If you regularly work remotely (away from home and the office), a portable monitor is one of the best investments you can make. I’ve had my HANNspree HL162 for almost a year now and it’s really helpful when I work from my family’s home. Having two screens really increases my productivity. 😄 ⌘ Read more

GoBlog’s new ChatGPT integration
There’s been a lot of AI hype lately. Everyone is integrating AI into their applications. ⌘ Read more

Google Bard is a bit too creative. In another chat, where I asked who “Jan-Lukas Else” is, it also said that I developed the “Quarkus programming language”. But this clearly shows the limitations of language models and the current state of AI. Just because the answers sound clever, they are not always right. ⌘ Read more

Google Bard is a bit too creative. In another chat, where I asked who “Jan-Lukas Else” is, it also said that I developed the “Quarkus programming language”. But this clearly shows the limitations of language models and the current state of AI. Just because the answers sound clever, they are not always right. ⌘ Read more

Beautiful sunny day with 17 degrees. So I put on my sunglasses and ride the pedelec a bit. 😎 ⌘ Read more

I’m currently validating the use of the OpenAI API as a cheaper and more powerful alternative to the Google Translate API. I hope my plans succeed and there will be a new GoBlog plugin with some AI power soon. ✨ So far the OpenAI API is quite easy to use, I thought it would be more complicated. Philipp is already using the API for his diary, another cool idea (which I may copy someday). ⌘ Read more

This time I’m doing my commute (to my second flat) with this new 70L travel backpack from Decathlon. It’s already full with just my work stuff (notebook, keyboard, mouse) and some other stuff (personal notebook, smaller backpack, toiletries, 2L water bottle). How am I supposed to fit 14 days of vacation stuff in there? 🤔 Good that I can take a vacation without having to take the work stuff with me. 😅 ⌘ Read more

Sunset view from the hill next to our flat. 🌇 ⌘ Read more

My cheap alternative to Ngrok
Since GoBlog has an Auto-HTTPS feature that can automatically retrieve HTTPS certificates via ACME from e.g. Let’s Encrypt, I need a public IP address with which I can reach my test instance of GoBlog via port 80 and 443. ⌘ Read more

The obligatory photo. Not frozen anymore. 🌞 ⌘ Read more

One reason I (have to) keep WhatsApp installed: It seems to be becoming more common for companies to offer support through it if you don’t want to call a hotline. ~50% of my chats are support chats. 🤔 ⌘ Read more

My February ‘23 in Review
And again a month is over, the shortest of the year. Here is my short monthly review. ⌘ Read more

50% (24 out of 48) of the workouts of my first Freeletics “training journey” completed! 🤓💪 ⌘ Read more

mox Mail Server
I currently use Purelymail for email. It’s very cheap and does everything I need (“purely email”). I’m also happy that I’m free of all the headaches of having a good IP reputation and setting everything up so that my mail doesn’t end up in junk folders. ⌘ Read more

New professional website
I’m always programming on my blogging software, so today I decided to do something different. With the help of ChatGPT, which wrote the basic HTML and CSS template, I created a new resume website, which is basically a copy of everything I put on my LinkedIn profile. ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Office and OneDrive for free?
I’m a bit of an indecisive (and frugal) person sometimes. ⌘ Read more

Nice, the number of GoBlog users is growing! 🤓 The next step is a growing number of GoBlog developers. It would be great to have more people giving advice on how to improve the code. 😅 Any senior Go devs out there? ⌘ Read more

How I archive my favorite TV show to get rid of Amazon Prime
I’m a fan of the German TV series “Notruf Hafenkante”, which is shown on the public broadcaster ZDF and is also available on their website. New episodes are released weekly, and older episodes are also made available on a regular basis. After a few months, however, they are no longer available for free. At the moment I have to buy an extra subscription for a Prime Video Channel to be able to watch all the old episodes. But that makes me dependent on Amazon, and I d … ⌘ Read more

Frozen ❄️ ⌘ Read more

Yet another AI application
AI is currently finding its way more and more into various software. There is ChatGPT, which sometimes feels like an all-knowing human, DeepL uses artificial intelligence not only for its translator, but also for its new tool that improves written text, or Bunny.net provides an API to generate images “on the edge”. ⌘ Read more

