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

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