f5n - Blog posts

Cycling on the D11, part 3

2026-02-23T20:27:25Z
In 2023</a> I started cycling along the D11</a> (Ostsee-Oberbayern-Radweg</a>) across Germany, doing 500km on that trip, then 300km in 2024</a>.
This is part 3, four days and 430km.
Planning</h2>
The route was clear (duh), but not the stops. This time I wanted to push myself a bit, but I also had to take into account the availability of hotels and the price, otherwise I might have cut down the route a little bit.
What I decided on:

Hof to Kaulsbach (close to Saalfeld): 113km</li>
Kaulsbach to Freyburg: 123km</li>
Freyburg to Alsleben: 115km</li>
Alsleben to Dessau: 80km (with an optional detour of 30km)</li> </ul>

Preparations</h2>
I didn't need a lot of new gear, but I wanted new rain pants, as my 10 (or more likely 12 or 13) year old pair was already disintegrating, so I grabbed a pair for 60 EUR at Lucky Bike and happened to find a black jersey on the discount pile for 40 EUR (matching my black MTB shorts, also Endura), so I bought that as well.
My trusty Garmin eTrex that I'd bought in 2016 for 170 EUR had lost its power button on a recent hiking trip. Probably not unfixable but I'd already wanted to get a newer, proper cycling GPS for a while, so after some research I went with the Edge 840 because I'd been happy with Garmin devices in the past. The eTrex and also the car navi was fine. I ended up paying 390 EUR for it.
The irony of probably paying more for this thing than for any mobile phone/tablet</a> I have ever owned is not lost on me. But in my defense I'm not that worried about security and plan to keep using it for 8-10 years if it holds up, just like the last one.
Day 1 - Hof - Kaulsbach</h2>
My train to Hof was scheduled for 5:44 and I need 30 minutes of (slow) riding to the train station, so I got up at around 4:15 with most things already packed and went on my merry way, forgetting I'll be passing that one club with many drunk people and glass on the street at 5 am, as on every early morning weekend ride to the main station.
The train arrived on time at 9:20, then I noticed that I should have spent a little more time famliarizing myself with the Garmin Edge, so I took a little detour because I messed up, still in Hof.
At some point I passed into Thuringia, but I don't remember seeing a sign on that gravel path.
As it was Father's Day I saw a lot of groups (mostly men, but not only) hiking, walking, drinking beer, cycling and to my surprise I was cheered on quite a few times when they noticed I'm the only idiot on this route without an e-bike.

Speaking of the route... too much elevation, too many small hills and mountains. Had to push the bike a couple times. In total around 1600m of ascent, but the scenery was mostly nice.
I had some Thüringer Rostbratwurst and a Coke for lunch, not even completely sure where it was, in a small village, my best guess is Saaldorf.
The hotel I chose</a> was pretty nice, could bring the bike in to the closed off courtyard and they had something to lock it to the wall.
Dinner in their restaurant was also very good (Soljanka and Wiener Schnitzel).
For some reason I couldn't really fall asleep, despite that very exhausting day, but I think I still got 8h in the end.
Breakfast was also really good here.
Day 2 - Kaulsbach - Freyburg</h2>
Because of the breakfast and being slow to pack up again I only started at around 9 am and hit another climb just 1km into my tour, that's when I decided to push the bike a little more.
I think it was on this day (but not 100% sure) when a lady flagged me down in the middle of the forest because she had a flat on her e-bike. I tried to help and pump it up but I guess it was proper done for, so she had to continue pushing the bike for a km or so, but seemed relatively unfazed. Maybe I could have tried to make my spare tube fit and replace it but with 100km ahead I wasn't too enthusiastic about it so I didn't suggest it.
At some point I passed into Saxony-Anhalt, but again I didn't see any sign.
Originally I wanted to stay in Naumburg, but for some reason (on this day I think it was the price) I chose to cycle another 7km or so to the north and stay in Freyburg.
The room was decent, the bathroom was a little small for someone my size, but overall ok. Could bring the bike into the entry hall of the building.
Went to Haveli</a>, an Indian Restaurant, for dinner, quite a big portion of Chicken Tikka Masala and some Naan, and pretty good.

Day 3 - Freyburg - Alsleben</h2>
The weather was good, but I had to backtrack 7-8km to the south, and went through Naumburg, where I had incorporated a couple photo spots into my route, then to Weißenfels and Leuna, then coming to Merseburg, where again I had changed the route slightly to take a detour into the city proper.
Because this was going to be another long day, but with less elevation and thus more time, I decided to have a proper lunch for once, so I chose the best-rated pizza place and was very disappointed. Waiter wasn't sure what to make of my order of a Pizza Prosciutto because they only had a Prosciutto e Funghi or a Hawaii but after explaining which word is the Prosciutto and which word is (are?) the Funghi, at least that part worked out. It didn't taste great though and I'm not sure when I ever left the outer part of a pizza... ah well.
On to Halle and mostly ignoring it because I've been here already a couple of years ago and further north through Könnern, to Alsleben (and still following the river Saale).
Grabbed dinner at a small pension/restaurant in the town center and talked to the only other guest at the next table, also a cycling tourist. A welcome surprise, apparently I'm not so good with chatting up other cyclists on my tours as other people are.
Because my shoulder had started to hurt the day before I had picked up some stuff from a drugstore in the morning, luckily it was Saturday and they were still open.
Either I hadn't read the booking page carefully or they were not very obvious with their offering, but I was a little surprised to find a communal shower (and toilet) next to the small log hut I'd booked. Not a problem, really - but they had failed to mention that showering was to be paid with 1 EUR coins and even the toilet was locked behind 20ct coins, but it was open when I arrived, or I would have probably been less chill about it. Also apparently the last guests had taken the only set of keys with them and those would be mailed back in the future... so I had no keys to my room, but I wasn't too worried about that, being on a property, behind another house and a fence. But they had no curtains in the hut and so the sun woke me up at 5:30...
But at least it was cheap, and it actually looked as nice as on the pictures, and I could sit on my own porch and look out on the river in the evening.

Day 4 - Alsleben - Dessau</h2>
Although I'd slept quite well, it was pouring in the morning and I wasn't actually enthusiastic about another 100km, I opted to skip my optional detour to Aschersleben, which would have added around 30km, and I felt 80 was gonna be enough for that day.
I think I liked this day less than the others, mostly because there were lots of boring stretches with no features, sometimes along bigger roads, less kilometers through forests or along rivers. Not bad, but just not as exciting.
Also this was the first day where my bum hurt, and my shoulder also hurt again.
So because my bus was going to go at 1:50 in the night, arrive 15min from home at around 7:15 and I was scheduled to be online at 8:00 to be on-call for the week at work and not completely optimistic to be sleeping well or at all on the bus I opted to take a cheap hotel room in Leipzig and try to sleep from around 8pm to 1 am, which surprisingly mostly worked. 40 EUR well spent. Also the room</a> was pretty nice, not even taking the price into account.
At first I had planned to maybe take a bed in a hostel for 15 EUR, but for this case where the only things I wanted were a shower and silence for a couple of hours and not having to care about the bike or getting a towel or whatever... I guess the 20-25 EUR was an ok tradeoff.
To my surprise the bus thing worked out fine, and I could actually sleep a couple hours more, so I didn't feel too bad in the morning and also didn't have to instantly jump in the shower again.
The bike was hella dirty though after 5h on the back of a bus.
Oh, and here's the GPX result in comparison to the route above:

Packing list</h2>
Not too many changes to last year's setup, and also not too many changes to the 2023</a> setup either.

same bike, KTM X-Strada</li>
same handle bar, frame, and top tube bag</li>
same backpack</li>
same pannier (single one)</li>
same shoes, same clothes (mostly)</li> </ul>
Stuff I had changed before the trip:

second bidon in the bottle holder, only for water and not sugary stuff</li>
new bike pump</li>
some voile straps in the frame bag</li> </ul>
Deliberate changes for this trip:

no water bladder</li>
new jacket, Marmot Gore-Tex Hardshell, no more Columbia rain jacket</li>
more rain/cold weather gear overall</li>
backup wall plug and cable</li>
banana!</li>
less sweets, no gels, just some store-bought oat/cereal bars</li>
daily dose of magnesium against cramps (it helped)</li>
no bulky glasses case, only a light felt pouch</li> </ul>
Mistakes I noticed:

accidentally took a second pair of long pants (bulky)</li>
forgot a normal T-Shirt for dinner</li>
backpack was a little too heavy on day 1/2</li> </ul>
What I still have not figured out:

the bike lock situation</li>
easy access to rain gear</li>
easy access to phone for pictures</li>
not forgetting handkerchiefs and thus relying on napkins</li> </ul>
Stuff I didn't use:

windbreaker jacket</li>
in-ear headphones</li> </ul>
Expenses</h2>

Preparation

new pair of rain pants - 60 EUR</li>
a new black bike jersey - 40 EUR</li>
Garmin Edge 840 - 393 EUR</li> </ul> </li>
Hotels:

Kaulsbach: 70 EUR</li>
Freyburg: 77 EUR</li>
Alsleben: 45 EUR</li>
Leipzig: 40 EUR</li> </ul> </li>
Trains & Buses:

32 + 7 EUR for a Bayernticket to Hof (+ bike)</li>
13.40 EUR for the S-Bahn from Dessau to Leipzig (bike was free)</li>
28 + 13 EUR for flixbus for me and the bike</li> </ul> </li> </ul>
I didn't really pay as much attention to drinks and snacks this time, just the "proper" meals I had.

Day 1 lunch: ~8 EUR</li>
Kaulsbach, dinner: 30 EUR</li>
Day 2 lunch: ~13 EUR</li>
Freyburg, dinner: 25 EUR</li>
Day 3 lunch: 24 EUR</li>
Alsleben, dinner: 30 EUR</li>
Day 4 lunch: ~5 EUR</li>
Leipzig, dinner: 18 EUR</li> </ul>
Final thoughts</h2>
It was fun, but I underestimated the elevation on day 1. Day 2 should have been a bit more relaxing but still quite a few kilometers, and I guess that's why I ended up cutting day 4 a bit short. A rough estimation tells me that I have about 550km left to reach the Baltic Sea now. I hope to complete this in 2026 and not have to split it into two parts, but we'll see. Getting to the start and getting back is becoming increasingly annoying. The way back in 2023 was only about 2:20h by train, getting to the start was already 3:30h this time, and getting back was 5:30h on a bus.
Having the new Garmin and connecting it to the phone was really great, I used brouter</a> and gpx.studio</a> for on the fly checking and planning my routes when having breaks and in the evening.
And yeah, this should have been published last summer, it was even mostly written but I never came around finishing it until February 2026.

CD-DB

2026-02-17T22:13:09Z
I've bought, collected, and ripped my own CDs for a very long time.
Some of those old rips were done in a terrible quality and need to be redone, and I might as well rip them to FLAC for archival purposes.
So I wanted a list of CDs I own, at least the important ones that I have on my shelves, from my favourite bands.
Now I know there must be a ton of systems that have all the fancy features, but I didn't know their names and after a brief web search I could not find anything that matched my needs, or they didn't advertise those:
scan barcode with mobile phone</li>
look up and fetch the metadata</li>
export all the data</li>
have a non-shitty phone app without ALL permissions</li> </ul>
So in the end I built something for myself.
I found barcode-scanner</a> which is web-based, can be self-hosted and mostly did what I wanted.

screenshot of the barcode-scanner web app</h4></figcaption> </figure>
I made an ugly 7 line patch that added a simple link that opens in a new tab with the scanned barcode as a GET parameter.
Then I wrote a small PHP script that

takes a ?barcode=</code> parameter</li>
checks the MusicBrainz API for that barcode</li>
writes the result (parsed and raw JSON) to an SQLite db</li>
shows an error if nothing is found</li>
alternatively also takes an ?id=</code> parameter (we'll come to that)</li> </ul> So this is how it works: take a CD from a stack facing back side up</li> scan a barcode</li> tap on the last link shown</li> check the new tab for errors</li> close the tab</li> go back to the barcode-scanner tab</li> keep the CD out of the stack on error</li> </ul> For the ones with errors I search the title of the album on MusicBrainz, then find a somewhat matching release and copy their MBID and manually call my script with it. Really important is just the track list here. I didn't exactly pay attention but I think I did not have to manually look up more than 10%, maybe 5%. I scanned 160 album cases as the first batch and I think I had to look up like 10-12. Finally I wrote a small table view with filtering on that same SQLite DB, and I already had the filtering JS in a different project. screenshot of a web page with a list of music albums, all by the band In Flames</h4></figcaption> </figure> Time investment: maybe 2h and < 300 lines of code I guess just typing the 160 album names with artist and title would have taken longer, and I wouldn't have all the metadata. Now I guess I just need to find more CDs and then compare to my mp3 folder and get to ripping stuff.

Hardware Mute Button
2026-02-13T11:32:53Z
I've long been annoyed at having to alt-tab and find the mute button (or even
more the UNmute button during Teams calls or Slack Huddles) when I have
another window open, also having to memorize the different shortcuts.</p>
So when I heard about a  Korg nanoKONTROL2</a> being used I thought I'd
also want to try that. I bought mine at Hieber Lindberg</a> in their
shop in Munich for 55 EUR.</p>
</p>
As I mostly wanted this for work first, this is about using macOS Tahoe.</p>
First these are tools we need:</p>

Korg Control Editor</a></li>
MidiPipe</a></li>
Script Editor (preinstalled)</li>
</ul>
Korg Control Editor</h2>
Download</a> and install the .dmg - I downloaded a
KONTROL_EDITOR_251.dmg</code> that turned out to be version 2.5.1.2.</p>
</p>
Midipipe</h2>
I installed this via homebrew:</p>
brew tap nicowald/subtlesoft
brew install --cask midipipe
</code></pre>
and then I found this forum thread</a>
which provided me with a good starting point but I ended up starting from scratch.</p>
The idea is that you add one "MIDI in" tool, choose your nanoKONTROL as the input:</p>
</p>
and then one "AppleScript Trigger" tool and run commands based on the MIDI inputs.</p>
</p>
In theory that's it, but I ran into several quality of life problems with this application:</p>
The editor component is like TextEdit and uses autocomplete and helpful 'fixes', so for example
it will replace every --</code> (a comment in AppleScript) into an — so to comment out a line
you have to type dash dash (wait a split second) escape</code> and it has no syntax highlighting.</p>
Then I tried calling my own scripts in ~/Library/Script Libraries/</code> but I ran into weird caching
issues, because the way MidiPipe works is that it compiles the script on first run and not on
deliberate save and it somehow did not include the latest library, but some older cached version.</p>
So in the end I settled on writing my full script (with functions) in the macOS Script Editor for
syntax highlighting (which is still a bit buggy) and linting, and then copy/pasting the full
script into MidiPipe. This is the least nerve-wracking method I found, also to test small changes
on their own.</p>
So here's a very basic example how to do anything with MIDI events in MidiPipe:</p>
on runme(message)
    -- introduce some variables
    set m2 to (item 1 of message)
    set txt to "midipipe " & (item 1 of message) & ":" & (item 2 of message) & ":" & (item 3 of message)

    -- log to a file
    do shell script "echo " & quoted form of (txt as string) & " >> $HOME/tmp/as_debug.txt"

    -- display a popup
    display dialog "kontrol " & m2
end runme
</code></pre>
and this is how you control some system volume settings and send key events to applications:</p>
on muteOutput()

    set cur to output volume of (get volume settings)

    if cur is greater than 1 then
        set volume output volume 1
        set volume with output muted
    else
        set volume output volume 50
        set volume without output muted
    end if

end muteOutput
</code></pre>
I'm still a little unsure if I want to do both volume 0/1 AND mute, or not.
Interestingly there is no mute for microphone input, just for output.
I originally chose 0 here but that auto-muted, so I had to unmute when raising it again.</p>
on muteSlack()
    tell application "Slack"

        reopen
        activate
        repeat 1 times
            tell application "System Events" to keystroke space using {shift down, command down}
        end repeat

    end tell
end muteSlack
</code></pre>
Of course the repeat 1 times</code> superfluous but I'm keeping this in as a general reference for
AppleScript, which is kinda fascinating and horrifying at the same time.</p>
The way the events seem to work is that the message</code> has three parts:</p>
The first one seems to be an identifier of the hardware, I saw the value 144</code> in the example,
but mine sends a 176</code>, not so important where it comes from.</p>
Then the second value is the button/slider/dial, that's where the Korg
Control Editor comes in handy to display the numbers.</p>
And the third one is the state of the control, a button fires 127</code> on keydown and 0</code> on keyup,
the sliders and dials emit a value between 0</code> and 127</code> (inclusive) when you slide or turn them,
based on the state.</p>
With that knowledge I wrote a simple trigger function to
check what has been used to not have all the lines in the dispatch function:</p>
on trigger(message, t2, t3)

    set m1 to item 1 of message
    set m2 to item 2 of message
    set m3 to item 3 of message

    if (m1 = 176) and (m2 = t2) and (m3 = t3) then
        return true
    else
        return false
    end if

end trigger
</code></pre>
and that's being used like this:</p>
on runme(message)
    if trigger(message, 39, 127) then
        muteInput()
    end if
end runme
</code></pre>
which would call the muteInput</code> method once, when the S</code> button in the 8th column is pressed
(the top right button on the nanoKONTROL2, the one highlighted in the Control Editor screenshot).</p>
So I am currently using only 6 buttons for my immediate needs:</p>

Row 8 (rightmost)

S - mute input in macOS</li>
M - mute output in macOS</li>
R - send some keystrokes to TextEdit (for testing)</li>
</ul>
</li>
Row 7 (second from right)

S - mute Slack</li>
M - mute Teams</li>
R - send a test message to Slack (without Enter)</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Useful enough but maybe not exactly worth 55 EUR and some hours. But I learned a lot about macOS
and AppleScript.</p>
The solution being used on Linux that triggered this whole adventure looks downright boring:
Midi-pw-mixer</a>.</p>


Tools: 2026 edition
2026-01-13T00:30:45Z
I wrote about tools on Windows in 2019</a> and I wanted to write an
update to that post for a while already. Now with extra content!</p>
Windows</h2>


Browsers</p>

Firefox</code> as the default, with several multi-account containers

Pinned browser tabs for Matrix, Slack, WhatsApp, Mail</li>
</ul>
</li>
Vivaldi</code> for some stuff instead of a container</li>
</ul>
</li>

E-Mail</p>

kinda got into the habit of using webmail and have not set up Thunderbird</code></li>
</ul>
</li>

IRC</p>

Quassel</code>, as usual</li>
</ul>
</li>

Audio/Video</p>

I just set up mpd</code>, currently I am using Cantata</code> as my client</li>
nomacs</code> instead of IrfanView, although it's worse</li>
</ul>
</li>

Editors</p>

Notepad++</code></li>
</ul>
</li>

Voice</p>

Discord</code></li>
Trialing Ferdium</code> here for chat, only starting the Discord client for voice</li>
</ul>
</li>

Passwords</p>

KeePassXC</code></li>
</ul>
</li>

Network stuff</p>

PuTTY</code></li>
FileZillaPortable</code></li>
Remote Desktop Connection</code> or whatever the offical name for the Win11 RDP client is</li>
Syncthing</code></li>
</ul>
</li>

Misc</p>

SharpKeys</code></li>
WinSplit Revolution</code> 11.04</li>
7ZipPortable</code></li>
Flow-Launcher</code> instead of Launchy</code> now</li>
Sysinternals</code>

mosty Autoruns</code> and procexp</code>, sometimes tcpview</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Quite pared down, but as I hate working on it I've moved everything I can to Linux.
My traditional C:\Apps\bin</code> looks downright barren compared to years ago. (This is where I
put shortcuts to everything, and give the dir to the launcher instead of letting it go wild
everywhere and potentially finding useless stuff.)</p>
</li>
</ul>
Linux</h2>
As I am currently writing this on my NUC</a> via RDP and it's a
pretty new setup (and I'm not using Linux for work at the moment), this will be shorter.</p>

Browser

Firefox</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Editors

neovim</code> - tried out CyberNvim</a> and it stuck for now</li>
TextAdept</code> for notes</li>
</ul>
</li>
Window managers/DEs

xfce4</code> on the NUC because using the super key via RDP is meh</li>
KDE Plasma</code> on my main laptop because it's a casual couch device now</li>
i3</code> on my old "work" laptop and this or sway would be my #1 choice for work again</li>
</ul>
</li>
Misc

rofi</code> because the xfce launcher is not great</li>
zenity</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
The funny thing is that while this would be the easiest OS to customize, it's the one I have to
do the least because I can choose my WM and configure stuff. And a lot of times I just don't
ever actively think about a tool because I have a proper shell open anyway (somewhat true for the
mac as well, but definitely not for Windows). E.g using bc</code> instead of a GUI calculator. Or just
quickly starting a Python repl, or just using some stuff in /bin or something from my
dotfiles</a>.</p>
mac OS</h2>

Browser

Firefox</code> for most tasks</li>
LibreWolf</code> for "personal stuff", e.g. logged into my own Github account, Webmail, etc</li>
Safari</code> only for the SAP portal where I file my vacation requests</li>
Chrome</code> installed as a Backup, only used for LinkedIn, useless</li>
</ul>
</li>
E-Mail

Outlook Web</code>, 90% of the time</li>
Outlook</code> (the app), when I need to access our shared team inbox</li>
</ul>
</li>
Audio/Video

Cog</code> plays mp3s</li>
recently Cantata</code> to control mpd</code> at home</li>
</ul>
</li>
Editors

IntelliJ</code> as my main IDE</li>
Neovim</code></li>
TextAdept</code> for notes</li>
</ul>
</li>
Passwords

KeePassXC</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Network stuff

Windows App</code>, Microsoft's better RDP client</li>
Syncthing</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Terminals

Ghostty</code> after some time with WezTerm</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Window Management etc

Hammerspoon</code></li>
Rectangle</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Misc

Podman Desktop</code> works surprisingly well for what I need, not using the GUI much though, but
it provided me with a working podman setup</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Plugins</h2>
Firefox: All three very important and I've not missed anything else.</p>

Consent-O-Matic</li>
Firefox Multi-Account Containers</li>
uBlock Origin</li>
(rarely installed) FoxyProxy</li>
</ul>
Fonts</h2>
Might as well put these here. What I use is changing over time, but there are a few choices that
I don't change around much.</p>

Terminals

Usually Iosevka</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
IRC

Fantasque Sans Mono</code> for the last few years, Iosevka in the past</li>
</ul>
</li>
Text editor (Non-IDE)

Consolas</code> or Iosevka</code> on Windows</li>
</ul>
</li>
IDE

I kinda like JetBrains Mono</code> and never changed it since they introduced it, but for some
reason I also never switched all my IDEs on other machines.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Themes and colors</h2>
I have this seemingly odd idea of wanting to read what is written on my tabs, so I've been using
this Firefox theme</a>
for the last 10 years.
Honorable mention</a>.</p>
I've not themed and styled all my apps in the same colorscheme, although I
wrote about it</a> - but I'm still using a mix of Dracula, Solarized Dark,
Monokai, Nord, and other things, usually to not have it uniform, but quicker to distinguish between
them :D.</p>


Shell scripts
2026-01-09T11:30:08Z
I've long been unhappy with shell scripts for anything that's more than 20
lines of glue code and so I've been looking for replacements for quite a
while.</p>
The problem is usually that you need to fiddle with various versions of
exec</code> or popen</code> or whatever the language calls their wrapper around the
underlying C functions (or POSIX functionality, whatever). The task is usually
to execute a command, very often piping it into another one, then using the
output.</p>
Janet</h2>
Last year I found something neat. It's the sh</code> package for Janet
(repo</a>).</p>
Small aside: At my current job we're doing something I really like - every so
often there's a housekeeping day where the whole team works on a list of all
our repos, sorted chronologically by which project has not had such a
so-called "Patch Day" for the longest. This is usually between 2 and 4 months,
and is completely separate from the vulnerability checks and renovate updates.</p>
I love this concept and I wish I'd had that at previous companies, no project
ever really goes stale like this because someone always has looked at it in
the last months, even if it's been running without intervention or adding new
features.</p>
Anyway, we have a checklist of tasks I felt could be automated, or at least
be made easier, as I was doing them anyway. This is not the full list, but I
think it represents exactly that type of small helper script. It's simple
enough it could have been a shell script, but if I needed more stuff, I could
have added it, in a proper programming language.</p>
Comments inline with #</code></p>
#!/usr/bin/env janet

# boring header, including the sh package
(use sh)

# One task is cleaning up old branches, so list them
($ echo "# Local branches")
($ git br)
($ echo "# Remote branches")
($ git br -r)

# Let's check that our Renovate setup is doing what it should
($ echo "# Last renovate commits")
($ git log --oneline --grep Renovate -n 3 --pretty=fuller)


# We're not big on using many fancy containers, but corretto and nodejs
# sometimes do need to be bumped to a new major version
($ echo "# Build images: corretto nodejs")
(run git grep corretto)
(run git grep "nodejs: ")


($ echo "# some boring renaming task in a metadata file")
(run rg "a-string-that-should-be-different")

</code></pre>
That's it, the special sauce is explained in this post</a>, but the
benefit for me is that I don't have to write anything like</p>
["git", "log", "--oneline", ...
</code></pre>
Python</h2>
Recently I also found a bug in a backup script of mine and annoyed with trying
to debug it, I rewrote it in Python, only to discover that the bug had been
trying to run docker with --rm -it</code> via cron (force of habit when typing).</p>
So yeah, it was a lot more debuggable, but the real problem was not shell :D</p>
Fortunately that one only runs a few docker commands in order to dump databases
that are running in a container.</p>
For completeness, this is how the interesting part looks:</p>
filter_arg = 'name=postgres' if is_postgres() else 'name=mariadb'
av = [docker, 'ps', '-f', filter_arg, '--format', '\{\{.ID\}\}']
cid = subprocess.run(av, stdout=subprocess.PIPE).stdout.decode('utf-8').strip()
</code></pre>
(Actually the curly brackets should not be escaped in this snippet, but
apparently I found a rare bug in the templating I use on this site...)</p>
This filters by container name and gives me just the ID. And just the if/else
for the dbms is already better in Python than Shell.</p>
Lua</h2>
And then some time ago I tried to solve the problem on my own but it's also
just a terrible hack: harsh</a></p>
It might be better if I had a proper parser for it, and I'm still not
completely sold on the idea, but it's meant as a test bed and proof of
concept.</p>
Using it looks like this:</p>
V.tokenFile = "/tmp/token"
local curl = run([[
    echo '{"token":"foo","b":3}'
]])
local jq = curl:pipe([[ jq -r .token ]])
spit(V.tokenFile, jq)
-- $ cat /tmp/token yields "foo"
</code></pre>
Which has the benefit of being able to write the shell code verbatim,
but you pay by the boilerplate around it.</p>
Maybe I should have a deeper look if the aforemention janet shell library
could be ported to Fennel</a>.</p>
Etc</h2>
Anyway, I kinda like the janet-sh</code> solution but I am not sold on Janet as
a general-purpose programming language (yet) - I don't have any real big
problems but when I looked at it (in 2025) it felt like stuff I expect to be
there to be missing, and it was simply was not better enough than other Lispy
languages I tried. These days I apparently either expect core functionality to
just be there or I am enthusiastic enough to contribute.</p>

Random aside: Coincidentally I also had that feeling a bit when trying
Gleam</code>, but much less so. For Gleam I found single bugs and rough edges,
for Janet it felt like: enough is missing to be annoying, not enough
missing to be one of the first people jumping on the train.</p>
</blockquote>
So maybe I am still searching for the "perfect" replacement for shell scripts,
or maybe I should just give up and write some python. What I learned with my
own attempt with harsh, a single:</p>
echo "git --foo --bar --whatever='3'" | sed 's, ,", ",g' >> myscript.py
</code></pre>
already fixes most of my problems, because fixing that is 5 seconds, instead
of having to type ", "</code> 10 times. Yes, I'm picky sometimes.</p>
And it's not like I rewrite those lines all
the time either, and I can usually replace all the calls to sed</code> and awk</code>
with Python string manipulation after getting the output of the one
original command.</p>
Footnote: Perl</h2>
I have nothing against Perl per se (except that I don't know it well and have
not had a good experience most of the time), but I don't want to learn it, I
can't (and don't want to make sure) it's installed on every box I use, and
so I can't judge it. I'm not saying it's bad for the task, but not for me.</p>


2025 in review
2025-12-31T23:59:39Z
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2024</a> / 2023</a> / 2022</a> / 2021</a> / 2020</a> / 2019</a> /
2018</a> / 2017</a> / 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

World of Warcraft</li>
EVE Online</li>
Diablo IV</li>
Final Fantasy XIV</li>
</ul>
(no change, really)</p>
Movies I've (re-)watched</h3>

Ant-Man and the Wasp</a></li>
Thor: Ragnarok</a></li>
Avengers: Infinity War</a></li>
Avengers: Endgame</a></li>
Captain America: Civil War</a></li>
Black Panther</a></li>
Captain Marvel</a></li>
Doctor Strange</a></li>
Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness</a></li>
Project Power</a> - this was a little odd, but not terrible</em></li>
Titan AE</a> - still great, 25 years later</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I've (re-)watched</h3>

The Rookie</a> - Season 6+7</em></li>
</ul>
Podcasts and other media</h3>
Not a lot this year.</p>
CDs I bought</h3>

Battle Beast - Steelbound</li>
</ul>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

a new PC</a></li>
a new (used) NUC for dev</a></li>
NO new keyboard</a></li>
a new Fritz!Box as the old one died after around 13 years - 159 EUR</li>
bigger handlebar bag (Deuter Mondego) - 46 EUR</li>
a bike computer (Garmin Edge 840) - 393 EUR</li>
some small SSDs for storage (2x 50 EUR)</li>
a new, bigger, thinner, floor protection mat for my office chair which I hate</li>
</ul>
Concerts</h3>
Yay, this category is finally back.</p>

Flotsam & Jetsam (+ Lord Volture + Hateful Agony) in August</li>
Battle Beast (+ Dominum + Majestica) in December</li>
</ul>
Social networks</h3>

Fediverse - it just works</em></li>
Facebook - logged in like three times</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC -  mostly every day</em></li>
Matrix - several times per week</em></li>
Email - no change, but it's definitely getting less used</em></li>
Slack - old work, new work and one other community</em></li>
Discord - yes, not too happy about it</em></li>
Signal - yes, but not with more people than before</em></li>
WhatsApp - yes, sadly</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

summer vacation in the Spessart region in July, also bike tour to get there</li>
multi-day cycling trip, continuing the route along the D11 (blog post tbd)</li>
pre-christmas trip to Erfurt, Bamberg, Fürth</li>
</ul>
(Online) Services</h3>

Subscribed to Netflix, Paramount and Amazon Prime</li>
some MMO subscriptions</li>
VPS: Mostly Hetzner Cloud, 1x Strato, 1x Netcup</li>
fraenk for mobile</li>
</ul>
No changes here except streaming services.</p>
Programming languages, sorted by usage</h3>

Kotlin - work</em> (current daily driver)</li>
TypeScript - work, unfortunately</em></li>
Clojure - some personal projects</em></li>
Python - some small stuff</em></li>
Gleam - started for Advent of Code, I like it, might stick</em></li>
Janet - tried it out for a small project. nice, but does not seem finished</em></li>
</ul>
Stuff that kinda worked out</h3>

cycle more, at least until some health problems in July/August</li>
summer vacation was great</li>
pen & paper resumed</li>
concerts</li>
</ul>
Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

visiting a bike park</li>
</ul>
Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

keep on cycling a lot, more mountain biking</li>
monthly board game night hopefully comes back</li>
some concerts</li>
</ul>


Package Managers
2025-12-14T16:20:30Z
If I look at my environment.zsh</code> (just the part of my zsh config that handles
PATH</code> - I see the following customizations, although not all are active on
every machine at every time (the curse of shared dotfiles):</p>

add rustup's bin/</code> and source .cargo/env</code></li>
add /usr/local/go/bin</code></li>
add JDK via SDKMAN (partial dogfooding for leiningen-sdkman</a></li>
Homebrew</li>
nvm</code> for node.js</li>
</ul>
And then stuff I don't currently use:</p>

add node_modules/bin</code> from nixpkgs</li>
add Elixir via kiex</code> and Erlang via kerl</code></li>
</ul>
I kinda hate this - and I get that I could maybe, sometimes just grab a
version that's packaged via the distro's package manager - but I usually
need a specific version (sometimes newer, sometimes LTS) when I am writing
code in that particular language.</p>
Of course it would be easy to wish for a generalized package manager, and
SDKMAN is just that - but they also don't seem to have everything I need.</p>
And so the path mangling continues. Usually it's not even that bad, except
Homebrew, which insists on adding itself to the front of the path, when every
other script appends or prepends at exactly that moment in time when you call
it, so it's relatively easy to get the order how you want it.</p>
But it's still ridiculous I can't have one bin</code> folder for all of those.
Maybe cluttering up /usr/local/bin</code> wasn't so bad after all, I'd probably
have had less issues if all those tools and package managers would have
symlinked their binaries (even better if configurable) to ~/.local/bin</code> or
something like that and then you'd simply include that in your path and be
done with it. How likely are naming conflicts with 10 language package
managers anyway?</p>


Mechanical Keyboards Revisited
2025-10-20T10:30:42Z
It's been over 7 years</a> that I last wrote about keyboards.</p>
There have been a few changes, some only recently.</p>
The Logitech G710+ MX Brown is still my daily driver on my main gaming PC. If you mash some buttons very hard, the key caps come off, but I usually don't do that, so it still works. Because I am quite so acquainted with the G buttons on the left and I couldn't find another G710+ I bought a new Alienware Advanced Gaming Keyboard AW568 for 60 EUR on eBay around Christmas 2023, just as a backup. A first quick test did not really work out in being able to use the extra buttons.</p>

  
  Alienware Advanced Gaming Keyboard AW568</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
The Noppoo Choc Mid 87 MX Black has continued to be my main work keyboard until September 2024, but then I got a Mac and Noppoo keyboards don't really play nice with Macs. It's a bit weird and apparently has to do with their NKRO implementation, there used to be an unofficial OSX driver. I had found this out in 2012 already when I got the Choc Mini.</p>
I've been mostly working from home since March 2020, but I got a Cherry MX Board 3.0 (MX Red) basically for free in summer of 2023, and I have that stashed away at the office since then, in order to have a proper keyboard when I am there.</p>

  
  Cherry MX Board 3.0</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
That was also pretty good as a replacement for the Noppoo while I decided how to continue. Originally I wanted something with a custom firmware and was pointed in the direction of either Keychron, Monsgeek, or a Neo80/Evo80. A combination of: Not in stock, too expensive, not the right switches, or ugly then made me go back to some plan a while ago where I wanted to try a Ducky, so I bought one in late October 2024. I had thought about getting the yellow one but in the end I settled for the "Origin Vintage" but I'll see if I will slap some colored keycaps on it, but it was only 100 EUR and not 140 and I wasn't sure if the novelty of the yellow one would wear off. I had used the Noppoo for 11 years after all (but with 3 different keycap sets). The Cherry moved to the office again soon after that.</p>

  
  Ducky Origin Vintage</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
The last keyboard I hadn't mentioned was the Kickstarter version of the Atreus</a>, which I backed in March 2020 and that was delivered around September. I paid 99 USD. On the one hand I'd been curious about the form factor and on the other hand I'd been working with technomancy (its designer) on Leiningen</a> for a couple of years already, so I knew about his self-built versions and kits, so when there was a non-wood assembled version it was kind of a nobrainer to get one. I've played around with it from time to time but I've not really tried to make the switch full time. I suppose that would be extra hard as I use my qwertz one at night after work. Now that I  think about it I am not even sure which switches it has.</p>

  
  Keyboard.io Atreus</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
I had written a draft of this post about exactly one year ago and in the meantime (July 2025) there was an odd sale of a "Ducky One 2 SF MX Brown RGB LED" for 23 EUR, so of course I could not resist.</p>

  
  Ducky One 2</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
Anyway, so the total tally of mechanical keyboards is now 9. Two in daily use at home, one several times per month in the office. One simply as a backup, one or two sadly in a state of "would use again if I had another linux laptop for work", one because of the price, and two I purely for fun. Not a terrible mix, but I guess I should stop again for a while. 2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2023, 2023, 2024, 2025. Four in 7 years, then five in another 7 years, so I guess I can't have more than 6 more by 2033?</p>


A New Dev Environment
2025-10-19T16:37:09Z
A while ago I noticed that I had not been happy with my "development environment" at home.
This mostly means that when I am on my main machine it's usually booted into Windows
because of some games and I hate developing stuff on Windows and I don't like WSL either.</p>
So I was looking to buy some Thin Client (Fujitsu Esprimo or similar) and put
Linux on it and then have something to remote into. But I couldn't decide what
exactly to get, then I accidentally bought a wrong thing on eBay (mostly
because the picture was a little dark and it was nearly the correct model
number), but fortunately could cancel (or I'd have a proper desktop PC,
nearly as big as a midi tower).</p>
In the end I had been annoying the crowd on our Matrix channel enough with my
indecisiveness that someone remembered they had an old unused NUC I could just
come and grab, so I did exactly that.</p>
So here's brick</a>:</p>

Intel NUC DC3217IYE</li>
i3-3217U (Q4 2012)</li>
16 GB RAM I stole out of my x230 for now</li>
30 GB Kingston mSATA SSD (probably need to order a newer, bigger one)</li>
</ul>
And it's been chugging along nicely for a couple of days now.</p>
I put Arch on it and after some fiddling I ended up with xrdp + xfce4.</p>
This means I can have a full screen session on one of the 27" monitors,
and still minimize it, and leave stuff running. And connect from several
other machines (tried Windows 11 and OS X, have yet to try Linux) - and all
of that without noticeable lag.</p>
These are things I tried first:</p>

RustDesk - laggy as hell, locally on wifi and plugged in</li>
wayvnc</code> didn't work at all, verbose also said nothing, or it crashed</li>
TigerVNC and X11 - fiddling with :0 and :1, not great</li>
i3 - no matter what I tried I couldn't get Alt or Super as mod key working</li>
</ul>
With this "meh, I don't want to work on a laptop" out of the way I've been busy with a couple projects now.</p>

Rust

cerith</a> (irc bot) - updated, tested, moved to Codeberg</li>
nextgen</a> (static site generator used for this) - updated, tested, moved to Codeberg</li>
</ul>
</li>
Clojure

multiplex</a> (tumblelog I use for music) - updated, tested, moved to Codeberg</li>
battlenet</a> (lib for reading Blizzard APIs) - updated, tested, some feature in progress</li>
</ul>
</li>
Go

feedfoo</a> (blog post to fediverse announcer) - updated, tested, moved to Codeberg</li>
cssmin-go</a> (css minimizer) - tested, moved to Codeberg</li>
Jerssey - Backend</a> (podcast tracker) - nearly finished the go rewrite, planning to publish</li>
</ul>
</li>
C++

Jerssey - Client</a> (podcast tracker) - still builds with Qt6 (on Linux) but need to try to build on Windows</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Nothing terribly big, but I'm happy it got done. Copied (not moved yet) a good
chunk of "usable" projects over from Github to Codeberg, some dependency
updates, some small bug fixes, nearly finished one rewrite.</p>
Also the cleanup of old Github projects continues, still a lot to do.</p>


A Podcast Tracker
2025-09-26T12:00:31Z
Usually I post all my code experiments and tools publicly (usually on Github,
but that may change) but for some reason I never published this, but after
a couple changes I might.</p>
I don't always listen to a lot of podcasts, but for some stretches of time in
the last couple years I listened to a few, and unlike most people (or so
I heard) I usually did that on my Windows PC, while doing other things, and not
on a mobile phone, so all the "common" podcast player apps were out.</p>
The mp3s are downloaded or streamed (no huge preference) in foobar2000, but
keeping track of where I was (episode-wise, not in the episode) proved
difficult.</p>
For a couple years I had used Juice</a></p>

but it was last updated in 2006 and at some point it could not connect to
modern TLS hosts anymore. I quickly looked into just patching it, but that
proved difficult. It's a python app, and then an ancient SSL version and...
well, in the end I decided on rewriting it.</li>
</ul>
So I ended up with a GUI app in C++/Qt and a backend (I have a PHP version and
a Golang version).</p>
It looks like this:</p>
</p>
It has its flaws (like being single-threaded and stalling while it downloads
something) but it was purely an MVP that got a few more features.</p>
It really only tracks a list of podcasts, then a list of episodes per podcast,
gives me a download link, a link to the episode post, some timestamps, and
I can set a status to New/In Progress/Done. That's it. Having it local only
would have been fine, but of course I had to add an API.</p>
</p>
I've not used it in a couple months, but it's there when I go back to listening
to podcasts. And it also tells me where to continue if I want to.</p>
When I use it again I will probably also fix the two things that I am not happy
with: Finish the Golang rewrite so I have one less PHP app to update, and move
to SQLite for easier backups (it's using Postgres right now).</p>
But now I have access to a Mac I kinda also want to get it to build there.</p>
Not that I see myself working on it in the immediate future, but it's a rare
case of building something just for myself I'd been using daily for a while.</p>


Hardware Upgrade 2025
2025-04-03T19:08:54Z
While I didn't really plan to (or need to) replace my 2019
Ryzen</a> we had a gaming laptop act up (again,
actually), and so I decided it would be good to have a 2nd current-generation
gaming PC again, so I bought one. Mostly because of "it has worked for years
without problems", I gave
up mine and ordered some parts to build a new one for myself.
But of course that's not the only reason -
I was also eager to get some new hardware and run Linux on it.</p>
Ignoring the graphics card, the other one was 5 years and 3 months old,
and not ignoring it 4 years and 2 months old. So not really a short time,
but I still hadn't replaced it because of its age. For comparison the last
upgrade cycle was 7.5 years (ignoring in-between upgrades)</p>

AMD Ryzen 7 9700X</a> 8x 3.80 GHz Socket AM5 WOF, 340 EUR</li>
MSI MAG Tomahawk WIFI AMD X870 So.AM5</a>, 315 EUR</li>
Noctua NH-D15S</a> CPU Cooler, 109 EUR</li>
2x32GB Crucial Pro DDR5-5600 DIMM, 155 EUR</li>
850W Seasonic Focus GX-850</a> Modular PSU, 155 EUR</li>
2 TB WD Black SN850X M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 3D-NAND TLC, 147 EUR</li>
Fractal Design Torrent Compact</a>, white, 136 EUR</li>
Sapphire Pure AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB GDDR6, 2x HDMI, 2x DP, 799 EUR</li>
</ul>
At 2156 EUR it was more expensive than I had hoped, but as the last one was
cheaper than I had expected I'm not complaining.</p>
Hardware I didn't replace:</p>

Logitech G710+ MX Brown</li>
Dell U2715H 27"</li>
some SSD I'd need to look up, the rest stayed in the old Ryzen rig</li>
HyperX Cloud Alpha Gaming Headset</li>
</ul>
Hardware I had replaced since 2019:</p>

Dell S2721DGF 27" (main screen) instead of the Samsung 27"</li>
Dell whatever 24" instead of the Samsung 24"</li>
Roccat Kone Aimo instead of the Kone EMP</li>
</ul>
So now that's 2 Ryzen 7 (one AM4, one AM5) and I'm getting rid of an i5-4460
from 2014, because it doesn't make sense to replace my
home server</a>'s i5-3570K, but I'm stealing the 8GB of
RAM which should fit. This will also retire the last spinning disk in regular
use.</p>
The one thing I'm a bit sad about is that I will get rid of the case the i5
is sitting in, I bought it in May 1998 for the first computer I would build for
myself, a Pentium II-350 MHz. It's been spraypainted metallic blue (a Ford
color) from a can that was left over from fixing the paint job on my first
car, and has been in more or less continuous use for the last 27 years.
Hooray for standards (ATX).</p>
As an aside, before the 9070 XT arrived I tried the RX470 from 2016 in this new
machine and I was surprised how well it held up.</p>


Unplugging
2025-03-07T23:32:53Z
There's been a German blog
post</a>
going round the last few days, in the general tone of self-hosting and choosing
European-hosted alternatives, or just more community-focused and decentralized
than walled gardens, with a focus on US megacorps.</p>
I found it quite interesting and of course I went along with the list and what
I use:</p>


"change your e-mail provider" - been self-hosting mail for decades, but still
have a GMail address (for Android) and as a last resort (e.g. mailing my
boarding passes there in case of catastrophic failures of my mail server while
I am at the airport or away - I could only solve the latter with a freemailer
or bugging a friend).</p>
</li>

"use a privacy friendly search engine" - I am mostly on DuckDuckGo but
I regularly fall back to Google because I am impatient when the results
are bad.</p>
</li>

"messengers without big brother" - Guess I fail here. I use Signal and
Matrix and IRC, but I also use WhatsApp and Discord because that's where
people I want to talk to are. Would gladly scrap both.</p>
</li>

"the networking effect" - now this is mostly wishful thinking, I've spent
enough time trying to convert people, it doesn't work for me.</p>
</li>

"open source voice assistant" - Pass, switched off on my Android voice
thing, never used anything else either.</p>
</li>