My January ‘23 in Review
Before you realize it, January - and with it the first month of the new year - is already over. A little review. ⌘ Read more

GoBlog plugins enable completely new and optional functionality. Andrés created a plugin to show the song currently playing on his blog. I use this plugin for now as well. 🎶 If you don’t see a song in the header, I’m probably not listening to music right now. 😅 ⌘ Read more

🎬🚄💶
Since I have YouTube Premium and log in to YouTube, YouTube is suggesting videos that seem to fit my interests a lot more (and it’s a little addictive again, but not as bad as when I was still studying). ⌘ Read more

My code is still a mess, but I’m learning
I taught myself Go (and programming in general) by learning by doing. I learned by making a lot of mistakes and after noticing them, doing the necessary research. My Go code is probably a big mess, but it’s so satisfying, after not touching some code for a while, to do a major rewrite and improve the code with everything I’ve learned since the last time. ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT is smart enough to detect what the code in the single minified JavaScript file on my blog front page does. Try it out! 🙃 ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT is smart enough to detect what the code in the single minified JavaScript file on my blog front page does. Try it out! 🙃 ⌘ Read more

My motivation to work on GoBlog isn’t always the same. Sometimes I don’t feel like programming in my free time, so the most I do is some bug fixing when I find broken things. Sometimes I just have no time to work on new features or improvements. But since yesterday evening I feel a new push and have completely rewritten the plugin system to make it much more flexible (and I like flexibility). I had to break compatibility with existing plugins, but given the small user base and the limited scope of what plugins could … ⌘ Read more

I posted about GoToSocial, but another Mastodon-alternative and Fediverse software, Takahē, seems to make fast progress and has some unique features like support for multiple domains or multiple identities per user. I haven’t tried running it yet, but it looks promising! ⌘ Read more

Majestetic 🏰 ⌘ Read more

Probably preaching to the choir… ⌘ Read more

I had an AWS training in November and have the opportunity to get the “Certified Developer Associate” certificate. Even though I have two attempts, I want to do well on the first shot. Since the trainer didn’t show us everything that is required for the exam, I’m kind of re-doing the training with this Udemy course (luckily I have access to Udemy Business and don’t have to pay for it). It’s really helpful because it helps me demystify the AWS cloud and reduce the 🤯 whenever I do something in the AWS console. ⌘ Read more

Nice to see that there is such a variety of MicroPub clients, next to Quill, Micropublish and the mobile app Indigenous, there’s also sparkles. But on the desktop, I mostly just use GoBlog’s editor nowadays. It has live sync and and a live preview, which is sometimes very helpful. But flexibility is the key, use what fits you and the situation the best. ⌘ Read more

My first Freeletics week
My first Freeletics week is complete. And I got a badge for the first “perfect week”. I hope this gamification (levels and badges for perfect weeks, perfect week streaks, training session milestones etc.) will make me pull through. My girl friend also joined me and started using Freeletics. 🤓 ⌘ Read more

I bought a full year of access to the Freeletics coach, so I should actually start doing my workout, right? 🙃 I can already feel the soreness just thinking about it… ⌘ Read more

My 2022 in Review
2022 is over, welcome 2023! A year full of unexpected events, many personal changes and a lot of new experiences… But since I wrote a review every month, I just want to highlight the highlights here. ⌘ Read more

Happy new year! 🎆 ⌘ Read more

My December ‘22 in Review
Now the last month of the year is coming to an end and before I put together a short review of the year soon, here’s another monthly review. ⌘ Read more

My December ‘22 in Review
Now the last month of the year is coming to an end and before I put together a short review of the year soon, here’s another monthly review. ⌘ Read more

My December ‘22 in Review
Now the last month of the year is coming to an end and before I put together a short review of the year soon, here’s another monthly review. ⌘ Read more

Bitwarden Unified
Bitwarden (my favorite and recommended password manager) is offering a “new deployment option”. This new option combines all microservices into a single Docker container and doesn’t require 11 different containers anymore. And it supports PostgreSQL and MariaDB in addition to MS SQL. ⌘ Read more

Achievement for today: I can finally correctly reply to Mastodon/Fediverse/ActivityPub posts. 🥳 ⌘ Read more

Achievement for today: I can finally correctly reply to Mastodon/Fediverse/ActivityPub posts. 🥳 ⌘ Read more

