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

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

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