"Fediverse/Mastodon" - Using that daily, have deleted Instagram and
Twitter accounts, kept Facebook because I'm only logging in once a year
anyway and got tons of old contacts there, it's a "just in case" thing.</p>
</li>

"your own cloud" - I should probably migrate my calender from Google, but
I don't need any other features here, I use Syncthing for some files.</p>
</li>

"calendar and addresses" - yeah, I was too quick with the last one. I have (hopefully
unsynced) phone numbers in my Android phone, zero addresses there.</p>
</li>

"routing/maps" - Maybe I should get in the habit of using OSM more, but
last time I tried it it wasn't great. Still using Google Maps often.</p>
</li>

"LibreOffice and co" - I've not used MS Office at home for probably 15
years, I do have "unimportant" stuff in Google Docs.</p>
</li>

"PeerTube" - Yeah well, if I was publishing videos, maybe - but I don't
see how it makes sense if you're watching stuff on YouTube that is... on
YouTube.</p>
</li>

"privacy friendly video calls" - Not sure when I last had a private video
call, maybe twice in 2020/2021 - not going to speak up at work here, as
I don't really care for work stuff.</p>
</li>

"buy locally" - Guess this is where I am unabashedly an apologist, but
I've always hated shopping (with a couple exceptions), so while I am
trying to use "local" online shops, unless it's clothing I am just so done with
local shops. I live in Munich and would expect them to have stuff available,
but everything I usually want needs to be ordered anyway, so I am saving myself
the hassle and just order it directly. And the customer experience at Amazon is
actually good 95% of the time, unlike with the typical German shop, online or
offline.</p>
</li>

"privacy friendly browser" - I guess this is the shit storm du jour with
the latest Firefox news, but I've not been using Chrome for many years and
sticking with Firefox for now, but I also use LibreWolf and Vivaldi.</p>
</li>

"Android Custom ROM" - I might be wrong but this is just ridiculous. While
I would very much like to have an open source OS there, the main killer
criterion is banking apps that detect root and other stuff I don't want to, but need to use.
I am not a smartphone person, I might play a game while waiting for the bus and
talk to people, but I need</em> the 2FA apps for my bank.</p>
</li>

"avoid app tracking" - I think this is just needlessly making your life
complicated - I know I am being tracked, I have given up. Play Store it
is because I don't think F-Droid on stock Android helps much here.</p>
</li>

"tech oligarchy bad, democracy good" - yes, I agree, I'm not sure I want
to spend my free time endlessly researching which companies I should
avoid, it's probably too many of them. But if I do know about a connection to
certain people I will try to avoid them anyway.</p>
</li>

"use linux" - Yes, I've been doing that for many years and I wish it was
a useful nudge people but it's usually not. I know tons of people that
basically use their computer because of 1 or several applications that exist on
Windows while having zero knowledge about tech. Everyone telling these people
to use linux should also provide free support. I'm actually just waiting for my
new graphics card to arrive then I will try to switch my main computer to
linux, it's been on windows ever since because of games.</p>
</li>

"video editing on  linux" - Kdenlive is good even on windows, but I've
used it like twice in my life.</p>
</li>

"consuming news" - Kinda disagree with the premise that getting news from
social media is bad. Well yes, of course now</em> X is bad, but I get enough
news from the fediverse, just as it worked on Twitter before, if you choose
your bubble. Also yes, RSS is good and I use it a lot.</p>
</li>

"avoid paypal" - Another one that's really hard. I don't think there's
a good alternative except using your credit card directly, but that's
still a lot more friction. The realtime transfers are a pipe dream, I think
I see this at a small minority of shops. Also EU only and I pay for digital
goods as well. I wish there was something, but PayPal is one of the top
5 online things making my life more enjoyable - easy payments.</p>
</li>

"ad blockers" - a no brainer, really</p>
</li>

"streaming music" - I have a Spotify account that I fire up a couple of
times per year to listen to an album before buying it. Maybe not perfect,
but I can totally accept that.</p>
</li>

"open source AI" - just getting started/not using it anyway</p>
</li>

"home assistant and co" - I don't do IoT and smarthome, I have 2 shellys
to measure power consumption from time to time.</p>
</li>

"vpn providers" - First thing I don't really have an opinion on, I've
never paid for a VPN, I used to self-host, currently doing a couple things
with Tailscale.</p>
</li>

"tesla" - Does not apply, would never have bought one anyway, even if
I was a person to buy an expensive new car, or use an electric one, or
need one at all.</p>
</li>

"catch all email and throwaway mobile number" - E-Mail is a given but I've
never found a sim/setup for a price I liked so far. I try to just not give
my mobile number to services, but if I have to...</p>
</li>

"step up" - Another one where past me was more enthusiastic than current
me.</p>
</li>

"touch grass" - Now this is just bullshit, I'm online as much as needed
and staying offline helps no one. Of course you're not being track offline
but it's just not a real argument.</p>
</li>
</ol>
So, how are the results and where do I stand?</p>
I have a feeling that I've already done most of the things that are either
important to me or not impossibly hard to do.</p>

emails and messengers</li>
social media</li>
browsers</li>
whatever software that can be self-hosted without going bankrupt</li>
</ul>
I also seem to have lost the will to do the right thing at any cost for my
personal happiness, you might call it laziness:</p>

google calendar (but I actually might)</li>
using google maps (guess I should try though)</li>
google docs</li>
</ul>
Then there are the things where I personally judge my usage patterns to be
"non-compliant" enough to occasionally benefit and not do the right thing and
stop using them altoghether:</p>

facebook account, hardly used</li>
spotify acccount, hardly used</li>
</ul>
The things where I don't see a realistic alternative:</p>

using whatsapp</li>
using youtube</li>
</ul>
And finally there are a few things where I just don't want to spend the money
and or mental effort to fix it, or I don't see it as realistic for myself:</p>

paying for a second SIM and</li>
keeping a 2nd phone functional/updated, one for banking and one for
everything else incl f-droid</li>
not using amazon</li>
not using paypal</li>
</ul>
Also interestingly I have zero problems buying books</em> somewhere else than
Amazon, it's mostly specific household items and electronics where I would have
to find a physical shop (often impossible in a reasonable time) or spend 5-10
bucks more in a random shop for postage, or worse price.</p>
While I disagree with some of the 30 things on the list, I'd say I mostly agree</p>

at least in spirit. I'm happy to help people transition away from some of
those but I'm over zealous evangelizing.</li>
</ul>
Anyway, I think it's mostly a good list to think about and analyze your
behaviour, if it's not something that's on your mind all the time.</p>


2024 in review
2024-12-31T23:59:39Z
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2023</a> / 2022</a> / 2021</a> / 2020</a> / 2019</a> /
2018</a> / 2017</a> / 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

World of Warcraft - The War Within</li>
EVE Online</li>
Diablo IV</li>
Final Fantasy XIV - Dawntrail</li>
</ul>
Movies I've (re-)watched</h3>

Rebel Moon</a> - didn't particularly like it</em></li>
Elemental</a> - good</em></li>
Heart of Stone</a> - a bit silly, but kinda fun</em></li>
The School For Good And Evil</a> - not terrible</em></li>
Inside Out 2</a> - good, but worse than the first</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I've (re-)watched</h3>

Secret Level</a></li>
The Rookie</a> - Season 6</em></li>
</ul>
Podcasts and other media</h3>
Again, mostly YouTube.</p>

Nomad Sweden</a> (Motorcycle Tours)</li>
Cade Media</a> (Bike Stuff)</li>
Amalias Moments</a> (German, MTB)</li>
Miranda Goes Outside!!</a> (Hiking)</li>
Probably Riding</a> (Cycling in Korea, mostly)</li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h3>

KMFDM - Hyena</li>
HANS LAZER ALIEN SLAM - ACTION METAL</li>
</ul>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

a new bike: KTM X-Strada LFC 2022 in June, 1560 EUR incl pedals</li>
a smart/fitness watch: Suunto 5 Peak in April, 190 EUR</li>
a gamepad - EasySMX PS3 GamePad (USB) in March, 15 EUR</li>
a new mouse: Roccat Kone Aimo Remastered in April, 42 EUR</li>
a new mousepad. Worth mentioning because my old one had Doom3 on it (2004), 10 EUR</li>
a tiny wireless mouse for my office backpack in October - Logitech M185, 10 EUR</li>
two small USB-C docks, one for my home desk and one for travel: 12 + 20 EUR</li>
M.2 USB-C enclosure + 1 TB M.2 WDBlack SN770 because it was cheaper than an external disk, 70 EUR</li>
an AeroPress with a metal filter in November: 31+17 EUR</li>
several bike bags and accessories, separate post to follow</li>
not technically mine, but we got a new car after 12 years</li>
</ul>
Social networks</h3>

Fediverse - this is my main platform now</em></li>
Facebook - logged in like three times</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC -  mostly every day</em></li>
Matrix - several times per week</em></li>
Email - no change, but it's definitely getting less used</em></li>
Slack - old work, new work and 2 other communities</em></li>
Discord - yes</em></li>
Signal - yes</em></li>
WhatsApp - yes</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

summer vacation in Hungary in July</li>
a stop in Bratislava on the way back</li>
three day cycling trip</a>, continuing the route</li>
</ul>
(Online) Services</h3>

Subscribed to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime</li>
some MMO subscriptions</li>
VPS: Mostly Hetzner Cloud, 1x Strato, 1x Netcup</li>
fraenk for mobile</li>
</ul>
Started consolidating a few things with hosting.</p>
Programming languages, sorted by usage</h3>

Java - work</em> (no more as of winter 2024/2025)</li>
Kotlin - work</em> (current daily driver)</li>
TypeScript - work, at least it's better than JS</em></li>
Clojure - some personal projects</em></li>
</ul>
Spent quite a bit of time on personal projects this year,
and I'm also back for Advent of Code.</p>
Stuff that kinda worked out</h3>

cycle more</li>
summer vacation was great</li>
</ul>
Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

visiting a bike park</li>
pen & paper stopped again for the second half of the year</li>
concerts (except free & easy)</li>
</ul>
Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

keep on cycling a lot, but do more mountain biking</li>
monthly board game night is at least planned already</li>
</ul>


A Few Changes
2024-10-30T23:24:27Z
As I started a new job in October I'm anticipating to learn a lot of things in
a short timespan in the coming weeks, and because in the past I was bad about
writing stuff down I've resolved to do better and write stuff down.
Or not let what I wrote down rot in a couple of files
called ~/Documents/notes.md</code> that wer kept for a year or longer at at time.
Maybe I can even extract some knowledge from some of these old ones...</p>
So there's a new category on this site: TIL</a> with small snippets of
knowledge, in the hopes that cleaning up my notes for publishing will be enough
of a repetition to help memorize it.</p>
The name was inspired by Simon Willison: TIL</a>
when I saw a post on Lobsters</a> recently and remembered I'd
seen the site before.
So I guess the concept is not new or unique,
in my old blog I posted small bits of
knowledge interspersed with normal blog posts and long articles all the time,
but for some reason over 10 years ago I stopped.</p>
Fun side story: I wasn't 100% sure if my own static stite generator</a>
would be able to handle this new category with all its differences or if I had
hardcoded too much. It seemed to work, I was just missing support for tags, but
even for that I found a branch from September 2023 which mostly did what it
should already.</p>
The second thing is that I tweaked the CSS a bit. Ran the W3C validator,
removed the moz-box-shadow et al that have probably been in there for 10 years,
and cleaned up the header section. Time will tell if I like it enough to keep
it. Also the breadcrumbs are gone for now.</p>


Self-Hosting Update
2024-10-26T19:49:49Z
I wrote about self-hosting stuff in 2022</a>,
since then I've made a few changes:</p>

server 1 - a blog

Debian 12 with podman (not happy with the rootless setup)</li>
Caddy, Tailscale, grafana-agen on the host</li>
MySQL in a container</li>
PHP + Wordpress in a container</li>
</ul>
</li>
server 2 - irc, websites

Ubuntu 22.04 + Docker</li>
some containers:

Caddy for a few static sites</li>
quassel-core for IRC</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
server 3 - mail

Debian 12 + Docker</li>
mailcow</li>
</ul>
</li>
server 4 - web & misc

Ubuntu + Docker</li>
some containers:

freshrss (migrated from TT-RSS)</li>
dokuwiki</li>
linkding (trialing a move from pinboard.in)</li>
ktistec (single user fediverse instance)</li>
</ul>
</li>
file hosting</li>
several tools</li>
several websites</li>
</ul>
</li>
server 5

Debian 12</li>
pulling backups from all other server</li>
syncthing</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
So I guess there are a couple of servers that are important</em> - that would be
mail & web - then some that are used a lot but not important: irc, and one
that is just for backups and not really actively accessed. And the first one
is important enough to be on backup, but if something happens I'll just redo
it.</p>
The irc server is also the playground if I want to spin up something in a
container, so maybe kind of a staging server.</p>
So I suppose I'd still be very much happy with a setup where I can just push
a container, assign a hostname and boom, no more server troubles. The problem
with that is that it doesn't really work if you have 20 small containers
without a lot of load, kinda expensive everywhere - or at least more expensive
than slapping a couple of them on a 5 EUR Hetzner VPS, which is what I am
mostly doing here.</p>
Still missing one big machine, but everytime I need to reboot it, or something
is up, then all services would be down, this kinda lowers the blast radius for
my non-critical stuff.</p>
Doesn't mean I am happy</em> - I suppose if I wanted to spend more money I'd get
2 bare metal servers for 40-50 EUR and host everything on one, and have the
backups on the other one with some kind of manual failover setup so with just
a couple DNS entries I could host everything over there. But that's twice the
price and I don't want to pay that.</p>
Also this had been sitting in the drafts folder since August 2023 and I kinda
had to rewrite half of the list above, because I only went back to Debian
since then, so 3 of the 5 VPS aren't older than about a year.</p>
Also for how they are setup, I have a bootstrap role in Ansible that is the
same for every server I have (switch off passwords, add some users, install
some common packages, etc.pp) and since then I've went back on the whole
"role" thing with DRY as it doesn't make sense for my tiny setup, only the
bootstrap role is common, every host has it's own role named after itself,
and I am not ashamed to freely copy and paste stuff, because if there's some
overlap it's probably tiny.</p>


Cycling on the D11, part 2
2024-08-29T11:15:23Z
Last year</a> I started my first long bicycle tour,
along the D11</a> (Ostsee-Oberbayern-Radweg</a>) across Germany.
I made it about a quarter in, 500km. This year I wanted to continue for
another 5-6 days but life got in the way, and so I could only do 3 days
and 300km, still great fun.</p>
</p>
Planning</h2>
As I already had some experience, it was just finding good stops along the route this time.</p>
The plan was:</p>

Hilpoltstein (where I left the route last year) to Bamberg, 109km</li>
Bamberg to Himmelkron (near Bayreuth), 103km</li>
Himmelkron to Hof, 62km</li>
</ul>
Again I used this page</a> for the route, but didn't keep to their daily routes,
but assembled my own daily track with the help of gpxbox.com and gpx.studio.
So my day 1 is their day 17 plus 25km, my day 2 is the rest of their day 16 plus
their day 15 (minus 5km), and my day 3 is 2/3 of their day 14.
Why? Mostly because theirs are too short, and my hotel on day 2 was 60% of the price
of their proposed town, 5km further. Also there's a good train connection from Hof
back to Munich, didn't see where the next good one crosses this route.</p>
</p>
Preparations</h2>
As I've still not managed to get a replacement wheel for last year's used gravel bike
after it broke, I'm taking the gravel bike I bought in early June, my KTM X-Strada.
The bag setup is similar, but a little different. Different pannier, different handlebar bag,
and a half-size frame bag. Other than that I booked my two hotel stays about two days before
I started, and researched what trains to take and bought a couple snacks.</p>
Day 0</h2>
Deutsche Bahn letting me down? What a surprise! The train I wanted to take (from Munich to Allersberg at 7:05)
the next day was canceled, as was the 9:05 one. Yes, Allersberg is not Roth, but it's only 10km away, to the
north east, so I was gonna go along Rothsee and do the same amount of kilometers, I'm not that anal about the
exact route. Anyway, so I had to take the train to Roth at 8:05, which is 11km off to the north west,
so I might have skipped 5km here.</p>
</p>
Day 1 - Roth - Bamberg</h2>
Getting up at 6:45, packing up the last things and arriving at Munich main station around 7:30,
buying a ticket for myself and the bike, grabbing breakfast and waiting, getting to Roth at 9:45ish.
Unfortunately it was raining for the first 2h, otherwise a nice start along the Main-Donau-Kanal into Nuremberg.</p>
I was amazed how you can avoid most traffic lights by going over and under bridges near the city center.
Was a bit cold, so I went for a bite but made the bad call to go into a small coffee joint
(with rave reviews on Google Maps) which served luke warm espresso, luke warm coke (from a fridge tho...) and
some ok cheesecake. Should have gone to the Korean place next door but I wasn't really hungry. Live and learn.</p>
Next on to Fürth, directly adjacent, no rain anymore.</p>
</p>
After that the route took me past Erlangen but I decided I wanted to see the city after all and made about
a 4km detour into the city center and looked around for a bit then grabbed a beer at Kitzmann Bräuschenke.
I suppose the Kitzmann brewery should thank JBO for the free advertisement when people still remember after over 20 years ;)
Next stop was Forchheim where I did a quick tour around the city center and was looking
for another beer garden as I had only around 30km to go and it was quite early.</p>
Didn't see anything open or looking good until I rode past the RadOase, a small kiosk.
Turned around, sat down, chatted with the locals and sampled more than one beer, then even had company
while riding along to Bamberg. The only downside was that it was getting dark already now and I just went
to the hotel (Hotel National</a>, nothing special but absolutely
nothing to complain for 60 EUR), took a shower, and looked for dinner.</p>
Went to Bella Tandoori Express</a> which despite the name is a freshly
opened perfectly normal sit-down Indian restaurant and I had delicious Pakoras and Chicken Vindaloo
for a fair price. Would recommend.
After that I walked to the closest gas station for an evening snack because I had no sweets left.</p>
Daily kilometers: 127</p>
Total kilometers: 127</p>
Fedi picture thread</a></p>
</p>
Day 2 - Bamberg - Himmelkron</h2>
Quick visit to a supermarket for breakfast, packing up things and got a bit of a late start at 9:00,
again did a quick tour of the city center (and was happy there were less people than
on Sunday evening for the "Sandkerwa").</p>
The next part of the tour was not very exciting from a sightseeing point of view, Bad Staffelstein
seemed nice though and when I rolled into Lichtenfels I took the chance to grab a quick bite at
McDonalds because I was mostly after a big coke and not so much after food,
then continued along the river Main to Kulmbach.
Unfortunately I have to admit Kulmbach was the worst city for cycling of all the cities I'd seen,
at least coming from the west and leaving in the east. Sat down for an alcohol free wheat beer
and then continued on to Himmelkron.</p>
I really wanted to go to Bayreuth for dinner and to look around but my legs didn't want to do
another hilly 30km round trip after 110km that day.</p>
My hotel was a bit weird, in the industry zone of this small town, the reception inside the
gas station and the hotel building itself 200m behind the gas station. Anyway, it was clean
and spacious and they had free water. Also not too bad for 80 EUR.
They even provided free ear plugs because of the road/gas station parking lot close by.
Had dinner at "Frankenfarm", a couple hundred meter down the road, got Schäufele and a
beer, then headed back quickly.</p>
Daily kilometers: 113</p>
Total kilometers: 240</p>
Fedi picture thread</a></p>
</p>
Day 3 - Himmelkron - Hof</h2>
I wanted to start early because I had a train to catch around noon, but after a little
change of plans I slept a little longer and I would later get to regret that decision.
Didn't really feel too good that morning, my stomach hurt a bit, my jaw was a
bit weird (still is, as I write this a day later) and the legs also were a little sore.</p>
First five kilometers to Bad Berneck were not great, stopped at a supermarket for a
coffee and some batteries for my Garmin (had used my spares already and no more
spares with me). After Bad Berneck the brutal part began, 10km of constant
mellow climbing, which worked ok, with a couple quick stops, and then a bigger
hill (still <100m of elevation but pretty steep), apparently I am not great at
climbing at the moment, glad I didn't try crossing the alps this week...</p>
After that I "just" had to get to the train station in Hof, "only" 40km,
but absolutely struggling with every hill, pushing my average speed way down.
I was stressing out a little, didn't stop for leisure, just to rest, didn't
really care about taking photos, but I at least tried to get the views in,
but it wasn't that exciting, I just hope I didn't miss anything great.
Anyway, train was supposed to leave at 12:40 and in the end I made it
there at 12:15, had time to buy drinks and snacks and then sit down in
the train, still shaking.</p>
Got off in Freising, got some ice cream and an espresso, walked around
town for a bit, then had dinner at Ariston</a>,
delicious Bifteki. Fortunately my Bayernticket was also valid for the S-Bahn
so I took the next one to the city and cycled the last 5-6km home, even
without my stuff, yay. On the one hand I'm a bit sad the original plan of
getting off in Regensburg didn't work out, on the other hand I really
needed those 3.5h of rest on the train, I think.</p>
Daily kilometers: 67</p>
Total kilometers: 307</p>
Fedi picture thread</a></p>
</p>
Packing list</h2>
Not sure I really want to repeat this, it's 90% the same as last year</a></p>

didn't use my buff</li>
was so happy about my wind jacket this time</li>
Shimano MTB shoes instead of the Five Tens</li>
didn't really eat as many bars and sweets this time</li>
</ul>
Stuff I want to improve:</p>

small power bank in the backpack, not the bigger one in the pannier</li>
should buy a 2nd bidon again instead of strapping bottles to the frame with a voile strap (it worked though)</li>
do not run out of AA batteries</li>
probably get a proper modern Garmin bike computer where I can add stuff without a laptop</li>
</ul>
Expenses</h2>


Preparation:</p>

another new bike, not counting that one</li>
bike equipment:

2 bottle cages</li>
half-frame bag by MIVELO</a></li>
handlebar bag</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>

Hotels:</p>

Bamberg: 62 EUR</li>
Himmelkron: 80 EUR</li>
</ul>
</li>

Trains:</p>

2x 6.50 EUR for the bike</li>
26 EUR for München - Roth</li>
29 EUR for a Bayernticket</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Food is again a little hard to pin down because I simply don't care so much,
I'm not eating at expensive restaurants if I can avoid it (same as at home)
and 5 EUR here or there are not worth keeping track of for me.</p>

Munich: 2 EUR</li>
Nuremberg: 11 EUR</li>
Erlangen: 5 EUR + 3 EUR</li>
Forchheim: 12 EUR</li>
Bamberg: 27 EUR + 3 EUR + 5 EUR</li>
Lichtenfels: 11 EUR</li>
Himmelkron: 21 EUR + 5 EUR</li>
Hof: 6 EUR</li>
</ul>
So that's 22 EUR for 2 lunches, 48 EUR for 2 dinners, and 41 EUR for drinks,
snacks, beer and I probably missed some stuff but I guess it's not more than
5 EUR for various bars and sweets I brought from home. Let's say 120 for 2.5 days.</p>
I suppose the dinners would be the easiest way to save some money.</p>
So excluding any equipment, that's 120+140+70 = 330 EUR for 3 days.</p>
Small aside, as I talked to someone on the trip, we both agreed that calling
it a "credit card tour" just because you sleep in a hotel feels wrong to both of us.
Maybe there are some of these mythical cheap camping sites, but we've both not seen
them in Germany. You will easily pay 20 EUR as a solo adult with a tent, and up to
30+ isn't too uncommon if you're in the wrong spot. All the while being hard to
research and often you can't even reserve. Oh, and power for charging might be extra.
So yes, I'm always using the cheapest hotel I can find on booking.com that was a
relatively good rating, but so far I've not paid more than 80 per night.
Totally worth it, but I suppose now after 5 nights I might have saved up enough to
pay for the tent + sleeping bag + cooking system, but not completely sure.</p>
Final thoughts</h2>
The first two days were superb, the third would have been better if I didn't have
to catch the train. With all the climbing I would have probably made it an 80km
day and take my time (if I only need dinner and get to my hotel room, I would
have had 8 more hours). Wasn't the worst day on the bike
though (but probably the worst 60km of my life :P).</p>
So now I have 900km left to Rostock, then I will have completed the D11 from
the Austrian border to the Baltic Sea. At this rate I will manage to finish
it in 2026, but with all the big elevation days over, maybe I will make it in 2025.</p>
</p>


2023 in review
2023-12-31T20:22:00Z
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2022</a> / 2021</a> / 2020</a> / 2019</a> /
2018</a> / 2017</a> / 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

World of Warcraft</li>
EVE Online</li>
Diablo IV</li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>

Debugging</a> by David J. Agans</li>
Gamma Draconis</a> by Eldo Yoshimizu/Benoist Simmat</li>
</ul>
Movies I've (re-)watched</h3>

Valerian</a> - hm, maybe a rewatch, but: good</em></li>
Encanto</a> - good</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I've (re-)watched</h3>

Witcher: Blood Origin</a> not as bad as the reviews say</em></li>
Dash & Lily</a> unexpectedly fun</em></li>
The Rookie</a> I like it</em>

was sick for a week and binged all five seasons - guess this was my favourite show of the last few years</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Podcasts and other media</h3>

I spent quite a bit on YouTube this year:

Itchy Boots</a></li>
c90adventures</a></li>
Cycling to Argentina</a></li>
some miniature painting channels</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h3>

The haul from late December 2022 I hinted at last year:

Therion - Leviathan II DIGIPAK</li>
The Halo Effect - Days Of The Lost</li>
Soilwork - Övergivenheten DIGIPAK</li>
In Flames - Whoracle</li>
In Flames - Used And Abused</li>
In Flames - Lunar Strain + Subterranean</li>
In Flames - The Jester Race + Black-Ash Inheritance</li>
In Flames - The Tokyo Showdown (Live in Japan 2000)</li>
Sabaton - The War To End All Wars</li>
Hypocrisy - Worship</li>
Fear Factory - Recoded</li>
</ul>
</li>
Dropkick Murphys - This Machine Still Kills Fascists</li>
In Flames - Foregone</li>
Electric Callboy - Tekkno</li>
</ul>
I need to double-check, but I should now own the complete In Flames discography. The Halo Effect is also great.</p>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

a new (used) bike. ~8 year old ROSE gravel bike for 200 EUR</li>
a new mobile phone, Google Pixel 6a for 340 EUR

Teufel Airy Sports wireless headphones, 60 EUR</li>
a fancy case that still ended up only costing 10 EUR</li>
</ul>
</li>
some bags for bikepacking, including an Ortlieb "Seat-Pack", used and in perfect condition</li>
a couple straps and replacement pads for two different sets of headphones</li>
a dedicated work bag/travel pouch that will always stay in the bag

some cables and chargers</li>
a small knife (another Gerber Paraframe Mini</a>)</li>
LED flashlight: OLight I3E Mini</li>
</ul>
</li>
an electric guitar!

Squier Stratocaster in black for ~320 EUR</li>
Boss Katana Mini ~100 EUR</li>
Fender shoulder strap and some misc equip</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Social networks</h3>

Fediverse - this is my main platform now</em></li>
Facebook - logged in like three times</em></li>
Twitter - deleted all remaining accounts</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC -  mostly every day</em></li>
Matrix - several times per week</em></li>
Email - no change, but I feel it's getting less</em></li>
Slack - work and 2 other communities</em></li>
Signal - yes</em></li>
WhatsApp - yes</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

other countries: London/UK for a few days in summer</li>
five day cycling trip</a> and staying at a rental house after that</li>
Austria, but that was not a vacation</li>
</ul>
(Online) Services</h3>

Subscribed to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime</li>
some MMO subscriptions</li>
No change for VPS: Strato, Hetzner Cloud, Scaleway</li>
switched mobile plan to fraenk, now 10 EUR per month</li>
</ul>
Still thinking about consolidating a few things with hosting, but no concrete plans.</p>
Programming languages, sorted by usage</h3>

Java - work</em></li>
TypeScript - work, at least it's better than JS</em></li>
Elixir - work</em></li>
Clojure - some personal projects</em></li>
</ul>
Not a lot of personal coding this year, also skipped Advent of Code due to lack of time.</p>
Stuff that kinda worked out</h3>

Eläkeläiset concert in April</li>
Free & Easy "festival" in July/August</li>
cycle more. I think I broke the 1500km mark on the new bike between June and September</li>
redoing the living room and entry hall of the apartment</li>
more pen & paper evenings, monthly Shadowrun has resumed</li>
</ul>
Happy this category is back. Concerts are back on the menu.</p>
Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

no big vacation trip, the London thing was more of saving a thing that had gone wrong</li>
visiting a bike park</li>
</ul>
Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

keep on cycling a lot, but do more mountain biking</li>
bringing back board game night</li>
</ul>


Theme Systems
2023-10-07T17:20:01Z
Maybe skip this intro</h4>
Back in the day I used to be very much into customizing and theming my Windows installation
(probably around the turn of the century), mostly before I started running Linux on half of
my machines with graphical interfaces. This has mostly faded, I don't really tweak a lot
these days (in any OS), I'm basically fine if I can set a wallpaper I like, even if I don't
see it very often. Then I'm not changing it very often either - for work machines it often
gets set in week one and then not replaced until I get a new machine years later.</p>
Anyway, there are still some apps where I usually want a theme. At home I'm usually running
two instances of Firefox at the same time, Normal and Developer. Not even sure if the dev
version comes with this dark theme by default or if I set it, but it's dark blue and for
the normal version I've been using this theme</a> for years.</p>
Editors? Some of them. For IDEA</strong> at work, it's usually their Darcula theme.
For VS Code</strong> at home (I'm not a heavy user) I've been using
August City Lights</a> for a while.</p>
For Notepad++</strong> it's just the plain white default theme, but for
TextAdept</strong> I'm using something
in light grey.</p>
Quassel</strong> has been on my own tweaked version of DarkMonokai</a> for ages.</p>
Theme Systems</h3>
As you can see, there's no real uniformity, so why am I talking about "Theme Systems"?</p>
What does that even mean?</p>
You might have heard about:</p>

Solarized</a> (Light/Dark)</li>
Dracula</a></li>
Nord</a></li>
</ul>
And maybe also about (thanks #lobsters):</p>

Base16</a> / Tinted Theming</a></li>
gruvbox</a></li>
ayu</a></li>
Tokyo Night</a></li>
</ul>
So basically one color scheme</strong>, in a theme for an application, and hopefully ready to roll
for all the apps</strong> you could be using that have theme support.</p>
I really love the idea, even if my stuff is a big random mix. It's this "I know I like Dracula,
so if I need a dark theme for application X, I can use it".</p>
Unfortunately there don't seem to be too many of them, or only for some apps.</p>
Also the amount of applications being themed varies greatly, and sometimes it's organized
in one org, or as a collab, and sometimes it's just completely unrelated ports. So it's
probably worth doing some research for some or all of the above mentioned.</p>
Why now?</h3>
Now why did I even start this research out of the blue?</p>
So I have this three screen setup at home, 2 27" (middle and left) and an older 24" in portrait
mode on the right, and on that one I use a 50:50 split with IRC in the top half and
Thunderbird and Signal in the bottom half.</p>
Unfortunately the viewing angle of the 24" is not great (and maybe becoming worse) and
so I noticed I have real problems with a dark theme in IRC on that screen (also I'm apparently
getting old) and so I went looking for a nice light theme and thought about Solarized and
Dracula and started looking. I switched Quassel to use Solarized Light</a> yesterday but I'm not
a huge fan of the yellowish tone, that's why I'd never used Solarized Light before.
Also Quassel is of course nowhere near VS Code in user numbers, so I guess I need to make my own theme.</p>
More?</h3>
I've not put a huge amount of work into researching this, but if you know of more "Theme Systems"
projects, or just some popular themes with several (i.e. maybe more than 3) ports, feel free to
hit me up so I can add them.</p>
The concrete problem</h3>
So I'm still looking for a nice light Quassel</strong> theme and unfortunately the best (or only?)
resource for themes</a> is not great.</p>
I've not started writing one,
but right now I'm looking at these color schemes:</p>

PaperColor</a></li>
Tomorrow</a> (found it in tinted as well)</li>
Alabaster</a></li>
tinted</a> (like, any of those light ones)</li>
</ul>
I've not fully grasped how tinted/base16 works but I'll go dig deeper and see if I can do this
for Quassel in a reasonable time.</p>


Mobile Phones
2023-08-11T10:45:51Z
As the discussion of mobile phones came up briefly in #lobsters, I thought I might finally
write down some thoughts I've had for a while.</p>
Intro</h2>
Important things first. I am not a phone person. I like to have a small computer in my pocket
when I am not at home or near a desk, but that's about it. My main uses are:</p>

listening to music</li>
using (Google) Maps (trialing GraphHopper atm)</li>
some random web browsing</li>
some messaging</li>
(not voluntarily) mobile banking and MFA for online banking/payments</li>
</ul>
And my main decision criteria are:</p>

not too expensive</li>
high chance of long upgrades</li>
not too big</li>
</ul>
Before getting a new phone this summer I thought about it for a few months, especially if I'd stay
with Android or get an iPhone. I've never owned an Apple device before, but I've had a work
iPhone for a year now. It usually sits in a drawer but whenever I used it it felt
perfectly cromulent.</p>
Spoiler: I stuck to Android.</p>
History</h2>
Let's look at a list of all the smartphones I've owned and ignore the dumbphones in the years before that:</p>

2009-12 - HTC Tattoo/Click - 307€</li>
2011-09 - HTC Desire Z - 239€

massive upgrade over the Tattoo</li>
</ul>
</li>
2015-09 - Kingzone N5 - 110€

display stopped taking touch inputs reliably</li>
</ul>
</li>
2016-07 - LG Nexus 5X - 280€

was still perfectly usable until it died with a boot loop error, reflow fix didn't help</li>
</ul>
</li>
2020-02 - Motorola moto X4 - 190€

it still works fine, but never received any security upgrades :(</li>
</ul>
</li>
2023-08 - Google Pixel 6a - 340€

too new to have a real opinion</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
So that's my sixth smartphone in just under 14 years, which means the average lifetime of the first five
comes to 32.6 months, or 2 years and 8.5 months.</p>
That's a lot better than getting a new one every year, but not the 3+ years I'd hoped.</p>
In total I paid 1126€ for those first five phones (excluding replacement batteries), which comes
to about 83€ per year, or about 225€ per lifetime.</p>
I am hopeful that I'll get 4 years of security upgrades out of the Pixel (don't care about feature upgrades),
if it doesn't die before that.</p>
2/5 replaced because they were too old/slow, 2/5 replaced because they were broken, 1/5 replaced because of the software.</p>
I do know I could have put a different OS on it and I checked availability when I bought it, but with all the MFA stuff
I have on it and the current state of viability of custom ROMs (especially regarding the Play Store) being unclear to me,
I didn't take a chance. When I have successfully migrated to
the Pixel I will probably try a custom ROM on the moto X4 and keep it as a spare or for mountainbiking or concerts or
other activities where I have a bit of anxiety of damaging or losing it.</p>
Do I regret any of the purchases?</h2>
HTC Tattoo</h4>
Android was pretty young and I still wasn't one of the real early adopters.
This device wasn't perfect but it was an
affordable option and it worked mostly fine. The touch screen was not great (resistive)
and pretty small (2.8").
I think it only ever ran Android 1.</p>
specs</a></p>
HTC Desire Z</h4>
This one was awesome, I loved the keyboard. Only problem was that it had gotten slow after
4 years (technically 5 because it was released in 2010). I think it ran Android 2 and then later
I had some custom ROM on it.</p>
specs</a></p>
Kingzone N5</h4>
It was cheap, it was a gamble, and it broke after a year. I don't regret it per se, but it would have been
smarter to wait a bit with the still functional Desire Z, I guess.</p>
LG Nexus 5X</h4>
This was basically the perfect phone except that it died too soon, and with the
exact problem that many of them seem to exhibit. Still, 3.5 years.</p>
specs</a></p>
Motorola moto X4</h4>
I have nothing bad to say about this phone's hardware, it's awesome.
The problem is that the software (Android 9) wasn't updated
after about 2.5y after it's release, and that's when I bought it in the first place.
This is about security upgrades, not Android versions.
Apparently the deal was too good to be true.</p>
specs</a></p>
Google Pixel 6a</h4>
I've not used it much, I'm in the progress of migrating right now.
It feels a little worse than the X4 (it's also a bit
taller) but that could fix itself by getting used to it. We'll see.
I'm not overly stressed out about different Android versions, my main
gripe right now is the "swipe from bottom to show all apps" which somehow
seems worse in Android 13 than it was in Android 9.</p>
specs</a></p>
Bonus history</h2>
Here's a less detailed list of my dumb phones because I had it handy.</p>

2000-08 - Nokia 6150 (the red one)</li>
2002-08? - Siemens ME45 (sahara beige)</li>
2006-08? - Nokia 6230 (bluish-black)</li>
</ul>
I have zero memory how long I kept the Siemens and when I got the second Nokia, but I am moderately sure I did not
forget one inbetween, so I must have had that last one until 2009 which makes a purchase around 2006 or 2007 realistic.
Also I had those (very typical for Germany) 2 year long contracts for quite a bit, so replacing them in 2002 or 2006 would make sense.</p>
Summary</h2>
Not sure what to make of this post, except it was interesting to run a few numbers.
I suppose the choice of models at their respective prices is a good indication of how much I value
phones. Can't say I'm not glad that I have one with me, but they're tools and not lifestyle products.
Unlike with computer hardware (or bike parts?) I am very much not enthusiastic and it just needs to work.</p>
So basically nothing new or insightful for me, but I am even more confused about people dropping 1000€ for
a new iPhone every year now, that was a bit of a surprise.</p>


Bikepacking the D11
2023-06-26T16:15:23Z
I'd long planned to do a multi day bikepacking
[see footnote at the end] tour and these last few days in
my June vacation it finally happened. Planning wasn't so great, but it all
worked out in the end.</p>
So the idea was to do the first part of the D-Route 11</a> in reverse.
This is an official long-distance cycling route from the
Baltic Sea to Upper Bavaria</a>, but my plan was to start in Freilassing,
next to the Austrian border and go as far as I have time.</p>
Planning</h2>
One huge problem was that I got some sort of flu three weeks before starting
and basically spent two weeks in bed, from a "how am I feeling every day?"
point of view it was even worse than when I had Covid and then I did a
city trip just before this, that also meant no time for preparation.</p>
At first I planned to do some camping on the way but then in the end decided
to just use hotels as this was the first multi-day trip and maybe a bed and a
shower were amenities I could use, also the Decathlon tent I was eying (the
only one at around 1kg, the Forclaz Trek MT900) would have cost me around
170 EUR anyway. I used Booking.com for all my hotel research and booking.</p>
So, in the end I settled on a 5 day trip and staying on the route as much as
possible.</p>
While this page</a> has the complete GPX track, the overall
presentation is kinda horrible, so I mostly used this page, in German</a>,
because I could download the single day partial tracks and it has some data
on altitude change etc.</p>
The plan was:</p>

go to Freilassing by train from Munich</li>
day 1, Freilassing to Rosenheim, 95km</li>
day 2, Rosenheim to Munich, 63km</li>
day 3, Munich to Landshut, 78km</li>
day 4, Landshut to Kelheim, 78km</li>
day 5, Kelheim to Hilpoltstein, 99km</li>
continue to Weißenburg, where we had booked a vacation home</li>
some days later, go home by train again</li>
</ul>
</p>
Preparations</h2>
I'd been hemming and hawing about getting a Gravel Bike for a while but only
did some window shopping and didn't really want to spend 2000 EUR on a new
bike, but luckily Pascal</a> wanted to get rid
of his old one anyway and after some scheduling problems we managed to let
me test it on the day before I was supposed to leave and it felt good and
so I was able to take it along that day. Which reminds me that I still
need to pay. Oops. (Wrote most of this on the weekend
and have since paid for it :P)</p>
I also went to the local big bike shop for some last minute stuff: a top tube
bag, 2 bottle holders, a chain tool, maybe some good Ortlieb or Vaude panniers.</p>
In the end I bought a cheap top tube bag, 2 bottle holders, fingerless gloves,
a gel for emergencies, some power bars, a chain tool, and no panniers.</p>
I was packing extra light, one of the reasons was that I was going to be home
at the end of day 2 and be able to grab stuff I was missing. I didn't grab
anything except refilling my bottles and bars, just as I would have somewhere
else, which was nice. Packing list below.</p>
Day 0</h2>
As usual, Deutsche Bahn let me down by not letting me book my ticket one day
in advance. The search form on the website let me filter by available bike
space on a train, to only tell me then that the available Railjets to Salzburg
were not available after all, and the regional trains would not let me book a
ticket for the bike, at all. So getting up early it was. In hindsight I am
still a little confused why you can't buy a bicycle day ticket for the next
day (or at all?) online, you can buy one for the next day at the ticket
machine.</p>
Day 1 - Freilassing - Rosenheim</h2>
Got up at around 4:30, final preparations, cycled to the central station, got
there at around 5:15, grabbed a ticket for me and for my bike, took the train
to Freilassing at 5:55 and had a nice chat with two other bike travellers.</p>
Got off at 7:45 and started my way towards Rosenheim, only stopping for a
second breakfast in Traunstein and made it to Chiemsee around noon but did not
really have any luck finding a restaurant I liked, so had a Currywurst with
fries at Döner-Kebap-Haus in Bernau. As this was the first day and it was hot
and I hadn't really ridden a bike a lot the last weeks I crashed pretty hard
around 3-4 in the afternoon and was looking for a shop or gas station to get
something cold to drink, but nothing was open in any vicinity of my route.
At some point I decided to veer off my route and try to get to that one
grocery store that Google Maps showed as open in a somewhat close village and
that was the first and only time I had to get off the bike and walk, uphill.
Of course Maps was wrong and the store only had been open until noon but there
was a restaurent next to it and so I ordered two drinks and rested for half an
hour, then could continue my journey for the last 90 or so minutes. Hotel was
a bit of a letdown, had to wait 15 minutes for someone at the reception to
arrive (while hardly being able to stand anymore after 10h on the bike, minus
breaks), room wasn't great or overly clean and the couple that arrived
just after me didn't get their booked room and got an address for an apartment.
I suppose they'd been
given my room if I had been 15 minutes late and on any other day I'd happily
tried to sort something out but I was just so glad to be able to take a shower.
They were back the next morning when I went for breakfast so maybe the did get
my room after all as they seemed to be staying for longer. Also the guy at the
reception made me pay via card and one day later booking.com also charged via
PayPal, so I had to sort that out later, but didn't take too long to fix.
Went to an Italian restaurant (Da Giuliano)
around a kilometer from the Hotel, adjacent to
some sports club and had some excellent pizza and a very noisy and
annoying neighboring table.</p>
In hindsight I noticed that I hardly slept the night before. Stressed out
because of the train, a bit overexcited and because I hadn't anticipated that
I wouldn't really sleep I went to bed too late (or I had had 2h more of trying
to sleep) - maybe the day would have been easier if I had been well-rested.</p>
Daily kilometers: 109</p>
Total kilometers: 109</p>
Fedi picture thread</a></p>
Day 2 - Rosenheim - Munich</h2>
Wasn't looking forward too much to this route, as I had gone the opposite way
already last September (Munich to Rosenheim, then to Wasserburg and home by
train) but it's part of the route. First you go along the river Mangfall past
Kolbermoor, then Bad Aibling and Bruckmühl until
Feldkirchen and then you're already close enough to Munich that there's an
S-Bahn station nearby. Had lunch at the Ayinger Bräustüberl around 12:30 and
then was routed through a part of Munich I hardly knew so that was interesting
as well. Arrived home at around 16:00, and spent the evening recovering and
doing some things I'd not gotten to, like preparing the route for the next
three days...</p>
Surprisingly my legs were completely ok, but my shoulders hurt a lot at the
end of day 2, I guess that's because of the new bike, new position with the
different cockpit, and just cycling for so many hours. Also the route turned
out to be slightly different than the one I used last year, so overall a good
day still.</p>
Also I noticed that one of clamps on my cheap bike panniers had broken, so I
decided to use the other one from the set for the second part. Other than that,
nothing had failed or misbehaved.</p>
Daily kilometers: 78</p>
Total kilometers: 187</p>
Fedi picture thread</a></p>
</p>
Day 3 - Munich - Landshut</h2>
The first leg of this tour was again something I'd seen, along the Isar
towards Freising is a trip I've done several times wholly or partially on my
hardtail as a day trip. That day I learned the difference that a front
suspension makes on certain types of gravel, ouch. The trip was uneventful,
except for struggling to find a place for lunch again, in the end I settled on
"Gasthaus und Hotel Forster am See" in Eching, mostly because I was riding
past at 13:00, had mediocre Käsespätzle with a good salad. And a light shower
that made me switch tables, good timing though. Apparently this leg was a
bit short because I arrived at the hotel at around 15:00. The hotel was in
Ergolding, not Landshut proper, so just a bit past it, from my starting point.</p>
This was some "no reception, check in at an ATM" thing that mostly seemed to
house construction workers, but it was cheap and seemed ok. Only downside was
not having an elevator and my room on the 2nd floor. Not a huge problem but
when I arrived I would have used it.</p>
I wanted a burger for dinner, but couldn't find any place that looked decent
and I kinda felt fresh (and cocky) enough so I decided to add a little
detour to Wörth an der Isar after an hour long break at the hotel, that would
be another 15km to get there and 15 to get back. When I arrived in Wörth I
checked Maps again and saw a place where someone had posted a photo of a
burger, so I went there (La Dolce Vita, again next to a sports club) and
the burger was excellent (although I've been told everything tastes better
after 100km a day). Got a scoop of ice cream on the way back and went to bed
early, as usual. While I usually like riding along the Isar (on my hardtail),
for this long trip, and day 3, it was a bit boring at times.</p>
Daily kilometers: 113</p>
Total kilometers: 300</p>
Fedi picture thread</a></p>
</p>
Day 4 - Landshut - Kelheim</h2>
This leg had me go through Ergoldsbach, Neufahrn in Niederbayern, Pfeffendorf,
and Schaltdorf and again I wasn't sure where I would get lunch or whether I'd
find something at all. Luckily I found "Bei Mario" in Rohr in Niederbayern
and had a really good pizza and even got my Espresso for free and my water
bottles refilled. Thank you, Mario!</p>
Onwards to Sallingberg, Offenstetten, Abensberg and Saal an der Donau, where
I had my second ice cream of the trip in a weird cafe, but it tasted good
enough. Saal would have been the official end of the leg, but I continued to
Kelheim (where my hotel was) along the route.</p>
This was the second "check in via machine" hotel without a reception and every
step of the process seemed to take ages and in the end it errored out, but
luckily still printed my room code. Apartment was huge and cheap for the size,
but the bed wasn't great. Also got an email later that the processing had
failed although the printed recipe showed me paying so something I needed
to sort out when I was back. It's been resolved meanwhile and they were very
polite about it.</p>
Research for dinner yielded "Little Budapest" which sounded nice, where I had
some kinda good Hungarian beer (Soproni) and a tasty and spicy meal.</p>
The worst thing about the hotel was that the power outlets next to the bed
were unreasonably high up the wall so when I plugged in my phone at night I
broke my charging cable (still mostly my fault) and had no backup. Luckily
I'd already done some research for the next day but was still panicking a bit.
At least it had happened on a Sunday evening with shops open the next day, the
problem would just be to find one.</p>
Daily kilometers: 82</p>
Total kilometers: 382</p>
Fedi picture thread</a></p>
</p>
Day 5 - Kelheim - Hilpoltstein</h2>
This leg was supposed to be a long one, first along the river Altmühl.
So getting up very early was a fun challenge with a switched off phone, but I
just hoped I'd wake up at some point during the early morning hours and then be
able to switch on my GPS and set an alarm. That worked, but I still ended up
waking up at 6:15 just before the alarm. Grabbed my stuff to stand ready at
6:50 when the big grocery store opened, but unfortunately they didn't have any
charging cables and the electronics store wouldn't open until 9.</p>
Anyway, no use delaying and so the route went to Essing, Prunn and in
Riedenburg I saw a sign for a store that sounded like it was worth a shot,
unfortunately it was way up a hill, so I decided to walk. They were open and
very nice, but unfortunately they only had lamps and washing machines and TV
cables, but no USB ones, but referred me to an electronics store in Dietfurt
(or the one in Kelheim where I came from). So off to Dietfurt along my planned
route, and there I first stopped at another big grocery store, mostly to get
a drink but they actually had USB-C cables and I didn't need to search for the
electronics store, yay. Hooked up my phone to my power bank and continued to
Beilngries, Kinding and Greding, where most restaurant were closed and I had
to take the open one with the worst ratings, but the waitress was nice and let
me charge my phone inside, and the food was actually ok as well. Just after
lunch I arrived in Thalmässing, the last bigger town before the planned end of
the leg, Hilpoltstein.</p>
Here I was to decide if I'd stop the D-11 route and go straight to the
vacation home or finish the leg and go from there. As it was kinda early in
the day, I felt reasonably fresh and able I decided to push to the end.
There is supposed to be a somewhat easy way between the two towns and there
was the route on my GPS which was kinda brutal, those last 20km really took a
while and it was the first time where I pushed the bike up a 15% hill, as part
of the originally planned route (the other two were when I had left the route
to detour to a shop), but in the end made it to Hilpoltstein where I planned
to sit in a cafe and have some coffee and a slice of cake maybe, but in the
end I sat in the shade in the REWE parking lot, chugging drinks, refilling my
bottles and making the cashier look at me funny when I came in back to buy 2
more bottles just after I'd left buying 4 bottles.</p>
After that I took on the last 30km of the tour and made it to Weißenburg, only
to be defeated by the vacation home being on a hill that I did not have the
energy to pedal up, after 125km that day.</p>
Anyway, got some decent dinner and that was the first bikepacking trip.</p>
Five days, just a bit more than 500km, four of our seven Bavarian governmental
districts, and 5 of 22 legs of the whole D-11 route done.</p>
Not sure if it will work out, but I'd love to continue where I left off
later this year, maybe doing 3-4 days over a long weekend, which would be just
past the Bavarian border, with the day trips I chose.</p>
Daily kilometers: 127</p>
Total kilometers: 509</p>
Fedi picture thread</a></p>
</p>
Packing list</h2>
Attached to the bike</strong>:</p>