Just setting up a quick Mastodon instance to test some compatibility is a pain. Using test accounts on public instances is also unreliable, because many instances are already overloaded and I don’t want to create spam. So I got a new DigitalOcean account with a $200 starter credit… ⌘ Read more

WordPress implemented SQLite support! 😱 (Not merged into Core yet, but you’re able to test it.) ⌘ Read more

WordPress implemented SQLite support! 😱 (Not merged into Core yet, but you’re able to test it.) ⌘ Read more

I have a question: Is there something similar to Telegram channels in Matrix? What should I do when I want to enable people to be notified about new blog posts using Matrix? ⌘ Read more

“AirTags Expose Dodgy Postal Industry”
Last year, YouTuber MegaLag tried to send several AirTag-ged packages from Germany to North Korea with DHL. But instead of arriving there, they were either misrouted to South Korea or ended up in China. In a new video, he further researches the reasons and also takes a look at DHL’s sorting center in Frankfurt at their invitation. Very interesting! ⌘ Read more

Bunny AI
Bunny.net joined the AI hype and created “Bunny AI” (docs), AI images created on the edge. I tried it out, because it’s currently free during the preview, but somehow I don’t find the generated images aesthetic or I’m just to stupid to write better prompts. I guess the Bunny developers also need some distraction from time to time, because they are working hard on S3 support for Bunny Storage for years already. 🐰 ⌘ Read more

My website is powered by GoBlog, a simple and dynamic blogging system that’s open source, actively developed and implements most IndieWeb functionalities. It packages everything in a single binary and I’ve been so over the moon using it and seeing it improve week after week that I’m surprised it isn’t more popular. So I put on my evangelist boots to share how I use this “stupidly-simple” blogging system to power my online presence. ⌘ Read more

Forgejo
A few weeks ago, it came to light that Gitea has been owned by a for-profit Gitea Ltd. for several months. The lack of transparency has disturbed the trust of many contributors and users. That’s why Codeberg (a German based non-profit association - disclaimer: I am a member of the association) has now started a soft fork: Forgejo. ⌘ Read more

I should write better tests or at least create some automatic tests. 😬 (But ActivityPub is so complicated to test!) ⌘ Read more

Should I sell my PC?
I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with my desktop computer (ASRock Deskmini A300), which I don’t really use anymore since I got my new laptop. ⌘ Read more

I think it was a very wise decision to buy some long merino underwear, a new and warmer jacket and new winter shoes. It’s so cold! The whole week already under 0°C. ⌘ Read more

I’m honestly thinking about switching browsers, because this “new feature” where Firefox always downloads PDFs first to display them is annoying me so much. I don’t want my Downloads folder to be cluttered with all those random PDFs. If I open a restaurant’s menu PDF, I just want to take a quick look, but don’t want to have the PDF in my Downloads folder until I manually delete it and then delete it from the Recycle Bin again. There are some work-arounds, but no real solution. ⌘ Read more

I use Firefox as my preferred web browser both on PCs and my phone. One extension is always installed: uBlock Origin. The web is so much nicer with all the ads and tracking removed. But today I also retried an extension that will probably join the “must install” list: DarkReader. Especially when I’m browsing the web on my phone in the early morning, I don’t like to be blinded by white websites. Since March DarkReader has finally an option to detect if a website already has a dark theme and only apply it’s color chan … ⌘ Read more

Thinking about chat apps again…
Lately, I’ve been thinking about chat apps more often again. Actually, I’ve always been a fan of Telegram, and it’s still a good messenger, but I’m a bit suspicious about the latest developments (such as the Fragment platform, with which Telegram is now implementing its crypto plans again). ⌘ Read more

Near my new home. 🍂 ⌘ Read more

GPT-3 is crazy 🤯
Do you want to read why Go is a great programming language? ⌘ Read more

GPT-3 is crazy 🤯
Do you want to read why Go is a great programming language? ⌘ Read more

My November ‘22 in Review
November is now over and it’s December and the Christmas season begins. But first a short review of November… ⌘ Read more

DeepL Write
I’m a big fan of DeepL for translations. Before trying to write more blog posts directly in English to improve my skills, I wrote many blog posts in German and then translated them. The texts were probably better than my non-native English. ⌘ Read more

