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

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

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