GPS, Garmin eTrex 20x</li>
one old gym bottle with 50% Fanta, 50% water or just water</li>
one bottle of Gatorade or Fanta</li>
</ul>
Worn</strong>:</p>

Helmet</li>
Sunglasses</li>
Five Ten MTB shoes</li>
Fingerless padded gloves</li>
Jersey</li>
padded bib shorts</li>
MTB shorts (no, I'm not that spandex guy)</li>
normal socks</li>
</ul>
Backpack</strong> (Deuter Race X 12L with 3L water bladder):</p>

spare AA batteries for the GPS</li>
bike lock</li>
keys (lock + home)</li>
wallet</li>
power bank</li>
Buff neck scarf thingy (U)</li>
cloth handkerchief (U, Z)</li>
pack of handkerchiefs</li>
Hand disinfectant (U, Y)</li>
wet wipes (U, X)</li>
plastic spoon (U)</li>
Foldable shopping bag (U)</li>
glasses case (U, Y)</li>
bike tools</li>
pump (U)</li>
spare tube (U)</li>
sunblocker</li>
meds, bandaids, magnesium pills</li>
</ul>
Pannier</strong> (a cheap "bikemate" one from Aldi, old and never used before):</p>

Jersey</li>
padded bib shorts</li>
MTB shorts</li>
one pair of socks</li>
rain jacket</li>
toothbrush, toothpaste, shower gel</li>
thin long-sleeve hoodie (U)</li>
t-shirt</li>
boxers</li>
normal pants</li>
wall plug for charging</li>
small pouch with: (U)

sewing kit</li>
ear plugs</li>
2 small carabiners and some zip ties and rubber bands</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
So, basically a 2nd set of what I wear cycling,
plus t-shirt + underwear + pants for going
out for dinner. The stuff I wore every day (minus the MTB shorts) I rinsed
under the shower, then packed into a towel and rolled it, then patted it dry
and let it dry in the hotel room over night.
Works fine with synthetic fibres and just
barely with normal socks, not with a cotton t-shirt for example.
I could have avoided the normal pair of pants (some hiking ones with
detachable legs at the knee) and just used the pair of shorts I hadn't used
that day but it wasn't a huge deal either way. I did use them most days though.</p>
Makeshift army shop pouch used as a handlebar bag</strong>:</p>

wind breaker jacket (U)</li>
quick snap ultralight unsafe-ish bike lock (U)</li>
extra elastic strap (U)</li>
in-ear headphones (U)</li>
</ul>
Top tube bag</strong>:</p>

energy bars</li>
energy gel (U)</li>
dextrose candies</li>
gummy bears</li>
phone unless it was in my pants pocket</li>
</ul>
So while the list is pretty long I didn't use a lot of space.</p>
I am reasonably sure my backpack is the 12l model and the pannier is around
13l, going from the dimensions. The extra pouch I had is maybe 1l, so is the
top frame bag. So all in all I guess it's just below 30l, aka one of the
bigger panniers by the usual suspects.</p>
Some explanation of the footnotes:</p>

U</strong> - Unused</li>
X</strong> - Expired, should've checked</li>
Y</strong> - In hindsight I should have left those at home</li>
</ul>
In total I am quite happy with my choices. Nearly all the things I brought and
did not use fell under the "emergency" category and nearly all of them were
pretty lightweight (handkerchief, 1 gel, wind breaker, straps and bands) or
so important that weight didn't matter too much (spare tube, pump, tools, rain
jacket).</p>
I usually bring a hard case for my glasses, but I guess as I was only having my
old beaten up sunglasses I could have saved that. Also the hand sanitizer...
where I went to eat I could usually wash my hands, or still had them clean
from the hotel room when buying breakfast. Not totally useless I guess as I
never had to make a toilet break during the day once (yay sweat). And my wet
wipes were completely dry after many years in my bag,
need to double check that next time.</p>
The quick-snap lock I had bought for a couple of euros a while ago seems a
little useless, I'd imagined it as some "I need to fix the bike to a pole or
railing in a few seconds while having to step away really quickly, and no time
to take out the lock from my back pack", but that never happened. But I guess
it's like 50g (like a zip tie with a metal core, with a special plain key) so
not much lost, except those couple euros :P</p>
The weather was really nice so I didn't need to change on a whim.</p>
The list of things I should have taken and did not is pretty short:</p>

second USB charging cable (it broke, and it's small and light)</li>
wound disinfectant spray (scratched my leg at some point)</li>
</ul>
I pondered about taking a lightweight pair of shoes but that seemed very much
not needed, as I was wearing "normal" MTB shoes without cleats.</p>
Expenses</h2>

Preparation:

a new (used) bike :P</li>
some 100 EUR of missing bike equipment (tools, tubes, gloves, bags)</li>
</ul>
</li>
Hotels:

Rosenheim: 80 EUR</li>
at home: free :D</li>
Landshut (easy sleep Apartmenthotel): 61 EUR</li>
Kelheim (greenpartment Boardinghousehotel): 80 EUR</li>
</ul>
</li>
Trains:

Bike: 2x 6 EUR</li>
Munich to Freilassing: 34 EUR but I don't know why, should be 27 EUR</li>
Treuchtlingen to Dachau: 24 EUR</li>
</ul>
</li>
Stuff:

USB charging cable: 7 EUR</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Food is hard to gauge as I didn't really pay attention here. I usually had
lunch and dinner, meals ranged from 8 to 16 EUR, usually with one or two
drinks on top - but I usually did choose a cheaper menu option.
Breakfast was usually from a bakery, only on day one I had a
"proper" one in a cafe for 8 EUR. Then 2-3 coffees, a scoop of ice cream here
and there and a lot of
mostly half litre bottles of Fanta/Water/Gatorade in supermarkets, so not that
bad - only on Sunday I needed to stop at a gas station twice and paid a
premium.</p>
But I did avoid having to buy panniers or anything really costly just for
this trip, as my bike clothes and equipment were in solid shape.
I guess by not paying for a single room but a double for two people
you can cut costs, the next thing would be to only
have dinner at a restaurant and take some stuff with you for lunch. I planned
to stop at McDonalds once but it didn't work out with the route. Can't beat
the cost/kcal ratio there I guess, but I don't think I wasted a lot of money.</p>
Final thoughts</h2>
Very fun, would do it again any time. Needs a bit of prep work and a proper
bike. I could have used my hardtail, but without any panniers it might have
been hard to put all the stuff in. Many people prefer to go without a
backpack, but mine is fine for me as long as I don't make it too heavy.
The suggested 80-100 km per day seem ok for someone who usually uses a bike
a lot but hasn't really started the season with doing longer trips.
A day with up to 800m of climbing was mostly doable, the day with 1800
was hard. My stop at home in the middle was
a nice safety net, but completely unneeded, although I did of course plan
around it a bit, for example only taking one spare tube for the first two
days and not two of them, or less energy bars, and brought breakfast with me
when leaving for the second time.</p>
I also guess I was overly cautious and now I know better how much I can
manage to do in one day. I was not skipping a meal, I was not only drinking
water - I guess you can wing it a lot more.</p>
Regarding camping with a tent, that would absolutely mean taking a second
pannier and as you're not allowed to camp out in the wild in Germany I tried
to do a little research regarding camping sites but their websites are mostly
terrible and I wasn't confident I'd have a place to sleep every night. Guess I
should try that some other time when it's not a huge trip, just a weekend
where if bad comes to worst you can improvise.</p>
Footnotes</h2>

I know some people might take offense that by sleeping in hotels and not
in a tent it's not bikepacking, but bicycle touring but I honestly don't care.
I did plan to go with a tent but it didn't work out. Maybe next time.</li>
</ol>


2022 in review
2022-12-31T20:22:00Z
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2021</a> / 2020</a> / 2019</a> /
2018</a> / 2017</a> / 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

World of Warcraft - less, but still mostly that</em></li>
EVE Online - tied with WoW this year</em></li>
Final Fantasy XIV - came back very briefly</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>

finished Laika's Window</em> which I started in 2020</li>
reread the Sandman comics</li>
quite a lot of pen & paper RPG material</li>
Polar: The Black Kaiser (comic)</li>
</ul>
Movies I've (re-)watched</h3>

The Book of Life</a> - good</em></li>
Space Jam</a> - been a while</em></li>
Enola Holmes</a> - it was good, and funny</em></li>
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness</a> - in a cinema, actually - loved it because of the sheer ridiculous stuff</em></li>
</ul>
For some reason I lost the drive to watch stuff a while ago, it's simply not fun anymore and I can hardly sit still through a whole movie or show episode.</p>
TV Series I've (re-)watched</h3>

The Sandman</a> S1, but not all of it</li>
</ul>
Podcasts and other media</h3>

a bit of ATP</a> and some gaming podcasts</li>
a surprising amount of watching Twitch streams</li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h3>

Sleigh Bells - Texis</li>
Sleigh Bells - Jessica Rabbit</li>
Soilwork - Verkligheten</li>
Soilwork - The Ride Majestic</li>
Arch Enemy - Deceivers</li>
Amon Amarth - The Great Heathen Army</li>
Battle Beast - Circus of Doom</li>
Blind Guardian - The God Machine</li>
Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga - Cheek To Cheek</li>
</ul>
If I'm going off this list</a> I seem to developing a bigger taste for Melodic Death Metal. In Flames has been a staple for years (soon decades), Arch Enemy and Amon Amarth are not so recent additions, but Soilwork is a new discovery of 2022. If I was 100% exact I'd also add the shipment of another 11 CDs I ordered just before the year ended (5x In Flames, Therion, Fear Factory, Hypocrisy, Soilwork, Sabaton, and The Halo Effect) - but I've not managed to even open the package on New Year's Eve, so those will be on the 2023 list.</p>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

an NVMe SSD, 2 TB, 189 EUR</li>
a 2.5" SSD I ended up not needing</li>
a multimeter, UNI-T UT139C, 50 EUR</li>
a couple Shelly Plug S, 20 EUR</li>
a coffee grinder (Hario Slim Plus), 25 EUR</li>
a lot of coffee beans</li>
16 used RPG source books on eBay, ~160 EUR</li>
another new laptop PSU</li>
a new travel backpack, a Dakine Campus L</a> (Night Tropical), 65 EUR (permalink</a>)</li>
</ul>
A year where no big things needed to be replaced, which is always nice. Not using my laptops a lot, so the 2013 x230 and the 2016 T460p are still completely fine for casual usage, although the x230 could of course be thinner and lighter as a dedicated travel machine - a Chromebook would have worked fine for me since the pandemic started, with one exception where I had to bring the big machine anyway.</p>
I have a 10-12 year old Dakine Campus 33L which has accompanied me on most, if not all, trips around the world and only recently has shown signs of wear, because I've also used it for getting groceries and have regularly had 20kg of stuff in it, milk cartons and bottles and whatnot. The new interior design isn't as great as the old one but it seems servicable, and I like the form factor and that it does not look like a tactical bag or if I'm a onebagging tourist. So yeah, 10 years of abuse (except maybe crawling through mud) and it's held up just fine, so this was my default choice for a replacement. We'll see how this one holds out, hopefully just as long, as I'll keep the groceries to the old one.</p>
Social networks</h3>

Twitter - daily light usage until November, then I stopped</em></li>
Facebook - logged in like three times</em></li>
Instagram - account sucessfully deleted</em></li>
Fediverse - yes</em></li>
</ul>
I managed to follow most of the people I followed on Twitter on my Fediverse accounts, also closely following the development of a self-hosted Mastodon alternative, ktistec</a> - already sent some small patches.</p>
Messaging</h3>

IRC -  still daily</em></li>
Matrix - nearly daily</em></li>
Email - no change, but I feel it's getting less</em></li>
Slack - work and 2 other communities</em></li>
Signal - yes</em></li>
WhatsApp - yes</em></li>
</ul>
Still don't see any widespread migration away from WhatsApp, but some discussions here and there that IRC isn't cutting it anymore for a lot of folks. The #erlang channel on Libera often references a Slack, the Munich CCC chapter had a discussion about Matrix vs IRC, and then some.</p>
Trips</h3>

other countries: Czech Republic for a weekend</li>
in Germany: once to Berlin, also a few days near the mountains</li>
</ul>
While I don't like German Pilsner at all, since this trip I've been buying Pilsner Urquell again, because Czech Pilsner is good (so is Budvar and most of the others I tasted). This phase will be over at some point I suppose, but for now I'm enjoying my small 33cl 4.4% bottles, usually not more than one a day.</p>
(Online) Services</h3>

Subscribed to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime</li>
some MMOs subscriptions</li>
I finally managed to consolidate all my domains at one company, INWX</a></li>
in the foreseeable future I'll keep paying for one VPS at Strato, two "cloud vps" at Hetzner, and one at Scaleway, for a total of 20 EUR</li>
procrastinating changing my mobile plan</li>
still waiting for fiber to the home, no dice</li>
</ul>
Overall I'm investigating running even less of "all the services on one box", as seen on the hosting options</a> post, but of course that's a slow work in progress and not everything has the same solution, but I'm very happy with Deno and Fly.io here. Guess it doesn't count as self-hosting anymore, but looking at it from an "own your data" point of view, I guess I'm trying to get rid of the stuff that has no "data" or not even a lot of state and let that be someone else's problem while still running the important services that have my data that is worth protecting.</p>
Programming languages, sorted by usage</h3>

Elixir - work, I like it</em></li>
Java - work</em></li>
Erlang - work</em></li>
C++ - work</em></li>
Clojure - went back to some old personal projects</em></li>
Rust - for Advent of Code, and a few small things</em></li>
Python - random small bits</em></li>
</ul>
We've been doing Erlang for years at my (not so new) job, but this time we needed something inherently HTTP API-ish, so we decided that Elixir might be a better fit than Erlang and writing all the framework-y bits ourselves, that's why we used Elixir and Phoenix. And of course everything took longer than expected and so a good chunk of my year at work was spent on this app and it was really nice. The only pain points are at the Erlang-Elixir boundary when working with strings.</p>
Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

mountain biking fell flat due to health problems</li>
</ul>
Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

more cycling and mountain biking</li>
</ul>


Trying out some hosting options
2022-06-14T10:30:47Z
In a mood of looking into not self-hosting every small tool I wanted to try out a few of the options that are around now.
Not that self-hosting is bad per se, for some of these things I thought it would be nice to get them into some sort of
shape to be able to host them somewhere else, especially if they're stateless and don't have any external dependencies.</p>
TypeScript + Deno Deploy</h3>
While I've never been a fan of nodejs, I am drawn a lot more to deno</a> and so I set out to rewrite a
very small and very old project I'd cobbled together and had been using for 9 years.</p>
The project is hosted at ip.f5n.de</a> and i.f5n.de</a> and simply displays the IP address you're connecting from, and some HTTP headers plus your IP, respectively.</p>
Here's</a> the PHP source code, it has gained a few more small features over the years,
for example showing the ASCII table,
converting unix timestamps to dates and back, converting from decimal to hex and binary.</p>
And here's</a> the rewrite in TypeScript, which I then put on Deno Deploy</a> on their free tier.
This is just connecting the repo to their Github App an now every push does a deploy.
If you configure the DNS TXT records correctly, then you also get SSL on your own subdomain via Let's Encrypt - nice.</p>
Everything has been completely smooth here and I didn't run into any problems.</p>
I did the same thing for another small project, but it's 100% the same setup, so I won't elaborate.
Roughly the same age, ~150 lines of PHP code (nothing wrong with the code, it's kinda trivial as well),
and I also rewrote it in TypeScript, cleaned it up, and moved it to Deno Deploy, also keeping the old
code running on my server under a different URL.</p>
Clojure + Fly.io</h3>
This project is also over 10 years old and is written in Clojure, and the way I have used it so far is a bit of a
convoluted mess. Cron runs a shell script, which runs commands via Make in a container.
On top of that the Clojure app itself was only running via lein run TASK</code>, but speed isn't really important.</p>
On the other side the offering by Fly.io</a>, running a container for free with 256MB RAM, sounded quite interesting,
and I wanted to try them out anyway so I saw a possibility to make this work.</p>
Of course (at least to me) running something like a cronjob in a hosted container doesn't really match, so I bit
the bullet and wrapped my CLI tool (with some library functions) into being exposed as a web service, which I could
then host there and call via cron again - which is no problem.</p>
I don't want to go into too much detail here regarding the refactoring and adding features, but focus on the deployment.</p>
My first try was using the clojure:openjdk-8-lein-slim-bullseye</code> docker base image I'd been using so far,
but while I did get the app to run on Fly.io I had it crashing by going OOM a lot, despite experimenting quite a bit
with the -XmxAAAm -XmsAAAm</code> flags. The app itself is not actually doing a lot, it exposes a web server and then
it fetches 2-20 smallish JSON files, extracts a few values, and writes them to HTML report.
This simply should not use up a lot of memory, as it's always just 2 JSON files at the same time, the other pairs
are fetched and processed sequentially.</p>
There wasn't a real change with the jdk11 image, but to my surprise using the clojure:temurin-17-lein-alpine</code> with
-Xmx192m -Xms192m</code> seems to have done the trick. While I did know you can't just assume 256 MB for the heap if all
you have is 256 MB, I don't have a lot of experience with these numbers, but I found the 'allow around 25% of leeway'
in a blog post and yes, it seems to work just fine.</p>
Overall the experience with Fly.io wasn't as great as with Deno Deploy I have to admit, but it wasn't exactly bad.</p>
First of all you need to enter your credit card details, even if you simply want to try the free plan.
I understand their angle but I don't have to like it.</p>
Then their docs aren't too great, but maybe only for this 'run your own Dockerfile' use case I looked at.
The docs</a> kinda tell you what to do, but not detailed enough.</p>
They tell you to run flyctl deploy</code> but for some reason insist on building the image from your Dockerfile
themselves (but on your local machine) instead of maybe using the image you just built 5 minutes ago for testing.
Again, not the end of the world, but if they only would at least tag them so you'd see which ones those are when
running docker images</code>, but they're all "unknown" and you need to clean up carefully. Should be really easy to
tag them with some fly-deploy-timestamp string.</p>
Once you managed to have your image deployed you might wonder why it's not reachable via the provided url.
Their fly launch</code> tool (why are half the commands fly</code> and half of them flyctl</code> btw?) has helpfully generated
the fly.toml</code> config file for you, but it was populated by some values you absolutely need to change but they're
not documented in the file and the docs on the website could be better.</p>
Caveat 1:</strong> The port. If the tool analyses your Dockerfile</code> and creates a config, I would have expected it would
default to the EXPOSE</code> port or mention that on the website. Nope, you only find that in the troubleshooting guide</a>.</p>
Caveat 2:</strong> I still don't know exactly what these numbers mean, but under [services.concurrency]</code> there's a default
hard limit of 25 connections, which I ran into when requesting 20 JSON files and then accessing my deployed container.
I don't want to blame them here really, because I've simply not understood if the http client I was using in my code
still had dangling connections, or what happens when I request a web page with 25 images. So far I have changed my
code to use a connection manager to reuse the connections, and also upped this limit to 50 and I've seen no further errors.
The problem here is that I don't know how to find out what they count as "concurrent connections", especially when
serving web pages.</p>
Caveat 3</strong>: There are some health checks by default, e.g. 'the port you gave is available via tcp after N sec' but
again it's there as a default with no explanation so I had to find the fly.toml docs</a> and find out where
this failing health check that I didn't ask for is coming from.</p>
While you deploy you can see the logs for this container on the web page, this is pretty nice, but it repeatedly
stopped working with the helpful "this page has stopped responding" popup in Firefox.</p>
Apart from those little annoyances (and the only WTF one being the port) it was a good experience.
Still a little worried I might overstep the free tier but we'll see.</p>
They really need to improve their "First steps with a Dockerfile" document, otherwise it was fine, you just need to
find the docs and actually read a lot. Maybe I'm a bit unfair here but this is a very basic container with a very
basic web app. If it's booted up it will serve a plain html page at /. No database, no external systems.
If you ignore my starting problems with the RAM (which I don't blame them for), this part should've been easy from
a given Dockerfile.</p>
I want to try out some other runtime and maybe also connect to a database (I have another project of mine on my mind),
but for JVM stuff the 256MB seems a little on the low end. No complaints towards fly.io here, just an observation, more
of a blame of the JVM :P</p>
Conclusion</h3>
I've always been a fan of the Heroku idea, easy deployments and then not having to care about stuff, but the only time
I actually tried Heroku I wasn't amazed by the performance.</p>
But now I found not one, but two offerings that 100% fit my needs, and that's serving some very basic small apps
(disclaimer: my Clojure container is actually huge, but I swear that it's not my fault, sorry fly.io) for free.</p>
There have been a lot more sites where you could deploy static sites (I have one small project on netlify and it also
just works) but this is what I need, not so much JS frontend, but actual server side code. I mean, to be fair, you
could probably rewrite the two aforementioned TypeScript projects to be client-side only, I haven't tried it.</p>
So far I fully recommend trying out Deno Deploy and fly.io - but I can't yet say if their paid plans are worth it over
self-hosting on a VPS. For someone like me who enjouys the tinkering.. probably not. You can put a LOT of low-traffic,
low-CPU projects on a 3 EUR cloud VPS instance.</p>


Switching to nextgen
2022-05-24T11:05:54Z
Last week I finally bit the bullet and, after changing the font,
made the few remaining switches. This website is now generated via nextgen</a>.</p>
There are still a few things to clean up, but overall I'm happy - there was still
one missing feature I had to add - copying the static assets from the theme folder
to the public</code> folder. Oh, and themes are now called blueprints,
because it makes more sense</a>. Unfortunately I'm way past my original 333 lines
of code, but it was just a fun coincidence anyway.</p>
The actual 'switch' commit</a> is kinda tiny, but being very compatible with hugo</code>
was one of the stated goals. Of course the commits</a> for the templates weren't
quite so small.</p>
The Atom RSS feeds should be similar enough (especially the IDs) as to not confuse
any RSS consumers, but apologies if you're being spammed with 10 years of posts
now.</p>
So there are still a few little things to implement in nextgen</code> but if it can
generate this site it's good enough.</p>


Theme V3
2022-05-06T15:45:00Z
Over the last few evenings I spent a little bit of time on the CSS for this
website, I can't say I was particularly enjoying it though.</p>
Back in October</a> I was ripping out most of that
old version of Foundation (which was huge), but it was still a bit of a mess
and 8.5 kb of copied minified CSS were left.</p>
So I started from zero and only ported what I needed from my SASS file, then
imported those 5 classes I use from Foundation, and I even rewrote
most of those. Now I have my own (bad) version of a CSS grid, using
display: flex</code> in a parent div. It seems to work well enough though.</p>
Hat tip to enough.css</a> which
looks good (and I stole a few bits), but I think it doesn't make sense to
use it verbatim if you already have something you like and just redo
the styling from scratch. I might actually use it for other projects.</p>
Anyway, everything seems to work and it also looks fine in a very narrow
browser window (just with about half the max-width</code> code now), there's only
one "bug" I still need to track down, there's always horizontal scrollbar in
mobile mode, probably a stray margin or padding - but that's not urgent now.</p>
The landing page is now 5.3 kb of HTML + 4.2 kb of CSS + a 9.6 kb Favicon.
Oh well.</p>


Self-Hosting
2022-05-05T11:37:38Z
Recently I've thought a lot about self-hosting, maybe triggered by the whole fediverse hype and how decentralization is actually desirable for many projects.</p>
Not that I usually don't think about self-hosting at all, after all I do that a lot. So what am I actually hosting?</p>

a production mail server for 4 users, and some static websites behind nginx</li>
a WordPress blog on another VPS, using Caddy and MySQL</li>
Quassel (+Postgres) for IRC on a third, this also functions as a test bed for running some other temporary apps</li>
a web server for all my random projects and some other stuff, the local dependencies are mysql + postgres

RSS reader</li>
personal wiki</li>
image hosting (a pic dump)</li>
my tumblelog</li>
syncthing for not-really-important files</li>
podcast episode tracker (because I'm bad at remembering done/todo) &1</a></li>
lately: ktistec</a> for the fediverse &2</a></li>
an IRC bot</li>
some fediverse and discord bots</li>
a dozen cronjobs that fetch data and reformat it for consumption</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Stuff I hosted in the past, but have stopped:</p>

TeamSpeak - everyone uses Discord now</li>
Mumble - same</li>
Matrix - enjoying my stay on a friend's homeserver &3</a></li>
Jitsi Meet - replacement for Teams in my former team at work &4</a></li>
</ul>
So on the one hand it's nice to have your stuff and also to play around with things that are 'live', even if it only has one user - you still have to think about backups, updates, dependencies, deployment, data, and more. Not that I'd say updating things is a great use of your time, but it's mostly worth it. On the other hand more services have sprung up that promise to let you run things there, no strings attached. Of course that that also sounds nice.</p>
I started by rewriting my small 'what is my ip' tool in TS and deployed it to deno.dev. Original</a> - Clone</a>. I didn't go for 100% feature parity, but it's good enough as a test. There's also fly.io</a>, render.com</a> and some contenders. Sure, you don't have to care for your application  anymore and if you're running an old (vulnerable) version of something, it's not your problem anymore - at least when there's no data to be leaked or if the data is public anyway. But the thing is that you'd kinda have to eliminate everything you're running in order to pare down your attack vectors and get rid of the chores. If I have a docker container with PHP I don't really care if it's serving one 'website' or five of them.</p>
Maybe self-hosting has several use cases and the people vehemently arguing in favor of it are muddling them up a little. Point one is to own your data, but sometimes having your own domain and migrating from one email provider to the next is good enough. No vendor lock-in, so to speak, just a temporary home for your thing. Then there's "not running anything on anyone else's server", which is an angle I don't really have, it's just a lot more convenient for me to have stuff on my own server, if it's something without a standardized way of deployment or if 'run it via cronjob' is the perfect fit. And then there seem to be the people who don't want to have chores but still not be at the mercy of any SaaS, so I guess that's where you run managed k8s on a bigger scale or Heroku/render/fly/etc. on a smaller scale.</p>
Conclusion</h2>
Is there one? Maybe I'm a little weird but for me keeping track of 10 things I have deployed at 10 different service platforms is nearly as bad as hosting them myself, somehow APP.example.org</code> seems to stick better if example.org</code> is my own domain. My main concern is outdated dependencies, so maybe this problem is not easily solvable. And is it really helpful to have several different deployment pipelines to several different services, who all could change something at some point, whereas on my own infra I choose when I make the jump to a newer (maybe incompatible) major version, otherwise it's mostly chugging along happily on a security-bugfix-only LTS version.</p>
I can see the draw of Go here. The aforementioned REST-backend for my podcast tracker was 750 LOC in PHP (using the Slim framework, a logging library, and a RSS library) and the Go rewrite which is only missing the HTML functionality is 450 LOC and a single dependency, the Postgres bindings. They have a pretty good track record of backwards compatibility, so I am confident that I could just recompile it with future Go versions and it won't break. But I'm surely not advocating to rewrite all your stuff in Go and stop using dependencies, but in this case it kinda made sense.</p>
I still have some concerns about hosting stuff with databases somewhere else, or anything stateful really. If it's just analyzing HTTP requests or has some content in HTML files I can see myself using deno.dev and Netlify more.</p>
Next steps</h2>
I'm not sure I found out some actionable advice here. I'll definitely be looking at fly.io and render and see what I could use them for (hosting a docker container would be awesome, but need to check the price first - it's always the price. I can run 20 small things on a 5€ VPS, why would I pay 20 times 5€ for an app I use a couple times per month?) Also maybe I should be looking into managed k8s, that might be this single interface deployment I am looking for... Also the things that are the easiest to hand off to e.g. Netlify are also the ones that are the easiest to host. A docker container for nginx and provide SSL for it, done.</p>
Pseudo Footnotes</h2>
&1 - Jerssey</h3>
I wrote the backend of my Podcast Episode Tracker Jerssey in PHP (Slim</a>) originally, for nostalgia reasons and to see if I can still do it after not having used it for over 5 years, but at the moment I am rewriting it in Go because I don't agree how many dependencies (direct and transitive( I am using for an actually tiny amount of functionality in a REST api. The client is a Qt desktop app that I use on Windows, but it also works on Linux. I have not open-sourced any of these three components, maybe I will.</p>
&2 - ktistec</h3>
I have nothing against Mastodon per se, but I think it's complete overkill to run a Mastodon instance for a single user, so I was searching for alternatives. I looked at honk</a> but I think it's more performance art than a usable piece of software (at least to me), I tried GoToSocial</a> but I was not enthusiastic about it, especially as it lacks a frontend of its own and it also didn't seem to do what I told it to do, but I'm not ruling out an error on my part. Then there's epicyon</a> which I haven't tried to run yet and finally ktistec</a>, which advertises itself as a lightweight single-user application and it just worked.</p>
&3 - Matrix</h3>
First of all, I love Matrix. Maybe I'm biased because it reunited me with some folks who had left our IRC channel one by one, and now we can talk again - and it works perfectly fine for this use case, even on mobile. Unlike in the fediverse I think it's very ok to tag along on someone's instance, at least how I use it. I am in a channel with a nick I choose. I could replace my 'connection' anytime, the 'hostname' doesn't matter, just like on IRC.</p>
&4 - Jitsi Meet</h3>
Yep, the experience for a team of six was better on a jitsi instance on a 5€ VPS than the Microsoft Enterprise[tm] solution. I wouldn't want to host (and scale) this productively (it could work, but I didn't poke deep), but it was good and we could of course fall back to teams. Also I wasn't comfortable having work meetings on a random instance, in this case I could make sure nothing was recorded and leak, so it was fine.</p>


Blogs and Microblogs
2022-04-25T21:27:44Z
Today is a weird day. First I read about Snikket</a> (in a HN comment
I guess), which sounds pretty awesome - a curated set of tools for XMPP (i.e.
server, web client, iOS + Android client) that are deliberately modified to
work well together, just as it should've been from the start, and not everyone
using different extensions and interacting being so painful at times...
But for me this is like 5-8 years too late and I'm probably not
going back to XMPP, I'm happy on Matrix for a certain set of people and I
guess I lost contact with the ones on Jabber years ago anyway, or it's via
Twitter or IRC or sometimes WhatsApp...</p>
Then the news broke that Elon Musk is buying Twitter and for some reason there
was a huge renewed interest in the fediverse again and the bigger servers
seemed to be fighting with capacity a little. And by "for some reason" I meant
that nothing actually has changed, it's just some event where everyone seems
to get an impulse to check it out. I'm not saying that as a completely remote
observer though, I did indeed log in to my fediverse accounts for the first
time in weeks, and before that it had been months. Anyway, we'll see how that
will pan out, the fediverse has never worked out for me because none of the
200 people I follow were actually being active over there.</p>
It doesn't help that many instances have gone away since 2018-2020 and so
there are a lot of empty references in my following list which I should
probably prune at some point, at least if I would be active.</p>
Back in 2017 (I think) I actually tried self-hosting (on a domain I no longer
own, so again part of the problem), but the setup for just one user was just
so overly complex and the software still buggy (I think I tried Mastodon and
Pleroma) that I just scrapped the attempt and went to chaos.social for German
content and mastodon.social for English content - I've never been a fan of
bilingual interactions on Twitter.</p>
I am not sure the landscape of self-hosting is a lot better today, someone
posted this list</a> and half of the applications are either declared
as unfinished/beta and/or have not seen an update in years, which wouldn't be
a problem if they were a little more mature and finished, but none of them
look like it. So maybe I'll be trying out honk</a> or ktistec</a>.</p>
And then I saw Blog more, tweet less</a> and remembered my attemps to
add IndiePub support into this site. Maybe I should just try to add something
regarding ActivityPub and have the canonical source and then publish to either
Twitter or the Fediverse... But oh well, does it actually matter? I put my
Twitter account to private months (or years?) ago, I only have 150 people
there, I haven't counted how many of those accounts are still active and so
on, so "do I actually have any benefits besides appeasing FOMO" is a real
concern. Self-hosting is nice, but not for the sake of it, the tool should
have a purpose. And maybe this is something where I'm better off just using
someone else's infra because it's just not important enough for me.</p>
Also there are some valid concerns</a>, mostly related to piggybacking on
other people's instances, but the problem (see above) of just hosting your
own persists. Maybe I should read Run your own social</a> again, but I'm
not sure there's anything new I haven't thought about.</p>
Maybe this sounded like random rambling about unrelated topics but the gist
of it is that I've been thinking about the communication channels I have used
and am using quite a bit and for several of them I've never been really happy.
The question is if moving to the fediverse would change anything about that
or if there's a need for something else yet again...</p>


7DRL 2022
2022-03-16T09:12:08Z
The 7DRL</a>, or 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, is a yearly one
week long event where you build a game. A roguelike</a>.</p>
It's been around for quite a few years and while I'm not actively seeking out
roguelikes to play very often, I like the concept and have played a few of the
better known ones over the years. I'm also really bad at them, but I thought
it might be fun to actually build one for a change. I like that it's scoped to
one week and then you can call it done, or revisit later to expand.</p>
From the start it was pretty clear that I wanted to build it for the browser,
just to ease testing and have less friction for people to play it at all. I am
not familiar with any proper game engine or with game development in general,
so my reasoning was that I would not miss out on awesome graphics or advanced
features, so browser sounded perfect. At the start I took a very brief look at
how I could convert/export a LÖVE</a> game to the browser (because I made
two very basic simple games with it in the past and I because I like Lua) and
also grabbed a copy of Godot, but in the end decided to stick with
rot.js</a>, which was linked on the 7DRL page - and it's actually
fantastic for this.</p>
So, after a failed attempt at making a board game representation on the
computer some 15 years ago with my wife, this was our second attempt at
working together on a game. Before the game jam started, we brainstormed
about the setting and gameplay for a bit - the only thing that was clear was
that we didn't want to make a basic dungeon crawler, like a typical clone of
the actual game 'Rogue'.</p>
In the end we settled on a fishing theme, with you, the protagonist, being
represented by a boat, going around a map on water, and fishing. My part would
be all the code (and some design decisions), my wife was going to do the
artwork and most of the game systems and formulas. I had taken most of the
week off from work anyway so it's hard to put down how many hours we worked
on it - we used the full 7 days, but took long breaks during the day or just
worked for a few hours on some days. Maybe 40 hours per person, I don't know.</p>


In-ear Headphones
2022-02-18T18:25:05Z
I'm a big fan of in-ear headphones when outside. I wear them when going for a
longer walk, when using public transport, and when cycling I usually have
one bud in on low volume for a little background music. So far, nothing
revolutionary about that, many people do that. Over-ears are not a feasible
alternative for me, I've tried it a few times.</p>
Many years ago I discovered the perfect in-ear, but I don't really remember
how. Maybe someone posted a link to a sale on IRC, maybe I read a review.</p>
I am talking about the Xiaomi Piston V3 from around 2015.</p>
Last time I checked I couldn't find them to be ordered anymore, but I still
had one working pair (I'm not saying they're not sturdy, but using them 5-6
days a week, and folding them at least twice takes its toll, and I didn't
actually wear out that many pairs...) and didn't need them a lot the last two
years and I seem to have misplaced it. So I grabbed a HTC one I had in my
"backup headphones from phones and whatever" box and used that for a bit.</p>
Two weeks ago or so I went to Mediamarkt to buy something else and checked the
headphone aisle, didn't see anything interesting, but near the checkout they
had some JBL T160 and because they were cheap and I was kinda happy with JBL
in the past (I have a small Bluetooth speaker made by them) I grabbed a pair.</p>
And boy do these sound shit. No bass at all, the cable is very slim and flat
and a little awkward, and the controls are in a weird place. Like directly at
your collar. Also they fall out of my ears easily, but I might just have to
try the other plastic nubs.</p>
So yeah, I know I shouldn't expect great sound for 13 EUR (although the
Piston V3 have that), but come on, sounding worse than the HTC ones they give
you for free on a cheap/medium phone line? (Could have been the Tattoo from
2009 or the Desire Z from 2013ish).</p>
So I guess I will put them in my bag as the new "backup in case I forgot to
bring some" headphones and continue using the HTC ones and see if I can
track down a few more pairs of Xiaomi Piston V3. Sad as it is.</p>
Between writing this and publishing it I actually found one set of the Pistons
in my drawer, so I guess I'm good for 1-2 years...</p>
Update 2023-09-06:</strong> Around November 2022 I bought a pair of Panasonic RP-HJE125 for
around 10€ on a trip because I'd forgotten mine at home and they seem to sound
better than the JBL ones.</p>
When I "upgraded" my phone</a> to one
without an audio jack I needed Bluetooth ones, I went for the
Teufel Airy Sports</a> - deliberately choosing
the ones with the neckband. They're fine, but I'd still prefer to use some cheaper
ones that don't run out of battery. Oh well.</p>


Development and Proxies
2022-01-21T07:30:49Z
I'm in the unfortunate circumstance to be using a mandatory proxy these days
(including SSL) and unlike with browsers where it's kind of fire and forget,
if you're developing software there's a plethora of tools that will or will
not accept the default environment variables, so here's a list of stuff and
how to fix it.</p>
Linux environment variables</h3>
The usual proxy variables:</p>
PROXY="http://proxy.local:8080"

export http_proxy="$PROXY"
export HTTP_PROXY="$PROXY"
export https_proxy="$PROXY"
export HTTPS_PROXY="$PROXY"

export no_proxy='localhost,127.0.0.1,*.localstuff.example.org'
export NO_PROXY='localhost,127.0.0.1,*.localstuff.example.org'
</code></pre>
Interestingly the internet seems to agree or disagree if it's the uppercase
version or the lowercase version. I think there's no harm in setting all of
them and just not thinking about it anymore.</p>
Fortunately this solves the issues for all tools and package managers that
use curl</code> under the hood.</p>
I've since configured these additional ones:</p>
nix-pkgs</h3>
MY_CA_CERT=/foo/my-cert.crt

export NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE="$MY_CA_CERT"
</code></pre>
Although on my current machine I actually have it set
to /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt</code></p>
Ubuntu/Debian</h3>
As an aside, on Ubuntu you can trust your org's CA cert like this:</p>
$ sudo cp MyOrgCA.crt /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/MyOrgCA.crt
$ sudo update-ca-certificates
</code></pre>
RedHat/CentOS/AmazonLinux</h3>
This should work on all RH flavours:</p>
$ sudo cp MyOrgCA.crt /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/
$ sudo update-ca-trust extract
</code></pre>
elixir/mix</h3>
So this week I tried to install the Phoenix</a> framework and that was a journey.</p>
Apparently kerl</a> and kiex</a> work with curl, so that was no problem.</p>
The fun started with mix</code> where I think it's not documented properly, or at
least their docs aren't ranking high enough, so I first arrived at</p>
export HEX_UNSAFE_HTTPS=1</code>, which is a bad idea</strong>, so don't do that.</p>
The actual solution seems to be:</p>
export HEX_CACERTS_PATH="$MY_CA_CERT"
</code></pre>
But then the next riddle came up, mix phx.server</code> in Phoenix's hello world
example seemed to be downloading stuff from the npm registry.</p>
I mean, it kinda makes sense to have
some JS dependencies for a web project, but it was still a bit weird.</p>
Asking in #elixir</code> on IRC gave me the answer though that this was an esbuild</code>
watcher that was being started, probably to minify some assets or whatever.</p>
nodejs</h3>
OK, esbuild</code>, that's nodejs</code> you might think, there's a variable for that:</p>
export NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS="$MY_CA_CERT"
</code></pre>
Just that it didn't help, for whatever reason. I didn't feel like debugging
why it didn't pick up the variable if there was another way.</p>
As I am writing this, there's still an open issue in this esbuild
module for Phoenix, #31</a>.</p>
I used the workaround described there, installing esbuild by hand and then
doing</p>
# I do not like install -g
npm install esbuild 
export MIX_ESBUILD_PATH=$(readlink -f node_modules/.bin/esbuild)
</code></pre>
but then you need to add this to config/config.exs</code>:</p>
config :esbuild,
  version: "0.14.0",
  path: System.get_env("MIX_ESBUILD_PATH")
</code></pre>
But it worked, so it's fine.</p>
erlang/rebar3</h3>
Update: Two weeks later I ran into the same problem with erlang's package
manager rebar3</code>, but from 3.17 on you can put this:</p>
{ssl_cacerts_path, ["/opt/foo.crt"]}.
</code></pre>
into your ~/.config/rebar3/rebar.config</code> and it works.</p>
Docker</h3>
Oh, and of course Docker also doesn't work properly behind such a proxy,
so I did this, although there should be other solutions:</p>
$ cat /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/http-proxy.conf
[Service]
Environment="HTTP_PROXY=http://proxy.local:8080"
Environment="HTTPS_PROXY=http://proxy.local:8080"
Environment="NO_PROXY=localhost,127.0.0.1,*.localstuff.example.org"
</code></pre>
but I've not run into problems without the last line yet, as I don't use
a local registry.</p>
You also might need to tweak DNS for Docker:</p>
$ cat /etc/docker/daemon.json
{"dns":["10.0.0.10","9.9.9.9"]}
</code></pre>
A quick way to test is running:</p>
$ docker run busybox nslookup example.org
</code></pre>
git</h3>
And finally there's git, put this into ~/.gitconfig</code>:</p>
[http]
        proxy = http://proxy.local:8080