“Bloggers, Dump Your Twitter Card Tags”
It’s crazy to think how much bandwidth is being used by metadata tags. Every company wants to invent it’s own new system. Wouter Groeneveld gives a brief overview and recommends getting rid of them (for the most part). I agree with him completely. The only one of these systems that my blog supports is Microformats, which is quite popular among the IndieWeb community. ⌘ Read more

My websites have finally favicons again. And I can update them using a simple web interface. 😄 ⌘ Read more

Sideloading Android apps on Windows 11
It’s really impressive how easy it is to sideload apps on the WSA (Windows Subsystem for Android). ⌘ Read more

I reworked the current ActivityPub implementation of GoBlog, fixed ActivityPub replies to posts and also added support for reply updates and deletions. Under the hood it’s using the comment system. 🥳 Using the go-ap/activitypub library, working with ActivityPub is much easier (but still more complicated than I wish it would be). ⌘ Read more

Today was already the 4th day that I worked using a mobile hotspot with a speed limit of 10 mbps down and upload. This is definitely doable. I’m glad I didn’t have to transfer any larger files. Faster internet is coming in two days. But I chose wisely when I signed my mobile contract last year without a data cap. ⌘ Read more

Moving to another city
As I’ve probably written many times before (have I?), I’m currently moving with my girlfriend to her university town. I will keep my old apartment as a second home. But it’s still my first move to another city and I’m just realizing it. ⌘ Read more

Why I bought a new laptop 💻
I just updated my Hardware Uses page. Recently, I bought a new notebook and today I reset my Surface Go and sent it to a trade-in portal. ⌘ Read more

Although there are definitely reasons to hate Windows, there are also reasons to like Windows 11: Linux GUI apps, Android apps, winget package manager and improved window tiling. It would be even better, when one wouldn’t need to toogle all the privacy and telemety settings first… ⌘ Read more

One simple thing to noticeably reduce the router’s power consumption: turn off 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. Meanwhile, almost every device supports 5 GHz. ⌘ Read more

After three days of AWS Developer training, I am fascinated about all the AWS products and features. But I also think that AWS has a huge lock-in power. Once you moved everything to the Amazon cloud, it will probably be very hard to get out of it again. And then prices will increase and you have a problem. 🙃 ⌘ Read more

SourceHut is banning cryptocurrency projects
SourceHut, a source code hosting service, is banning cryptocurrency- and blockchain-projects: ⌘ Read more

My October ‘22 in Review
Another month is over and Happy Halloween! 🎃 ⌘ Read more

Because I used Prometheus and Grafana at work, I also tried them at home and I must say, monitoring isn’t as boring as I always thought. Next up Kubernetes? 😅 ⌘ Read more

98.css (again)
I already shared “98.css” on my blog in 2020. It’s a CSS framework that styles semantic HTML to look like Windows 98. ⌘ Read more

Disable RAM Plus on OneUI 4.1
When Samsung released the Android 12 update for my phone a few months ago, I noticed a new RAM Plus setting, which uses the storage to expand the memory. Pretty useless on my phone, as it has already 8 GB of RAM. ⌘ Read more

The Pocket Casts mobile apps are now open source
Good news! The Pocket Casts mobile apps are now open source. ⌘ Read more

Maybe it wasn’t the best decision to name my blog software “GoBlog”, because it has a negative meaning in Indonesian. But whatever, I won’t rename it now… I even bought a domain with the name. ⌘ Read more

GoBlog syncs the editor state between browsers in real-time now. ✨ Thanks to WebSockets! ⌘ Read more

After all, debugging is still fun!
One reason I use an Android smartphone is that there are apps like Indigenous (a MicroPub-compatible app for posting from your phone to a MicroPub-compatible blog). And even if the app ever disappears from the store, there’s still the option to manually install the app. And if you need to, you can also develop your own apps without having to invest nearly $100 a year. ⌘ Read more

Some IndieWeb protocols are complicated and there are sometimes no programming libraries to simplify the use of them, but ActivityPub is another beast. Although the standard is documented, the way the specific implementations (Mastodon etc.) work often isn’t and it’s hard to debug. So huge respect for the big rework. 👍 ⌘ Read more

“WebVM: Linux Virtualization in WebAssembly with Full Networking via Tailscale”
When I tell people about programming or my work, they often say software development is too abstract for them. But there are moments when I think that about some software as well. ⌘ Read more

