Keep breathing and stay cool.

While the US politicians and tech billionaires are going full-on fascist mode, here is a reminder that there are European alternatives for many well known digital and online services: https://european-alternatives.eu

Simplifying my online presence further by removing my Known site. Goodbye social.johanbove.info - it was sometimes a little fun.

How long will it take for the opponents of the Trump regime to start mysteriously disappearing?

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Reading “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak

Cancelled Mastodon because the time spent on it could have been used for reading books instead and the level of interaction is not enough to keep me interested.

@prologic@twtxt.net Since I live in Germany, I do believe the media here is generally reputable. It really depends where you live of course. Source I look at are Reuters, NPR, The Guardian, Die Zeit, NY Times, CNN, Tagesschau, Spiegel Online, RP Online (for local news), … I would never just trust what I see in my social media feeds.

Shocked about the fires around LA right now. Following CNN mostly. It’s devastating.

There is a reason why being a journalist is still a profession.

Your favourite social media platform should not be where you get your facts from. You get jokes and share with your friends, but facts they ain’t. Get your world news from actual news sources instead.

In a rush in getting all my private data off from US - based company servers - the way it is looking, it might be that it would be good for us Rest Of The Worlders, to bring in our sheep and keep them close by.

Happy New Year to the readers of my little Twtxt feed! Wishing you and are your family all the best.

My 400th Twtxt Post will be about you: wishing you, reader of my Twtxt feed, all the best for the coming year and most of all love, health, and that your projects and work may contribute to the greater good of all mankind. I will be taking a social-media break for a couple of weeks to enjoy this special time with my family. I hope you will be able to do this with your family and friends too.

Aus Liebe fürs Leben

If there hadn’t been a better time than now to leave the hatred filled cesspool network of right-wing craziness, aka X - then I wouldn’t know when would be.

Enjoyed the eight christmas party at work today with some colleagues who I have known and worked with for more than ten years now. That is a nice feeling.

Imagine if all computer UIs would act like the UI from my NAS system… I feel I need to be waiting for output from the machine like it’s 1973.

The web server in Calibre is pretty cool. Love how the UI was designed and made. Feels intuitive, yet powerful. Now i do need to organise the book collection a bit better.

Did I write here already that the reason why I love Twtxt so much is that it works without having to compile, install anything extra. Just the bin applications that come with 95% of all operating systems and you’re good to read and participate, giving you have a domain name somewhere to host the twtxt.txt file.

We had a great weekend overall. N. loves ice-skating and we had a nice time with friends today playing a round of bowling and visiting the Dussy christmas market.

Organised my decades old ebook collection and cleaned up all the duplicates. The Czkawka application helped a lot with getting that done. Also - finally - using Calibre as our home digital library.

Got tickets for the Germany - USA 🏒 ice Hockey game in Düsseldorf on May 4th 2025

Cleaned up my npm package for twthash; made it CommonJS compatible, added more documentation and even a test. Current version is 1.2.2

Always a great feeling when you can solve npm install problems by simply copying over the whole node_modules folder from your own (linux) machine. One of the benefits of developing on a Linux machine I suppose.

Added TwtHash hashes to every message on my personal Twtxt HTML renderer. Code is not yet ready for prime-time. Need to work out some kinks still.

You can select some text from a web page and right/command click and select print… and select To PDF to quickly save snippets for save-keeping or further reading.

If I use Fedora on my PC, Vivaldi as my browser, Signal as my main messenger program, then which OS should my phone run on?

Getting my knowledge refreshed on web accessibility through a course on deque university.

I have been on Twtxt for five years straight now. Hurray me.

My 7-year old invented the word guakilijion which is a 1 with a bazillion zeroes following after it. He wants to be a word inventor.

Was on the receiving end of multiple robocalls originating from the UK so now I blocked the whole of the UK from being able to call me on my phone.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk Really cool that you did the presentation about Twtxt! Thanks for doing this.

Listening to Buffalo Springfield’s - For What it’s Worth - the topic seems still very relevant these days sadly.

Wanted to share that we’re so proud of our six year old son; after taking skating lessons himself, he taught me and my wife how to stop on skates today. He was so proud about that he could teach us something good. Enjoyed also playing table tennis with him in the park, even-though it got windy, we had fun and didn’t give up trying to have a decent game. And at the guided tour at the old hot-metal plant in Duisburg yesterday, he asked the best questions and could be the guide’s assistant - holding the flashlight.

Oh the joy of working half the day in remote desktop environments with intermittent Internet connection issues… Good thing there is still some LTE left.

I have ethical concerns about executing killall node in my console, regardless of how necessary it is.

Wishing all carnevalists around the World a great start of the fifth season of the year.

My German word of the week: der Einfallsreichtum

Not sure that I really like where Microsoft is taking VSCode - it looks like soon it will be just another frontend for them to sell Github Copilot subscriptions.

We turned the heating up/on in our home for the first time this year.

Let it sink in how the richest person on the planet was EXTREMELY directly involved in getting his preferred candidate in the US presidency seat.

After testing Vivaldi for a couple of weeks I am convinced this is a great browser and to support the team behind it, I decided to start sending them a couple of Euro monthly, just to keep the momentum going.

If all Orange Face Elefant party voters would take them on their words and make them actually do whatever insane world they invented, then perhaps people will realize the grave mistake that was made today. Many people have to feel consequences before they believe it. I hope there will still be history books in the future to disclose the insanity for future generations. But whatever happens, the World will keep spinning…

Another new email handling strategy I am applying is agressively deleting everything that I don’t need to keep for some reason.

@Codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl I have separate mail boxes for private and work, but flattened both to have a simpler structure. For work, where we use Outlook, I am using categories for organising the mails and privately I am using Vivaldi’s labels system. The main idea is to use search and grouping through dynamic saved searches instead of static folders.

I wish I could absorb some of the horrors the rescue workers will encounter in Valencia’s underground garages and basements, so they could somewhat manage on with their own lives after… #realheroes #cannotunsee

Grateful for everything I have. Wishing everyone a good week.

So I’ve flattened my work and private email inboxes to single inbox folders and I don’t even know anymore what I was thinking before trying frantically to organise everything in sub folders. Labels and search filters are the way forward.

Moved my email back into a single ‘inbox’ folder instead of trying to keep everything organised in sub-folders. Using Vivaldi’s labels instead for organising the messages. Makes sense because I sometimes had trouble if a message needed to be in multiple boxes.

My guilty pleasure: raisin bread with salted butter and a slice of gouda cheese

My favourite part of Halloween is helping to set up the charity halloween party at a local school. Love decorating the haunted hallway and setting up the lights. Feels great to get those smiles on people’s faces.

First day back at school after our first real school vacation. Didn’t know where to start when a parent asked me about how our vacation was.

Cleaned up my personal e-mail account this week and claimed back about 2GB of space occupied by irrelevant stuff.

Liking the distinction in Vivaldi between bookmark and something to add to your reading list.

After many many years on Firefox, I am making the move to Vivaldi.

Had a great time at the Duisburg zoo yesterday including the amazing dolphin show

Got my flu shot today!

Monthly sign of life. We’re good.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s hot here as well. Luckily should only last a couple of days. Bunkering down in our home and keeping all the doors and windows closed. No airco. Fans give some relieve.

We had a great and relaxing three week vacation in Denmark and Sweden.

Picked up Altered Carbon again on Netflix. Really need to read those books.

Had totally forgotten how cool Apocalyptica’s “Nothing Else Matters” is.

@Prologic@twtxt.net No, haven’t had the need to. We’re sticking to trusted and true over latest and sleekest in this project. Perhaps next year.

Asked ChatGPT 3 yesterday to tone down an angry message I had to send, as in make it still polite, but make sure to get the message across, and it succeeded pretty well.

So dissatisfied and disappointed with the Fairphone 4’s audio issues where during phone calls, the receiver only gets half of the messages due to noise cancellation problems, that we’re considering iPhone as a valid “it just works” replacement. Especially since the iPhone15 now also has the USB Type C port.

I lapsed with the coffee drinking. One cup a day. Making tea takes way more time than making a quick coffee. Although I still should take the time.

Doing laundry at 6:00 in the morning

Time flows backwards for some successful people

And I feel fine…

Haven’t been sleeping well lately. Going to bed late. Lots to do.

Fun with React Hook Forms and MUI Material lately.

Cutting down on drinking coffee to one cup a week. Drinking more tea to get me through the day instead.

Made something that was mentioned in a national press release last week. That was cool.

Saw an airship fly over Düsseldorf and for a second I felt like being in an alternative dimension where these were more common. Really like them as they glide through the sky.

We’re good. Lots of work to do and that is great.

Finally using workspaces in my monorepos.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, normally I just use s browser to open PDF, but we had actually create one and it needed some special Acrobat features. Afterwards I immediately uninstalled it again.

Not having a great experience with Acrobat Reader. What the heck is Adobe trying to achieve with all of these popups and annoyances?

Half of Germany’s car owners are trying to get their cars washed today.

If AI coding machines become mainstream in less than ten years no human will be able to understand how any digital service works any more.

Even AI coding machines will need to rotate their access credentials every 90 days.

Going to have to reinstall my Yunohost server one of these days as the packages no longer seem to be updateable.

The show “One Day” is well worth the watch.

I’m in need of some nineties rage against the machine right now - sleep now in the fire

Asked an “AI Assistant” (Perplexity) to summarize my introduction of my homepage and then I asked it to give me some book recommendations I might like, and the thing actually nailed it.

The way things are going, we’re never going to make it to Alpha Centauri.

I arrived at a phase of life where waking up after 6:30 feels late.

What the heck is a Devil’s Haircut anyway Beck?

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.’ RIP Alexei Navalny (1976-2024). https://youtu.be/AHDueubF0QY

So I had three espressos before 11:00 - today’s going swell.

Wishing I could do accents like Trevor Noah can.

Found a new CLI timetracker assistant named Watson. Works really well.

“no-code” and “low-code” is still someone else’s code.

I’ve been enjoying my Fairphone 3 since January 2020. Not planning to change to a newer phone soon.

Of all the Daft Punk hit songs, ‘Around The World’ is probably still my favourite.

Played our first “Ticket To Ride” boardgame today.

Listening to classic rock with my six year old son on a Sunday afternoon - what can be better than this?

Lost my wallet with my IDs and bank cards. Would have been worse case if I had lost my phone. Still, it’s a waste of time and it will take weeks before I get all my cards back.

Got a Dr checkup and the screw in my hand hasn’t moved. That’s the good news. Bad news is that there seems to be something going on with the internal healing. Nothing to do but wait.

Late fees for public libraries are not fines, they’re extra donations to keep the organisation going.