[https]
        proxy = http://proxy.local:8080
</code></pre>
Python/Pip</h3>
pip install --cert=/foo/my-cert.crt PACKAGE
</code></pre>
Rust/cargo</h3>
I've also had problem with Rust's cargo</code>, where solution is supposed to be</p>
[http]
proxy = "proxy.local:8080"
debug = true
cainfo = "/foo/my-cert.crt"
</code></pre>
in e.g. ~/.config/cargo.toml</code> (docs</a>) but I didn't get this
to work, but it is supposed to fall back to one of these:</p>
CARGO_HTTP_PROXY
HTTPS_PROXY
https_proxy
http_proxy
</code></pre>
and that worked, although cargo is unusually slow.</p>
Gradle</h3>
For gradle, you need to put these lines into ~/.gradle/gradle.properties</code>:</p>
systemProp.http.proxyHost=proxy.local
systemProp.http.proxyPort=8080
systemProp.https.proxyHost=proxy.local
systemProp.https.proxyPort=8080
</code></pre>
Maven</h3>
Maven needs this in ~/.m2/settings.xml</code>:</p>
<settings>
  <proxies>
   <proxy>
      <id>http-proxy</id>
      <active>true</active>
      <protocol>http</protocol>
      <host>proxy.local</host>
      <port>8080</port>
      <nonProxyHosts>*.localstuff.example.org|localhost|127.0.0.1</nonProxyHosts>
    </proxy>
   <proxy>
      <id>https-proxy</id>
      <active>true</active>
      <protocol>https</protocol>
      <host>proxy.local</host>
      <port>8080</port>
      <nonProxyHosts>*.localstuff.example.org|localhost|127.0.0.1</nonProxyHosts>
    </proxy>
  </proxies>
</settings>
</code></pre>
Java</h3>
Finally, for every JVM you use you need to add the cert to the key store, if that's applicable:</p>
For a .crt this is usually done via:</p>
keytool -importcert -alias asdf -keystore $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/cacerts -storepass changeit -file cert.crt -noprompt
</code></pre>
For GraalVM the path is slightly different:</p>
keytool -importcert -alias asdf -keystore $JAVA_HOME/lib/security/cacerts -storepass changeit -file cert.crt -noprompt
</code></pre>
And yes, none of this is breaking news, but before I have to put everything
together again the next time I'd rather have a consolidated page.</p>
Maybe I'll run into more and make this continually updated, as I had to with
the default browser post</a>.</p>


2021 in review
2021-12-31T22:59:00Z
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2020</a> / 2019</a> /
2018</a> / 2017</a> / 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

World of Warcraft - subscribed for the whole year, played a lot in the first half of the year</em></li>
EVE Online - subscribed for the whole year, played a lot</em></li>
Final Fantasy XIV - resubscribed for the winter</em></li>
Horizon: Zero Dawn - it's good!</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>
Finished "A Guide To The Good Life" by William B. Irvine. That's not a lot.
But I've read four technical books on Erlang and OTP basically from cover
to cover.</p>
Movies I've (re-)watched</h3>

Kingsman: The Golden Circle - the first one was a lot better</em></li>
The Old Guard - I liked it</em></li>
Falling Inn Love - wanted to watch a movie with NZ accents, no idea how I came to this one, was ok</em></li>
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - desperately needed a rewatch</em></li>
I Kill Giants - it was ok</em></li>
The Claus Family - stopped after 30 minutes, I don't like it</em></li>
Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey - not bad for a Christmas movie, but not my favourite</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I've (re-)watched</h3>

Arcane - only started, but it looks really good</em></li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h3>
Two bands I've actually rediscovered this year and decided to support.
I saw Mono Inc. live a few years ago and only had a shirt, I remembered Metric
after rewatching Scott Pilgrim, and I discovered Unleash the Archers last year.</p>

Metric - Art of Doubt</li>
Metric - Pagans in Vegas</li>
Metric - Synthetica</li>
Unleash the Archers - Abyss</li>
Unleash the Archers - Apex</li>
Mono Inc. - The Book of Fire</li>
Mono Inc. - Welcome To Hell</li>
Mono Inc. - Together Till The End</li>
Mono Inc. - Terlingua</li>
Mono Inc. - After The War</li>
Mono Inc. - Viva Hades</li>
Mono Inc. - Voices Of Doom</li>
</ul>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

a new 27" monitor (Dell S2721DGFA) because my 2nd one was old and wonky, it's good, 380 EUR</li>
a new headset (Corsair HS35) to replace my aging one for work - I don't like it, 30 EUR</li>
a new unmanaged 8-port switch for below my desk, 11 EUR</li>
</ul>
Surprisingly little for another year stuck at home, not that I'm complaining.</p>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much</em></li>
Facebook - I actually logged in this year</em></li>
Instagram - need to delete that account</em></li>
Fediverse - nope</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - daily use, default communication channel for many people I communicate with</em></li>
Matrix - daily use</em></li>
Email - same as usual</em></li>
Slack - *work and 2 other communities</li>
WhatsApp - still kinda unavoidable</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

other countries: half a day in Austria</li>
other German states: zero</li>
</ul>
(Online) services</h3>

Still subscribed to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime, but I don't personally use them a lot</li>
Mostly MMO subscriptions this year</li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent</h3>

C++ - work</em></li>
Java - work</em></li>
Erlang - work, surprisingly fun to use</em></li>
Python - for some small stuff</li>
Go - for Advent of Code, I don't like it</em></li>
</ul>
Podcasts I listen to</h3>
Hardly anything this year</p>
Stuff that kinda worked out</h3>
I like my new job, that's about the only upside of this second pandemic year.</p>
Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

do more Rust</li>
do more Clojure</li>
read at least 3 novels this year</li>
more cycling, more mountain biking</li>
</ul>
"New Year's Resolutions" aka stuff that would be nice if it would work out</h3>

(more) mountain biking in the summer</li>
</ul>


Advent of Code 2021
2021-12-25T15:31:50Z
This is my third time taking part in the Advent of Code</a>,
I wrote about it before:</p>
2019</a>/2020</a></p>
This year I wanted to not just do Python again but also not invest so much time
into doing Erlang or Clojure, but practice Go a bit.
I will come to part later of how that turned out.</p>
Again there will be no problem description or complete spoilers, and the code
is on github</a>.</p>
My plan was to get up early and finish the two parts before work.</p>
Day 1 - Sonar Sweep</h2>
Easy start, 13 + 8 minutes. Getting used to Go and doing some mistyping</p>
Day 2 - Dive!</h2>
Parse input, calculate. 6 + 4 minutes.</p>
Day 3 - Binary Diagnostic</h2>
The first day that took a bit longer, 37 + 15 minutes. I'm still making silly
mistakes and fighting some parts of Go, but the VS Code integration is pretty
nice, especially auto-gofmt on save.</p>
Day 4 - Giant Squid</h2>
21 + 30 minutes, not sure why. It wasn't hard, just a little tedious.</p>
Day 5 - Hydrothermal Venture</h2>
Intersecting and overlapping vectors on a grid. 25 + 15 minutes.</p>
Day 6 - Lanternfish</h2>
This was supposed to be solved with a good trick, but I used a bad trick.
Instead of decoupling the identity of the fish and just track their value,
I implemented run-length encoding and if there were 11 new, I appended some
[11, 8]</code> instead of 11 times an [1,8]</code> - it worked well enough to combat
the exponential growth despite not being optimal. 11 + 18 minutes.</p>
Day 7 - The Treachery of Whales</h2>
Some math, uneventful. 13 minutes + 3 minutes.</p>
Day 8 - Seven Segment Search</h2>
While part 1 was still easy (15 minutes), this part 2 was the first tough one
for me (2h 15 minutes). I think this is the first one where in Python I would
have just used a set()</code> and not lose my train of thought, whereas in Go I had
to implement it manually with a map and a for-loop...</p>
Rewrote in Python (65 lines) because I couldn't believe how bad the Go version
looked (385 lines).</p>
Day 9 - Smoke Basin</h2>
Ah, the first day where you need to draw a map, get the neighbors, and then in
part 2 use that certain algorithm.</p>
17 minutes + 1h 31 minutes for me, the idea was there very quickly but I think
I fell into some traps when doing part 2. This should've been faster.</p>
This was the only day where I used Python and not Go, rewrote in Go later.</p>
Day 10 - Syntax Scoring</h2>
This is a proper parser and while it looked straightforward, I needed some
time. 1h + 13 minutes, so part 1 had already solved most of part 2.</p>
Day 11 - Dumbo Octopus</h2>
I think this is the day where I curse every language where I can't just extend
an array into the negative and so this was riddled by off by one errors and
some other things. 2.5h + 7 minutes.</p>
Day 12 - Passage Pathing</h2>
Ah, well-known algorithm solution number 2. I had learned my lessons in one of
the preceding years and thus it took 70 + 60 minutes and not ages.</p>
Day 13 - Transparent Origami</h2>
This was a fun one, you can either bruteforce it or apply some math. I
originally did the dumb version, which took 62 + 34 minutes. When I rewrote it
in Clojure, I used the math version but this only worked for p2 until I fixed
it to be a general solution that would also solve p1.</p>
Here's a nice blog post</a>
(not mine of course) that's kinda related to the solution I took, but not 100%.</p>
Day 14 - Extended Polymerization</h2>
Flashbacks to the 2019 or 2020 version of this, which I absolutely hated. This
time it went better, with 30 minutes + 2h.</p>
Day 15 - Chiton</h2>
Ah, the first pathfinding puzzle of the year. Another one where I learned my
lesson in the past and just had to remember, adapt, and not make errors.
2h 49 minutes + 30 minutes say that I didn't really do a good job though.</p>
Day 16 - Packet Decoder</h2>
Another parser, which I totally messed up at first. This was a day where Go
really got in my way, but I can't blame the language here, but my lack of
familiarity. (On other days I totally blame the language where I made some
stupid error when writing 5-10 lines of code which would've been a standard
library use and thus error free in another language). 3h 30 + 15 minutes,
because my elaborate part 1 was really easy to extend for part 2.</p>
Day 17 - Trick Shot</h2>
Reminds me of one puzzle in 2019 that was very similar. The basic calculation
of the trajectory was quite easy, also hitting the target. The real problem
was brute-forcing the correct answer for p1. p2 was then again was putting
another loop around it looking for the hits. 2h 49 min + 30 minutes.</p>
Again I could not believe how long my Go code was (243 lines), so I tried to
shorten it (95 lines) and then I had some time left in the evening and went
for a little code golf in Python and managed to get it down to just 32 lines.</p>
Repo</a></p>
Day 18 - Snailfish</h2>
This was a weekend puzzle where I had the correct idea and also a good first
throw at an implementation, but here an error, there an error, and in the end
I spent the whole day working on part 1. Part 2 then was a quick 15 minutes.
It was still quite fun, but this should've been a 2-3h solution and not me
messing up the details.</p>
Day 19 - Beacon Scanner</h2>
Another weekend puzzle where I thought I was progressing ok and then at some
point felt close enough to the solution but still not having it that I looked
at someone else's example code and got my solution working. 12h + 7 minutes.</p>
Day 20 - Trench Map</h2>
Again a map and neighbors, but this time with a twist. This felt really easy,
46 minutes + 32 minutes.</p>
Day 21 - Dirac Dice</h2>
This is one where I misunderstood a part of the problem, as I thought it will
end "as soon as someone wins a game, [in one of the realities]" versus the
actual "in all realities". One native speaker did an "oh, yes" when I said
that so either it was not 100% clearly written or it is the lack of English
on my part. Anyway, 78 minutes for part1 and no idea about part2, also this
is one where I cheated.</p>
Day 22 - Reactor Reboot</h2>
Part 1 was easy, 66 minutes and then... I looked at part 2 and it looked
tedious enough that I simply didn't feel like solving it. I guess this is
where I finally noticed (and accepted) how much time I had sunk in and now
the fun was gone. Did not complete part2, although I looked at it for a bit
again in the evening, then said screw it.</p>
Day 23 - Amphipod</h2>
Oh yeah, a towers of Hanoi path-finding again. I looked at it for a bit in the
morning but as the day before, felt zero drive to implement it. Nope.</p>
Day 24 - Arithmetic Logic Unit</h2>
I coded up the ALU (this was quick and fun), then I noticed that I'd probably
read the input by hand and deduce some sort of solution. Also I went out and
away from the computer for most of the day, so I never continued working on it.</p>
Day 25 - Sea Cucumber</h2>
Map and neighbors again, I had the example working pretty quickly but again Go
got in my way and my solution had just a little error, but I ran out of time,
went to have lunch and in the end I think it took 2h, of which I could've saved
about one by just being able to copy a 2-dimensional array without problems.</p>
Completion</h1>

total stars: 44 / 49</li>
two stars: Days 1-21</li>
one star: Days 22, 25</li>
zero stars: Days 23, 24</li>
</ul>
Languages</h2>

Go: Days 1-22, 25</li>
Clojure: Days 1-3, 6, 7, 13, 20 = 7 days</li>
Python: Days 8, 9, 17</li>
</ul>
Open TODOs</h2>

rewrite some more solutions in Clojure</li>
maybe do some Erlang again, or finish 2020 which I started doing in Erlang</li>
</ul>
Non-TODOs</h2>

not sure if I will do Day 22.2, 23, and 24</li>
</ul>
The end</h2>
So, this year was a bit different. I didn't try anything fancy like in 2019,
but I also didn't take the real easy way of just using a language I can work
with really well, but used a language I have used in the past and wanted to
brush up again. What I learned from this is that I do not like Go at all and
nothing has convinced me that this will change. I didn't like it back when I
used it for work and I don't like using it now, but I accept that it is really
good for some things. Currently I don't need these things, so that was it.</p>
I had A LOT of fun for the first 17 days and even when spending basically my
whole weekend on Day 18 + 19 I was still in high spirits, but on Day 22 it
was simply enough for me for this year. Maybe it would've been better if I had
switched to a different language on the weekend, probably not.</p>
I am still very happy I participated again and as usual a huge shoutout to
#lobsters-advent</code> (on Libera.chat now) for discussions, providing moral
support, and enjoying Advent of Code together again.</p>
Thanks to Eric (and the team) for giving us this plethora of puzzles every
year. I think the difficulty level is fine overall, but as I imagine it is a
hard choice to make as there are so many different people wanting to
participate. So I guess I can only sum up my thoughts as someone who has
reached 44-45 stars three years in a row now with the times provided...</p>
Getting it completed without actual cheating is really hard. Just trying on
your own and maybe asking people for clarification or some intermediate output
is sometimes helpful, but I would prefer it to be solvable in 1-2h every day.
I know there are speedcoders who do it in 5 minutes, and there are others who
might also do it in a new language in 10 - but I am not that. I am also not
immensely letdown for not finishing, but it sucks a bit that there are always
a few days where you either don't have that hour or it is simply so hard that
you would have needed a lot longer. Or maybe my goal of "complete it before
24h are up" and not catch up later is a bad idea anyway, for my skill level.</p>
Additional resources</h2>

Howto AoC</a></li>
AoC 2021 Big Inputs</a></li>
AoC subreddit</a></li>
</ul>
Appendix 1: Personal stats</h2>
      --------Part 1--------   --------Part 2--------
Day       Time   Rank  Score       Time   Rank  Score
 25   07:30:50   6689      0          -      -      -
 22   03:30:56   6778      0          -      -      -
 21   03:58:23   9197      0   12:29:13   9647      0
 20   03:30:19   5301      0   04:02:53   5513      0
 19   17:43:12   7249      0   17:54:06   6997      0
 18   18:44:24  11948      0   18:59:16  11788      0
 17   02:02:34   6181      0   02:09:43   5380      0
 16   05:00:15   7884      0   06:23:10   7862      0
 15   02:49:25   7915      0   03:53:28   6774      0
 14   02:42:59  13283      0   08:55:03  17095      0
 13   01:14:31   7329      0   01:48:31   7901      0
 12   09:03:28  20148      0   10:03:05  18989      0
 11   06:07:33  17138      0   06:14:46  16908      0
 10   01:15:29  10092      0   01:28:13   9243      0
  9   00:17:30   4028      0   01:48:26   7940      0
  8   00:14:15   3679      0   05:58:48  15476      0
  7   02:08:01  17771      0   02:10:55  16212      0
  6   02:33:39  17741      0   02:51:49  13792      0
  5   03:05:07  13360      0   03:20:49  11974      0
  4   04:38:56  16930      0   04:53:50  15440      0
  3   02:52:48  26054      0   04:27:29  21760      0
  2   01:29:10  18211      0   01:32:56  17156      0
  1   01:38:46  12994      0   01:46:56  11727      0
</pre>
Again I will repeat that I'd love to have a personal board with times between
"accessing the puzzle/input page for the first time" and submission. This will
not catch cheaters who have two accounts or look at the puzzle with someone
else, but for most of us it would alleviate having to track our completion
times manually every single day, and I think this is the majority, who won't
get up at 6 am (for Central Europe) or whatever. If you look at my stats, I
actually did get up at 6 or 7 a few times because I wanted to be done before
work.</p>


Website updates
2021-10-25T16:20:00Z
For no particular reason I finally started fixing a few things that had
annoyed me on this website on the weekend, but postponed putting it all
live because I ran out of time.</p>
Back in 2013 when I moved to Foundation as a CSS framework I was lazy and
just used their minified version. The problem is that it's 161.17kb unzipped
and I guess I was using like 10% or less of the features, but loading the
index page of this website was ~180kb and 160 of those was just the CSS
framework.</p>
So I just took the minified blob (because there's no way I can reasonably get
the exact unminified version I copied, years ago) and then I grepped through my
templates and looked which classes I am actually using. Then I went to town
and just copied everything that seemed important out. Seems like I can live
with 10-12 of those 160 kb. The only bug I'm currently seeing are some
line-height shenanigans when the window is narrow.</p>
I guess the endgame would be to look for a CSS framework that only does a grid
in the way foundation does it, that was the only feature why I was pulling it
in in the first place. On the upside, not many visitors means not a lot of
bandwidth wasted. Maybe Pagespeed will now complain less though.</p>
Anyway, it was a good opportunity to fix some CSS things as well, like the
display of code snippets and handling of long blog post titles. And all the
weird margins and empty spaces, although my patience is limited with those.</p>
Also the Favicon situation seems to be even worse than 10 years ago, so there
were a few tweaks.</p>
Then I also took the liberty of updating a few pages:</p>

The Stack</a> finally talks about it having ended in 2018, because
I don't think I'll revive it anytime soon</li>
About</a> got an update after 3 years and a partial rewrite</li>
</ul>
So what's left is to put up a TODO, with no time frame to actually do them:</p>

completely replace foundation with some minimal grid CSS</li>
remove all "reset" css functionality and fix my CSS to still look ok</li>
maybe add a syntax highlighter for the code snippets</li>
see if my static site generator still works and replace hugo</li>
change the font, or at least the fallback font</li>
</ul>
After completely forgetting that this website (and mostly the blog) had its
tenth birthday this summer (which isn't a great milestone anyway, because I
used its predecessor blog from October 2004 until after this one launched and
that wasn't even my first one) maybe it's time to modernize a few things.</p>


Small everyday hacks
2021-10-20T06:00:00Z
Last night a friend asked for help. Due to Covid their sports club added some
weird registration feature to their website, apparently reusing the event
workflow of their CMS. The idea is ok, but the implementation is lacking.</p>
If they go to train three times a week, they have to fill out the same form
with ~13 fields in the same way, three times per week. So I was asked if
that couldn't be automated. Filling out the form, that is, not navigating
to the correct page, which only takes a few clicks and the URL changes all
the time, anyway.</p>
I've not done proper frontend stuff in a while, so I guess there's some
replacement for it, but my first idea was Selenium. A bit overblown, but
it should solve the problem. But how would it run, on a Windows PC?
Too complicated, but shouldn't a bookmarklet also work?</p>
This is what I came up with in 10 minutes:</p>
javascript:{
document.querySelectorAll("[name=salutation]")[0].value="Mr";
document.querySelectorAll("[name=firstname]")[0].value="Firstname";
document.querySelectorAll("[name=lastname]")[0].value="Lastname";
document.querySelectorAll("[name=street]")[0].value="Street 23";
// ...
void(0)}
</pre>
"Take this, fill out your details, strip the linebreaks, create any new
bookmark, edit the bookmark, and replace the URL with this monstrosity."</p>
It seems to work and while I'm not sure it will save a lot of time (unless
autocomplete didn't work on the page, the customer is happy and I'm glad
I could help.</p>
This is one of these rare? "everyone should be able to code a little bit"
occasions, I guess. But searching for the right words and function call in
JS took longer than firing up a dev console and analyzing the form. So maybe
the knowledge of what's possible is indeed more valuable than remembering
syntax of a language you hardly use. Also not sure how often people use
bookmarklets.</p>
I guess the semantically correct version would've been</p>
document.querySelector('input[name=firstname]').value
</pre>
(which also saves 3 characters per line), but it was late and I settled for
the first working solution.</p>
This also works for the example page at hand:</p>
document.querySelector('[name=firstname]').value
</pre>
But if we're going to code golf anyway:</p>
javascript:{
var d=document;
var q=querySelector;
var n='[name=';
d[q](n+"salutation]").value="Mr";
d[q](n+"firstname]").value="Firstname";
d[q](n+"lastname]").value="Lastname";
d[q](n+"street]").value="Street 23";
// ...
void(0)}
</pre>
With the stripped example lines readded, that would be 546 vs 870 characters.</p>
If it wasn't JS, I might actually feel bad about that version, but I can just
call it minified now.</p>


The Old Computer Challenge, Part 2
2021-07-16T18:00:00Z
While I didn't take part in the Old Computer Challenge</a> I wrote about
last week</a>, I did play around with the laptop a bit since then.</p>
First of all, here's a screenshot:</p>
</p>
I didn't take the time to properly configure my terminals to start with a
black background at the start, but later I did.</p>
Only after this screenshot I noticed that something seems off and xrandr</code>
told me that I'm running with 1280x1024, and not the display's native
1680x1050 resolution, which you don't really notice if you only have shells
open. Not sure I can fix that with the graphics driver issues...</p>
Also for some this reason wifi via the iwi</code> driver didn't seem to work at
first, networking via cable was instantly fine, as expected. But of course
I have a cat5 cable near my sofa in the office...</p>
On a second try it did actually work with my mobile phone's hotspot and then
also with my normal AP, but seemingly not via /etc/hostname.iwi0</code> and
sh /etc/netstart</code>, but only when doing:</p>
ifconfig iwi0 down
ifconfig iwi0 nwid my_ssid wpakey my_key
ifconfig iwi0 up
ifconfig iwi0 scan
</code></pre>
In the end I'm back to cable because something was still slighly wrong, even
though I got route show</code> to look more correct, but I wasn't in the mood to
fix this now. I think wifi can be filed under: it works.</p>
Not sure I was ever going to be happy with the ratpoison</code> keybindings.
But Ctrl-t on this keyboard
could get painful after a while (pinky + index), whereas my usual
win-1 to win-0(thumb + ring/middle/index) feels a lot better. Also the spacebar
on this laptop isn't great, I keep on missing spaces when I type.</p>
Also no idea why I had thought that i3</code> was using a lot more RAM, maybe that
was my weird bug on Ubuntu last year, when I switched it was under 5MB used.</p>
So here's a new screenshot:</p>
</p>
The browser situation is still a little unclear, I tried netsurf</code> and dillo</code>,
but I am not happy. Guess I need to install firefox</code> after all and see how it
goes.
[time passes] The results are in and they are not great. Loaded up a
YouTube video and got 2 ads, had some stutter, then during the 2nd ad the tab
crashed. Reloaded, music played fine then. CPU was working and Firefox with
one tab open already drew a lot of RAM. Closing the tab and opening my website
did not improve RAM usage in a meaningful way. Then I tried seamonkey</code>, this
seemed to be a little better.</p>
I tried youtube-dl</code> and mpv</code> and that used less CPU, so I think that's a
workable solution, at least for certain things. The official youtube-dl didn't
work out of the box (even after installing python3</code>), but the one from the
ports did. Again, thank you, OpenBSD.</p>
Every page I visited in Seamonkey seemed fine, only Element (the Matrix web
client) wouldn't accept this browser.</p>
Didn't try to read mail, but I've used mutt</code> in the past, so I would probably
try that (for a week).
[time passes] Ok, I tried it. IMAP works fine, but this
version of mutt seems to be compiled without SASL, so I can't send mail via
this mail server I tried. also it's not compiled with DEBUG so I gave up
troubleshooting very quickly.</p>
irssi works fine, weechat would be fine, although I prefer Quassel.</p>
I think one of the main problems is actually trying to use OpenBSD (where not
all software I use is available), at the same time trying a different window
manager, and then the slow hardware - but I think the latter is the
least of my problems, if I can keep my 1.5GB of RAM, that is.</p>
Using a Linux distro I know very well (Debian for example) would've made some
things a little easier, I guess.
But that doesn't mean I had any major difficulty with OpenBSD, despite only
ever using it on servers or on this old notebook, and I didn't use it enough
to run into any real road blocks in daily usage.</p>
But during the week I took some notes of stuff I was using to at least guess
how this would work out:</p>

Matrix - could use on phone, not sure it's fun to type a lot there</li>
WhatsApp Web - pure convenience, could use on phone, not typing a lot</li>
IRC - no problem</li>
Slack - I guess this is a problem and I'm not willing to use it on the phone</li>
Discord - Same as Slack, really, but I could easily not use it for a week</li>
all other websites - should be no problem if I have Firefox</li>
music - only via YouTube this week, but I surely could access some local MP3s as I usually do</li>
keepass/keepassxc - available via pkg_add, I just didn't search properly</li>
</ul>
So yes, it mostly boils down to the fact that a major World of Warcraft patch
went live a while ago and that I am spending a good chunk of my spare time
with that at the moment. So I need a computer to run WoW and Discord on.
And some additional resources in the form of (modern) websites and YouTube
videos, but the latter two could be solved.</p>
The only coding I did outside work this week was in rust, and the files sat on
my linux server, where I also compiled them.
I used Visual Studio Code with the excellent remote support to work from
Windows via ssh, but I could've done it with vim, as I did in the past.</p>
Many of the typical use cases that other people mentioned are completely
foreign to me.</p>
Despite writing lists about windows software in the past</a>,
there's nothing really innate to working on Windows, actually a lot of the
stuff is trivial on Linux or BSD and only needs a special Windows solution.</p>
I do have a couple of spreadsheets in Google Docs, usually when there are too
many columns to use tabs in a text file (I use a lot of text file), but I
hardly ever fire up LibreOffice on my personal machines, maybe a few times per
year, and that has never been different.</p>
OK, that's enough of a wall of text. It was a fun experiment, but I'm not sure
I would've wanted to do this for a full week. Most things except the modern web
seemed to work just fine. I would have needed to use webmail or compile my own
version of mutt. I would have had to use irssi over Quassel, and a few other
small things, but overall it's probably doable (with enough RAM) and probably
even easier with Linux.</p>
But this challenge has shown me that you should</em> be able to live with
something like a dual-core 2GHz CPU with 2 or 4 GB RAM, which probably means
a CPU from around 2009, think Allendale or Wolfdale, that's still 12 years old.</p>
But my 1.7 GHz Pentium M (I think it's a Dothan) is a bit slow for YouTube
and modern web apps.</p>


The Old Computer Challenge and OpenBSD 6.9
2021-07-10T00:00:00Z
When I read The Old Computer Challenge</a> I knew this wasn't really for me.</p>
I'm not doing a lot of personal programming at the moment, and the things I do actually work a lot better (or at all) on a machine that's not 15-20 years old.</p>
Yes, I admit it, it's mostly playing games that were released when 512 MB RAM weren't the norm any more, or using YouTube (which eats a lot of CPU, I tried it).</p>
But I found the idea interesting nevertheless, and I do have an old laptop here, my first one, actually.</p>
It's a hp compaq nx7010 that I bought in 2004 for university,
it has a nice widescreen 15,4" screen with 1680x1050 resolution (ATI Radeon Mobility 9200/ATI Radeon Mobility M9), a 1.5 GHz single-core Centrino CPU, and was upgraded to 1.5GB of RAM. And it was really expensive,
but I used it for at least 6 years as my main laptop, and I think I really only stashed it away in 2013 when I got my work x230 that I could also use for private stuff.</p>
I had installed OpenBSD 6.2 at some point in 2017, when it was the latest version and since then I hadn't done a lot. I booted it once in a while, I think I even
committed an OpenBSD-only bugfix for i3-statusbar or something, and that was that.</p>
But I wanted to update the OS for a while already and now this was the perfect opportunity. So in my lunch break I downloaded the latest 6.9 install image and ran with it.</p>
Unfortunately some things weren't working out of the box, so I had to stop and wait until work was over, but I think it's good enough for now.</p>
So here's a little guide to running OpenBSD on a very old laptop.</p>
I've actually typed up most of this post on the laptop, in vim, although the file is sitting on another computer - but I'm using xterm on ratpoisonon OpenBSD.
Yes, I do prefer i3, but I won't bother to even change the keybindings, ratpoison seems reallyok out of the box, just ctrl-t is a bit weird.
And netsurf seems fine to check how this post looks as a finished html page, haven't tried some real web surfing.</p>
The install instructions</h2>
Download the install image file, install69.img from https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html and write to a USB stick:</p>
# dd if=install*.img of=/dev/rsd6c bs=1M
</code></pre>
The OpenBSD installation itself is pretty uneventful, just go with the defaults, wired networking via DHCP worked fine. WiFi didn't work out of the box,
but I may as well just have fat-fingered something. The interface was up but it didn't connect. Or maybe the wifi is too new for this card...</p>
I ran with the defaults for partitioning and everything.</p>
But then it got interesting:</p>
Notice that as soon as the kernel has booted you only have a blank screen, search the web. find a fix.</p>
Temporarily disable radeondrm</code>:</p>
boot> boot -c
UKC> disable radeondrm
UKC> quit
</code></pre>
or do it permanently (on revisiting it seems I copy/pasted this wrong):</p>
# config -ef /bsd
UKC> disable radeondrm
UKC> quit
</code></pre>
Edit 2026-02: All that seems to still work, I did this:</p>
echo 'disable radeondrm' >> /etc/bsd.re-config
config -e -c /etc/bsd.re-config -f /bsd
reboot
</code></pre>
Some configuration</h2>
OpenBSD recommends doas</code> over sudo</code>, so when in Rome, do as</strong> the Romans do:</p>
# enable doas for group wheel
echo "permit :wheel" > /etc/doas.conf
# check config
doas -C /etc/doas.conf
</code></pre>
Now it's time to see how outdated the install medium was and do an upgrade:</p>
syspatch -c
syspatch
</code></pre>
Then notice that something with KARL didn't work:</p>
# it tells me to run this
/usr/libexec/reorder_kernel
</code></pre>
It didn't help, but  in the log file there are some steps I should do, those do work.</p>
But still, X won't start.</p>
I learn that startx</code> is deprecated, and I should do:</p>
rcctl enable xenodm
rcctl start xenodm
</code></pre>
Sadly it didn't change anything, but the fix is actually easy if you RTFM correctly:</p>
echo machdep.allowaperture=2 >> /etc/sysctl.conf
reboot
</code></pre>
(thank you, helpful people of r/openbsd</a>)</p>
So now I can finally log in to a graphical interface and am greeted by the horrible, horrible fvwm2</code>.</p>
After 5 minutes of trying and not liking cwm</code> and deciding that i3</code> is too resource heave for this, I want to try ratpoison</code>.</p>
pkg_add ratpoison
</code></pre>
Then simply edit the $HOME/.xsession</code> and restart X:</p>
xsetroot -solid rebeccapurple &
xterm -bg black -fg white +sb &
ratpoison

</code></pre>
Finally install a few applications I will or might need:</p>
pkg_add git zsh tmux vim irssi mutt netsurf htop
</code></pre>


Dell Latitude 5310
2021-02-26T15:30:00Z
I started a new job in February and with it came a new work computer, it's a Dell Latitude 5310
with an i5-10310U, 16GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD. I also got a USB-C docking station.
It's the first non-ThinkPad I've been using for any serious amount of time since 2010,
I think (W500, x230, T460p, T470p).</p>
On my first day they handed me an XUbuntu 20.04 usb stick and that's probably what I would've
chosen anyway, given the fact that Ubuntu was recommended. Installation worked flawlessly and all
the hardware seems to work fine.</p>
I didn't use it without an external keyboard, mouse, and monitors a lot, so can't really
comment on the mobile aspect, but the one time I used it off the grid I missed the trackpoint
dearly, but I've never really been a fan of touchpads since my first laptop in 2004 (good old
HP nx7010) and when I used it at uni I always brought a mouse if I had enough room.</p>
Overall I'd say as a non-mobile work computer it seems fine.</p>

Have not yet exhausted the 16GB of RAM, unlike at my last job</li>
CPU wasn't a limiting factor yet, but I'm doing Java and not compiling C++ all day</li>
the screen looks good</li>
the camera quality is decent, I'd say much better than the T470p's</li>
I'm actually surprised how thin and light it is</li>
</ul>
There are some problems though:</p>

some coil whine - worst when scrolling in IntelliJ, and only there</li>
need to manually set audio in/out after every plugging in, sometimes after resume</li>
on some days I need to replug both monitors after resume</li>
if it is on 100% CPU, you can hear the fans</li>
the ethernet port is one of those weird ones you have to pry open like a drawer</li>
</ul>
So coil whine and a wonky docking station (K20A001), the rest is not really worth mentioning.</p>
Like on my last work computer I went with Regolith</a> via PPA, so
I have a fully functioning i3 window manager and still some nice desktop environment features.
Wrote about it</a> in summer 2019 and now all the problems I
had were all solved, I don't think I noticed a single one in nearly one month of usage now.</p>
This is the first time I did not try to get rid of network manager but am actually using the VPN
integration as well.</p>
Also for technical reasons I need to participate in 1-2 actuall phone conference calls per week
instead of just Slack/Zoom/whatever and so I'm using a SIP client for the first time. I went with
the Linphone version that is packaged in Ubuntu (3.x), it's very bare-bones and the setup wizard
has a bug but you can work around that and inputt your details manually. I connected it to my
fritz-box and chose the 2nd phone number we don't actively use. I've been getting a few calls from
unknown callers now (the number was actively muted before I started using this sip client), so I
think I need to tweak a few things there, but overall it's so much better on the computer.</p>
I started with this guide in German</a>
but then had to tweak some things.</p>

; Linphone
sip identity: sip:user@192.168.0.1
sip proxy address: sip:192.168.0.1
transport udp
"resulting sip address": "User" [sip:user@192.168.0.155]
SIP/UDP port 5061
SIP/TCP port 5061
Audio RTP/UDP: 7078
Video RTP/UDP: 9078
[x] Direct connection to the internet
; FRITZ!Box
Port forward 5061/udp to the computer with the sip client
</pre></p>
</p>
I probably should've gone with installing version 4 from somewhere else than apt but it works now.</p>
Also this time I wanted to separate all (well, most) private stuff from the work computer.
I actually already have an Xubuntu Desktop VM running on my home server, and I can connect to it
via libvirt over ssh and it's lagfree enough that I can have a browser for Amazon or an IRC client
running there. Still can checkout and push to personal git repos from the work computer
(dotfiles, etc) but the browsers are not littered with personal logins (again, with a few
exceptions, of course), which is really nice so far.</p>
So I wouldn't go as far as recommending the Latitude 5310, but overall I'm happy with it, I guess.
Sadly I have no recent experience with thinkpads in docking stations (I think I had one in 2010?),
so maybe these monitor problems are more universal. Looking around for a very brief time it seems
to cost around 1200 EUR. If I'm not mistaken the specs roughly match the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which
is roughly 1800 in a similar configuration (CPU, RAM, 512 GB SSD, so maybe -100 EUR). On the other
hand the current X13 is roughly the same price, and the T14 with a bigger screen is ~1700, whereas
there seems to be no more T14p model, only a T14s, and I heard those had some performance/cooling
problems in the past. I probably would've chosen a ThinkPad E15 Gen 2 with Ryzen 7 4700U with a
512GB SSD and a 15.6" display in the ~1k EUR range, it should be bit faster, a bit cheaper and
after having a Ryzen workstation I'd be confident enough to put my own money on it.</p>
Still a bit surprised I got handed a small 13" laptop when 90% of the time it will be sitting on my
desk and plugged in to external peripherals, so I would've preferred a 15", but I guess being able
to choose your hardware becomes less likely the bigger your company is. Or at all. At least this
time it doesn't seem to be completely unfit to do the job, because that last T470p with an i5 with
only 4 threads and 16GB reached its limit already in the first week when I tried to compile LLVM...</p>


2020 in review
2020-12-31T14:30:00Z
These review posts have proven incredibly useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2019</a> / 2018</a> / 2017</a> / 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

World of Warcraft - subscribed the whole year, played quite a bit</em></li>
EVE Online - subscribed for ~9 months, played a lot</em></li>
Borderlands 3 - had started in 2019, was still playing at the start of the year</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>
Zero novels and one technical book ("Database Internals" by Alex Petrov). An alarming trend continues.</p>
I started with both "Laika's Window" by Kurt Caswell and "A Guide To The Good Life" by William B. Irvine though.</p>
Movies I've (re-)watched</h3>

Rise of the Guardians - discussions about whether this is a Christmas movie aside, it was very funny</em></li>
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - the best Spider-Man movie, one of the best Marvel movies</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I've (re-)watched</h2>

Dr. Oakley - Yukon Vet on Disney+ - no idea why, but I really liked it</em></li>
Encore on Disney+ - stopped after 2-3 episodes</em></li>
The Mandalorian on Disney+ - *it's Star Wars and I didn't like it. Weird.</li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h2>

Nightwish - Human II Nature</li>
Nightwish - Endless Forms Most Beautiful</li>
Sabaton - The Last Stand</li>
Sabaton - The Great War</li>
</ul>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

moto X4 64 GB - my Nexus 5X died, so I needed a phone. 190 EUR and completely happy after 10 months</em></li>
a Geforce RTX 3070</li>
</ul>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much</em></li>
Facebook - not sure I logged in even once this year</em></li>
Instagram - not sure I logged in even once this year</em></li>
Fediverse - back for a short stint, mostly not</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - daily use, default communication channel for many people I communicate with</em></li>
Matrix - daily use</em></li>
MS Teams - work stuff</em></li>
Email - same as usual</em></li>
Slack - using two communities, sparingly, but one is a different one than last year</em></li>
WhatsApp - kinda unavoidable</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

other countries: zero</li>
other German states: zero</li>
one actual holiday trip, cycling in the summer</li>
one trip for a family birthday party, under protest</li>
</ul>
(Online) services</h3>

Still subscribed to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime, but I don't personally use them a lot</li>
Mostly MMO subscriptions this year</li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent</h3>

C++ - work, I came to terms with the fact that it won't be my favorite language</em></li>
Python for AoC</a> and other small stuff</li>
bash - still too much</em></li>
PHP - just a little, for one private project</em></li>
</ul>
Podcasts I listen to</h3>
Very irregular this year:</p>

ATP</a> - I'm not using any Apple products and still listen to these guys sometimes.</em></li>
some real gaming podcasts, but even less regularly</li>
</ul>
Stuff that kinda worked out</h3>

I don't have a real podcast downloader (yet), but I have something like trakt but for podcasts (mentioned last year)</li>
be able to read cyrillic letters fluently and practice enough to memorize them (mentioned last year)</li>
not going bonkers while confined to the apartment for most of the year</li>
</ul>
Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

more blog posts</li>
do more Rust</li>
do more Clojure</li>
"focus on one or two languages for hobby stuff" - focused on zero languages, only wrote very little (C++, Python, PHP)</li>
read at least 3 novels this year</li>
more cycling, more mountain biking - the former fell flat because of perma-WFH and no motivation, the latter because of the pandemic</li>
watch Hamilton</li>
</ul>
"New Year's Resolutions" aka stuff that would be nice if it would work out</h3>

starting a new job in February, so of course I hope it will be a good gig</li>
(more) mountain biking in the summer</li>
</ul>


Why does it have to be so complicated?
2020-12-30T11:30:00Z
After I wrote my post about Advent of Code 2020 yesterday I wanted to put it live, of course.
I thought my setup of a static site generator couldn't be so complicated, right? I was running this
on a machine where I hadn't run it before.</p>
So I have a Makefile.</p>
make reserve
# sass not found
</code></pre>
Oh right, let's download sass and put it in the PATH. At least this doesn't have any dependencies.</p>
make reserve
# file 'themes/.../xyz.sass' not found
</code></pre>
Oh right, let's actually clone our theme. Why did I not put this as a git submodule? No one knows.</p>
make reserve
# cssmin not found
</code></pre>
Oh right, I didn't install this. It's my own, so I know how to build it.</p>
git clone https://github.com/winks/cssmin-go
cd cssmin-go
go get ...
# go not found
</code></pre>
Yeah, well, I don't usually use go a lot these days...</p>
ll /usr/local/go
/usr/local/go/bin/go version
# go version go1.13.7 linux/amd64
</code></pre>
Whatever, this will do.</p>
go build
cp cssmin-go ~/bin/cssmin
</code></pre>
Let's go!</p>
make reserve
# hugo not found
</code></pre>
Oh right, the static site generator itself. Which version did I need again?</p>
Looking at the commits in the theme I apparently upgraded to 0.59.1 in November 2019,
whereas the README of this repo still tells me 0.13 (from 2011).</p>
So yeah, 10 minutes later everything was up and running but it's fascinating that every single step failed,
except the actual generation at the end. Maybe I should've tried nextgen</a>,
but I would've had to build it with rust first, as well...</p>