Another change in my infrastructure setup: I replaced rathole with Chisel. There wasn’t any particular reason, I use it in the same way: It’s making a few services and websites hosted on my home server available on my VPS to publish using Caddy and a static IP. Chisel is just a bit more simple to configure using command line flags. And it’s written in Go. ⌘ Read more

One year ago, I started using AdGuard Home instead of Pi-Hole to filter DNS requests and block ads and tracking. Yesterday, I switched to NextDNS instead. NextDNS has mostly the same features, but is hosted in the “cloud” and I have one less self-hosted service to care about. AdGuard Home is awesome, but NextDNS seems to be working great as well and also integrates with Tailscale easily. ⌘ Read more

My September ‘22 in Review
Now September is over, a month in which I have again extraordinarily blogged so little, even as little as not since the beginning of 2019. But that’s no wonder, after all, this was my first month in the new job and I also spent a lot of time with my girlfriend, who was with me for the month. ⌘ Read more

I don’t know a lot about HTTP/3. But today I updated Caddy to version 2.6 and my sites should support HTTP/3 by default now. More speed? 🤔 ⌘ Read more

GoToSocial seems like a promising alternative to Mastodon. It’s written in Go (👍 in my opinion), lightweight and pretty good documented so far. It’s still “alpha software” but seems to make great progress. In the past, I self hosted a microblog.pub instance and then after some time without any Fediverse profile other than my blog, which has ActivityPub support as well, signed up at Fosstodon to be able to reply to blog comments from the Fediverse. I already set up an instace of GTS, but will probably wait to use it … ⌘ Read more

wsl-vpnkit: Internet for WSL2 distros behind a VPN
I’m still alive. 👋 Today, at work, I discovered a nice little tool for WSL2. On my work laptop I need to use Cisco AnyConnect to connect to the corporate network. Unfortunately this blocks Internet access in Windows Subsystem for Linux VMs (at least in the Ubuntu VM, I tried to use for some Docker stuff). I tried a lot of different hacks and workarounds, but none worked. Until I found wsl-vpnkit. It just works. 😄 ⌘ Read more

Now that I have access to Udemy Business and can watch many, many courses for free, I subscribed to two courses. One to improve my English and one to improve my quick-wittedness. Let’s see if I complete them and if they really help. ⌘ Read more

A script for Go dependency updates
I regularly update the dependencies of my blog software, a Go based project. Dependency updates are important because they can contain security fixes or fixes for bugs. ⌘ Read more

First work day in my new job
My first day at my new job is over, and it went quite well despite the lack of sleep. Super nice colleagues and I am already full in the training. ⌘ Read more

Why can’t I sleep when I’m excited? And why am I not excited during the day, but then my thoughts are circling at night? Well at least I slept well yesterday. Maybe that helps to get through the day somehow after only 3 or 4 hours of sleep. ⌘ Read more

My August ‘22 in Review
And now August is over, time for a new monthly review. ⌘ Read more

Some impressions from the Krka National Park in Croatia. 🇭🇷 ⌘ Read more

I should have attended the Homebrew Website Club London / Europe in June, after all they talked about maps, a topic I have some experience with. James uses Leaflet to create maps with his visited coffee shops. 👍 ⌘ Read more

I should have attended the Homebrew Website Club London / Europe in June, after all they talked about maps, a topic I have some experience with. James uses Leaflet to create maps with his visited coffee shops. 👍 ⌘ Read more

I was just about to write a long response to a discussion I saw online. But while writing it, I realized that I have an opinion, but I can’t express it properly and somehow I don’t have anything to contribute. So I deleted my draft. I don’t have to give my two cents on everything. 😅 ⌘ Read more

I’ve realized that trying to strictly follow what is on the IndieWeb wiki won’t work well for me. Thus, I have to invent and change some things to make it work better. ⌘ Read more

Tailscale SSH
I finally got around to using Tailscale SSH. I’ve been using Tailscale for over a year to access my servers via SSH (my VPS is even available via Tailscale only), but I haven’t used the new Tailscale SSH feature yet. ⌘ Read more

Just got my second booster shot. 💉 Hoping to stay free of COVID-19 on vacation and beyond… ⌘ Read more