Loop”
Spammers and their spam are annoying. ⌘ Read more

Catching COVID-19
So far, I had been spared from COVID-19. “Had,” focusing on the past, because now it has affected me, or us, after all. We had to cut short our vacation, which I used to share little glimpses of here on the blog. We quickly went back home, wearing masks the whole time and hoping not to infect more people. ⌘ Read more

The angle of the sun wasn’t perfect for this photo, but it turned out to be an unexpected highlight during our hike around Thurso today. ⌘ Read more

Is this the Hogwarts Express? 🚂🧙 ⌘ Read more

West Highland Way
With a backpack full of stuff for two weeks, we managed to walk 11km on the West Highland Way in 2:35h. I feel it in my legs, but the views and the experience are worth it. ⌘ Read more

West Highland Way
With a backpack full of stuff for two weeks, we managed to walk 11km on the West Highland Way in 2:35h. I feel it in my legs, but the views and the experience are worth it. ⌘ Read more

Here are three things I’ve noticed in the UK that I really appreciate: ⌘ Read more

Here are three things I’ve noticed in the UK that I really appreciate: ⌘ Read more

London is on a whole different scale when it comes to size. It has roughly the same population as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt combined, and those cities are already quite large. 🤯 ⌘ Read more