Advent of Code 2020
2020-12-29T18:00:00Z
This is my second time taking part in the Advent of Code</a>, I also wrote about it last year</a>.</p>
Using 20 languages was fun, but I didn't want to spend all my spare time on AoC again so I settled on one language, Python.</p>
Again there will be no problem description or complete spoilers, and the code is on github</a>.</p>
Day 1 - Report Repair</h2>
This shouldn't be too hard but I added a tiny bug which I couldn't for the life of me find, so I hacked up a bash one liner to solve it.
Part 2 takes 516ms to run, so maybe I should add some memoization.</p>
Day 2 - Password Philosophy</h2>
I accidentally solved part 2 first by not reading the instructions properly, so part 1 took a little longer and part 2 was done very quick.</p>
Day 3 - Toboggan Trajectory</h2>
Don't think I can say much, but it's the first one this year that uses a "map" with coordinates. Parsing to an y/x-array doesn't twist my mind,
so I usually go the easy route here.</p>
Day 4 - Passport Processing</h2>
This one was unnecessarily tedious. A lot of fields to validate and no real meat to the problem, half of the fields would've been fine.
Someone had solved it correctly and hadn't noticed a typo which made it fail. My superpower of instantly seeing this at a glance proved useful again.
I still would prefer to write bug-free code over typo-free code that easily...</p>
Day 5 - Binary Boarding</h2>
This was fun and I didn't "get" the easy solution, but my brutish attempt yielded the correct solution anyway.</p>
Day 6 - Custom Customs</h2>
For some reason I found this part 2 a little tricky. (10 + 50 mins)</p>
Day 7 - Handy Haversacks</h2>
Flashbacks to last year's day 14 but it was either easier or I simply didn't make the same mistakes. (35 + 55 mins)</p>
Day 8 - Handheld Halting</h2>
People on Reddit were assuming (or fearing) this would be intcode all over again but it was quick and easy and a single occurrence. (22 + 50 mins)</p>
Day 9 - Encoding Error</h2>
I don't remember much, but it was quick. (7 + 10 mins)</p>
Day 10 - Adapter Array</h2>
Didn't particularly like this one, and I was pretty sure my part 2 was mostly correct, but I asked someone for help and my solution was indeed 90% correct. (18 + 45 mins)</p>
Day 11 - Seating System</h2>
Not sure what I messed up, but I did mess up something, so this took a while. My part 2 solution runs for 4 minutes, so needs some optimization.  (54 + ~120 mins)</p>
Day 12 - Rain Risk</h2>
Playing around with coordinates, this was fun. I was slower than I had hoped though. (25 + 34 mins)</p>
Day 13 - Shuttle Search</h2>
Part 1 was really quick, but I spent ages on part 2. When I was relatively confident that my solution was correct but unbearably slow,
someone on #lobsters-advent offered help and calculated my input to give me a rough estimate where to start my search, and then it "only"
ran for 16s instead of probably 16h. Needs some work. (11 mins + 6h)</p>
Day 14 - Docking Data</h2>
This is the first day I did not complete, part 1 took like 39 minutes but I didn't have time that evening and couldn't extend my lunchbreak either, so I never tried part 2.</p>
Day 15 - Rambunctious Recitation</h2>
The description text on this one confused me multiple times, it wasn't the problem so much that was hard, but extracting the specs was.
Completion time seems to be 95 minutes and 16 minutes. Maybe there is a trick to part 2, because mine takes 60s to run.</p>
Day 16 - Ticket Translation</h2>
Part 1 seemed relatively easy again (33 minutes) but I think part 2 took a little longer, unfortunately I didn't take the time on that one.</p>
Day 17 - Conway Cubes</h2>
Oh, Game of Life again. Reading my IRC backlog, I was not happy or impressed and decided to only do this after work, not in the morning.
I didn't take note how long part 1 took, but part 2 took  about 55 minutes, so I guess part 1 also took between 30 and 60 minutes.
Execution times for these are slow (2s and 96s), so I want to revisit this with one optimization I have in mind.</p>
Day 18 - Operation Order</h2>
I think the correct solution would be to build a proper parser but I wasn't in the mood for fiddling around with that so I solved it with regex.
Still took a while because I made a few silly mistakes. Part 2 took one hour.</p>
Day 19 - Monster Messages</h2>
Part 1 was fun, I wrote a regex compiler. Didn't attempt part 2 due to time constraints again.
Unfortunately my solution is a bit slow (50ms incl. python startup) whereas most other days only take 25-35ms.</p>
Day 20 - Jurassic Jigsaw</h2>
This was a lot more annoying and tedious than I had thought at first. Took me quite a while to solve. My ideas for part 1 weren't completely off,
but I guess I was inspired a little by skimming the IRC backlog. I'd still say I solved it on my own for the most part. Then I spent quite a while
trying part 2 but my head wasn't agreeing on thinking that day, so I didn't finish it.</p>
Day 21 - Allergen Assessment</h2>
This took a while because I wasn't using sets. But part 2 only took 7 minutes then because I started to clean up what I had instead of reading part 2.
Should've been less than 3 I guess...</p>
Day 22 - Crab Combat</h2>
Part 1 was really easy, 8 minutes. But then I looked at part 2 and decided to not waste time on this.</p>
Day 23 - Crab Cups</h2>
I took a few detours but finished part 1 in 72 minutes. Then in the evening I had an idea for part 2 but wasted hours failing to implement it.
I still think my idea is mostly correct, but I need to revisit this.</p>
Day 24 - Lobby Layout</h2>
Because of a stupid parsing bug that I discovered too late part 1 took 66 minutes, and because of some bad experience with dicts in python I went the
very slow but safe route and thus my part 2 takes 15 seconds to finish. Need to revisit this and try one optimization trick.
Or maybe: remove my pessimization "trick". Solving part 2 took 52 minutes.</p>
Day 25 - Combo Breaker</h2>
Oh boy, that day was the first time in 50 days I was actively mad at the puzzle author. Apparently there were two things that came together:
I didn't read (or understand) the puzzle correctly and so I thought I needed to find the subject number and the given was just an example.</p>
That wouldn't have been so bad because my solution accounted for that (just a loop around everything, slow but correct) - but the second thing
was that this puzzle was probably supposed to be "bruteforced" to a certain degree, and so I simply stopped my running generic solution
several times because it took too long to run.</p>
Once I had glanced at a solution because I was annoyed enough I saw that mine was actually correct, so I plugged in the known subject number and
let it run for 15 seconds and had my correct result.</p>
So yes, of course it's my own fault, but my algorithm was correct in the first place and I wasted a lot of time, only because I didn't want to look at others' solution.
Can't measure time, but had I read it correctly, definitely below 1 hour. Also from what I read I was far from the only problem misunderstanding
the given number as an example and bruteforcing this one as well, as it's really doable on moderately fast hardware.</p>
Open TODOs</h2>

Try to get the missing stars</li>
I really want to speed up a few of my solutions</li>
I might try redoing all of them in a second language</li>
</ul>
The end</h2>
Another year wrapped up, I had a lot of fun again. It was easier than last year,
but I am super happy I didn't have to spend so much time on getting to roughly the
same result, i.e. 90% completion.</p>
Again, many thanks to the people in #lobsters-advent on Freenode, we had interesting
discussions, helped some, got help by some and overall had a pretty fun time there, I think.</p>
A few things I noticed, in no particular order:</p>

This was easier than last year, but not completely easy</li>
I still make a lot of stupid mistakes</li>
The examples are tremendously helpful</li>
I don't think I'll ever be a really fast competitive coder</li>
Some problems were SO MUCH easier because I did last year's puzzles</li>
Python is kinda good for this</li>
</ul>
Appendix 1 - My scores</h2>
      --------Part 1--------   --------Part 2--------
Day       Time   Rank  Score       Time   Rank  Score
 25   16:38:16  10815      0          -      -      -
 24   04:49:01   6304      0   05:43:24   5673      0
 23   04:32:43   5932      0          -      -      -
 22   04:41:07   8298      0          -      -      -
 21   10:21:08   8603      0   10:28:39   8306      0
 20   12:58:27   9174      0          -      -      -
 19   07:07:14   7068      0          -      -      -
 18   06:02:02   9832      0   07:07:41   8782      0
 17   10:11:06  12078      0   11:05:30  11791      0
 16   03:42:55  10456      0   09:33:01  11968      0
 15   04:45:21  13157      0   05:01:59  11581      0
 14   05:23:19  13112      0          -      -      -
 13   05:33:38  16323      0   18:58:52  20144      0
 12   03:24:47  10414      0   03:57:55   9099      0
 11   03:21:04  11101      0   04:56:02  10654      0
 10   03:20:46  17279      0   11:55:31  20904      0
  9   03:45:50  18538      0   03:55:53  16723      0
  8   01:52:35  12259      0   02:42:13  11727      0
  7   02:13:51   9452      0   03:08:32   9004      0
  6   04:26:47  20665      0   05:18:12  21331      0
  5   04:40:12  18957      0   04:46:23  17794      0
  4   13:31:12  48151      0   14:12:31  39562      0
  3   02:31:56  15312      0   02:36:33  13956      0
  2   02:28:28  13739      0   02:34:01  12841      0
  1   02:20:34   9723      0   02:41:57   9822      0
</pre>
 </p>
That's 44 of 49 stars. No part 1 missing, but 5x part 2.
Two of those I never tried, and for three I gave up after trying.
No completions > 24h later this year (as of writing this post).
Interestingly the exact same number as last year, if I don't count
submissions past Dec 25th.</p>
I really don't like that the personal leaderboard only has the global
timestamp, that's why tried to write down my personal completion times,
as I didn't get up at 6 am a single time for this this year. I did get up
an hour earlier to have an hour before work on a few days, that's all the
submissions in the 1-4 hour brackets.</p>


Security, Backups, and Update Woes Part 2
2020-02-29T20:21:10Z
First of all, the Nexus 5 is really dead</a>. I think it made it to ~19h and
then it was stuck in the boot loop again. I got it to boot up from time to time
but I mostly lost confidence, even when it was working for a few hours.</p>
So on Thursday I pulled the trigger and ordered a Motorola moto 4X for 190 EUR,
and it arrived yesterday. Feels good, looks good, a few grams heavier but
otherwise nearly the same size as the Nexus 5X. The only odd thing was the
patching. It shipped with Android 8.0 and I had to click "contine, reboot,
search for updates" like 10 or more times until I arrived at 9.0 now.</p>
But that wasn't the actual thing I wanted to write about, but this is what
triggered it. I've been less annoyed by the loss of my favorite phone or the
need to buy a new one (had it long enough and the new one was cheap) but it
will shock you what happened next...</p>
So I tried to buy something online with a credit card and to do that (and for
other reasons of course) I have two at 2 different German banks.</p>
Using number one popped up this 3D secure thing where I need a special app by
my bank, of course this</em> part hadn't been backupped and restored - so now I
needed to order a new letter via snail mail, if there's even another way of
recovery they're doing a terrible job of telling it to the user.</p>
So at bank number two I couldn't even login to the online banking without a
special TAN app (again this is not for banking per se, just authentication).</p>
At least they offer an SMS-based workflow to pair a new device with your
account, the problem is that it doesn't work. In this case you should log in
to online banking, be in a kind of locked down state, but can trigger an SMS
with a special link. I got the link but tapping on it I just got "TAN app not
installed" so I called the hotline. First this also didn't really work, but
after a few tries I could copy the entire SMS and paste it in the app and it
parsed out the magic part of the URL and now my new phone is paired. Yay.</p>
So half of this drama is over I guess. Still it would be so easy if they
supported my Yubikeys...</p>
On to the Google Authenticator 2FA stuff. First of all, I've never had a
problem with Google Authenticator itself. I use it for basically all websites
that support it. Not that many, in my case, this is the sad thing.</p>
twofactorauth.org</a> has a big list but I don't use many.</p>
Github</h2>
I think Github takes the #1 spot without any real contenders. Also it has the
potential for massive damage if someone would commit something nasty.</p>

authenticator app</li>
multiple Yubikeys</li>
one-time codes</li>
no forced SMS auth, but as a fallback comm. channel</li>
</ul>
Google/Gmail</h2>
Seems close to Github, but I don't really care about this account.
It has my calendar and I bought apps for < 20 EUR in 10 years. It's not my
primary email and not used as a recovery email address afaik.</p>

authenticator app</li>
multiple Yubikeys</li>
one-time codes</li>
haven't tried to remove SMS auth</li>
</ul>
Namecheap</h2>
Bought a domain here, so far everything went perfect.</p>

multiple Yubikeys</li>
OR authenticator app - that's a little weird</li>
one-time codes</li>
</ul>
DigitalOcean</h3>
Spun up some droplets in the past, currently not actively using it.</p>

authenticator app</li>
one-time codes</li>
</ul>
Scaleway</h3>
Got 1 VM here right now.</p>

authenticator app</li>
one-time codes</li>
</ul>
Amazon</h3>
Don't have to explain this one I guess.</p>

multiple authenticator apps, but can't remove old ones, wtf</li>
</ul>
Blizzard Games, formerly World of Warcraft only</h3>
Pretty good for a game.</p>

keyfob OTP generator</li>
own authenticator app</li>
</ul>
Star Wars - The Old Republic</h3>

keyfob OTP generator</li>
own authenticator app</li>
</ul>
EVE Online</h3>
Didn't try this myself.</p>

authenticator app</li>
</ul>
Final Fantasy XIV</h3>
Didn't try this myself.</p>

keyfob OTP generator</li>
authenticator app</li>
</ul>
What does that mean?</h2>
So yes, you read that correctly. Of all the hundred or so of online accounts
I have only 4 have 2FA enabled, but of course I didn't check all</em> of them,
but I don't think I'll find a lot who do support it. Compare this to like
every major MMO I've played in the last 10 years, they all support it - and
as I don't have a gaming laptop it would be even easier to have this somehow
temporarily bound to a certain computer, in a sense of alerting of logins from
different machines, whereas you can bet I will login to several websites from
a laptop or phone from a different subnet multiple times per day.</p>
Also still very disappointed by both of my banks, if I didn't make myself
clear already how much I love my Yubikey.</p>
Stuff I'm using that should support 2FA, but I don't use it:</p>

Discord, app</li>
Slack, app</li>
</ul>
Also, famously no support:</p>

Strato, a hoster I use</li>
Booking.com - ok, not sure the hardware key would be useful for me</li>
</ul>
TLDR</h3>

authenticator app without one-time codes is annoying or stupid</li>
many workflows of "I have a new phone" converge to "just click on 'I lost
my phone' - why can't I act proactively?</li>
I know restoring the authenticator from an Android backup might be
insecure, but not being to use my CC sucks. A lot.</li>
I want more Yubikey support, dammit</li>
</ul>


Update Woes
2020-02-18T20:09:04Z
My phone is a Nexus 5X, I bought it on July 21st, 2016 - that's 3 and a half
years ago. According to GSMArena</a> it came out in October 2015, so it
wasn't exactly brand new - but it was affordable and it was the best phone I
ever had. I had (and have) no plans of replacing it, but Google stopped
shipping security updates in December 2018, and I somehow missed this and was
a little shocked when I noticed a few weeks ago - and I'm on a kind of ancient
version of Android 8.1.</p>
So I had the plan to install LineageOS</a> because I had heard good things
about it, the device seems to be supported</a>.</p>
So last Saturday I pulled the plug. The last time I had put a ROM on a mobile
phone was probably in 2016, maybe 2017.</p>
The installation instructions</a> were straightforward.</p>

boot into bootloader</li>
unlock bootloader</li>
flash recovery</li>
boot into recovery</li>
wipe phone</li>
sideload the OS</li>
add Google stuff</li>
reboot</li>
</ul>
All this worked flawlessly and close to midnight on Saturday I had a
phone with a new OS, still 8.1. - but built in 2020 and not in 2018.</p>
I was a little surprised I could just restore from (Google Cloud-) backup, but
it went fine and so I went to sleep at some point.</p>
I got up on Sunday, the phone was charging overnight and unplugged it around
noon and let it sit on my desk. In the evening I had a look at it and it had
gone dark. Weird. So I started it and that's where the fun part of the story
begins. It was stuck in a boot loop. Great. Couldn't even get into recovery,
no matter what I tried.</p>
So I didn't try too hard to solve it any further and did what everyone would
do on such an occasion. Find out where the project IRC channel is and ask
there. Didn't get answer in the morning but it was kinda quiet. So I asked
again in the evening and got some hints, but nothing that made me go "yay,
solved" instantly. Meanwhile after the phone being unplugged for hours I
actually managed to get it to boot once, but it went out after like 10 minutes
again, just when I had stopped looking at it.</p>
The final thing I tried was flashing TWRP-3.3.0 instead of TWRP-3.3.1, but I
don't really see how the recovery would influence anything, but as I couldn't
boot into the recovery I had flashed I wanted to try this first.</p>
Intermission: The Nexus 5X is a little infamous for being stuck with a boot
loop, many people have experienced that - I personally know two people. One had
it soon enough to just get LG to replace the phone. So one of the interesting
links was this one about boot loops</a>. I did find it kind of unlikely
though that after 3.5 years of daily use it would just get this issue 16h after
I had flashed another OS. Weird coincidence.</p>
Some reasearch also resulted in some people saying that they did the ghetto
reflow version that's been around since at least the XBox 360 days - take out
the board and put it in the oven for 5-10 minutes at 200°. I had wanted to try
that with my 360 when it was locking up while playing Rock Band a lot, but I
never did it. So with no high hopes to ever fix the phone I did just that.</p>
Disassembled it, took the board out (was surprisingly easy) and baked it for
6 minutes at 200°. Let it cool for 10 minutes and what can I say? Plugged it in,
phone booted up just fine (albeit with an empty battery) and it's been running
for roughly 24h now. The camera works and I'm a bit wary of surprises but it
seems good.</p>
I have a second Nexus 5X here that's as old and it doesn't recognize any SIM
cards anymore. Now that I know it can be easily disassembled I'm inclined to
do that in the near future and investigate if I can somehow see a mechanical
problems and maybe properly touch of on the solder of the SIM slot parts. Or
just get to baking again. Wouldn't hurt to have a working backup solution -
I don't see a compelling reason to buy another 250 EUR phone when this one
works just fine - if only it weren't for lack of updates...</p>
Thanks to #lineageos on Freenode for help and emotional support :)</p>


Home Server
2020-01-21T20:45:29Z
After the hardware upgrade</a> in November and a
somehow rekindled interest in playing around with hardware and self-hosting
after a few months of mostly playing games... I found myself with a spare
i5-3570K with 16GB RAM. I'm pretty happy with my FreeNAS box, but it's not the
fastest (AMD Turion(tm) II Neo N54L) and it doesn't run docker and I don't
even want to try to run a beefy VM on it. The NAS should be stable and left
alone. (I run 2 jails, but they're just serving files, in a sense.)</p>
Also I tried to have my Raspberry Pi 3 as a "development box" here, but it
just felt too slow. Maybe it was the USB stick over USB 2, I don't know. And
WSL also doesn't excite me, really. It just feels wrong, somehow.</p>
So incidentally a years old 650W PSU died on me a few weeks back and I had
already transplanted my i5's PSU into that other computer, so I needed a new
one anyway if I wanted to use that computer. Sadly it was in a midi tower that
was just  a little too big to fit under my desk (there's already my main
machine, my NAS, a container with wheels and my subwoofer that doubles as a
foot rest most of the days).</p>
So I looked for a small case and a "smaller" PSU and then I ordered</p>

AeroCool QS-180</a> mini tower</li>
be quiet! System Power B9 300W</a></li>
</ul>
Now it fits under my desk. I didn't want to go full-out proxmox because I only
want to run a few docker containers and one "pet" VM where I have a normal
Linux box available without having to boot a laptop and that can use 4 cores
a lot of RAM. So my host was supposed to be kinda bare-bones, so I decided to
Alpine, which I hadn't used in a while, and mostly in VMs and containers.</p>
The wiki</a> was helpful, as usual, but I'm still
copying my steps here in case they change it.</p>

install alpine via alpine-setup</code> (3.11 in my case)</li>
uncomment the /community</code> repo in /etc/apk/repositories</code></li>
install packages:</li>
</ul>
apk update

# for docker & libvirt, not 100% sure if you need virt-manager
apk add docker bridge libvirt-daemon qemu-img qemu-system-x86_64 dbus polkit

# for my own convenience
apk add sudo curl file htop

# for docker-compose (there should be a better way, but it didn't work)
apk add py-pip python-dev libffi-dev openssl-dev gcc libc-dev make

</code></pre>

add user to correct groups:

addgroup USER docker</code></li>
addgroup USER libvirt</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
start daemons on boot:

rc-update add docker</code></li>
rc-update add libvirtd</code></li>
rc-update add dbus</code></li>
rc-status</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
enable remote access for virt-manager</code>:</li>
</ul>
# cat /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/50-libvirt-ssh-remote-access-policy.pkla
[Remote libvirt SSH access]
 Identity=unix-group:libvirt
 Action=org.libvirt.unix.manage
 ResultAny=yes
 ResultInactive=yes
 ResultActive=yes

</code></pre>

check networking (brctl</code> might be smarter than manual fiddling):</li>
</ul>
# cat /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
        hostname whatever
        bridge-ports eth0
        bridge-stp 0
        bridge-fd 0
        address 192.168.1.2
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.1.1

</code></pre>

finalize:

reboot</code> and check if everything works</li>
brctl show</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
[...]
br0             8000.c86000ecf792       no              eth0
                                                        vnet0
docker0         8000.024214a852b8       no
virbr0          8000.52540047d4cc       yes             virbr0-nic

</code></pre>
* connect via ssh + virt-manager from anywhere
</code></pre>
Addendum:</p>
The only open ports should be:</p>
# netstat -tulpen
Proto Local Address  PID/Program name

tcp   127.0.0.1:5900 6419/qemu-system-x8
tcp   0.0.0.0:22     4380/sshd
tcp   :::22          4380/sshd
udp   127.0.0.1:323  3027/chronyd
udp   ::1:323        3027/chronyd

</code></pre>
Low RAM usage in idle, no CPU power wasted in idle, looks good. So far Alpine
looks like a good choice. I only need a script or two to quickly spin up some
throwaway VMs, but maybe virt-manager is also good enough for that.</p>


A Static Site Generator
2020-01-18T01:40:00Z
Why?</h3>
A little while ago I wrote about micropub</a> and this meant I needed a way to integrate dynamic content into this static site.</p>
Of course the easiest way is to just let some dynamic part create a new file (or append to one) in this input folder and then rebuild the website,
but I didn't find that very elegant. But i looked into this (and especially hugo's data feature) and it looked ok, but not great.</p>
Anyway, I tried to upgrade hugo from a 4 year old version and while it worked, there were some things that felt needlessly changed and I had to rewrite some
templates and overall I was a little annoyed at the thousand features I didn't need and the amount of docs to be read.</p>
This was a while ago and a week ago I thought it might be fun to see just how much time and effort it would take to write a static site generator from scratch,
because for all of the myriad of blog system I'd written in the past, I never wrote a static site generator.</p>
And I think I'm finished now and decided to write a bit about nextgen</a></strong>.</p>
Just the facts</h3>

Written in Rust</li>
333 lines of code (plus a few external crates, of course)</li>
Fast enough (250 markdown pages in 0.1s)</li>
It can build this website kind of identical, not bit by bit but structurally the same</li>
It took roughly a week to build it, a few hours each night</li>
seriously, don't use this in its current form</li>
</ul>
How it evolved</h3>
The first commit</a> still uses a lot of regex parsing, was mostly playing around.
But the basic flow is the same already and the static asset handling hasn't really changed: Use the walkdir</code></a> crate to look for matching files in a directory and
copy them to ./public/static</code>.</p>
The pulldown_cmark</code></a> crate for Markdown parsing works great.</p>
The second commit</a> introduces the tera</code></a> create for templating, which is similar to Jinja. I tried liquid</code></a> at first, but it really didn't click.</p>
This is the final form of the templates</a>.</p>
Then</a> I introduced sections, which means that for example everything under /blog/</code> is grouped under the blog</code> section. Also for years I had kinda wondered how
websites calculate this "takes 5 minutes to read" but never looked it up. Well, hugo has that feature and so I searched a bit and settled on a very basic algorithm.
Count the words in the Markdown file, divide by 200. This was close to hugo's output, but not perfect, so I am simply adding one minute and it seems to mostly match.</p>
The next planned dependency</a> was toml</code></a> to read the front matter of the markdown files (and also the site config) and it also needed serde</code></a>.</p>
Then I noticed that I should generate directories with an index.html</code> inside and not a file called e.g. /foo.html</code> - thus this boring commit</a>.</p>
Next up were the section index pages</a> (live example</a>). If there's a file called _index.md</code> in the blog</code> folder, this gets generated, otherwise nothing happens.
I got the idea how this is handled from Zola</a> because of course I looked at a few static site generators this week.</p>
I couldn't really work with/format dates yet, thus the next commit</a> introduced the chrono</code></a> crate, as expected.</p>
Next up</a> were the section index pages, which made me restructure how I keep the parsed pages in memory. These can only be generated once all the pages in this
section have been parsed. I first implemented these in Rust and not in the template.</p>
Commit #9</a> introduced section rss feeds (Atom actually), which was pretty straightforward.</p>
Then</a> the section index pages were converted to the template language and everything was cleaned</a> up</a> a bit.</p>
Here</a> all parsed markdown pages are finally sorted into a defined section. _index</code> for the /index.html</code>, _default</code> for normal pages (like my
about page</a>) and the section for e.g. /blog/</code> pages. Everything that is not a section index or index also goes into _pages</code>.
This makes it possible to show the latest posts on the index page, in my case the last 10 of the sections blog</code> or stack</code>.</p>
Now a little refactoring</a> to eliminate a fourfold code duplication of 4 lines to write the resulting pages to disk.</p>
And finally</a> only the main RSS feed is missing, but the list of pages is already there, so it's easy.</p>
An overview</h3>
And that's how the final program looks:</p>

read config.toml</code></li>
let tera</code> read all the template files</li>
copy static files</li>
identify the sections</li>
parse every markdown page and prepare the variables for the templates</li>
if it's a normal page, just generate it</li>
if it's the index or a section index, defer writing, but save the variables</li>
sort by section, but keep a list of all pages</li>
go over the sections and generate the section index and the section rss feed</li>
generate the index page and the main rss feed</li>
</ul>
I didn't do a real comparison in the browser yet, only looked at colordiff</code> output of the
different types of pages, so there might be a few small bugfixes left, but the goal of
replicating all of hugo's features that I actually use is achieved. I don't generate CSS from
SASS but looking at my Makefile it's not even done by hugo now...</p>
Next steps?</h3>
I'm not sure if I'll switch to nextgen</code> or if I will add the features I need for micropub,
but working with Rust for a few hours made me understand a few things better and I can really
use the training.</p>
So yes, I do think hugo went a little off the rails in the last few years, but I am still
very happy with it and I'm thankful it was written, it was the best one I found back then.</p>
But I dreaded updating and so I never did it, for over 4 years. Good thing is that it only
parses my own content, is not a network service and so I don't need to care about security.</p>


First steps with WSL
2020-01-03T21:40:00Z
It is January and I decided to bite the bullet and finally try out the Windows
Subsystem for Linux, despite my bias against development on Windows.
I have a Rust app I want to have a look at again and I
don't want to install Git on Windows, for starters. And always editing code
with vim grows old, if you're only doing it because your code sits on a box
without a GUI, not because you love vim and want to use it all the time.</p>
OK, installing it is easy enough, PowerShell as Admin, one command, reboot.
Adding Ubuntu 18.04 as well, download one file, one command, find it in the
start menu, wait a little, done.</p>
First problem arises. Since I installed this I don't have the keyboard layout
chooser anymore, and right now I have a US Intl. keyboard connected. This is
really painful already. Why does this happen?</p>

Settings -> Time and Language -> Language</li>
English -> Options -> Keyboards</li>
Add a keyboard -> US-Intl</li>
</ul>
Now I have a different keyboard selection icon in the taskbar, but fine.
Digging deeper in the settings this seems to be the 'Language Bar' that is
acting in a weird way. If I set it to float it's gone, but by changing stuff
in 'Advanced keyboard settings' I can make it reappear. Aaanyway.</p>
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade</code> works, good.
Installing tmux and git, creating a new SSH key, cloning, fine.</p>
OK, now I need rust. I want to build for Windows, so can I do this in WSL or do
I still need it in Windows? No idea, let's use the Windows rustup-init.exe</code>.</p>
Addendum: Trying to install rustup inside WSL, I do get a default host triple of
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu</code>, as expected, so it was the right choice.</p>
It's really been a while since I installed Rust on Windows, but did you always
need the 4.5 GB C++ Visual Studio support files? This is weird, but ok.</p>
Next problem, running cargo build</code> in \\wsl$\Ubuntu-18.04\</code> is really, really
slow and errors out after 30%. Twice. OK, this doesn't seem to work. After
reading some posts and articles I should be glad to be able to have write
access at all, it seems.</p>
Good, copying over my 30kb of project files to a Windows dir, rerunning, this
works fine. I'm using VS Code right now for Rust.</p>
A day later I'm minding my own business and suddenly Windows Defender pops up
and says there's a trojan in my /bin/su</code> file of the Ubuntu WSL thing.
A Windows trojan, nonetheless. I wouldn't say I panicked, but I was a little
concerned indeed. It's supposed to be a normal Ubuntu 18.04.3 - so I connect to
a real server I have and start comparing stuff. Same version of the package,
which files are in the package, what are their md5sums... It's 2:30 am already
and I'm a little tired and wanted to to go to bed just before this, so I miss
checking the "infected" executable properly. Turns out if it's overwritten with
only zeroes the checksum might indeed be different... Restoring didn't work, so
I fired up FileZilla and copied the Ubuntu 18.04.3 su</code> binary to one of my
Windows partitions and boom, quuarantined again. This time restore worked though
and I was calmed down enough to let it rest.
Filed a false positive report (at least that went quick without an account) and
went to bed. When I got up 8h later it was already accepted, at least this
worked fine.</p>
Still. I know why I hate Windows as a development platform, but the WSL seems
to be good enough for certain things.</p>

have a full Linux system available instantly</li>
not having to bother to install most development tools on Windows</li>
there is some amount of cross-access so I can use e.g. grep on files easily</li>
ip a</code> didn't work yesterday but today it does?</li>
the terminal has a few oddities, putty is better</li>
</ul>
Starting services on WSL when Windows starts seems to be a bit of a hassle,
but I wouldn't want them running all the time anyway, I guess</p>
I need to play around with it a little more. It's definitely better than a
full-blown VM, and some things are kinda seamless, but there have been a few
awfully sharp edges for a good first experience.</p>


2019 in review
2019-12-31T11:00:00Z
These review posts have proven incredibly useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2018</a> / 2017</a> / 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

World of Warcraft</li>
FFXIV</li>
EVE Online</li>
Borderlands 3</li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>
Worst year ever, again. Zero novels. Reading  Thinking in Systems</a> right now.</p>
The pile of shame - books I wanted to read</h3>
Same as last year:</p>

the two Foundation ones from the 2014 list yet again</em></li>
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole</a></li>
The Clan Corporate:  Book Three of The Merchant Princes</a></li>
</ul>
Movies I've (re-)watched</h3>

Thor: Ragnarok - a bit weird, but ok</em></li>
Star Wars: Solo - really good</em></li>
6 Underground - ridiculous and funny. mostly ridiculous</em></li>
Big Trouble in Little China - very 80s, but it's really ok</em></li>
The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring - Extended</li>
</ul>
Movies I didn't manage to watch</h3>

Blade Runner 2049</li>
Baby Driver</li>
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets</li>
The Lego Movie</a></li>
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For</a></li>
Veronica Mars</a></li>
Chappie</li>
Mara und der Feuerbringer</li>
Jurassic World</li>
Fantastic Four</li>
Straight Outta Compton</li>
Logan</li>
</ul>
TV Series I've (re-)watched</h2>

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Netflix) S1-S2 - funny</em></li>
Firefly - about time for a rewatch</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I didn't watch</h2>

Wynonna Earp S2</li>
The Expanse S2+</li>
The Shannara Chronicles S2</li>
Jessica Jones & Luke Cage</li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h2>

Arch Enemy - Rise of the Tyrant</li>
Arch Enemy - Khaos Legions</li>
The Chats - Get This In Ya</li>
The Chats</li>
In Flames - I, the Mask</li>
In Flames - Battles</li>
In Flames - Sounds from the Heart of Gothenburg</li>
Gloryhammer - Legends from Beyond the Galactic Terrorvortex</li>
Amon Amarth - Jomsviking</li>
Amon Amarth - Fate Of Norns</li>
Amon Amarth - With Oden On Our Side</li>
Amon Amarth - Twilight Of The Thunder God</li>
</ul>
Only one In Flames album missing from my collection now, discovered The Chats,
and been listening to a lot of Amon Amarth lately.</p>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

Fenix PD25 Flashlight - nifty</em></li>
Gerber Paraframe Mini pocket knife - went camping, lost it without using it once. doh</em></li>
a new computer</a></li>
my first smart home device, a smaho wifi power plug</li>
replaced my Roccat Kone+ mouse with a Roccat Kone EMP, I hope they won't stop making those</li>
first batch of LED light bulbs as my inherited stock of old heatballs was finally used up</li>
bought a slim/small leather wallet after searching for a long time</li>
</ul>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much</em></li>
Facebook - logged in maybe three times?</em></li>
Instagram - posting a photo from time to time, checking others' stuff once a month</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - daily use, default communication channel for many people I communicate with</em></li>
Matrix - daily use</em></li>
MS Teams - work stuff, it's not as bad as it sounds, but Slack is better</em></li>
Jabber - server was shutdown, might revisit</em></li>
Email - same as usual</em></li>
Slack - using two communities, sparingly</em></li>
WhatsApp - replaced FB messenger</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

road trip (France, Switzerland, France, Monaco, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria) in June</li>
Austria in January</li>
Chaos Communication Camp near Berlin in August</li>
</ul>
(Online) services</h3>

Still subscribed to Netflix and Amazon Prime</li>
stopped using xmpp/jabber, migrated to Matrix</li>
upgraded my mailserver, Ubuntu 14.04 was EOL, I'm using docker-mailserver</a> now, originally planned to do mailcow</a></li>
upgraded my Neo N54L NAS, it has 8 GB RAM now and runs FreeNAS 11.2-U7 now</li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent</h3>

C++ - work, I like it a lot more than I had thought</em></li>
bash - still too much</em></li>
Python - work and a few private things, deployment and packaging is still hell</em></li>
PHP - for one private project</em></li>
Rust - still learning</em></li>
several for AoC</a></li>
</ul>
Podcasts I listen to</h3>
Very irregular this year:</p>

Battle Bards</a> - "A musical journey through MMO soundscapes"</em></li>
ATP</a> - I'm not using any Apple products and still listen to these guys sometimes.</em></li>
some real gaming podcasts, but even less regularly</li>
</ul>
Stuff that kinda worked out</h3>

write more blog posts: 7 isn't a lot, but it's ok, also wrote elsewhere</li>
get my self-hosted services in shape, trimming unneeded, keep everything updated, etc</li>
learn</s> try out some new programming language(s)</li>
after 2 years I'm no expert in C++, but I can work just fine with it</li>
</ul>
Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

start properly learning Spanish</li>
write a replacement for my podcast downloader of choice (JuicePortable), because it stopped working</li>
solve the deployment problem of hobby projects</a></li>
add Micropub support for this site. Started</a> but didn't finish.</li>
do more Rust</li>
do more Clojure</li>
</ul>
"New Year's Resolutions" aka stuff that would be nice if it would work out</h3>

be able to read cyrillic letters fluently and practice enough to memorize them</li>
learning from AoC: focus on one or two languages for hobby stuff and get good with it, not just be able to use it and forget stuff all the time</li>
read at least 3 novels this year (starting slow, somehow I lost the enjoyment of reading. Literally lost it, my shelves are full with books I read.)</li>
get my podcast management thing to at least a usable state</li>
</ul>
These lists keep getting shorter and shorter, maybe the focus on media consumed and used for
communication is not the right angle anymore.</p>


Advent of Code 2019
2019-12-27T21:45:00Z
This is my first time taking part in the Advent of Code</a>, although I had heard about it earlier.</p>
At first i thought I didn't have time, so I didn't start on day 1.
Apparently I first committed something on day 3, and my solutions for day 1 and 2 show > 24h for solving.</p>
My goal was to use C++ with the stdlib because all I ever do at work is Qt and so I'm not really good with standard C++.
But I also thought it could be neat to try a few languages.</p>
TLDR: code is on github</a></p>
I don't aim to describe the problems, there's no plan to remove them from the site, read them there :)</p>
Day 1 - The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation</h2>
Easy start, don't remember if I did it in C++ first (probably), but I also did a solution in Crystal (part 1 and 2 in both languages).</p>
Day 2 - 1202 Program Alarm</h2>
Now this was a bit of a surprise, building a virtual machine.
Did this in C++ first, later added a TypeScript version for part 1 and 2, although I guess solving part 2 via brute force in a shell also works.
Also I would later rewrite it in Java because of reasons that will become clear.</p>
intcode part 1</strong></p>
Day 3 - Crossed Wires</h2>
Only managed to do part 1 on that day (in C++), but I iirc I had coded 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 and 2.2 on the same day.
I redid part 1 in Nim on day 5, and also solved part 2 in Nim shortly after midnight.
I would later try to solve this one in pure Bash (on day 15). It was horrible - it's slow and hard to grasp,
but I did it (after many hours of learning just how inflexible arrays in bash are).</p>
Day 4 - Secure Container</h2>
Used Python3 for this one, solved it in reasonable time.
Later did a Tcl version of part 1 and a PHP version of part 2 (on day 7).
Much later added part 2 in Tcl and part 1 in PHP (day 24).
In retrospect, this is the first day where I noticed 100% overengineering of my solution.
I added all</em> the (un)necessary boundary checks and made this work for basically all inputs,
whereas other people just solved the problem in < 5 minutes. Also surprisingly the
Tcl version was really slow (5s) because of this and with a little restructuring
and making it easier I brought it down to 2s in a few minutes.</p>
Day 5 - Sunny with a Chance of Asteroids</h2>
Adding instructions to the intcode VM, did part 1 in the morning and part 2 on lunch break. C++, extending the day 2 solution.</p>
intcode part 2</strong></p>
Day 6 - Universal Orbit Map</h2>
Used Python again and struggled for quite a bit, as I was traversing the graph in the wrong direction.
After some hints to try the other direction it went kind of quick. Part 2 solved 16 min after part 1, record time.
Also tried to rewrite in Clojure, but as of day 27, still not 100% done with part 1 (it's buggy).
That was finally fixed on day 28, and again I am a bit surprised how concise and
readable the Clojure solution is, it's just that I need hours to arrive there.</p>
Day 7 - Amplification Circuit</h2>
This was a saturday so I solved this at around noon, part 2 only later. C++ again.
Here a little annoying trend surfaced for the first time.
Sometimes you'd need to reset the VM between runs and sometimes keep state.
Not really hard to do, but easy to mess up if you're extending your code and evolving it based on previous assumptions.</p>
intcode part 3</strong></p>
Day 8 - Space Image Format</h2>
Sunday, time to code. Finished part 1 in C++ before lunch, part 2 45min later.
Then did a Common Lisp version that surprisingly only took less than 4h (going by commit time now).
Looking back this was one of my favourite problems. Not too hard, not too fiddly.
But also not a real walk in the park. Also much more to what I am used to code,
compared of some of the other days that were really</em> abstract for me.
Doing this in D later on Day 29 took a little longer than expected mostly
because of off-by-one errors, they're my Kryptonite.</p>
Day 9 - Sensor Boost</h2>
OK, no idea why exactly I didn't solve this until the 11th, but I think it was
because I was out with friends on day 9 and day 10 and didn't get up at 6 or 7
to have a go before work. C++ again.
I would later rewrite the day 9 version of the intcode VM in Java (for day 21)
because I wasn't happy with the software architecture and apparently had some bugs.
It took 2h, should've done that earlier, no matter in what language.</p>
intcode part 4</strong></p>
Day 10 - Monitoring Station</h2>
Another slow solve, done on day 13 in Python after spending a lot of hours
searching for ideas and going in the wrong direction, trying to grab all vectors,
then checking if they are on the same line. This should work, but it didn't.
First time not having fun at all.</p>
Day 11 - Space Police</h2>
Oh yeah, that was a fun day.
I had broken my VM and had to use someone else's</a> to write the actual day 11 code.
The solution went surprisingly quick. Fixed my VM on day 13.
Also pretty close in spirit to day 08, imho.</p>
intcode part 5</strong></p>
Day 12 - The N-Body Problem</h2>
Was on vacation that day, so had some spare time.
The solution for part 2 took quite some time, but part 1 was ok I think.
Used Lua(JIT) for this, that was fun.</p>
Day 13 - Care Package</h2>
Breakout! That was awesome. C++.</p>
intcode part 6</strong></p>
Day 14 - Space Stoichiometry</h2>
Used Python and again hit some sort of road block until I got a clue,
again the solution was to start from the other side and not build a tree.
My solution was good for part 1, but very, very slow.
So again I borrowed someone's part 1 solution in order to be able to do part 2.
Half-cheating, maybe.
Rewrote this from scratch in Perl on day 16 and apparently made the same mistake, it's just as slow.
Finally solved (in Perl) on day 26 after consulting some other solutions and
doing a detailed analysis why mine was so slow.</p>
Day 15 - Oxygen System</h2>
I totally failed at BFS.
I don't like mazes and this was the first time I ever tried to write path-finding code.
Not fun, not my thing.
Still managed to solve part 1 with luck and then manual counting of steps on the discovered map.
Part 2 is unsolved as of day 30.
C++ again.</p>
intcode part 7</strong></p>
Day 16 - Flawed Frequency Transmission</h2>
Used Ruby for this one. Solved part 1, but executing it took roughly 50min on a slow server.
I think I actually managed to cycle to work while it ran and then also started it on my laptop, just in case.
Part 2 was a lot harder, spent the whole evening on this but I had a good idea in the end.
I did have to look up someone else's solution to fix an off-by-one error.
Still counts as solving it on my own, I guess, I didn't change anything meaningful in my code.
Interestingly I found the solution to the problem by manually writing out the
results of the example in a text editor and looking for patterns. It helped.</p>
Day 17 - Set and Forget</h2>
C++ again for this one.
Solved part 1 in record time (for me) 1:32h after in unlocked.
I think I got up pretty early, but still only ~1h.
But then I totally misunderstood part 2, and struggled for a while until
I got a hint how to read the problem description.
In the end I didn't write the compressor (as of day 22) but as my
instructions were correct, I manually compressed it in ~5 minutes
on a sheet of paper. Good enough for me.</p>
intcode part 8</strong></p>
Day 18 - Many-Worlds Interpretation</h2>
Mazes again :( Tried in Python (my most productive language I guess) but still unsolved as of day 30.</p>
Day 19 - Tractor Beam</h2>
This was a fun one.
Started very late in the evening because I was sick that day and had slept for
~16h but it didn't take really long to solve part 1, and then I even managed
to solve part 2, submitted my result and went straight back to sleep.
Would not recommend, took a while to even reproduce the results a few days later :P</p>
intcode part 9</strong></p>
Day 20 - Donut Maze</h2>
Mazes again :(( But after finding a BFS implementation in Python I actually
kinda solved this one pretty quickly.
Had the right idea about the portals and that was that.
Tried to solve part 2 for quite a bit with no result. Didn't revisit yet.</p>
Day 21 - Springdroid Adventure</h2>
This is where I noticed that my VM is beyond redemption.
I was asking people how I should jump over 8 wide holes and the widely
accepted answer was that there should only be 1-3 wide holes.
Quickly rewrote the VM, came to the part where you need to do the Boolean
math and kinda failed.
Could've done without the manual calc, De Morgan's laws, etc, I guess...
Had to look up the solution in the end.
But at least that gave me enough ideas to solve most of part 2 on my own.
So this was done in Java, actually.</p>
intcode part 9</strong></p>
Day 22 - Slam Shuffle</h2>
Finally felt confident enough to use Rust, and managed to solve part 1 after just 2h.
Part 2 proved to be trickier, really, really tricky indeed.
It was to be known as the mathiest problem of this year and in the end I gave
up and copied a solution. I am 100% sure I would've never discovered this.</p>
Day 23 - Category Six</h2>
Got up at 6, used my shiny new Java VM, made a few stupid mistakes,
still managed to get my first place under 1000 after 1h 57min.
And then I totally messed up part 2 and only managed to finish it in the
evening after rewriting my code completely for 3 times.
It was too easy to be true...
In the evening I tarted porting my Day 10 code to Julia and finished part 1.</p>
intcode part 10</strong></p>
Day 24 - Planet of Discord</h2>
Oh, Game of Life. Not sure I ever did one before.
Part 1 was pretty easy and besides a few stupid mistakes it went smooth.
First submission in under an hour leaderboard time, ~49 minutes after getting up, rank 848.
This reminded me of Day 20 and so I had a solution after 2:32h, leading me to rank 670.
Had some time, so did 4.1 in PHP, 4.2 in Tcl and started 22.1 in C.
Oh, and 1.1 + 1.2 in PowerShell.</p>
Day 25 - Cryostasis</h2>
Oh, a text adventure, neat. At first I wanted to solve it automatically
(not like day 15 where I started with manual input) but then I noticed that the rooms are not evenly spaced.
So I did go the manual route again and drew a map on paper.
Then I noticed what I will call my personal bug of the year 2019, including all work stuff.</p>
In this problem you're supposed to walk through some rooms, pick up some good
items, avoid some bad items and in the end have the correct items.
So everything seemed to work - I could traverse the rooms in any order, I
could get to the last room with the check... but I didn't find a single item to pick up.
After a while of being astonished I asked for someone else's input with an
exact location of an item and tried that - same result.
That means I had a bug in my IntCode VM that did not trigger on Day 09,
Day 21, or today - with the exceptions of the items.
I was a little frustrated after a while and asked on Reddit</a>,
then got back to my C++ IntCode VM and tried that.
Sadly (obviously) it still had the other weird bug, the one that surfaced on
Day 21 and which prompted the rewrite, and it kept crashing.
But after a while I fixed those bugs and could finally walk through my rooms,
grab the items and then tried the correct solution with pen and paper.
After I found this, the folks on Reddit pointed me to the correct bug location
and after only a few minutes of thinking I could fix it.
And then finally I was a little surprised that the 50th star,
for Day 25 Part 2, is only awarded if you have 49 stars, so everything solved.
Apparently that's the case every year...</p>
intcode part 11</strong></p>
Day 26 and beyond</h2>
As I'm writing this on the 27th, I've finished a lot of TODOs but still have a
few things that I want to finish up before I end this chapter.</p>
When I say "VM" - I do this knowing that VM may not be 100% the correct definition.
It's an interpreter of machine instructions for a made up computer system.</p>
DONE after the event</h4>

Grabbed a 22.2 implementation, I have zero interest to solve this on my own</li>
Rewrote 22.1 + 22.2 in C</li>
Rewrote 16.1 + 16.2 in D</li>
Finally fixed 10.2 in Julia. What a nasty bug to find. "negative value mod positive" in Julia returns a negative value, python makes it positive</li>
Fixed my 14.1 in Perl to be fast enough for 14.2</li>
Added a Makefile to most directories, mostly to document how to build/run those 20 languages</li>
Rewrote 12.1 + 12.2 in Go</li>
Added 2.2 in TypeScript</li>
Tweaked my early C++ solutions (and some others) to consistently take the input file as the first CLI arg, not via stdin</li>
Wrote down some basic benchmark numbers for most solutions</a></li>
</ul>
Open TODOs</h4>

Solve 15.1 properly in Java</li>
Solve 15.2</li>
Solve 20.2 (aka fix my WIP code and see if it works)</li>
Solve 18.1 + 18.2</li>
Fix 6.1 in Clojure, then do 6.2 (done on day 28)</li>
Get that damn 50th star :)</li>
</ul>
What they all have in common (Exception: Day 06) is that they are
maze/path-finding problems. I'm really bad at BFS/DFS, so I need to read up first.</p>
Ideas, more than TODOs</h3>
I'm a little unhappy that I broke my self-imposed rules by copying someone
else's code for some days instead of writing my own, so there are some
languages where I might redo another day in that language, with my own code.
Not trying to reinvent everything, but at least only porting my own code.</p>

Perl and Day 14, but it's not fun to use :P</li>
D and Day 16. Might pick an easier day, but D is really ok. (Did day08 on the 29th)</li>
Rust and Day 22. I think I aced part 1, but not part 2.</li>
C and Day 22. Again Part 2 is not my code, so I want to do another day in C. (Did day06 on the 28th)</li>
Have a go (no pun intended) at the Day 09 Intcode VM in a few more languages and setups.</li>
</ul>
Cancelled TODOs</h4>

Get to 25 languages</a>, 20 is enough</li>
My Day 16 Part 1 is really horrible and slow, and I won't try to properly solve it</li>
Day 21 Part 1 - My code</em> is correct, but I cheated with the puzzle.</li>
</ul>
Languages used:</h2>

Bash: day03</li>
C: day22, day06</li>
C++: 1,2,3,5,7,8,9,11,13,15,17,19,25</li>
Clojure: day06</li>
Common Lisp: day08</li>
Crystal: day01</li>
D: day16, day08</li>
Go: day12</li>
Java: 9, (15), 21, 25</li>
Julia: day10</li>
Lua: day12</li>
Nim: day03</li>
Perl: day14</li>
PHP: day04</li>
PowerShell: day01</li>
Python3: 4, 6, 10, 14, (18), 0, 4</li>
Ruby: day16</li>
Rust: day22</li>
Tcl: day04</li>
TypeScript: day02</li>
</ul>
Total: 20 languages</strong></p>
Learnings about the languages</h2>

Bash</strong>

Not fit for writing proper software. EOD.</li>
I use Bash often, but usually not because I love it.</li>
</ul>
</li>
C</strong>

Not my cup of tea, and I don't really know it.</li>
</ul>
</li>
C++</strong>

Surprisingly good to use if you're not a total beginner. Bit unwieldy for quick solutions.</li>
stdlib is still new to me.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Clojure</strong>

Didn't use it for too long. Would love to use it more.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Common Lisp</strong>

Surprisingly nice, after an hour of warming up to it.</li>
Think I'd tried it once in the past.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Crystal</strong>

Very much like Ruby, I guess?. A few odd differences. Don't forget to compile, or it's really slow :P</li>
</ul>
</li>
D</strong>

Overall really nice, but Ranges are weird. Or maybe I hate lazy stuff that's not as transparent as in Clojure.</li>
First time.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Go</strong>

Still a really good language to quickly solve problems.</li>
Hadn't used it for ~2 years.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Java</strong>

If you don't forget to use .equals()</code> instead of ==</code>...</li>
I was surprised how quick it was to write without proper tooling, just VIM and tmux.</li>
Not used for ~2.5 years.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Julia</strong>

Probably really good for Data Science, but being 1-indexed and subtly different than Python while looking very alike.. not my thing.</li>
First time.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Lua</strong>

Still awesome and fun to use.</li>
Not really used in a while.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Nim</strong>

Surprisingly straightforward to use. A few odd things, but overall really nice.</li>
First time.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Perl</strong>

Nope, never liked it and probably won't. Hash references are the worst. So much fiddling.</li>
Not used for non-one-liners in... forever.</li>
</ul>
</li>
PHP</strong>

If you don't really use it for a few years, the struggle to remember needle/haystack order is real.</li>
</ul>
</li>
PowerShell</strong>

A lot nicer than bash, but I don't think I want to write real software with this. Kinda ok for scripts.</li>
First time not just changing a line.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Python</strong>

Default language for quick results for me. No surprises, even though I never really used Python3</strong> extensively yet.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Ruby</strong>

I don't really know Ruby, but it's easy enough to get results.</li>
Also not used for years.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Rust</strong>

This went with a lot less pain than I anticipated. The borrow checker liked me this time.</li>
Not used in a few months, still pretty much a beginner.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Tcl</strong>

Not my favorite language, but it gets the job done. Easy to pick up, just the syntax is a little odd.</li>
First time.</li>
</ul>
</li>
TypeScript</strong>

Only ever wrote a few lines at work, it seems to be pretty usable. Definitely want to use it more.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Languages that didn't make it</h2>

JavaScript (21-25)

Had done TypeScript - so... why?</li>
</ul>
</li>
Ocaml (21-25)

Just didn't have the time to dig into it again, I'm a little sad :(</li>
</ul>
</li>
Pony (21-25)

Skimmed the manual, looked a little too complicated for this</li>
</ul>
</li>
Fennel (21-25)

It looks nice but I have quite a little respect for new (to me) functional languages</li>
</ul>
</li>
Kotlin (21-25)

the only language where I gave up instantly, as nothing worked out of the box</li>
the compiler flags in the tutorial were all unknown</li>
import java.io.File</code> - paraphrased: "Java? Who dis?"</li>
</ul>
</li>
Scheme (21-25)

Was quite at the bottom of the list, simply didn't make it to 25</li>
</ul>
</li>
Racket

Simply forgot to add it to the list</li>
</ul>
</li>
LOLCODE, Brainfuck, etc.

Just not a fan, even I</em> think it's wasted time</li>
</ul>
</li>
Scala

just nope</li>
</ul>
</li>
Haskell / PureScript

I suck so bad at this, but I'd actually think about it</li>
</ul>
</li>
Pascal / Delphi

Maybe worth revisiting after 25 years. I didn't like it.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Basic

This might actually be fun.</li>
</ul>
</li>
F#

Does this even run on Linux? Worth investigating</li>
</ul>
</li>
C#

Apparently not a bad language, but the entry barrier is too high for this event</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
The end</h2>
Ok, so this is how I spent most of my spare time in December 2019.
I guess by using just one or two languages I could've saved massive amounts of time.
But where's the fun in that?</p>
There are really a few lessons I took away, although some were not surprising:</p>

Read instructions carefully</li>
Write 5 lines of a test harness code to quickly run your test inputs</li>
Worse is better. Don't even try to structure at first, just solve it</li>
Don't even try to compete with the fast people</li>
I'm really not quick to code up solutions</li>
I don't think I'm a really good coder, this micro-problem-solving is not what I do at work</li>
This doesn't have much to do with software engineering, sans a few caveats when extending the intcode vm</li>
Maybe I should really focus more on a few tools over having a broad spectrum</li>
</ul>
Will I participate again next year? Maybe, if time allows.</p>
Finally I want to say a huge thanks to the #lobsters-advent IRC channel where we talked a lot about Advent of Code and I got massive help in the
form of clues or having some stuff checked when it absolutely didn't make sense. Also it's just more fun if you have people to talk to.
In the end i think I finished 14th on our leaderboard, with 3 people from the channel way ahead of me, but I'm totally happy with my result.</p>
And of course thanks to Eric for doing this. I watched the talk and it seems to
be quite some work. Also thanks to the subreddit, it's a good one.</p>
Some links:</h2>

jjuran</a> had to fix the language to solve the problems, that's hardcore. blog post</a></li>
tumdum</a> had some really clean and readable solutions in Rust</li>
gerikson</a> wrote a nice journal about AoC 2019</li>
gthm</a> inspired my rewrite of the intcode VM</li>
AoC subreddit</a></li>
nitnelave/advent_of_code_2019</a> - 14 days, 14 languages</li>
kdheepak/awesome-advent-of-code</a> - many repos, all the the languages</li>
bogdanp/awesome-advent-of-code</a> - another list</li>
really expansive post about aoc and about solving all problems in Go</a></li>
</ul>
Appendix 1 - My scores</h2>
      --------Part 1--------   --------Part 2--------
Day       Time   Rank  Score       Time   Rank  Score
 25   07:17:37   1411      0          -      -      -
 24   00:57:35    848      0   02:32:54    670      0
 23   01:57:11    919      0   14:21:51   2287      0
 22   03:03:04   1270      0       >24h   2222      0
 21   17:23:49   2652      0   18:09:25   2351      0
 20   07:38:16   1722      0          -      -      -
 19   14:40:16   3867      0   18:44:10   3363      0
 18          -      -      0          -      -      0
 17   01:32:37   1771      0   15:56:28   3125      0
 16   03:46:54   2808      0   18:03:19   3388      0
 15   09:21:04   2806      0          -      -      -
 14   17:49:46   4837      0   19:51:49   4466      0
 13   05:18:30   4900      0   09:59:36   4323      0
 12   06:39:46   5491      0   12:05:28   4383      0
 11   03:13:20   3110      0   03:20:20   2877      0
 10       >24h  13355      0       >24h  10938      0
  9       >24h  13094      0       >24h  13060      0
  8   04:13:22   5674      0   05:04:49   5703      0
  7   06:43:14   6574      0   09:23:38   4617      0
  6   11:27:08  11745      0   11:43:15  10447      0
  5   03:06:15   4384      0   08:00:35   6755      0
  4   16:07:14  22517      0   17:21:01  21033      0
  3   16:08:54  18054      0       >24h  26882      0
  2       >24h  37905      0       >24h  41205      0
  1       >24h  56901      0       >24h  51381      0
</pre>
 </p>
That's 45 of 49 stars, of which I got 44 including the submission of
25.1 - the official last puzzle. One day is missing completely, and two days
are missing part 2. And I finished only 22.2 after the 25th.</p>


Tools for Windows: 2019 edition
2019-11-18T17:00:00Z
Despite never speaking very highly of it, Windows is still the OS of choice for
my main machine at home, because it's mostly used for gaming and I still find
it highly annoying to work on Windows.</p>
I've written about what software I use in 2014</a> and 2016</a>
and now, with the new computer</a> and using Windows 10 for the first
time, it makes sense to update the list.</p>
I guess the overarching theme is that I need less specialized stuff as I have
completely moved development off this platform.</p>

Browsers:

Firefox</code> and Firefox Developer</code>, only because the taskbar stacking/pinning
makes it really annoying to just</em> use two profiles at the same time</li>
</ul>
</li>
E-Mail

Thunderbird</code> for the main account</li>
SylpheedPortable</code> for testing stuff</li>
</ul>
</li>
IRC

Quassel</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Audio/Video

foobar2000</code> for mp3s</li>
VLC</code> for Videos</li>
Greenshot</code> for screenshots</li>
IrfanView</code> for images, but it's a bit weird on Win10 so far</li>
</ul>
</li>
Editors

Notepad++</code> for everything that's not code</li>
</ul>
</li>
Voice

Discord</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Passwords and encryption

KeePassXC</code></li>
VeraCrypt</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Networking stuff

PuTTY</code></li>
FileZillaPortable</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Misc

CopyQ</code> for clipboard management</li>
SharpKeys</code> to rebind CapsLock to F9</li>
WinSplit Revolution</code> for window tiling</li>
7ZipPortable</code></li>
Launchy</code> because Linux has spoiled me for launchers</li>
</ul>
</li>
Game Launchers

Steam</code></li>
Epic Games</code></li>
GoG Galaxy</code></li>
Twitch</code> for free stuff and WoW addons</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Then some things I have put off installing for now:</p>

Visual Studio Code</code> when I really, really need to develop on this machine</li>
f.lux</code></li>
MP3Tag</code></li>
VirtualBox</code></li>
SumatraPDF</code></li>
cmder</code></li>
Audacity</code></li>
Spotify</code></li>
JuicePortable</code> (writing my own replacement)</li>
</ul>
And stuff that I left out and don't plan on using in the near future:</p>

any jabber client</li>
Chrome</code></li>
CDEx</code> (no drive anymore)</li>
InfraRecorder</code></li>
</ul>
So overall I still think that list is too long, but on the other hand compared
to the old lists and the dozens of small tools I had installed these are kind of
the essentials.</p>


Hardware Upgrade
2019-11-17T18:00:00Z
The old computer was nearly 7.5 years old</a>, so it was time for a new one:</p>

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X</a> 8x 3.60 GHz Socket AM4 Boxed, 324 EUR</li>
MSI B450M Mortar Max</a>, 94 EUR</li>
2x16GB Crucial Ballistix Sport LT</a> V2 Dual Rank DDR4-3200 DIMM CL16-18-18, 144 EUR</li>
1 TB Samsung 970 Evo</a> M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 32Gb/s 3D-NAND TLC, 167 EUR</li>
500W be quiet! Pure Power 11</a> Non-Modular PSU, 56 EUR</li>
Fractal Design Define C</a>, black, 77 EUR</li>
</ul>
At 866 EUR without graphics card I'd call that pretty cheap.</p>
Hardware I didn't replace:</p>

ASUS ROG Strix RX470</a>, from 2016</li>
Roccat Kone EMP</li>
Logitech G710+ MX Brown</li>
Dell U2715H 27"</li>
Samsung SyncMaster 2443BW 24”</li>
Samsung EVO 860 1 TB SSD</li>
</ul>
Update 2021-01:</strong> Despite the market's best effort to deny me one, on December 28th I managed to order a
GeForce RTX 3070 (GIGABYTE Eagle OC 8 GB) for just under 600 EUR and it arrived on January 2nd.
Also I've been running a 3rd monitor since a bit before that, a 27" Samsung LS27C350, which is not great,
but I got it for free.</p>


Looking at Micropub
2019-11-11T23:53:23Z
I'm not new to IndieWeb</a> but apart from implementing
webmentions in clojure a few years ago</a>
I never really participated.</p>
This weekend I thought about how I use social media and if I want to preserve
and "own" some of those posts, so I looked into it again. What's interesting
to me is Micropub and maybe being able to import stuff from Foursquare and
Instagram and maybe post some quick notes from my phone or a computer without
having to ssh to this box and write a post with vim and markdown :)</p>
So here's a little braindump on tools and misc.</p>
On a computer I like the token login via OAuth. Github is fine here, but doesn't
work on my phone where I am not logged in and with 2FA it's a real hassle.</p>

Micropub/Client</a> - "official" client list

Indigenous for Android</a> - unsolved login problems</li>
tt-rss-micropub</a> - sounds interesting</li>
OwnYourGram</a> - grab instagram posts</li>
OwnYourCheckin</a> - grab foursquare/swarm posts</li>
Quill</a> - web UI, need to test this</li>
</ul>
</li>
Micropub/Server</a> - "official" server list

nanopub</a> - looked good, didn't work for me</li>
micropub</a> - sounded nearly as good, worked 90%. Probably not maintened soon</a></li>
hugo-micropub</a> - this posts to git, I think I don't want that</li>
www-api</a> - this posts to gitlab</li>
mastr-cntrl</a> - this uses node.js and seems not very general</li>
flask-micropub</a> - not updated for 2-4 years</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
TLDR: Nearly everyone who wants micropub support writes their own library,
endpoint, or whole cms or blog engine. Not that this isn't fun, but right now
I'm just looking for a minimum viable product to be able to use micropub.</p>
The PHP micropub project does exactly that, but not sure it's worth forking and
adapting at this point. I didn't look at hugo-micropub yet but maybe I can rip
out the git integration and just let it create markdown files. Finally, there's
nothing written in Rust yet :P</p>
I'll probably first try to hack up php-micropub for quick results and then see
if I need to rewrite it.</p>


Switching to Regolith
2019-09-06T06:30:23Z
The only thing I've been writing about seem to be
desktop environments</a> lately, especially
i3 and kde</a>.</p>
Some time ago I found Regolith Linux</a> which is an
Ubuntu derivate on the one hand, and a ppa with a set of packages on the other
hand. I guess most smaller Ubuntu derivates work like this, but that is not
the point.</p>
Quoting from their website:</p>

Regolith Linux is a distro for people that prefer a spartan interface with
polished and consistent system management. It brings together a trifecta of
Ubuntu’s ubiquity, i3-wm’s efficient and productive interface, and Gnome’s
system configuration features.</p>
</blockquote>
So in short it seems to be i3, with a set of preconfigured defaults, and the
one thing I was missing when not running a full desktop environment, but just
a standalone window manager - the system settings stuff.</p>
So I tried it out by installing the packages from the ppa and nearly
everything worked out of the box, with a few small things I had to tweak.</p>

reintegrate dmenu over rofi, but maybe rofi could be fixed for me</li>
copy parts of my old i3 config, carefully merging it to theirs</li>
fixing the workspace names for i3-wk-switch to work again, not 100% there</li>
this was a hard one: uninstalling ibus, because it claims ctrl-shift-u
without any means to undo that (in the version in 18.04) and I absolutely
need that shortcut daily in Qt Creator (as this is my work laptop)</li>
</ul>
Also some config things I merged or I'm using both versions because I am still
undecided what I like best:</p>

win-p</code> starts rofi</code> in default mode, using .desktop</code> files</li>
win-shift-p</code> starts dmenu</code> in my old config, also having ~/bin/*</code></li>
win-enter</code> starts st</code>, regolith's default terminal</li>
win-shift-enter</code> starts terminator</code>, my default terminal</li>
</ul>
RAM usage so far seems to be a tiny bit better, but I've not measured it,
objectively or otherwise.</p>
But overall, I'm 99% happy with Regolith so far and while I still have a few
tweaks to do - none of them pressing issues, actually most of it is my stuff
ignoring their color scheme, so a lot of black over bluish, and I don't care -
I really like it and it fixed all
the weird small problems I had with the unorthodox i3+plasma setup.</p>


Desktop Environments
2019-04-18T13:55:23Z
I stumbled over this post about the new
Xubuntu 19.04</a>
and what's going to be included I remembered writing about i3 and kde</a>.</p>
Maybe time to reevaluate this choice after 6 months? Do I really need KDE/Plasma? I certainly need
a tiling WM, be it i3 or xmonad (or back to awesome). Am I taking advantage of what a full-fledged
Desktop Environment brings me versus using just a "lightwight" window manager?</p>
I think my original problem with just xmonad was the lack of status bars and a tray area, out of
the box. Sure, there are tools to fix this and it usually worked. But I also had a somewhat arcane
setup with dhcpcd</code> and wpa_supplicant</code> instead of network-manager. It worked fine, but I didn't
want to try to reproduce it on the (new) work laptop. Let's just say I've regretted it already a
few times when nm behaved badly or just takes many seconds to connect to a wifi whereas my old
setup is mostly really fast. I also thought I could easily add OpenVPN to this nm-applet</code> or
whatever it is called these days but I ended up forgetting about it and using CLI openvpn all
the time anyway, also I'm only using wireguard</code> on a regular basis these days anyway...</p>
Another problem was the bad/non-existant discoverability of configuration for input and output
devices. I'm really happy with the KDE "System Settings" application.</p>
A funny thing is that I use graphical file managers so seldomly that I usually forget which one
I actually have installed on the machine I'm using currently, be it dolphin</code>, thunar</code>, or
whatever. I usually start them 3-4 times per year. Again there would be the KDE Start Menu, but
I also forgot I had that, expecially when sitting at my desk with 2 external monitors and the
laptop (with the KDE bar in the bottom) tucked away to my far right side... Doh.</p>
I still launch everything with win-p</code> via dmenu</code> although I also have KDE's alt-space</code>
launcher. Speaking of this, spectacle</code> is quite nice for screenshots, but I could use that one
without a full KDE desktop, of course. I guess the same is true for Okular (PDF viewer). I
don't really know if I use any "KDE applications" that aren't just by chance associated with
KDE or written in Qt. Nothing deeply integrated in the system, at least.</p>
KDEConnect seemed pretty cool but it's useless to me as my private mobile phone is in the guest
wifi at work whereas my work laptop is in the internal one.</p>
I'm also quite set in the ways of where my applications end up (which workspace/virtual desktop)
and I think I don't use so many, anyway.</p>

2: QtCreator (C++) + Visual Studio Code (TypeScript, Python, misc)</li>
3: Chrome (primary browser)</li>
4: Slack, Quassel, Toggl (TimeTracking)</li>
5: TextAdept (text editor, my scratch buffer) + misc tools</li>
9: Firefox (secondary browser) + misc tools like Krita for graphics</li>
0: system settings and other stuff like VirtualBox if needed</li>
1: terminals with currently active project</li>
6,7,8: terminals (non-main project and if I need more)</li>
</ul>
Where did my 16GB of RAM vanish, again? Not many applications open. I think only the
password manager is missing from the above list. I'd use Thunderbird more often but due to
always lacking RAM I decided to not use it for the moment.</p>
So yeah, apparently when doing development work I don't need a whole lot of GUI tools, so I might
as well not use a full Desktop Environment. I guess I'll stick to KDE+i3 as long as this
installation of 18.04 doesn't die. When I choose to upgrade I might try something else, and
although a lot of that blog post in the opening paragraph sounded interesting, I guess I simply
won't use it, just as I don't take advantage (or simply don't need) the plethora of tools that
come with a DE.</p>
I remember I always check out everything that any linux distro installs by default (been doing
that for 20 years now) but I think not much "sticks" - most of these tools are novelty or solving
special problems I am lucky I don't have. For all the common and regular-but-rarely I have a set
of tools and I don't change them all the time, just because there's something newer or better,
only when problems arise.</p>
When I reboot for the next time I still think I should measure base RAM usage of this KDE stuff,
it didn't look too bad, but if I could reclaim a GB I might ditch it for pure i3 again...</p>


2018 in review
2018-12-31T15:00:00Z
These review posts have proven incredibly useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2017</a> / 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

SW:TOR - Subscribed for the 2nd half of the year, played a lot</em></li>
EVE Online - Not subscribed, but played a little</em></li>
Diablo 3 - a little</em></li>
Destiny 2 - a little</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>
Worst year ever, I guess. Zero novels.</p>

Effective C++</a> (Meyers) - Had to learn and improve my C++, I guess it's good.</em></li>
Operating Systems</a> (Tanenbaum) - Reread my 17 year old copy. Still good for basics.</em></li>
</ul>
The pile of shame - books I wanted to read</h3>

the two Foundation ones from the 2014 list yet again</em></li>
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole</a></li>
The Clan Corporate:  Book Three of The Merchant Princes</a></li>
</ul>
Movies I've (re-)watched</h3>

Wonder Woman (Stream) - pretty good</em></li>
A Wrinkle In Time (Cinema) - wasn't bad, but not awesome either</em></li>
Avengers: Infinity War (Cinema 2x) - ok, 2nd time was in Spanish</em></li>
Black Panther (Cinema and Airplane) - pretty good</em></li>
Tomb Raider (Airplane) - awesome, best movie this year</em></li>
Ghost in the Shell (Airplane) - actually quite good, still would've preferred a Japanese main</em></li>
Ready Player One (Airplane) - really good, but the book is better</em></li>
The Fate of the Furious (Airplane) - not as bad as I thought</em></li>
Deadpool (Airplane) - rewatch</em></li>
Deadpool 2 (Airplane) - first one was better</em></li>
Supercharged Otters (Airplane) - how can you make a documentary about otters that is not good? :(</em></li>
Neat (Airplane) - bourbon documentary, interesting and kinda good</em></li>
Ghostbusters (Stream) - wasn't terrible, but not so good either</em></li>
Kingsman: The Secret Service</a> (Stream) - finally, and it's good</em></li>
Suicide Squad (Stream) - not good</em></li>
American Ultra (Stream) - not good</em></li>
A-Team (Stream) - not bad</em></li>
Jupiter Ascending (Stream) - finally, not so bad as I had feared. Not terribly good either</em></li>
John Carter (Stream) - actually kinda fun</em></li>
Baywatch (Stream) - not so bad as I had feared, pretty funny</em></li>
RED (Stream) - moderately good</em></li>
RED 2 (Stream) - moderately good</em></li>
Fast Five (Stream) - ok</em></li>
Fantastic Beasts 2 (Cinema) - pretty good, first one was better</em></li>
Christmas movies:

Arthur Christmas (Stream) - second best christmas movie I know, funniest movie I've seen in a while</em></li>
Die Hard (Stream) - well, this is the best christmas movie :P</em></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
I had two long international flights. And then I wanted to catch up on some stuff.</p>
Movies I didn't manage to watch</h3>

Blade Runner 2049</li>
Baby Driver</li>
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets</li>
The Lego Movie</a></li>
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For</a></li>
Veronica Mars</a></li>
Chappie</li>
Mara und der Feuerbringer</li>
Jurassic World</li>
Fantastic Four</li>
Straight Outta Compton</li>
actually bought those and still didn't watch:

Thor: Ragnarok</li>
Logan</li>
Star Wars: Solo</li>
Big Trouble in Little China</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
TV Series I've tried to watch</h2>

Archie S1E1 (Netflix) - meh</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I didn't watch</h2>

Wynonna Earp S2 (Netflix)</li>
The Expanse S2 (Netflix)</li>
The Shannara Chronicles S2 (Prime)</li>
Jessica Jones & Luke Cage</li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h2>

Arch Enemy - Will To Power</li>
</ul>
Concerts attended</h2>

Wintersun & Arch Enemy</li>
The Prodigy (& Slaves)</li>
</ul>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

new LCD screen and battery for my x230</li>
8 GB RAM for the NAS</li>
a new</em> Bluethooth speaker (JBL Go2), because the MillSO stopped working</li>
Tai Hao Triple Play keycaps from Massdrop</li>
</ul>
Comics I read</h3>

Web comics:

Questionable Content</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
Paper:

Several Dork Tower, Sandman (Neil Gaiman), Miss Marvel, She-Hulk</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much, more reading and answering than writing</em></li>
Facebook - not checking it regularly, no more active messaging now</em></li>
Instagram - posting a photo from time to time, checking others' stuff once a week</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - daily use, default communication channel for many people I communicate with</em></li>
Jabber - still practically dead this year</em></li>
Email - same as usual</em></li>
Slack - using three communities, sparingly</em></li>
Matrix - started using it in Oct/Nov - it kinda works</em></li>
WhatsApp - replaced FB messenger</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

Belgium (FOSDEM) in February</li>
Croatia in May/June</li>
Austria in June</li>
Netherlands in August</li>
Mexico in September/October</li>
Berlin (Qt World Summit) in December</li>
</ul>
Online services</h3>

Still subscribed to Netflix</li>
Still using Tarsnap, but less</li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent</h3>

C++ - work, I like it a lot more than I had thought</em></li>
bash - still too much</em></li>
Python - work and a few private things, deployment and packaging is still hell</em></li>
Rust - still learning</em></li>
</ul>
Podcasts I listen to</h3>
Very irregular this year:</p>

Battle Bards</a> - "A musical journey through MMO soundscapes"</em></li>
ATP</a> - I'm not using any Apple products and still listen to these guys sometimes.</em></li>
noclip</a> - awesome documentaries/podcasts</em></li>
some real gaming podcasts, but even less regularly</li>
</ul>
TLDR: This is even less quantifiable than last year, I'm kind of confused where all the time went.
Didn't watch much in the first half of the year, didn't read, didn't play much. Played more in the second half
of the year and watched a few more movies than in the last years. No shows that take a lot of time though.</p>


i3 and KDE 5/Plasma
2018-09-11T10:55:23Z
I've had used i3</a> from time to time in the past but I was
still a staunch supporter of xmonad</a>, so when I got a new
work laptop in late 2017 I of course tried to use xmonad, as I have been since
early 2012. But for some reason it didn't really work on Ubuntu 16.04 (neither
0.12 nor 0.13) so I switched to i3.</p>
There's one feature I was missing though, in multimonitor mode I absolutely
need the screens to switch places. Gladly
someone wrote</a> a helpful addon, but I
had to poke around</a> a bit.</p>
Anyway, now it was time to upgrade my work laptop to Ubuntu 18.04 and after
having a look at the live cd I was very impressed with Kubuntu, so I wanted to
try that. But there's a dilemma: Plasma is no tiling wm.</p>
So I went to look around bit and found some configs, which I had to modify a
little and now it seems to work a bit.
(Source 1</a>
and Source 2</a>)</p>
The key lines in the i3 config</code> file seem to be:</p>
exec --no-startup-id wmctrl -c Plasma

for_window [title="Desktop — Plasma"] kill; floating enable


for_window [class="plasmashell"] floating enable
for_window [class="Plasma"] floating enable
for_window [title="plasma-desktop"] floating enable
for_window [class="Plasmoidviewer"] floating enable

# Float by type
for_window [window_role="pop-up"] floating enable
for_window [window_role="task_dialog"] floating enable
for_window [window_type="dialog"] floating enable
for_window [window_type="menu"] floating enable


#focus_follows_mouse yes

no_focus [class="plasmashell"]
no_focus [window_role="pop-up"]
no_focus [window_type="notification"]

focus_on_window_activation none
</code></pre>
To get xmonad's screen switching behaviour I had to comment thse lines:</p>
#bindsym Mod4+1 workspace 1
</code></pre>
and replace them with these:</p>
set $x_switch exec --no-startup-id ~/.config/i3/i3-wk-switch/i3-wk-switch.py
bindsym Mod4+1 $x_switch 1
bindsym Mod4+2 $x_switch 2
bindsym Mod4+3 $x_switch 3
bindsym Mod4+4 $x_switch 4
bindsym Mod4+5 $x_switch 5
bindsym Mod4+6 $x_switch 6
bindsym Mod4+7 $x_switch 7
bindsym Mod4+8 $x_switch 8
bindsym Mod4+9 $x_switch 9
bindsym Mod4+0 $x_switch 10
</code></pre>
Here's my current config</a>
without the above modifications at the time of writing.</p>


Mechanical Keyboards
2018-09-01T18:55:23Z
It's a nice and sunny</s> cold and rainy Saturday and I noticed I have never
written about keyboards, but I did post a few pictures on the Fediverse, so I
thought I'd rather save them in a proper format.</p>
At the time of writing I own 4 mechanical keyboards (and a handful of old
non-mechanical ones, all unused - the newest of them is probably 7-10 years
old already), of which I use two on an almost daily basis.</p>

  
  Logitech G710+ MX Brown</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
This is a Logitech G710+ MX Brown with a German QWERTZ layout. I bought it in
February 2018, on ebay, for 60 EUR. I had successfully put off getting one for
so long that I didn't get a new one. Whatever.
It was described as lightly used, as good as new - I had problems with the
included USB hub, but I couldn't care less.
It was clean, had no blemishes, and everything works perfectly. I use this on
my main workstation/gaming machine (Windows 7) after I had used a Logitech G10
for close to 10 years (or maybe 12? I don't remember). The color was coming off
the keys already, the LEDs were fading, it was becoming very hard to clean...
But I already miss the 3x4 additional G keys when playing MMOs, but it's ok.</p>

  
  Noppoo Choc Mid MX Black</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
This is a Noppoo Choc Mid 87 MX Black, with a Tai Hao Sunshine Keycap set from
MassDrop. I've had this one since July 2013 (so 5 years now) as a work keyboard,
and got a nicer keycap set in early 2016. I originally wanted a rainbow one, but
then settled for Sunshine as it was available at the time and I didn't regret
the choice.
This is the best keyboard I've ever had (since 1994) and I hope I can use it for
a few more years.</p>

  
  Noppoo Choc Mini MX Black</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
This is a Noppoo Choc Mini MX Black ANSI US International NKRO, I bought it in
July 2012 for 88 EUR after having either this one or another Mid at my
workplace back then.
So this was my 2nd Noppoo Choc already. I'm not happy that the INS key is only
available via Fn, and the arrow keys could be more prominent, but it's ok.
Would be a cool travel keyboard if it had a detachable cable and was a bit
lighter.</p>

  
  Motospeed Inflictor CK104 Blue Switch</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
This is a Motospeed Inflictor CK104 Blue Switch I bought in April 2017 for
41 EUR. This is a pretty nice keyboard, it was cheap and because I bought it
for the sheer fun I took the white+rose gold version, not my usual color
scheme. I think it doesn't have original MX Blues but they feel similar.
It's absolutely not usable in an office, or anywhere with people around,
and I personally don't even like Blues that much.
But I now know that for 40 EUR, instead of 100+ for a "proper" keyboard.</p>
I don't plan to buy more at this time, but who knows what the future will bring?</p>


SSL enabled
2018-08-05T15:55:23Z
So the word is that Chrome displays "Your connection to this site is not
secure" as of two weeks ago. I'm not debating that.</p>
Most of the websites on this host were already given SSL certs by
Let's encrypt over the last year, this one and 2-3 more were missing,
I just fixed that, the canonical URL is now https://f5n.org - permanent
redirects should be in place.</p>


Lunar eclipse
2018-07-28T15:29:23Z
So yesterday the lunar eclipse was supposed to be seen quite nicely and as I
usually complain that my balcony only gets sun during breakfast time and is
no use to sit there in the evening because it's going out to the east...
at least I could try to watch the lunar eclipse from 21:30 to 23:13 (00:54).</p>
Pictures (taken with a Sony DSC-RX100) aren't terribly good, but it was what
was available and still ok.</p>
I know I've been doing it wrong, I like the last two pictures taken at 00:30
when the real eclipse was already over a lot more.</p>
Oh and of course I
had to be reminded</a>
to actually post some photos...</p>
</p>
</p>
</p>
</p>


Linux and Multimedia
2018-07-07T19:59:23Z
I've been using Linux on the desktop for quite a few years now, on work machines exclusively since 2010, and casually for a while longer. Also all my private Laptops have run Linux at least in dual boot since 2004 or 05. The one thing I've never been happy about is sound though. It usually works well enough but then again I've never tried to do anything advanced.</p>
Yesterday I had friends visiting and wanted to play some music in the living room (something I don't usually do) and so I grabbed my T460p (running Debian Stretch) and started the first full-blown desktop environment I had installed, which happend to be Cinnamon 3.2.7 instead of my daily driver on this machine, XMonad (running i3 at work, because I'm on 16.04 there).</p>
First there was the problem of getting the MP3s from the NAS mounted. I don't know when they renamed smbfs</code> to cifs-utils</code> but I don't use this stuff often enough to have remembered, but the name does ring a bell. Surprisingly, Cinnamon's file browser (nemo</code>) recognized the network mounts without any user intervention already, but I couldn't drag and drop folders to Rhythmbox for whatever reason, so I did mount the folder via CLI. Still didn't work so I switched to Clementine. (Somehow I don't seem to need a graphical file browser more than twice a year.)</p>
The TV was instantly recognized as an external screen, mirroring worked (not a surprise, I hardly know problems with external monitors) but sound didn't go over HDMI. This could quickly be fixed via Preferences, Sound, Switch from Analog to Digital, though. This seems to be PulseAudio, but unlike pavucontrol</code> and friends, it was easy to use.</p>
Annoyingly, the screensaver kept on activating and killing off the sound over HDMI after 10 minutes even though I disabled it. I somehow got it really deactivated after a few tries though.</p>
So, the only takeaway is that while I prefer total control via xmonad or i3, managing external screens manually with scripted xrandr, etc - sometimes it's really nice to have some GUI dialogs for stuff you don't have time to read up on or only use once every few years.</p>
Yes, maybe not surprising to people who haven't stopped using Gnome et al. many, many years ago - I was pleasantly surprised to get everything running in a mere 5 minutes. The only thing Windows 10 does better (depending on how you see it, but for this use case..) is automatically switching sound to the external TV when connecting HDMI.</p>
Despite this nice experience there are indeed a few problems with cinnamon. First, desktop scaling - there are 2 options, Normal</strong> (which is too small), and Double</strong> (which is too big). Also all the Preferences are a bit weird to access in the "Start" menu. Sure, might be nice to save click to start the one you need, but more likely it's a fair bit of scrolling and you need to know that "System Settings" is the one with all the preference dialogs in them.</p>
I've had a plan to try out some parts of xfce in addition to xmonad/i3, some of those audio/display preferences might come in handy. Also, one day I will remember the "logout" key bindings for xmonad/i3 and not have to kill X to logout :P</p>


20 years
2018-05-26T09:59:23Z
As the topic came up at work this week and I've also been thinking about it
for a while and still nearly forgot, this May marks my 20th anniversary of
being online.</p>
We've had computers since Christmas 1994, but no internet connection, and
I wasn't old enough to be interested in much besides games and getting to
know DOS and Windows 3.11 (mostly to get games to run, to be fair - damn
you emm386, himem, mouse drivers, config.sys and autoexec.bat). In 1995
until 1997 I saw the first websites advertised in magazines, but it
wasn't a huge draw. I started visiting LAN parties in 1997 and people with
access to the internet brought some interesting things with them. I
learned about Back Orifice, NetBus, MP3s, and other stuff. I don't even
remember if I was really adamant about getting online.</p>
In May 1998 we got ISDN at home and that started the online part of my life.
It wasn't really different than dialup via modem, just that we had internal
PCI Fritz!-Cards, logging in went a little faster and a lot more silent, and
the speed was a bit higher (64kbit/s instead of 56kbit/s for the faster
modems). It was still dialup with costs per minute (or second). I think we
went through at least a dozen ISPs in those first two years, always taking
advantage of the cheapest option at the time (sometimes nightly was better
than daily, sometimes it rounded full minutes, so just checking something
was better by second, whereas longer sessions were better with a one-time
fee for the first 1 or 5 minutes, and so on). Some I remember were
germany.net</a>,
okay.net</a> and a few others. At
some point I was even an AOL customer. It was also a time of hopping
between email accounts from various providers and some freemail providers
until I secured the first domains in 1999 (iirc).</p>
There was also
RivalNet</a>,
a local gaming dialup provider that didn't give you access to the internet,
but to a spiced up chat, internal newsgroups, and most importantly, the
ability to play games, sometimes even ones that didn't work so well over
normal internet connections.</p>
The first flatrate dialup offers for ISDN came in mid-2000 and some of them
didn't really last long, Sonnet, MobilCom, NGI are names I remember. Some of
them even had some specialized login application you had to keep open that
displayed ads.</p>
At some point there came DSL, at that time mostly by Deutsche Telekom, and
it was 768kbit down, 128kbit up and I don't really remember the year, probably
2001. Then at some point there was an upgrade 16 Mbit down, 1 up - that was
probably 2006 when I moved. Now I'm at 50Mbit down, 10 up and again not sure
since when, but I might still have that paperwork somewhere, must have been
later than 2009. Maybe I'll try to upgrade to 100 down, but I see no
immediate need. So far for the unexciting tale about connection speeds.</p>
At least I was lucky enough to not need the fast unmetered internet access at
university, although I did have access to it - but already having a DSL flat
rate at home worked out 99%, maybe unless grabbing a huge ISO that could wait
a day or two.</p>
So that's 20 years of using the web, 20 years of using email, ~19 years with
the same primary email address, what else? I have an 8 digit ICQ UIN with a
leading 1, that also makes it from late '98 or early '99 - I haven't used it
in years, but I can still login - also I based my mobile phone numer on it
(just left one digit off) and I got that one in 2001. Not sure when I first
used IRC, that must've been summer 2000 because in 2001 I went to
HAL2001</a> and met up with
people I knew from IRC for a while.</p>
From a hardware perspective, I already mentioned the Fritz!-Cards, of which we
had at least 2, maybe 3 in the house. At some point I installed the first
Linux router made of spare computer parts in a big tower sitting in the
basement. I think I used FLI4L, Gentoo, and SuSE and then finally settling on
Debian. As an aside, the process for joining as a Debian Developer back then
was so elongated ("expect a reply in a few months") that I simply stopped
bothering and always stuck to projects where I could start with a few drive-by
commits and maybe stick around for a few years then.</p>
I only have a SuSE 6.2 manual here, so I really don't know if this also marks
20 years of Linux or only 19, I do remember getting some Red Hat version in a
magazine as my first distro, maybe I still have it somewhere.</p>
The third anniversary is 19 or 20 years of programming, but again I can't
really pinpoint it down to the month. My first experience was Turbo Pascal in
an elective subject in 6th grade, but it was mostly typing up listings and it
was DOS and I didn't really like it. I had a lot more fun when I could
generate or parse HTML and put stuff online. The first meaningful program I
remember was generating HTML playlists from M3U files (that was before WinAmp
had that feature, I might add), written in Visual Basic. On the web front I
started with SSI (Server Side Includes, not a proper programming language) and
moved to PHP3 quickly. That also landed me my first jobs as a programmer, but
that's for another day.</p>
So to summarize, 1998 was pretty important and I may not have ended up as a
software developer if it hadn't been for that first access to the internet and
the subsequent years.</p>


2017 in Review
2018-01-14T21:00:00Z
These review posts have proven incredibly useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2016</a> / 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
A bit late this year (last year?) but before it gets too weird:</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

WoW - Was playing a bit for the first 4 months of the year</em></li>
SW:TOR - Played quite a lot in autumn/winter, unsubscribed around New Year's Eve</em></li>
EVE Online - Not subscribed, but played a little</em></li>
Guild Wars 2 - Quite a bit, but more randomly in bursts</em></li>
Marvel Heroes - More at the start of the year, and now it's been shutdown :(</em></li>
Mass Effect 3 - Managed to finish it, awesome!</em></li>
Fallout Shelter - Mobile game I played on the PC. hmmm.</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>
Again not much in the sense of vacation and thus not much reading done.</p>

Off to be the Wizard</a> - good, should read the sequels</em></li>
Ready Player One</a> (Ernest Cline) - pretty good, but a little pop-culture heavy, even for me</em></li>
The Bloodline Feud - A Merchant Princes Omnibus</a> (Charles Stross) - pretty good, should grab the sequels</em></li>
The Graveyard Book/Coraline/Fortunately the Milk</a> (Neil Gaiman) - Coraline was very good, the other two... well, children's books.</em></li>
Accelerated C++</a> (Koenig/Moo) - Pretty good introduction for people who know other languages I'd say</em></li>
</ul>
The pile of shame - books I wanted to read</h3>

the two Foundation ones from the 2014 list yet again</em></li>
The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole</a></li>
</ul>
Movies I've watched</h3>

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2</a> (Cinema) - AWESOME</em></li>
20000 Miles on a Horse</a> (Stream) - interesting, probably not good if you don't like horses</em></li>
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1</a> (Stream) - nope</em></li>
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2</a> (Stream) - also nope</em></li>
Warcraft</a> (DVD) - not as bad as I had feared, but not my cup of tea</em></li>
The Saint</a> (Stream?) - well, it wasn't terrible, but I much prefer the 1997 one</a></em></li>
Star Wars Ep. VII - The Force Awakens</a> (Stream) - still very good, had to rewatch because of...</em></li>
Star Wars Ep. VIII - The Last Jedi</a> (Cinema) - unsure if I liked it a little better or a little less then TFA</em></li>
Maleficent</a> (Stream) - was on the 2014 list, finally managed to. I liked it a lot.</em></li>
</ul>
Movies I didn't manage to watch</h3>

Wonder Woman</li>
Thor: Ragnarok</li>
Blade Runner 2049</li>
Baby Driver</li>
Logan</li>
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets</li>
and the 2014 and 2015 lists still stand, minus Edge of Tomorrow and Maleficent</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I've watched</h2>

Iron Fist S1 (Netflix) - meh</em></li>
Wynonna Earp S1 (Netflix) - awesome</em></li>
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Netflix) - weird, but good</em></li>
The Expanse S1 (Netflix) - good</em></li>
Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries ~S1 (Netflix) - ok</em></li>
Rick and Morty (stopped after S1E1) - meh</em></li>
Adventure Time (stopped after S1E1, might continue)</li>
unCaged S1E1-S1E2 (Stream) - could've been good, wasn't</em></li>
Daredevil S1-S2 (Netflix) - good, not as brutal as I had feared, because people had said that</em></li>
Killjoys S1-S2 (Netflix) - surprise hit, it's a little wannabe-Firefly</em></li>
Punisher ~S1 (Netflix) - didn't like this Punisher in Daredevil at first, but now it's ok</em></li>
Godless ~S1 (Netflix)</li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h2>

a few Iron Maiden albums I was missing</li>
Guardians of the Galaxy - Awesome Mix Vol. 1</li>
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2- Awesome Mix Vol. 2</li>
</ul>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

my first Bluetooth item - a speaker. MillSO BV170 - pretty awesome for 13EUR</em></li>
Kickstarter/Indiegogo - nothing</li>
</ul>
Wait, that's weird. Either I'm missing something big or I really didn't buy any unusual stuff. Hmm...</p>
Comics I read</h3>

Web comics:

Questionable Content</a></li>
Alice Grove</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much, more reading and answering than writing</em></li>
Facebook - no change - maybe a few more posts, regularly messaging with a few people</em></li>
Instagram - actually using it, posted a pic a day on vacation and from time to time</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - daily use, default communication channel for many people I communicate with</em></li>
Jabber - still practically dead this year</em></li>
Email - same as usual</em></li>
Slack - using two communities, sparingly</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

Scotland in June</li>
Austria in January and December</li>
</ul>
Online services</h3>

Still subscribed to Netflix</li>
Still using Tarsnap</li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent</h3>

Java - work, not so bad</em></li>
Python - work and a few private things, deployment and packaging is still hell</em></li>
Go - work and a few small things, not a huge fan anymore</em></li>
C++ - work, I like it a lot more than I had thought</em></li>
Rust - still learning</em></li>
Clojure - still tinkering with multiplex</a></em></li>
bash - still too much</em></li>
</ul>
Podcasts I listen to</h3>
Very irregular this year:</p>

Battle Bards</a> - "A musical journey through MMO soundscapes"</em></li>
ATP</a> - I'm not using any Apple products and still listen to these guys sometimes.</em></li>
Under the Radar</a> - short and kind of interesting views from app developers</em></li>
some real gaming podcasts, but even less regularly</li>
</ul>


Manic Street Parade 2017
2017-10-28T15:12:00Z
Got encouraged to check out the manic street parade</a>,
it's called a "club festival" -whatever that means- but a quick listen to their preview
playlist got a "live music - ok" seal of approval. It seems to be the second year but I
hadn't heard about it at all until last Thursday.</p>
Matthew Matilda</strong> @ Pigalle</a></h3>
Not my type of music, but still not bad. Apparently they got moved to this venue at short notice,
and the sound check took ages and then there were some sound problems. Still worth a listen.
Just need to figure out what kind of music they actually play. Some of it was rock (70s stoner rock?),
some of it was blues-y? I am bad with categories.</p>
Facebook</a> | Spotify</a></p>
Ropoporose</strong> @ Südstadt</a></h3>
Sadly only heard 3 songs before they stopped, but I liked them. Need to listen to a few more songs.
My first expression was rock/electronic.</p>
Facebook</a> | Spotify</a> | YouTube</a></p>
Poppy Ackroyd</strong> @ Kirche St. Anton</h3>
After tha last two this was bit unexpected... but enjoyable, even if a little slow and
not making you tap your foot.</p>
Facebook</a> | Spotify</a> | YouTube</a></p>
Unno</strong> @ Pigalle</h3>
They were so good I would've been happy to pay for the ticket to just see those 3 guys.</p>
Facebook</a> | Spotify</a> | YouTube</a></p>
Lambert</strong> @ Kirche St. Anton</h3>
Guy on the piano accompanied by a guy with a guitar and a guy on the drums, all wearings masks.</p>
Facebook</a> | Spotify</a> | YouTube</a></p>
Leyya</strong> @ Strom</a></h3>
Wikipedia calls them a "Trip Hop Duo" and that's probably correct but I wouldn't have said Trip Hop.
Doesn't really matter anyway, I liked them.
Unlike the other locations it was a bit loud here, as to be expected with a club/concert sound system I guess.</p>
Facebook</a> | Spotify</a> | YouTube</a></p>
About the locations</h3>
Südstadt looked really nice, would love to see it on a normal night. The light setup in the church was amazing.
Strom was a typical club/small concert venue. Didn't like Pigalle at all. And didn't manage to visit Substanz.</p>
TLDR</h3>
Saw six different artists/bands I had never heard of for 30 EUR, now I
want to listen to more stuff by some of them. Good idea.</p>
Only semi-related, saw a tour poster for Gogol Bordello</a> at Strom, remembered them and now I want to go...</p>


Blogging anniversary?
2017-09-11T20:09:48Z
I've kinda stopped blogging regularly, I think I've migrated mostly to Twitter
like many people did. Some weeks I found enough interesting (at least to me
and as I hope, to my roughly five readers) links to post an update to The
Stack, but not much in the way of real content. Words, pictures, essays? Ok,
mostly rants.
I'm still posting stuff on various websites, but not in this "blog" format,
maybe because I didn't want this iteration of "my personal website" to be
daily journal back in 2011 when I went live. Maybe for some other reason.</p>
Anyway, I found the oldest posting in one of my earliest blogs - it's dated
September, 11th 2000 - at 20:09:48 (not sure if UTC or German time). It's
the id:1 post in the database that's run until 2005-06-12 when I
completely moved to the blog where I mostly wrote about studying, it's still
online</a> and I stopped posting there at the end
of 2011, a bit after this site went live.
So this is kind of a 17 year anniversary - because I have no clue when I
really</em> started, if it was late '98, somewhere in '99, or earlier in 2000,
my guess is 1999 as I found another website that apparently went live in '99 -
but that first entry talks about a new design and porting content. Sadly the
oldest snapshot on archive.org is also from September 2000 and it has no
content at all - so I just don't know when I moved to that domain and I also
don't remember if I was already blogging on that Geocities website I had
before.</p>
Summary, because I kept having to amend stuff all the time:</p>

1999? - 2000-08 :: Geocities?</li>
2000-09 - 2002-12 :: first blog on own domain</li>
2003-01 - 2005-06 :: blog at munich.art-core.org</li>
2004-10 - 2011-12 :: blog at codeschmie.de</li>
2011-06 - now :: blog at f5n.org</li>
other stuff</li>
2004-02 - 2005-09 :: first gaming blog about Ragnarok Online</li>
2007 :: second gaming blog about World of Warcraft</li>
2009 - now :: third gaming blog</li>
</ul>


PolyConf 17 recap
2017-07-10T07:42:00Z
Came back way too late from my first PolyConf</a> in Paris
last night, it was really fantastic.</p>
Some general thoughts:</p>
There wasn't enough time between talks to chat with people (this is my only
real complaint). I guess alternating blocks of (2 talks, 20min break) instead
of (talk, break, talk, break) might have helped there.
I don't usually go to 'normal' conferences, so maybe my expectation was a bit
skewed. Yes, I do love unconferences and the 'chatting with people' was the
best part of the always excellent Hamburg PHP Unconf when I attended. But maybe
it was a bit easier there for me as I ran into people I knew already all the
time, be it from other conferences, IRC, or mailing lists.
I'd say PolyConf is more on the informal end of the spectrum of paid
conferences (I absolutely do not mean 'unprofessional') but it's not one where
the speakers are ferried off to a VIP area, or that cost thousands of dollars,
etc. - so I think removing some communication barriers are encouraged.</p>
The venue was really cool but a bit annoying to navigate, I guess that's why
some people never took the 10min breaks and just stayed sitting.</p>
Selection of talks was very nicely spread out over topics and languages
(and paradigms :]). I would have liked some more technical depth in some of
them, though, but I do know that's very hard to achieve (and maybe detrimental)
when you have such a broad topic. There was not a single bad talk, but why
strive for less than only really great ones? :) Some people said they found it
a bit web dev-heavy, and I agree - but I was also expecting that.</p>
Some short comments about talks:</p>

Ada 99 - very entertaining, and I can relate to this exercise, as I've done it a few times myself</li>
Going Serverless - interesting, but I still need the right problem</li>
Lua/LuaJIT - sadly hardly anything new for me, been using it too much I guess, yay Lua</li>
Pinterest + React - funny how 'serverside rendering' is in fashion again :P</li>
Creating Your Own Language - awesome intro and caveats, should be a blog post</li>
Homoiconicity - IMHO a very nice introduction</li>
Prometheus - awesome presentation, interesting topic, so many WTFs though :)</li>
Blockchain - wasn't expecting much due to the topic, but I really enjoyed it. Still not sold on BTC though.</li>
Benchmarking - very solid talk. I don't want to call it unexciting, but best practices talks are rarely exciting, more 'important and useful'</li>
One VM to rule them all - this was exciting, very much so that I asked poor Gilles a million questions afterwards</li>
Polymorphism - again very solid (SOLID? :P)</li>
Web Apis for Desktop - Well, ScreenHero. If I wasn't so bitter about lack of Linux support... interesting</li>
Servo - It wasn't really about Servo, but it was. Very interesting</li>
I would've expected at least one or two talks mostly from academia, but apparently I misjudged there</li>
</ul>
The after-conf parties I attended were nice, close to the venue, would've
loved to see some more people though (see above, not so much time to meet new
people and talk to them), but of course everyone's free to spend the evening
how they prefer. I'd say the amount of people was great, there could be a few
more, but with twice as many it might be hard to find someone, but I don't
really know.</p>
I think every single conversation I had was very interesting and fun (maybe not
so much educational when we didn't talk about computery things).</p>
I know it's all too easy to be the armchair organizer who never did an actual
conference, but I'd love to fix two things: More time and space between talks
for conversations and some form of discoverability</strong>. The badges were great
(I've had some in the past that always twisted and you could never read the
names. Yes I know that's a silly detail, but it's annoying) but maybe there
should be some freeform fields to put projects and languages you work in. I
know, I know, you could just go to people, introduce yourself and ask
questions, but conversation starters are really helpful - I'm using dozens of
projects and unless person X is a speaker I usually don't know from their name
if they are involved and I might miss a nice conversation. (Like all the
Clojure people.)</p>
Some people were unsure if 3 days might be too long, I found it just perfect,
but wouldn't mind it being 2 full days. In my case I took the earliest flight
on Friday morning, did some quick sightseeing and arrived just in time for the
registration. As I was kind of sleep-deprived and had a bit of a headache I
didn't really start to engage (annoy) people until it was time for dinner and
also didn't know anyone, so I felt a little alone until I decided to fix that.
(see above for conversation starters, in my case I saw a
tweet</a> and went to
ask a few questions and got dragged along for dinner. Also I seemed to be the
only person who left for a 9pm flight on Sunday, everyone else was already gone
on Saturday or stayed until Monday.</p>
I'll definitely try to come back next year, I think it's my second favorite
conf after FOSDEM now. But it's close. :)</p>
That's enough random thoughts I guess, so thank you and a shout out to Zaiste
and team, sponsors, speakers, animated GIF connoisseurs, groups of people who
just dragged me along for stuff, people who answered my questions, and everyone
else who attended.</p>
PS: (I really love PS in electronic texts, maybe I should've written more
letters in the 90s.)</p>
Stuff I'd really like to take a deeper look at in the near future, or general
todos:</p>

serverless, this time with properly measuring exec time and costs</li>
creating a language</li>
handing in talk proposals again after a multi-year break</li>
have a lightning talk handy for the next conf I visit, just in case</li>
look at ZetaVM</li>
install and play with GraalVM + Clojure + Java 9</li>
write more Rust</li>
</ul>
PPS: Thanks to wywy</a> for letting me go :)</p>


20 years ago in movies - 1997
2017-03-28T20:42:00Z
When I saw this video</a>, for the second time
this week I found myself talking about a movie that came out in 1997. Time flies.</p>
The good stuff (or well-known, in case of Titanic):</p>

Princess Mononoke</a></li>
The Fifth Element</a></li>
Starship Troopers</a></li>
Titanic</a></li>
Men In Black</a></li>
Gattaca</a></li>
Con Air</a></li>
The Devil's Advocate</a></li>
Jackie Brown</a></li>
Life is Beautiful</a></li>
The Jackal</a></li>
The Saint</a></li>
Smilla's Sense of Snow</a> (didn't know the book back then)</li>
</ul>
Plus the movies I never watched, but actually wanted to at some point</p>

Anastasia</a> (Disney)</li>
Chasing Amy</a> (Kevin Smith)</li>
Wag the Dog</a></li>
Fierce Creatures</a></li>
</ul>
But not all was good in 1997:</p>

Batman & Robin</a></li>
Event Horizon</a></li>
Cube</a></li>
Spawn</a></li>
Speed 2: Cruise Control</a></li>
Spice World</a></li>
</ul>
And maybe it seems so different because I was a huge movie fan back then (and don't really watch
much these days) but 1997 seems to have been quite a year.</p>


Microblogs
2017-02-19T20:42:00Z
TWO new posts on the same day? Something must be wrong.</p>
When I closed up my old blogs and moved to this domain I made the decision
to not write whatever came to my mind anymore, but more planned stuff and also
bigger posts, not just one-liners. I don't think it was a conscious decision,
it was more a shift because I hadn't posted to much any more anyway - so I
just tried to avoid the clutter of constant small updates.</p>
Microblogs are useful and I've been using Twitter and posting random stuff to
various channels for the last 5.5 years (the first post on this website is
dated June 2011) but it's been partly lost (well, most of it was not very
important in the first place) but maybe it will work to consolidate a bit of
stuff here in the future.</p>
Today I went live with my microblog called nano</a></strong> -
it also has an atom feed</a>. Maybe it will strive,
maybe it will rot silently, but I had a lot of fun writing something that
resembles a full web app after quite some time.</p>
So anything that is not</p>

a full blog post (that goes into the blog</a>)</li>
not a YouTube video with music (that goes into my soup clone</a>)</li>
</ul>
might end up there. I implemented some Twitter cross-syncing to archive my
tweets that might have some original content (i.e. no RTs, no replies) but
that's not fully done.</p>


Video Game Literacy
2017-02-19T11:30:00Z
</iframe>
This video "Basic Game Literacy - Why It's Hard to Learn How to Play" is making the rounds
and I think it's pretty good and interesting. For me it still includes a few Huh? moments.</p>
I agree with the basic premise - many people (and often it's a generational thing) don't
get video games (at all) and sometimes it's hard to talk about things.</p>
What confuses me most is the distinction about starting/finishing a game.
Also using a certain kind of controller or being able to play a certain kind of genre of game.</p>
I'm really not 100% sure what they're trying to say here. I'm someone who's been playing video
games for more than 2/3s of my life, but I only ever finished a handful of games. What does
"finish" even mean? All Levels in Super Mario Bros. - ok. What about Fighting Games? Do I have
to finish Single Player Mode or does 100h of fighting human opponents count as well? What about
Tetris? Must it be A type and B type on hardest difficulty? I'm confused.</p>
Next, the controller. There's this famous story that I've told a few times. At the start of
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (on the Xbox 360) there's a room full of rats near the start. Thet's
where I repeatedly died and at some point stopped playing the game. I've played lots of RPGs and
MMORPGs (which I maybe unjustly all just take as equal now) - but apparently I simply can't play
this type of game on this type of controller. Give me mouse and keyboard or a SNES/GB DPad and it
will work.</p>
Also, can you lose a literacy in a genre? I've played many hours of Sim City, Sim City 2000, Theme
Park and many others in this genre. But I don't like any of the newer titles. Too many types of
resources, too many things, too much 3d. Yeah, call me old and boring, but these games somehow
are much better to me when they are isometric 2d and not full 3d.</p>
And yeah, they said a lot of those things, but in a slightly convoluted way I guess, because I'm
not really sure what their point is besides "Well, it's complicated, right?". With their examples
I am now 100% not sure where I would put myself. On the one hand the completion part, the "can I
use this?" part, the "unfamiliar genre" part.</p>
Maybe it's a bad comparison, but I've never ever seen anyone analyze types of sports in such a
way (on the meta-level, or in terms of "literacy"). I'd say it's more like: "Do you know
football?" - "Yes." - "Do you know the rules?" - "I couldn't be a referee, but yeah." - "Have you
ever played it?" - "Technically yes, but the coach always sends me to the bench after 60 minutes"</p>

"So you haven't completed it?". I guess you know what I mean. It's always just "Have you ever
played [x]" and that's usually where the conversation ends and this is why I found this part so
strange.</li>
</ul>
I am in no way or have I ever been a pro gamer. I've played shooters in the ESL (I think
that counts good enough as a hobby league) and I've raided at the edge of progression in WoW
(yes, nothing special) and whenever Blizzard talks about numbers of players doing a certain thing
in WoW, that was usually only 10% of players in the "top" bracket (if your metric is progression).
But wait, do I have "completed" WoW? I don't know, I haven't participated in PvP for many, many
years. Yes, it's complicated.</p>
TLDR: Watch the video and maybe you're better at figuring out if according to this video you have
a basic literacy on video games. I think I do, but there are certain genres where I only briefly
had a look and then already decided to stay away. Also I am easily distracted and have more than
once just watched a video or read a summary to see the end (in an hour) instead of finishing the
game (in 5-20 hours).</p>
(via</a> and via</a>)</p>


2016 in Review
2016-12-31T14:00:00Z
These review posts have proven incredibly useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2015</a> / 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Happy new year 2017, may it be better than 2016 :)</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

WoW - Resubscribed a month before Legion launch, played a lot for ~3 months, now a little here and there</em></li>
EVE Online - been subscribed for a while, played some</em></li>
Diablo 3 - seasons are fun, played for a week at a time at some times</em></li>
Marvel Heroes - have only actively played in the first half of the year</em></li>
Guild Wars 2 - I stopped playing at some point during this year, but when?</em></li>
Mass Effect 3 - Finally started part 3, not finished</em></li>
Dishonored - gave in when it finally cheap enough on Steam. Fun, but unfinished</em></li>
Faeria - bought early access for a few bucks, then it went F2P anyway</em></li>
Broken Sword - played one of the best adventure series ever again after nearly 20 years</em></li>
SW:KotOR2 - just for completeness sake</em></li>
Pony Island - Holiday sale, yay, awesome game</em></li>
Stardew Valley - not my copy, but after a quick look it looks as good as promised</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>
Oh, that's a short one this year I guess. After my kindle was stolen in February and I was
commuting by bike all spring/summer/fall and also didn't really go on vacation at the beach...
I kinda didn't read a lot.</p>

Starcross</a> (Philip Reeve) - aka Larklight, part 2</em></li>
Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks</a></li>
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codeas</a> (John Scalzi) - awesome</em></li>
Starman Jones</a> (Robert A. Heinlein) - SF - a bit naive, but really good - I have the German version on paper</em></li>
Die Edda: Die germanischen Göttersagen</a> (Walter Hansen) - just a slightly annotated version of the Edda</a></em></li>
Die Chroniken von Waldsee 1-3</a> (Uschi Zietsch) - High Fantasy, German, very good</li>
Hart & Herzlich</a> (Anja Bagus)</li>
Schiit happened</a> (Jason Stoddard) - a series of detailed forum posts with a cool story, IMHO worth being called a book</em></li>
</ul>
The pile of shame - books I wanted to read</h3>

Coraline; The Graveyard Book; Fortunately, the Milk</a> (Neil Gaiman) - again</em></li>
Off to Be the Wizard</a> (Scott Meyer, Liz Pulido)</li>
the two Foundation ones from the 2014 list yet again</em></li>
</ul>
Movies I've watched</h3>

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher</a> (Stream) - ok</em></li>
Pan</a> (Plane) - not too bad for a movie on a plane</em></li>
Skyfall</a> (Plane) - first Bond movie in ages, pretty good</em></li>
Spectre</a> (Plane) - and this one as well</em></li>
The Intern</a> (Plane) - funny. I liked it.</em></li>
Role Models</a> (TV) - really not as bad as it sounds</em></li>
Tangled</a> (TV) - one of the better Disney ones</em></li>
Inside Out</a> (DVD) - so awesome</em></li>
The Expendables</a> (Stream) - really not as mediocre as I had hoped</em></li>
16 Blocks</a> (TV) - I actually liked this one</em></li>
Captain America: Civil War</a> (Cinema) - liked it a lot better than I had feared because of the comics storyline</em></li>
X-Men: Apocalypse</a> (Cinema) - not my favorite X-Men movie</em></li>
Edge of Tomorrow</a> (BD) - finally saw it, really good</em></li>
Killers</a> (TV) - ok</em></li>
Doctor Strange</a> (Cinema) - woo, awesome</em></li>
Deadpool</a> (Cinema) - best or second best movie this year</em></li>
Hitchhiker's Guide</a> (Stream) - many people hate it, I found it ok</em></li>
Django Unchained</a> (Stream) - quite good</em></li>
Hellboy II: The Golden Army</a> (Stream) - could've skipped that one</em></li>
Plan 9 from Outer Space</a> (Stream, Rifftrax version) - not sure I like Rifftrax, but the movie wasn't good either</em></li>
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them</a> (Cinema) - very good movie, but not such a good fit in the Harry Potter universe</em></li>
A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell</a> (Stream) - a bunch of 4th graders would write a better script</em></li>
Spacegirls in Beverly Hills </a> (Stream) - was searching for worse ones after the last one, found one</em></li>
B.C. Butcher</a> (Stream) - hilariously bad and thus funny</em></li>
Sherlock Holmes</a> (Stream) - not bad, not really good either</em></li>
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows</a> (Stream) - worse than the first one</em></li>
Hummingbird</a> (Stream) - expected something like The Transporter, but wasn't so bad</em></li>
Rogue One</a> (Cinema) - been waiting all year, not disappointed</em></li>
Climbing The Nose / Cedarwood Trails / Shangri La / Beastmaker (Cinema) - Filmfest St.Anton</a> - overall: really cool</em></li>
</ul>
Movies I didn't manage to watch</h3>

Warcraft</li>
and the 2014 and 2015 lists still stand, minus Edge of Tomorrow</em></li>
</ul>
TV Series I've (re)watched</h2>

The Shannara Chronicles - pretty good</em></li>
Stranger Things - a bit too creepy, but overall awesome</em></li>
Bojack Horseman S01</li>
Crossing Lines S01-S03 - first two seasons were awesome, stopped watching the third pretty soon</em></li>
House of Cards S01-S02 - didn't think I'd like it, but I did</em></li>
Sherlock S01-S03 - waiting for S04</em></li>
Scorpion S01 - S02 soon, just landed on Netflix a few days ago</em></li>
The Grand Tour S01E01 - not too bad, but I guess not my cup of tea</em></li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h2>

Gloryhammer - Tales from the Kingdom of Fife</li>
Gloryhammer - Space 1992: Rise of the Chaos Wizards</li>
technically I bought a few Game OSTs, e.g. Shadowrun Returns</li>
nothing at Amazon this year, wow</li>
</ul>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

Nexus 5X in July - replaced my Kingzone N5 that stopped working reliably after 10 months :/</em></li>
Fire TV Stick - was on sale and works better than the 360</em></li>
a hardtail MTB - Rocky Mountain Vertex 930 (2015 model) and some equipment</em></li>
Garmin eTrex 20x handheld GPS - for cycling, used it a lot</em></li>
again a PSU for a laptop</li>
new graphics card - Asus ROG Strix RX 470 - well, the old one died</em></li>
a fancy office chair for the home office</li>
Kickstarter/Indiegogo - nothing</li>
</ul>
Comics I read</h3>

Ms Marvel (Wilson/Alphone) 3-4</li>
Punisher (Edmondson/Gerads) 3</li>
Spider-Gwen (Latour/Rodriguez) 0</li>
Serenity 3</li>
Web comics:

Questionable Content</a></li>
Alice Grove</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much, more reading and answering than writing</em></li>
Facebook - no change - maybe a few more posts, regularly messaging with a few people</em></li>
Instagram - made an account and trying to post photos there instead of random places</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - daily use, default communication channel for many people I communicate with</em></li>
Jabber - practically dead this year</em></li>
Email - same as usual</em></li>
Slack - using it for work via their IRC bridge, but still have the browser open for the bonus things besides chat</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

Costa Rica</a> and Cuba in February/March</li>
Austria in July, September, and December</li>
</ul>
Online services</h3>

Subscribed to Netflix in autumn and still watching stuff</li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent</h3>

Java - work, not so bad</em></li>
Python - work and a few private things, deployment and packaging is still hell</em></li>
Go - work and a few small things, still learning</em></li>
Rust - still learning</em></li>
Clojure - still tinkering with multiplex</a></em></li>
bash - still too much</em></li>
PHP - work, I'm quite indifferent right now</em></li>
Lua - work, could've been more</em></li>
</ul>
Podcasts I listen to</h3>
A lot less than last year, but still basically keeping up with those:</p>

ATP</a> - I'm not using any Apple products and still listen to these guys sometimes.</em></li>
Under the Radar</a> - short and kind of interesting views from app developers</em></li>
Battle Bards</a> - "A musical journey through MMO soundscapes"</em></li>
some real gaming podcasts, but even less regularly</li>
</ul>


A boring list of tools for Windows: 2016 edition
2016-07-17T11:00:00Z
I had this list halfway finished, when I actually took a look at the
2014 list</a> and to my surprise I
a) wrote it basically 2 years ago and
b) hardly anything has changed.</p>
So I'll start with the changes:</p>

Browsers:

no more IronPortable</code> for Facebook, but a dedicated profile and -no-remote</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Audio/Video:

haven't used Mp3Tag</code> in ages</li>
</ul>
</li>
Editors:

I never fully warmed up with LightTable</code></li>
still unimpressed with Atom</code></li>
used Visual Studio Code</code> for some Rust stuff, it's cool</li>
not using eclipse</code> for much these days</li>
gVim</code> for special tasks that Notepad2 can't do</li>
</ul>
</li>
Jabber:

Gajim</code> (like on Linux) instead of PidginPortable</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Misc:

SyncThing</code> on my NAS instead of BTSync</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
Programming stuff:

leiningen</code>, Rust</code> and Github's git</code> cli client (hardly ever the GUI)</li>
</ul>
</li>
PortableApps</code>:

Didn't need Audacity</code> in the last 2 years I guess</li>
</ul>
</li>
Random stuff:

Been using VirtualBox more for work stuff (when working from home)</li>
Gow</code></a> seems cool, but I don't really need it on Windows when a linux is just a putty away</li>
Started using Launchy</code> again</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
And here are the newcomers:</p>

Spotify</code> - Free user, listening to an album once in a while when I might buy it</li>
Wordpress.com</code> - Surprisingly handy if you post to a blog on wordpress.com</li>
cmder</code> - Finally a proper terminal, although ConEmu isn't too bad either</li>
Discord</code> - Tried it out for a while, but no community where I feel I belong to, so on hiatus again</li>
Juice</code> - downloading and keeping track of Podcasts (JuicePortable)</li>
PicPick</code> - awesome screenshot tool (PicPickPortable)</li>
</ul>
And some stuff I hadn't mentioned last time:</p>

KVIrc</code> - when testing irc stuff, used to my default client before Quassel (KVIrcPortable)</li>
Pidgin</code> - also for testing, jabber stuff (PidginPortable)</li>
Skype</code> - had to use it twice this year already...</li>
Notepad2_lua</code> - Notepad2 version with a Lua lexer, should be replaced if I found something proper and small and wrote more Lua</li>
</ul>
The wishlist:</p>

Something to really</em> quickly share screenshots (and files) - picpick (or copying file) + syncthing is nice, but not perfect</li>
A bigger 2nd screen, IRC really does take up some space</li>
</ul>
Pinned items on my task bar (which is on the top of the second, smaller, monitor):</p>

Chrome</code></li>
Firefox</code></li>
Explorer</code></li>
Quassel</code></li>
Thunderbird</code></li>
foobar2000</code></li>
Notepad2</code></li>
PuTTY</code></li>
TweetDeck</code></li>
Steam</code></li>
</ul>
Everything not under changes above is still the same as in the 2014 list</a>. How unexciting.</p>


nix - first steps
2016-06-09T19:30:00Z
After hearing about it for a long time and also mentioning it</a>
I finally wanted to try nix</a> (not NixOS though).</p>
I usually have GNU stow</a> installed on every box I admin and use
to allow for some at-least-partially-sane workflow of installing non-os-package-manager software.</p>
As usual I can't just download and test something, so I wanted to use the opportunity to try out
purescript</a>.  Sadly it involves both Node.js and cabal, so to cut a long
story short... I gave up, even after some help from the #nixos irc channel.  You can set the npm prefix
and stuff will be installed somewhere, but packaging node deps apparently isn't as easy as 1-2-3.</p>
I don't really like their install procedure of curl|sh, so I downloaded, edited the script and manually
ran it, but it looked rather well-written.</p>
Anyway, on one one host I'm now running these things from nix instead of manually built with stow:</p>

the silver searcher</li>
chruby</li>
node</li>
tmux 2.2</li>
</ul>
So yeah, success so far, and I'm liking it, although despite their "don't worry, we have binaries" node.js
version 6.1.0 had to be built both on x86 and</em> amd64.</p>


Travel journal - Costa Rica
2016-03-06T13:00:00Z
After roughly 2.5 years</a> I've left Europe for the second time - this time going in the other direction, to Costa Rica and Cuba. The planned itinerary was: Munich to Madrid on the 8th, Madrid to San José on the 9th, roundtrip in eastern/northern Costa Rica, then San José to Havana on the 18th, on to Trinidad on the 23rd, back to Havana on the 29th, going back to Madrid on the evening of the 1st, arriving on the 2nd and getting back to Munich in the evening.</p>
08.02.2016</h3>
Flight to Madrid was scheduled for 19:05, so the plan was to be at the Munich airport at least 3h before that. Unlike on the trip to Asia in 2012 they wouldn't even open the baggage check in until T-2h - officially, so that was a bit early. Interestingly the self-check-in terminal computer thing only needed the passport to print the tickets (which was new to me), but it kind of malfunctioned. First passport yielded two boarding passes for one person (me), Munich to Madrid and Madrid to San Jose. Second passport yielded two tickets for one person (me again). On the next try the second passport yielded all four tickets, two per person, two per leg of the flight. Weird, but at least it worked. Everything was uneventful if a bit delayed until we were boarding and then got told in the tunnel to go back - technical problems. Sadly Iberia didn't manage to give sensible feedback on time and so the poor lady at the counter was being shouted at very quickly. With about 3 or 4 hours delay we landed in Madrid but there were already people in tears or very aggravated because they'd missed their connecting flights to Mexico (as far as I heard) and some other destinations. Pretty glad we chose to fly a day early, that would've sucked. Arrived at the Hotel (Be Live Diana Madrid Airport) at around 01:00.</p>
09.02.2016</h3>
We had no breakfast booked at the Hotel, so took the early shuttle bus and searched for some food there. Don't remember the place's name, but they had quite tasty tortillas and you didn't pay 10 EUR for a snack and a coffee. Stocked up on water and waited for 11:40. That flight was indeed on time and so a 10h journey began. First time I had opted for the "legroom level: DELUXE" upgrade (but I think it cost me 35 EUR in addition to the 33 EUR for reserving a seat in general) and yes, while the place was freezing with no seat in front of you to shield you from A/C - totally worth it.
Watched Skyfall</a> and Pan</a> and the food was surprisingly good. Sadly we got stuck in San José traffic and got to the hotel (Don Carlos</a>) pretty late, getting dark outside already and the guy from the travel agency had to wait for us to arrive.</p>
Had dinner at Cafe Mundo</a> - food was very good but the first in a long streak of venues without prices for drinks on the menu.</p>

  
  view from the plane</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
10.02.2016</h3>
Early start with breakfast at 7:00. But it was pretty good - learned about Gallo pinto</a>. We were picked up at 7:40 and were to go to Irazú Volcano</a> and met some nice people on the tour. Sadly the weather was not good (read: horrible) and we saw a wall of fog instead of the crater. Plus it was roughly 6°C and raining - lovely. But at least the landscape and the rest of the trip was good - visited Cartago and the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles</a>. Then a little scare because all the first 50 photos from the first SD card seemed to be gone (but could be recovered later). Then the Jardín Botánico Lankester</a> [I'm going to regret trying to reproduce all á and í correctly very soon I guess].
We were left behind at the lunch restaurant (in the Orosí Valley</a> I think), to be picked up for the next part of the journey. That's about when it started to rain most of the time. After a bit of driving we arrived at Hotel Villa Florencia</a> in Turrialba, which was pretty awesome with a terrace with a sofa on it right into the forest, sadly a bit remote so only a bit of walking before heading to the hotel bar for a snack and a beer or two.</p>

  
  no crater</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
11.02.2016</h3>
Got up at 5 (wait, wasn't this supposed to be some kind of vacation?), very quick breakfast at 6:15 (because nobody had told us we'd be going to a place where we would have breakfast, so we asked to have something before the official start time...) only to discover that because of the rain and the condition of the roads our transport would be late 30mins. Oh well, gave the poor cook/bartender we had stressed for nothing some extra tip and hoped she wouldn't hate us too much. Were dropped of at El Ceibo</a> in Guápiles to be transferred to another bus at 8:30 - there was the breakfast nobody had mentioned. Met two nice British couples and waited for the other people to arrive. And waited. And waited. Again it seemed to be the roads (a real landslide that blocked one or more roads, actually) and at 11:30 we were on our way. Saw a sloth (actually, a wet ball of fur in a tree - but I swear it was a sloth. And didn't move). Arrived at Tortuguero</a> and went to Evergreen Lodge</a> by boat. Went on a trip to the village, saw a lot of animals, were soaked by the rain and had a quick glance at the Caribbean Sea.</p>

  
  Tortuguero</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
12.02.2016</h3>
Alarm at 4:45 (hey, what was that with the vacation?) and got some coffee (yay). The boat trip should start at 5:45 but apparently everyone was late - the French tourists, the French guide, our guide... Then I noticed I had forgotten our tickets in the room and did a not very smart sprint across wet tiles and back, but was quick enough and didn't slip. Then we again waited at the national park's ticket counter until 6:30, but at least it stopped raining and the trip was pretty good. Just no alligators to be seen. :( Breakfast at 8:30, then we should've been picked up by the boat at 9:30... which turned into 11:55 and another meal at El Ceibo at 15:00, where a lot of drivers were already waiting for their passengers, so hooray for 10 minute lunch. Again 2h of driving and we arrived at Hacienda Pozo Azul</a>. Had a quiet evening with a short hike and a beer afterwards. The "hotel" was a bit weird as in that you sleep in a tent</a> - but it's a big army tent with a real bed inside and a little brickwork bathroom extension. Not too bad, but I prefer real camping or a real hotel room. Maybe this is for people who never have been living in a real tent for a week?</p>

  
  some kind of iguana</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
13.02.2016</h3>
Alarm at 7:15 - awesome. Breakfast in an open space room and swamped by flies and other insects, ah well, at least also a lot of hummingbirds and butterflies in sight. Then when you think you have already adjusted that everything is always a few minutes late here you want to be there exactly on time and not earlier... then someone's waiting for you, if only a few minutes. Anyway, I'm on a horse! And it was surprisingly fun after all those years (must have been around 20 years if I'm not mistaken) - just that they had trained them to accelerate only on some kind of smooching churping sound I didn't seem to be able to create and no leg queues at all and so my horse was the only one that only ever followed the others and never sped up on my command. At least decelerating worked. Back to the hotel, packing up things (wait, is this really the fifth hotel in five days already?) and waiting for the transfer - which is late, again. At least the reception could call them and ask, so the nagging "will they arrive at all?" was settled. That trip was a bit longer again then and it was nearly dark when we arrived at Lavas Tacotal</a> - which is not in La Fortuna at all, despite their claims. At least for me 12km to a smallish town is not "in" - but at least there's a great steak house across the road. Actually that's all there is.</p>

  
  Look at my horse, my horse is amazing.</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
14.02.2016</h3>
Hotel staff gave highly conflicting answers how much a taxi would cost and as it was Sunday morning and we didn't even know if shops in La Fortuna were open or the interesting sounding thing in the other direction was open... we spent the morning watching birds near the hotel, was also nice. At around lunch time we were picked up for a tour to Arenal Volcano</a> and gladly the weather was better. Again we were lucky with a pretty nice small group of people for that. After that we were driven to some hot springs (all we knew, not which ones) - turned out to be EcoTermales</a>, which are apparently the famous ones. Nice misunderstanding when being picked up again: "Where did you go now?" - "EcoTermales" - "Oh, wow, we tried to book that but it was already fully booked. When did you organize that trip?" - "Hm, back in November." - "WTF?" - "And they told us we were pretty late already, with travelling to Costa Rica from Germany (and not the US)" - "W T F?" - "Oh wait, you meant the hot springs? Were part of the trip package, so yes, still November, but accidentally" - "...".</p>

  
  Arenal Volcano</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
15.02.2016</h3>
Transfer to San Jose to Hotel Don Carlos again. Let the sightseeing begin. First a coffee at Cafe Miel</a>, then to the Casa Amarilla, Parque España, Jardín de Paz and Parque Morazán. Railway station, Edificio Metalico, Plaza de la Libertad Electoral, Parque Nacional, Teatro Nacional, Teatro Melico Salazar and Catedral Metropolitana, then off to the Mercado Central. Had a very good Guaro</a> Sour at the hotel bar.</p>

  
  Teatro Nacional, San José</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
16.02.2016 - 17.02.2016</h3>
Spent 2 or so hours watching butterflies at Spirogyra Butterfly Garden</a>, then more sightseeing, drinking coffee and aimlessly walking through town. As we'd never been to the US and were quite curious we stopped by at the Taco Bell in Calle 5 for a light lunch one day. Wasn't bad, but nothing special, as expected. I don't remember on which day, but we went to La Criollita</a> for dinner twice because it was very good, moderately priced and close to the Hotel. Whereas the oddly (for Non-Germans) named Stiefel Pub</a> was pretty awesome, as they had some local microbrews on tap according to our guide book - and they didn't disappoint. They have a small wooden board with 4 smallish tasting glasses, so we got to taste 8 different beers for ~20 EUR. I forgot to take a photo and my Spanish is not good enough, but they had a picture of Das Boot</a> and apparently there would have been some beer for sale in it, it kinda fits their name. We also visited the Mercado La Coca Cola (in the district of the same interesting name), which was definitely different than the Mercado Central - a lot less souvenir shops, a lot more "real" shops like small hardware stores, electrical stuff (as in cables and parts) and so on.</p>

  
  definitely a butterfly</h4></figcaption>
</figure>

  
  a busy street corner in Coca Cola (San José district)</h4></figcaption>
</figure>
18.02.2016</h3>
Time to say goodbye to one of the -if not the- most awesome countries I've visited so far. :( Plane is scheduled for 11:40, so we had moved our transfer to one hour earlier because of the traffic we had experienced when arriving and the morning was wasted anyway. Turned out to be not only unneeded, but pretty much unneeded. Even when arriving and checking in our luggage the plane was rescheduled to 12:40 already. So at around 12:40 we got transferred to the plane at the very end of the airfield only to be told to get out again after a while because of technical problems. Back at the gate we were told to grab lunch at a restaurant a few gates away with a "please be back in 20 minutes." And while we were with the first bunch that arrived there apparently the choice of seating was very poor as the first people after us already got their food when the waiter finally noticed us. But then the ground crew of Cubana also arrived and took a seat, so apparently there was more time than 20 minutes. In the end the plane was 5 hours late to start and instead of 15:00 we arrived at around 20:00 I think. Then it took another 1.5-2 hours to get our luggage. Also a record I think. And only a little taste of what should await us in Cuba :P</p>


2015 in Review
2015-12-31T14:00:00Z
These review posts have proven incredibly useful when looking up stuff this year, so I'll continue this (new-ish) tradition.</p>
 </p>
( 2014</a> / 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

WildStar - not so much as last year, but I played it</em></li>
WoW - I think I didn't do more than log in to a sub-20 character more than twice this year</em></li>
EVE Online - if I played, it was early in the year, not so sure</em></li>
Marvel Heroes - has completely destroyed Diablo as my go-to ARPG - spent a lot of hours here</em></li>
Guild Wars 2 - my other go-to MMO in 2015</em></li>
Age of Wonders 3 - couldn't resist a good deal, it's quite ok, but HoMM 3 is still better. Maybe HoMM 5 as well</em></li>
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood/Revelations/III/IV - oh the Steam Sales. Started with Brotherhood, not completed. Ongoing procrastination project.</em></li>
Talisman: Digital Edition - just not the same as playing the board game with friends, but it's ok I guess</em></li>
Realm of the Mad God - nice for a quick run from time to time</em></li>
Mass Effect 1+2 - Finally started with #1 after I got told it's really something everyone should've played. It's quite ok so far.</em></li>
Shadowrun: Dragonfall Director's Cut - just as good, if not better, as Shadowrun Returns</em></li>
Shadowrun: Hong Kong - still need to play this, high hopes it's just as good as its predecessors</em></li>
The Witcher 1+2 - too cheap to pass on, same as with ME - but haven't started</em></li>
Borderlands 2 - again on some recommendations - I liked it but haven't made it very far</em></li>
Lost Lands - free to play hidden object game. First time I tried the genre, was quite nice to kill some time</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>
Oh, that's a short one this year I guess. After my kindle was stolen in February and I was
commuting by bike all spring/summer/fall and also didn't really go on vacation at the beach...
I kinda didn't read a lot.</p>

Vier Fäuste für ein blaues Auge: Wie der Wilde Westen nach Deutschland kam (Tommy Krappweis, Heinz J. Bründl) - German book about a western-themed amusement park near Munich. Very funny if you knew it.</em></li>
Burning Chrome</a> (William Gibson) - short stories, including "Johnny Mnemonic" - awesome</em></li>
Larklight</a> (Philip Reeve) - I think it's a childrens' book, but it has steampunk and it was enjoyable enough</em></li>
Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks</a> - just as good as the first one</em></li>
will amend if I stumble over more, but LibraryThing</a> tells me that was everything</em></li>
</ul>
The pile of shame - books I wanted to read</h3>

Starcross</a> (Philip Reeve) - aka Larklight, part 2</em></li>
Neil Gaiman - Coraline; The Graveyard Book; Fortunately, the Milk</a></li>
Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks</a></li>
the two Foundation ones from last year's list</em></li>
I bet I'll find some more</em></li>
</ul>
Movies I've watched</h3>

The Hunger Games</a> - meh. Was pressured into watching it, not a fan</em></li>
The Hunger Games - Catching Fire</a> -  see above</em></li>
Avengers - Age of Ultron</a> - not movie of the year, but quite good.</em></li>
Mad Max: Fury Road</a> - was looking forward a lot and wasn't disappointed</em></li>
Tomorrowland</a> - actually better than I would thought. I liked it.</em></li>
Kung Fury</a> - AWESOME</em></li>
Mr. & Mrs. Smith</a> - had some funny scenes, not keen on rewatching though</em></li>
Captain America: The Winter Soldier</a> - still good the second time</em></li>
Captain America: The First Avenger</a> - good</em></li>
Guardians of the Galaxy</a> - very good</em></li>
X-Men: Days of Future Past</a> - quite ok</em></li>
X-Men: First Class</a> - ok</em></li>
X-Men Origins: Wolverine</a> - not so good</em></li>
The Wolverine</a> - also not so good</em></li>
Ant-Man</a> - a bit overhyped, but fun</em></li>
Pacific Rim</a> - not as bad as I had imagined. Entertaining, but not good.</em></li>
Haywire</a> - I'm not saying it was awful...</em></li>
Daredevil</a> - I'm also not saying it was awful..</em></li>
Star Wars - The Phantom Menace</a> - Even worse than when I first watched it.</em></li>
Star Wars - Attack of the Clones</a> - This one was actually better when rewatching it.</em></li>
Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith</a> - Let's just leave it at 'meh'.</em></li>
Star Wars - The Force Awakens</a> - Apart from the plot, finally a good Star Wars movie again. Very happy with it.</em></li>
</ul>
Movies I didn't manage to watch</h3>

Jupiter Ascending</li>
Chappie</li>
Mara und der Feuerbringer</li>
Jurassic World</li>
Fantastic Four</li>
Straight Outta Compton</li>
Aeon Flux</li>
Plus everything from last year's list</a>, but the Edge of Tomorrow BD is at least sitting on the shelf already :P</li>
</ul>
TV Series I've (re)watched</h2>

The Prisoner - still very cool</em></li>
Heroes S1 - made my way through Season 1, and I think I fully enjoyed one episode - the last one. Then S02E01 was horrible and I stopped.</em></li>
</ul>
CDs I bought</h2>

Mike Patton - Mondo Cane</a></li>
Moloko - Things to Make and Do</a></li>
Blind Guardian - Beyond The Red Mirror</a></li>
In Flames - Siren Charms</a></li>
Deichkind - Niveau Weshalb Warum</a></li>
Deathmøle - Permanence</a></li>
</ul>
Other stuff I bought</h3>

Audio-Technica ATH-M50x</a> - SO GOOD</em></li>
New PSU for a laptop - apparently I'm lucky to only need one every few years per notebook</em></li>
Kingzone N5 mobile phone - extremely happy with this, after my Desire Z just got too slow for daily use</em></li>
Xiami Piston 3 In-Ears</a> - very good for the price</em></li>
Kickstarter/Indiegogo - nothing</li>
</ul>
Comics I read</h3>
For the first time in many years I bought some comics. Usually the bigger books, not the thin magazines.</p>

Ms Marvel (Wilson/Alphone) 1-2 - very good, ordered Vol 3 already</em></li>
Punisher (Edmondson/Gerads) 1-2 - very good, Vol 3 is sitting next to me</em></li>
She-Hulk (Soule/Pulido/Wemberly) 1 - very good start, but I didn't like the change of the art style at all, so I stopped</em></li>
Web comics:

Questionable Content</a></li>
Alice Grove</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much, more reading and answering than writing</em></li>
Facebook - no change - maybe a few more posts, regularly messaging with a few people</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - definitely more, although some channels went mostly dead</em></li>
Jabber - very seldom, everyone seems to have moved on and I can't blame them</em></li>
Email - same as usual</em></li>
Slack - using it for work via their IRC bridge, but still have the browser open for the bonus things besides chat</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

Austria in September</li>
CfgMgmtCamp</a> and FOSDEM</a> in Ghent/Brussels, Belgium, end of January</li>
most of Germany in August</a> including M'era Luna and CCCamp 2015</li>
</ul>
Online services</h3>

Literally zero change compared to last year.</li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent</h3>

Java - work, not so bad</em></li>
Python - work and a few private things, deployment and packaging is still hell</em></li>
Clojure - fun projects like multiplex</a> and a recruitment web app prototype I coded on a weekend</em></li>
PHP - work, I'm quite indifferent right now</em></li>
Lua - work, could've been more</em></li>
bash - ugh, one day I'll write a sane-language-to-bash-converter tool ;)</em></li>
Rust - so much to learn. toy project: irc bot</a></em></li>
OCaml - brief stint with the book at the start of the year, sadly too impractical for me right now - but I enjoyed it, unlike 2004 in university</em></li>
</ul>
Podcasts I listen to</h3>
So apparently the only tech podcasts I listen to are focused on stuff I have never used,
am not using, and don't plan to use. Still I enjoy listening to them talking about things.
Whereas when I tried some podcasts for stuff I am using and also interested in - I didn't like
the hosts' style. Only exception were most Rust podcasts I sampled, but it's too soon for a
real review, I guess.</p>

ATP</a> - I'm not using any Apple products and still listen to these guys.</em></li>
Core Intuition</a> - Same thing applies, but at least more developer stuff.</em></li>
Under the Radar</a> - And number three of the odd podcasts.</em></li>
Battle Bards</a> - "A musical journey through MMO soundscapes"</em></li>
some real gaming podcasts, mostly talking about games I don't play</li>
</ul>


Travel journal - a road trip
2015-08-24T23:00:00Z
This year's summer vacation was something slightly different. I wanted to attend Chaos Communication Camp 2015</a> but as the distance from Munich to Zehdenick is quite far (roughly 650km) I had the idea to stay up in the north a while longer. So I searched around if there were some music festivals in that region and hatched a plan.</p>
The plan was to go from Munich to Hildesheim for M'era Luna</a>, then continue to Hamburg</a>, then a quick visit to the Baltic Sea to drop a certain someone off, go to the Camp, get back and stay at the Baltic Sea and visit Halle(Saale) on the way back.</p>
Day -5: Saturday, August 1st, 2015</h3>
The car's "vehicle inspection sticker" (according to my dictionary of choice) was to run out in August, so I tried to get this fixed before the trip.</p>
Day 0: Thursday, August 6th, 2015</h3>
The car is not done although it's not totally the garage's fault - in any case there was nothing urgent to be repaired, so packing begins. Pretty full for a medium sized car...</p>
Day 1: Friday, August 7th, 2015</h3>
Early start on the A9 to Nuremberg, then A3 to Würzburg, then A7 nearly to Hildesheim. Quick detour to Hamelin with a bit of sightseeing and an iced coffee. Got to the Hotel (boo, no camping yet), then off to the festival venue at the airport for grabbing the wristband and checking out the medieval market and whatever's already there. ~690 km in total.</p>
Day 2: Saturday, August 8th, 2015</h3>
My first festival, woohoo. Elvellon at 11:00 - quite good. Nachtgeschrei at 11:20 - very good. Versengold at 11:40 - kind of ok. Coppelius at 12:35 - awesome. Lunch break and looking around the venue. Melotron at 15:35 - quite good. Merciful Nuns at 16:30 - ok. L'ame Immortelle at 16:55 - not as good as I had remembered them. Saltatio Mortis at 18:05 - pretty good. Rob Zombie at 21:00 - ok, but near the end we left. Missed ASP, which is a bit sad.</p>
Day 3: Sunday, August 9th, 2015</h3>
Hotel breakfast, then off to the festival. Private Pact at 11:00 - but can't remember them. Then a reading by Kai Meyer with a few songs by ASP - pretty nice, probably gonna buy the book. Unzucht at 12:20, but not impressed, then Tyske Ludder at 12:55 - pleasantly surprised, bought a CD as well. Quick lunch break, then Absolute Body Control at 13:55 and Tanzwut at 14:15 - which I still liked a lot. Then my memory gets a bit hazy, but I think we heard a bit of Joachim Witt. Then one of the acts I was coming for, Assemblage 23 at 16:05 - pretty cool. Caught a bit of Apoptygma Berzerk, then off to Mono Inc. (who I had seen already a while ago) - also really good. I was pretty keen on Einstürzende Neubauten, but I wouldn't day I've enjoyed it a lot. Too strange for my taste. At 21:00 the main reason to visit - Nightwish, who I hadn't seen live since around 2004 I think. For some reason I didn't enjoy their stuff with their then new singer Anette Olzon, so I kinda had written them off and only learnt that they had another new singer, Floor Jansen, a while ago and now I can happily listen to them again \o/. Anyway, the show and the music was awesome and concluded the festival pretty nicely.</p>
Day 4: Monday, August 10th, 2015</h3>
Hotel breakfast, then off to Hamburg. Went for a boat trip around noon with a hilarious captain/guide. I know he's probably doing the same jokes three times every day, but it was a lot funnier than most so-called comedians on TV. Mostly sightseeing by walking after that. ~190km by car. Had a very good beer and excellent coffee at Barley and Malt</a>. Dinner at Bistro Roth</a> - pretty good.  ~170km.</p>
Day 5: Tuesday, August 11th, 2015</h3>
Very tasty breakfast at Das Knuth</a>. More sightseeing (and walking). Saw the MS Queen Elizabeth</a> which is so huge I mistook her for an office building at first glance. Walked through the old Elbtunnel. Dinner at Alt Helgoländer Fischerstube</a> after I annoyed hmans</a> for fish restaurant tips for a while :P - it was pricy, but very good. Went to the Pyrates Bar</a> across the road (because we were too tired to go looking for another bar) for a few beers. Quite good Pilsener there that's rumoured to be brewed in Bavaria.</p>
Day 6: Wednesday, August 12th, 2015</h3>
Breakfast at some bakery/cafe. Unfriendly clerk. More sightseeing and walking, what a surprise. Late lunch at Dos Amigos</a> - wasn't bad for lunch, but a bit boring.</p>
Day 7: Thursday, August 13th, 2015</h3>
To Lübeck</a> by car, then had a look around the city. Had a list of restaurants but they were either closed for lunch or overpriced for a snack, so opted for Tony's Pizza. Saw a pretty cool street music combo in steampunky clothing in the city center. Quick visit to the small Niederegger marzipan museum and had a very tasty cup of marzipan cappuccino at their cafe. Then drove halfway to Wismar to a resort at the sea, had a brief look at the beach and drove off to the camp. Got there around 18:00 after buying some beer, food and soft drinks. Put up my tent, had a lot of fun and went to bed at around 4 am. In total ~370km.</p>
Day 8: Friday, August 14th, 2015</h3>
Got up around 10, explored the so-called bathroom facilities, then the rest of the camp I had missed the day before. Started my diet of toasted cheese sandwiches and sausages. Went for a quick shopping tour for more beer for the village in the evening. Gladly the supermarket had Budvar besides all kind of German Pilsener. Got my rad1o</a> in the evening and went to bed at around 4 am again.</p>
Day 9: Saturday, August 15th, 2015</h3>
Got up around 10, more cheese sandwiches, beer, talking, sun and fun. Had my first angel</a> shift ever (at the third CCC event I attended, shame on me). Went to bed at around 3.</p>
Day 10: Sunday, August 16th, 2015</h3>
Got up before 8, packed up my tent and stuff and drove back to the sea. Enjoyed the afternoon at the beach. Dinner at portofino</a>. ~240km.</p>
Day 11: Monday, August 17th, 2015</h3>
Weather was kind of bad, so visited Wismar</a> and went for an extended walk. Lunch at Piccoli</a> - tasty pasta for a quite low price. ~80km.</p>
Day 12: Tuesday, August 18th, 2015</h3>
Weather was a bit better, but not exactly sunny - went to the beach anyway. Dinner at portofino</a> again - another pretty good pizza.</p>
Day 13: Wednesday, August 19th, 2015</h3>
Got up at 5 to go to the beach and see the sunset and search for amber (nope, didn't find anything). Hotel breakfast (were the first ones so it was packed with stuff formerly not discovered). Onwards to Schwerin</a> with a bit of sightseeing, lunch at Herzogliche Dampfwäscherei</a> - wasn't especially good. Then off to Halle</a> and again some walking and looking around, then dinner at Hallesches Brauhaus</a> after a recommendation</a>. This was basically the best restaurant on the whole trip - awesome food and I tried all of their homebrewed beers and nearly all of them were excellent. ~415km.</p>
Day 14: Thursday, August 20th, 2015</h3>
Hotel breakfast (was quite ok) and after some more sightseeing and a trip to the Halloren factory shop</a> where we bought a few kilograms of sweets we started the final leg of the journey home. Had a quick bite at the Brückenrasthaus Frankenwald</a> overlooking the A9 (nothing special, but whatever) and an uneventful ride home. ~430km.</p>
So in 14 days that was roughly 2600km of driving, quite a few cities visited (Hameln, Hamburg, Lübeck, Wismar, Grevesmühlen, Wismar, Schwerin, Halle), a few days of camping and spending a lot more money than just flying to a sunny beach somewhere. I'm definitely up for CCCamp19 though, and Hamburg's always worth a visit - usually I just go there for conferences and beers with developers. And each and every time not being able to meet someone living there because she's in another city on those days.</p>


Popular movies I might have seen
2015-04-13T16:00:00Z
This morning I stumbled upon this fantastic post</a> by Marco Arment titled "Popular movies I haven’t seen in the last 15 years" where the first paragraph reads:</p>

Whenever anyone asks me about a popular movie, they’re flabbergasted that I haven’t seen it. You’d think they’d learn to just assume I’ve seen nothing, but they haven’t yet.</p>
</blockquote>
My first thought was something like "Wow, really? There have been a lot of good movies in the last 15 years." and although I've absolutely noticed that I'm watching less and less movies I was kind of shocked when I scrolled through the list and counted.</p>
TLDR: I don't watch many mainstream movies. For the definition of mainstream that reads "Academy Award Best Picture nominees and top 10 highest-grossing films". So thanks Marco and I hope he doesn't mind that I copy his list verbatim.</p>
Key</em>: Seen it</strong>, Haven’t seen it</p>

2000</h3>

Gladiator</strong></li>
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon</strong></li>
Traffic</strong></li>
Mission: Impossible II</strong></li>
X-Men</strong></li>
What Women Want</li>
Meet the Parents</li>
Chocolat</li>
Erin Brockovich</li>
Cast Away</li>
Dinosaur</li>
How the Grinch Stole Christmas</li>
The Perfect Storm</li>
What Lies Beneath</li>
</ul>
2001</h3>

Monsters, Inc.</strong></li>
Ocean’s Eleven</strong></li>
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring</strong></li>
Moulin Rouge</strong></li>
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone</strong></li>
Shrek</strong></li>
The Mummy Returns</strong></li>
A Beautiful Mind</li>
Gosford Park</li>
In the Bedroom</li>
Pearl Harbor</li>
Jurassic Park III</li>
Planet of the Apes</li>
Hannibal</li>
</ul>
2002</h3>

Spider-Man</strong></li>
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones</strong></li>
Men in Black II</strong></li>
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers</strong></li>
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets</strong></li>
Ice Age</strong></li>
Die Another Day</li>
Minority Report</li>
Chicago</li>
Gangs of New York</li>
The Hours</li>
The Pianist</li>
Signs</li>
My Big Fat Greek Wedding</li>
</ul>
2003</h3>

Finding Nemo</strong></li>
The Matrix Reloaded</strong></li>
The Matrix Revolutions</strong></li>
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King</strong></li>
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl</strong></li>
X2</strong></li>
Lost in Translation</li>
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World</li>
Mystic River</li>
Seabiscuit</li>
Bruce Almighty</li>
The Last Samurai</li>
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines</li>
Bad Boys II</li>
</ul>
2004</h3>

Shrek 2</strong></li>
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban</strong></li>
The Incredibles</li>
Ocean’s Twelve</li>
Million Dollar Baby</li>
The Aviator</li>
Finding Neverland</li>
Ray</li>
Sideways</li>
Spider-Man 2</li>
The Passion of the Christ</li>
The Day After Tomorrow</li>
Meet the Fockers</li>
Troy</li>
Shark Tale</li>
</ul>
2005</h3>

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith</strong></li>
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire</strong></li>
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe</strong></li>
Madagascar</strong></li>
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory</strong></li>
Batman Begins</strong></li>
Crash</li>
Brokeback Mountain</li>
Capote</li>
Good Night, and Good Luck</li>
Munich</li>
War of the Worlds</li>
King Kong</li>
Mr. and Mrs. Smith</li>
Hitch</li>
</ul>
2006</h3>

The Departed</strong></li>
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest</strong></li>
Ice Age: The Meltdown</strong></li>
X-Men: The Last Stand</strong></li>
Little Miss Sunshine</li>
Casino Royale</li>
Cars</li>
Babel</li>
Letters from Iwo Jima</li>
The Queen</li>
The Da Vinci Code</li>
Night at the Museum</li>
Mission: Impossible III</li>
Superman Returns</li>
Happy Feet</li>
</ul>
2007</h3>

Ratatouille</strong></li>
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End</strong></li>
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix</strong></li>
Transformers</strong></li>
The Simpsons Movie</strong></li>
300</strong></li>
No Country for Old Men</li>
Juno</li>
I Am Legend</li>
Atonement</li>
Michael Clayton</li>
There Will Be Blood</li>
Spider-Man 3</li>
Shrek the Third</li>
National Treasure: Book of Secrets</li>
</ul>
2008</h3>

The Dark Knight</strong></li>
Iron Man</strong></li>
Quantum of Solace</li>
WALL-E</li>
Slumdog Millionaire</li>
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button</li>
Frost/Nixon</li>
Milk</li>
The Reader</li>
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</li>
Kung Fu Panda</li>
Hancock</li>
Mamma Mia!</li>
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa</li>
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian</li>
</ul>
2009</h3>

Inglourious Basterds</strong></li>
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince</strong></li>
The Hurt Locker</li>
Avatar</li>
The Blind Side</li>
District 9</li>
An Education</li>
Precious</li>
A Serious Man</li>
Up</li>
Up in the Air</li>
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs</li>
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen</li>
2012</li>
The Twilight Saga: New Moon</li>
Sherlock Holmes</li>
Angels & Demons</li>
The Hangover</li>
</ul>
2010</h3>

Alice in Wonderland</strong></li>
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1</strong></li>
Iron Man 2</strong></li>
Despicable Me</strong></li>
How to Train Your Dragon</strong></li>
The Social Network</li>
Toy Story 3</li>
The Kings’ Speech</li>
127 Hours</li>
Black Swan</li>
The Fighter</li>
Inception</li>
The Kids Are All Right</li>
True Grit</li>
Winter’s Bone</li>
Shrek Forever After</li>
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse</li>
Tangled</li>
</ul>
2011</h3>

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2</strong></li>
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides</strong></li>
The Artist</li>
The Descendants</li>
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close</li>
The Help</li>
Hugo</li>
Midnight in Paris</li>
Moneyball</li>
The Tree of Life</li>
War Horse</li>
Transformers: Dark of the Moon</li>
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1</li>
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol</li>
Kung Fu Panda 2</li>
Fast Five</li>
The Hangover Part II</li>
The Smurfs</li>
Cars 2</li>
</ul>
2012</h3>

Beasts of the Southern Wild</strong></li>
Les Misérables</strong></li>
The Avengers</strong></li>
The Dark Knight Rises</strong></li>
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey</strong></li>
The Hunger Games</strong></li>
Skyfall</li>
Argo</li>
Amour</li>
Django Unchained</li>
Life of Pi</li>
Lincoln</li>
Silver Linings Playbook</li>
Zero Dark Thirty</li>
Ice Age: Continental Drift</li>
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2</li>
The Amazing Spider-Man</li>
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted</li>
Men in Black 3</li>
</ul>
2013</h3>

Iron Man 3</strong></li>
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug</strong></li>
Thor: The Dark World</strong></li>
Monsters University</li>
12 Years a Slave</li>
American Hustle</li>
Captain Phillips</li>
Dallas Buyers Club</li>
Gravity</li>
Her</li>
Nebraska</li>
Philomena</li>
The Wolf of Wall Street</li>
Frozen</li>
Despicable Me 2</li>
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire</li>
Fast & Furious 6</li>
Man of Steel</li>
</ul>
2014</h3>

Guardians of the Galaxy</strong></li>
X-Men: Days of Future Past</strong></li>
Captain America: The Winter Soldier</strong></li>
Birdman</li>
American Sniper</li>
Boyhood</li>
The Grand Budapest Hotel</li>
The Imitation Game</li>
Selma</li>
The Theory of Everything</li>
Whiplash</li>
Transformers: Age of Extinction</li>
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies</li>
Maleficent</li>
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1</li>
The Amazing Spider-Man 2</li>
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes</li>
Interstellar</li>
</ul>
</div>
For the record: He has watched 33, I have 65 out of 234 (if I counted correctly). I find my numbers quite interesting, although misleading. If I subtract the 12 Marvel movies, 8 Harry Potter movies and 5 Tolkien movies, there goes a good third.</p>


Lua shenanigans
2015-03-11T14:30:00Z
After some time away from building stuff with Lua in my spare time I wanted to
revisit it and thus decided to start another project with
OpenResty</a> and Lapis</a>.</p>
Turns out there's a reason for it being relatively niche.
Lapis works fine, just like a while back.  I reported some minor issues, but
they were promptly fixed or explained and I'm still a happy user trying
to recommend everyone to at least give it a try ;)</p>
So, I was going to use PostgreSQL and Lapis now even uses a better api than
ngx_postgres</a> (which is a cool hack,
but I wasn't entirely sold...) in the form of pgmoon</a> - and it works fine.</p>
My other dependency would be a Markdown library.  I had used lunamark</a> last
year but forgotten about my problems.  To cut the long story short, I found my own bug reports and applied my fixes again. boo.</p>
I don't know how I found out about lunamark, but according to the
lua toolbox</a> it's endorsed by 2 people.</p>
Anyway, this is how you lua: (it's part howto, part rant, part exercise in futility)</p>

download latest openresty

tar xaf ... ; cd ...</li>
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/openresty-1.7.10.1 \ --with-luajit --with-pcre-jit</code></li>
wonder why it doesn't work because of missing ldconfig</li>
prefix PATH=$PATH:/sbin</code> and retry configure</li>
make && make install</code></li>
wonder why it doesn't work because libluajit can't be found</li>
retry configure as root, make && make install</li>
it works?</li>
</ul>
</li>
git clone https://github.com/keplerproject/luarocks; cd luarocks; git checkout v2.0.13</code>

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/openresty/luajit \ --with-lua=/usr/local/openresty/luajit/ \ --lua-suffix=jit-2.1.0-alpha \ --with-lua-include=/usr/local/openresty/luajit/include/luajit-2.1</code></li>
make && make install</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
alias luarocks=/path/to/luarocks</code></li>
luarocks install lapis</code> - hey, this works. surprise</li>
luarocks install lunamark</code>

this fails, so back to source</li>
git clone https://github.com/jgm/lunamark/ && cd lunamark && luarocks make lunamark-0.3-2.rockspec</code></li>
notice the still unfixed lpeg problem</a>

luarocks remove --force lpeg && luarocks install lpeg-0.10.2-1</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
notice the unicode problem with slnunicode

notice there hasn't been a release since your own fix</a>, so manually build head</li>
git clone https://github.com/LuaDist/slnunicode slnunicode-1.1a</code></li>
now move this directory to from where you installed openresty. sounds complicated, but for me it was:

cd /opt/src/ngx_openresty-1.7.10.1/build && ln -s /opt/src/slnunicode-1.1a</code></li>
make -f slnunicode-1.1a/Makefile</code></li>
ignore the error because the test can't run because your lua binary is somewhere else</li>
cp unicode.so /usr/local/openresty-1.7.10.1/luajit/lib/lua/5.1/unicode.so</code></li>
restart openresty</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
My project is called wheee</a> and it's a small
wiki engine.  It includes users, pages and revisions.  That's about it.</p>
TL;DR: I love Lua and Lapis is a pretty cool framework if you're just getting
started or not want to care about low level stuff for a fun side project.  BUT
if you're comparing it to the frictionless experience of Rails or something,
you'll probably be annoyed.</p>
Oh, and I'm gonna try out this markdown library</a>
now, it's endorsed by 5 people.</p>


FOSDEM and CfgMgmtCamp 2015
2015-02-04T10:30:00Z
I am glad that my employer</a> let me go to FOSDEM and Config Management Camp in Belgium again, so here's a quick summary of stuff.</p>
Saturday</h2>
After a weird experience at the Munich airport security (first I accidentally showed last year's email with the ticket, dated Feb 1st 2014 and was let through and they seem to have played with the knobs at the metal detectors because my belt seems to suddenly trigger after many years) the plane had been moved to another gate and was delayed as well... we at least made it there by noon.</p>
The first talk we barely managed to see was
Diagnosing Performance Issues Using Thermostat</a> about
Thermostat</a>, something that definitely seems worth a look although I'm not sure how it compares to VisualVM.</p>
Then sadly JSON and PostgreSQL, the State of the Art</a> was full and High-performance packet filtering with Pflua</a> had already started.</p>
So I went to Are distributions really boring and a solved problem?</a> which was a bit too Debian-centric (although I use Debian and kind of expected a few detours by the current DPL) but interesting nevertheless
and then Puppet Plus Parentheses</a> by @KevinOfCorc</a> which was interesting, but (probably because it was in the Lisp room) focused a bit too much on an intro and what puppet does and why it's done instead of how. Still very interesting and nicely presented.</p>
Next up was Stretching out for trustworthy reproducible builds</a> which was about an interesting project to get a) all Debian packages to be built in a reproducible way (and that means identical binary blobs at the end, not tests or something) and b) to maybe in the future avoid the problem that if a Debian maintainer builds their package on amd64 and uploads it only the other archs are being built by buildd and amd64 is directly used (built on their machine, boo) - I might try to invest some time there, still many packages to go.</p>
Talks I missed because of lack of reading comprehension in the timetable: OpenStack and Xen</a>, Escaping DSL Hell By Having Parenthesis All The Way Down</a></p>
Sunday</h2>
Apparently operating an alarm clock is complicated, thus I missed Introduction to Using GNU Radio</a> and started with a lightning talk on JMAP</a> which could be really nice, we'll see what the future brings. I've been following fastmail.fm for a few years and their advent calendar blog articles last December were pretty good. I prefer to host my mail myself, but I think I'd try them first if I was to pay someone.
Next up was a Lua BoF session moderated by @hisham_hm</a> (creator of luarocks</a>) which gave me a nice deeper insight into the Lua community, apparently I need to read more mailing lists (already subscribed).</p>
Next up was Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse</a> which I didn't like at all. Speaker mostly read everything from his notes, it seemed like a boring presentation of tables and numbers and in general was pretty boring. Which is especially sad as he seemed to be knowledgeable enough and about every time he elaborated on anything that was regarding a question or not on his notes it was interesting stuff. Kind of weird.</p>
Then a talk on PHP 7</a> by @SaraMG</a> which sadly detoured a lot into Hack (but the rest was quite ok), nothing new in it though if you follow internals and the RFC process, but some HipHop and zval things were indeed interesting.</p>
On to Ntimed an NTPD replacement</a> I went where I already knew about a few things because I had followed the news how @bsdphk</a> had released a version of ntimed, but it was really interesting and I'm really looking forward to it being stable. At the end of the talk I had a quick chat about DNS with a fellow who worked on BIND 10 and that was pretty interesting as well, thank you unnamed fellow :)</p>
Again, stuff I missed: Matrix</a>, Elvish</a>, XMPP and Android</a>.</p>
I think I didn't get to talk to as many people at the booths as last yeat, NixOS was great (I really need to try it). MySQL was empty all the time, whereas I met @MaineC</a> at the elasticsearch booth last year, chatted with the Jenkins people, the Jitsi/XMPP people and some Debian people. But this year no one I knew from IRC at any of the booths.</p>
Summary:</h2>

too many tracks. Which is not bad in general, but I'd love to see even more stuff and meet more people</li>
BoF sessions were always excellent, need more of those. The so-called "devrooms" are only smaller talk venues, imho</li>
next year there needs to be a Lua track, as @justincormack</a> noted</li>
Thanks FOSDEM organizers, it was a blast!</li>
</ul>
Monday</h2>
We were on time, yay.</p>
Beyond Configuration Management</a> by @mitchellh</a> - a pretty cool keynote without bullshit and namedropping. Up next BOSH, configuring services, not systems</a> by @littleidea</a> (who from now on I will call the Gruber of DevOps). Talk was good, but BOSH doesn't really interest me I think (need to read up more though) and the name is horrible, but whatever. The following panel wasn't so much my cup of tea, but maybe I don't like panels at all.</p>
Then I wanted to watch Automate almost anything with Ansible</em> but apparently the speaker wasn't there (did I hear sick? not sure) (edit: He</a> sent me a link to the repo</a> so there was a cool intro talk on Ansible that basically mirrored my minor experience and showed me I at least got the basics correct.</p>
Managing Containers at Scale with CoreOS and Kubernetes</a> by @kelseyhightower</a> and it was a really good talk (I had heard about Kelsey when I watched his Go for Sysadmins</a> from Gophercon on YouTube. Too bad I missed him afterwards, would have loved to ask a few questions. Because of this talk I missed NixOS: Your next favorite server OS</a> - meh.</p>
Up next was Modern Module Development</a> by @KnittyNerd</a> which was good and interesting, but sadly not many new/advanced things. Quote of the day was "the nightmare that is the Apache module"</a> though.</p>
The day was concluded with @liamjbennett</a>'s Testing with beaker</a> - very interesting and I need to try it out, although I'm not happy with the state of testing in puppet in general, but that's enough of a rant for another post...</p>
After that drinks at The Zone</a> in Ghent as usual (their website seems to be down right now) - just that most people left very early, apparently many of them to grab lunch at 8 or 9 and they didn't come back.</p>
Tuesday</h2>
Got up early, went to Lean Configuration Management</a> by @jezhumble</a> - this was great, let's hope there's a recording. Next was The parallel universes of DevOps and cloud developers</a> by @dberkholz</a> (with whom I also chatted last FOSDEM about containers after his talk (iirc) when suddenly @gregkh</a> joined the discussion when passing by, that's something that only happens at FOSDEM I think) - but I wasn't especially happy with this talk. Sure, interesting metrics about tool usage, but I'm not so sure I can trust them (like stars on Github can be 100% misleading sometimes), but as he measured more stuff it's probably the best data you can get without a huge effort.</s> the findings/methods used here. For example, I don't like stars on Github as an indicator. Any promising new JS projects seem to get hundreds of stars the day they are made public, same for new code by well-known community members (of any community) whereas semi-new stuff in more obscure languages can be the best solution to a problem ever and have a dozen stars. Nevertheless I think his numbers support reality, and the talk was good. Rephrased this for clarity.</p>
We had an early flight so my last talk for the day was Configuration Management in a Containerized World</a> by @julian_dunn</a> which was kind of interesting, but I'm not sure what I got out it.</p>
Summary:</h2>

CfgMgmtCamp was awesome, the talks in general were even a bit better than last year (don't be mad, last years' speakers who might read this, you brought me back!)</li>
Dear organizers, please let the social event start 1-2h after the talks (like the last 2 years iirc) and not instantly. People need to get to their hotel and maybe grab dinner before drinks. The place was basically abandoned by 9 pm (it had started at 5 pm and was too packed until 6 pm anyway.)</li>
I need to book my flights earlier, better to arrive 1 day before FOSDEM or at 8 am at latest and also to catch a flight home later than 7 pm on the last day</li>
thanks all who helped and attended</a></li>
I still don't trust containers (and especially docker), but I'd love to play around more with lxc</li>
shoutout to the puppet folks who I've met over the years, all the discussions with you have been insightful and enjoyable, on any kind of topic. That of course shouldn't reflect on the people from the other projects, but I mostly use puppet so of course there's usually more interest at CfgMgmtCamp.</li>
</ul>
My todos</h2>

Look at Juju</a> again after a few years, apparently it's a lot more useful now</li>
Look at Ansible Tower</a></li>
Look at Rudder</a> and do a basic provisioning of a host with it and look at the cfengine stuff</li>
Look at slides for a few talks I missed (mostly those mentioned above)</li>
Look at some things in the Prosody</a> code base</li>
Look at Jez Humble's 2 books and "Release It!" by Michael T. Nygard</li>
Play around with Kelsey's Kubernetes Demo</a> if it's online</s> - there's a repo</a> (thanks @eLobatoss</a></li>
Find out whether lxc and docker work with multicast. :P</li>
Finally put my 2 puppet modules on the forge</li>
Look at Mirage, Unikernels, Xen in detail</li>
Test NixOS or at least nixpkg</li>
</ul>
That list is horribly long, I hope I can tick off at least a few items.</p>


Switching to Hugo
2015-01-03T14:30:00Z
This website was put live in its current form in June 2011. There hadn't been
many structural changes apart from replacing Blueprint with Foundation.</p>
I wasn't completely happy with Hyde</a> anymore, as I was using the 0.5.3</a>
version that hadn't been updated since early 2011 and not even the newer one
where the updates only stopped in 2013</a>.</p>
But apart from rendering speed I really don't want to say anything negative
about it, it worked nearly flawlessly, so thanks lakshmivyas for that.</p>
Hugo</a> seemed interesting from the day I stumbled over it, and so when
having a closer look at it I decided to try to convert this page to using
it and I was pretty surprised how quick it went. This was in October 2014
already but I kind of lost interest and as there was no real need to speed up
I only added the finishing touches over the recent holiday break.</p>
I especially hope the two RSS feed doesn't break, but the urls are the same,
and the validator doesn't complain either.</p>
So that's it - nothing new besides a few small layout changes and hopefully
more posts in the future.</p>


2014 in Review
2014-12-31T17:00:00Z
In the spirit of "Release early, release often" I am pushing this out on New Year's Eve and will amend it later, not happy with the brevity in some paragraphs, but it's mostly correct. ( cf 2013</a> )</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

WildStar - pre-ordered, played a lot</em></li>
WoW - cancelled sub when WildStar came out, resubbed for one month when WoD came out</em></li>
EVE Online - resubbed around November</em></li>
Marvel Heroes</a> - tried it, liked it, spent 10$</em></li>
10,000,000</a> - not so bad, unsure about long time fun</em></li>
Game Dev Tycoon</a> - bought and completed in June, loved it</em></li>
Shadowrun Returns</a> - bought in June, not completed</em></li>
Terraria</a> - bought in June, kind of hated it</em></li>
Gunpoint</a> - bought and completed in June, loved it</em></li>
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic</a> - very similar to HoMM. Not bad, but I prefer HoMM 3 and 5</em></li>
Master of Orion 1+2</a> - not impressed, should've skipped probably</em></li>
Humble Bundle 11, because of FEZ</strong> and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams</strong> - played neither as of December</em></li>
Humble Bundle 9, because of:

Brütal Legend</strong> - haven't played</em></li>
FTL</strong> - kind of nice, but didn't keep me entertained for very long</em></li>
surprise gem: Eets Munchies</strong> nice puzzler</em></li>
</ul>
</li>
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls - the changes up to launch and the expansion made me play it for a month or two, was a lot of fun</em></li>
Hammerwatch</a> - best 1.16 EUR I ever spent on a game. Seriously, buy it!</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>

Aetherresonanz</a> by Anja Bagus (Kindle, German) - part 2 of an awesome Steam Punk trilogy</em></li>
Aethersymphonie</a> by Anja Bagus (Kindle, German) - part 3</em></li>
An Astronaut's Guide to Live on Earth</a> by Chris Hadfield - I enjoyed it, many truths... and truisms</em></li>
Barrayar (Vorkosigan Saga Book 3</a> by Lois McMaster Bujold (Kindle, English)</li>
Foundation</a> by Isaac Asimov - very good</em></li>
Alif the Unseen</a> by G. Willow Wilson (Kindle, English) - meh at the start, good in the end</em></li>
Spin</a> by Robert Charles Wilson (Kindle, English) - very good</em></li>
Daemon</a> by Daniel Suarez - good</em></li>
Boneshaker</a> by Cherie Priest (Kindle, English) - very good</em></li>
The Phoenix Project</a> by Gene Kim (Kindle, English) - very good</em></li>
</ul>
Books I didn't read (but bought anyway)</h3>

Second Foundation</a> by Isaac Asimov</li>
Foundation and Empire</a> by Isaac Asimov</li>
</ul>
Movies I've watched</h3>

Iron Man Trilogy (1</a> 2</a> 3</a>) had only watched part 1 before. my first BD</em></li>
The Avengers</a> (DVD)</li>
X-Men: Days of Future Past</a> (Cinema)</li>
Captain America: The Winter Soldier</a> (Cinema)</li>
Noah</a> (Cinema)</li>
The Monuments Men</a> (Cinema)</li>
Words and Pictures</a> (Cinema)</li>
The Dark Knight Trilogy (1</a> 2</a> 3</a>, DVD)</li>
Star Wars Episode IV-VI (Cinema, on May 4th) just awesome on the big screen</em></li>
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World</a> (DVD)</li>
Serenity</a> (DVD) I had never watched the movie, only the tv series</em></li>
Guardians of the Galaxy</a> (Cinema) pretty cool</em></li>
Gattaca</a> (Stream) about time, very good</em></li>
The Polar Express</a> (Stream)</li>
Catch me if you can</a> (Stream) halfway in, it stopped playing. Will finish soon.</em></li>
Green Lantern</a> (Stream)</li>
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World</a> (DVD)</li>
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies</a></li>
</ul>
TV series I've (re-)watched</h3>

Veronica Mars, Season 1-3 - how the hell did I miss out before?</em></li>
Grey's Anatomy, Season 1-4 - First medical drama I actually enjoyed</em></li>
Firefly - rewatched after a few years</em></li>
Twin Peaks - Started, got sidetracked, looking good though. The music is weird, but awesome.</em></li>
Being Human (US version) - Hated it from the first minute, stopped after the first episode</em></li>
Weeds - Looks good a few episodes in</em></li>
Elementary - midway season 1, very nice</em></li>
</ul>
Movies I wanted to watch but didn't</h3>

Maleficent</a></li>
Edge of Tomorrow</a> Bought the BluRay, it's on the pile of shame (aka todo list) near the top</em></li>
The Lego Movie</a></li>
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For</a></li>
Veronica Mars</a></li>
Kingsman: The Secret Service</a></li>
</ul>
Hardware I've bought</h3>

Philips BDP2180/12</a> (BD player) - cheap DVD player was broken, 360 didn't play a lot of DVDs very well...</em></li>
Anker Astro Mini 3000mAh</a> - mobile with power on a night out - awesome, but the plug broke, still works</em></li>
HP ProLiant G7 MicroServer N54L</a> NAS/home server - absolutely happy with it, running FreeNAS</a></em></li>
2x WD Red xyz 3TB HDD</li>
Behringer HPM1000</a> awesome headphones for 10 EUR, but not closed and too loud for the office</em></li>
Creative Fatal1ty Pro HS-800</a> good headset, not as small as its predecessor, or I am imagining things</em></li>
PSU for a notebook</li>
16GB USB stick</a> for random stuff, 8GB USB stick for keychain</li>
new 1600 mAh battery</a> for my Desire Z - finally 3 days instead of 8h</em></li>
</ul>
Music I've bought</h3>

Volbeat - Beyond Hell/Above Heaven</a></li>
Volbeat - Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies</a></li>
Volbeat - Rock the Rebel/Metal the Devil</a></li>
Portishead - Dummy</a></li>
Portishead - Portishead</a></li>
In Flames - Come Clarity</a></li>
In Flames - Soundtrack to Your Escape</a></li>
Arch Enemy - War Eternal</a></li>
Halestorm - The Strange Case of...</a></li>
</ul>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - moderately often, i.e. several times per day - responding to mentions and DMs asap</em></li>
Facebook - skimming once a day</em></li>
#pants</a> - from time to time</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - used extensively, privately, for work and for stuff in between</em></li>
Jabber - moderately often</em></li>
Email - still not sending many mails, reading quite a few</em></li>
Twitter - hardly, only people I don't have an irc/jabber/mail contact</em></li>
Facebook Messages - a few group chats, still refuse to install the Android app</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

Austria in early January</li>
CfgMgmtCamp</a> and FOSDEM</a> in Ghent/Brussels, Belgium</li>
Alanya, Turkey in September</li>
</ul>
Other misc. stuff</h3>

Got rid of a lot of domains I was paying for for no good reason, also a few failed MMO fansite projects :/</li>
First order at shirtwoot!</strong></a> went well, nice shirts</em></li>
</ul>
Online services and software</h3>

Happy with Tarsnap</a></li>
Happy with pizza.de</a> - although I don't pay them, my delivery shop does?</em></li>
Signed up for DriveNow</a> - haven't used it in the first X months</em></li>
(Still) got several VPS at Strato, de-punkt, proplay and DigitalOcean</s></li>
local public transport started to offer tickets via mobile app, nice as a fallback sometime</li>
FreeDNS</a> - for a few hostnames for test projects not under my domains</em></li>
</ul>
Online services I've signed up for but never used after the first week</h3>

Rackspace - something with the signup form, US vs EU, etc.</em></li>
Ello - tried to get an invite to secure my nick, nick was gone</em></li>
OneName.io - what does it even do?</em></li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours</h3>

Python</li>
Lua</li>
Java</li>
Clojure</li>
bash</li>
PHP</li>
Ruby</li>
</ul>
Programming languages not used</h3>

OCaml - Reading Real World OCaml</a> right now, after 10 years of not liking OCaml</em></li>
</ul>


A boring list of tools for Windows
2014-07-19T11:00:00Z
Part two of a draft I had stashed away and forgotten. Here is part 1: A boring list of tools for Linux Desktops</a></p>
I've been writing lists like these for years (oldest I can find is from late 2005), but I've never gone into that much detail like this one, for example</a> - he seems to have a specialized thing (GUI tool) for almost every task. Maybe that's the way to be productive on Windows, I have mostly given up to do any meaningful work. For what I call work</em> I take a laptop with Linux and only in extreme cases work with PuTTY</code> for ssh. Well, and a browser, of course.</p>
My workstation</s> playstation</a></h2>

OS: Windows 7 64 bit</code></li>
Browsers:

Chrome</code> - default browser, nearly everything</em></li>
Firefox</code> - mostly gaming websites and stuff</em></li>
IronPortable</code> - yes, I have a dedicated Facebook browser</em></li>
ChromePortable</code> - and one for work email and logins</em></li>
</ul>
</li>
E-Mail: Thunderbird</code> (extensions see below)</li>
IRC: Quassel</code></li>
Audio/Video: foobar2000</code>, vlc</code>, MP3Tag</code></li>
Editors: Notepad2</code>, LightTable</code>, MarkdownPad</code>, testing Atom</code> atm (unimpressed)</li>
Jabber: PidginPortable</code></li>
Voice: TS3</code>, Mumble</code></li>
Misc: BTSync</code>, f.lux</code>, ClipX</code>, PuTTY</code>, IrfanView</code>, KeyTweak</code>, SumatraPDFPortable</code>, 7-Zip</code>, TrueCrypt</code> and WinSplit Revolution</code></li>
Programming stuff I actually use sometimes: leiningen</code>, eclipse</code>, msysgit</code></li>
Some rarely used PortableApps</code>: Audacity</code>, CDEx</code>, FileZilla</code>, InfraRecorder</code></li>
Random stuff: python, sbt</code>, Racket</code>, VirtualBox</code>, Julia</code> (all in mint condition)</li>
Finally stuff that's more or less cool but I don't need: AutoHotKey</code>, ConEmu</code>, chocolatey</code>, GitHub for Windows</code>, Synergy</code></li>
</ul>
After many years of a totally clean desktop I've began using it again. For Games.</p>
To conclude, a list of Thunderbird addons:</p>

Enigmail</code> - GPG</em></li>
Lightning</code> - Calendar</em></li>
Sieve</code> - Mail filter</em></li>
ConfirmFolderMove</code> - avoid fatfingering stupid actions</em></li>
Quote Highlight</code> - improve readability</em></li>
Flexible Identity</code> - don't reply as bozo@bogusdomain if it was sent to krusty@bogusdomain</em></li>
</ul>
and Chromium addons:</p>

Enhanced Steam</code></li>
Facebook Disconnect</code></li>
FlashBlock</code></li>
Privacy Badger</code></li>
TweetDeck</code></li>
</ul>
Oh, and just for fun here's the tools that were on my 2005 list already :)</p>

Notepad2</code></li>
IrfanView</code></li>
Firefox</code> (I know I used Phoenix already)</li>
FileZilla</code></li>
CDEx</code></li>
7-Zip</code></li>
MP3Tag</code></li>
Audacity</code></li>
eclipse</code></li>
vlc</code> (but not as default)</li>
</ul>
Damn, seems it's hard for me to break habits. Extra thanks for the developers of those tools I am still using after nearly 9 years.</p>


A boring list of tools for Linux Desktops
2014-07-18T10:00:00Z
Another draft I had almost forgotten about, updated some things and now publishing it before I forget about it again.</p>
Both linux laptops I use most frequently are configured in a similar way.
One (my laptop) runs Debian stable (wheezy), the other (work laptop) runs Debian testing (jessie) since May 2014, wheezy before that.
Both run xmonad</code>, xmobar</code> and trayer</code> (and xdm</code>) with the same config.
I have 9 virtual desktops, aptly? named:</p>

sh</em> for shells</li>
code</em> for my IDE</li>
www</em> for my main browser</li>
im</em> for irc and jabber</li>
@ for email</li>
☹ for nothing specific, usually shells</li>
♨ you guessed it, shells</li>
♫ for music and more shells</li>
♥ for my second and third browser</li>
</ul>
on startup a few commands are run:</p>

xmodmap</code> (for a custom keymap</a> to be able to type äöüß€λµ…–·→←)</li>
feh</code> (for the background image</a> that I hardly see)</li>
</ul>
so on to the programs that are usually running at any time:</p>

parcellite</code> (to keep my clipboard history)</li>
xscreensaver</code> (to lock the laptop)</li>
xfce4-power-manager</code> (to avoid unnoticed instant shutdown)</li>
BitTorrent Sync</a></li>
sh</em>: terminator</code> with zsh</code>, sometimes tmux</code></li>
code</em>: IntelliJ Ultimate 11.1 (why upgrade?) or vim</code>/gedit</code>/LightTable</code> or all of them</li>
www</em>: chromium</code></li>
im</em>: quasselclient</code> and gajim</code></li>
@: thunderbird</code>, actually earlybird</li>
☹: a root shell with openvpn</code>, boo me</li>
♨: shells</li>
♫: rhythmbox</code> or banshee</code></li>
♥: firefox</code> nightly

one with default profile for private stuff</li>
one with extra profile, just for facebook</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
then the stuff that gets used occasionally:</p>

wpa_gui</code> (despite a semi-automated setup of dhcpcd</code> + wpa_supplicant</code>)</li>
pinta</code> for image editing - damn, I forget this name all the time</em></li>
evince</code> for PDFs is good enough for me</li>
vagrant</code> + VirtualBox</code> (would prefer lxc</code>, but as I am the only Linux user, it's not worth duplicating all of the work when ~8 others use Mac+VirtualBox)</li>
xbacklight</code></li>
audacity</code> and vlc</code> because we sometimes do audio stuff at work</li>
</ul>
programming language runtimes used most often (roughly in order):</p>

python</code> (no ipython</code> yet, might try)</li>
lua</code> (I use lua.org</a>, need to find a repl)</li>
bash</code> :(</li>
ruby</code> (irb</code> is fine for me)</li>
clojure</code> (lein repl</code> is fine)</li>
php</code> (php -r</code> is sufficient)</li>
</ul>
some history grepping and sorting shows nothing unusual:</p>
1119 git
 693 ag [1]
 671 vi
 496 ls
 443 cd
 398 ssh
 376 mv
 350 curl
 322 rm
 283 scp
</code></pre>
[1]</a></p>
The work laptop was originally fully puppetized with masterless local puppet</code>, until they broke some</s>everything and I had no time to fix all my stuff.</p>
Meanwhile I migrated the automatic setup of one box from puppet</code> to ansible</code> because it seems a lot easier for casual use, we'll see if there's less breakage as well.</p>
And I should probably mention that I am pretty happy with this.
Very rarely I wish I had a Mac available, but that usually lasts for a single task of 15m to 2h, for example when I must connect to a VPN with PPTP or want to play a game in my lunch break.</p>


2013 in Review
2014-07-17T13:00:00Z
What do you do when you're sick at home, your head hurts too much to do
anything involving brain power? Good question, but if you notice that
you did not write a summarizing post of 2013, you might as well try to
copy/paste some info from various sources together.</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

Lego Marvel: Super Heroes</a> (Xbox 360) - very fun game, sadly didn't finish it</em></li>
EVE Online, for a few months even</li>
nothing on Steam</li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>

The Princess Bride</a> by William Goldman (Kindle) - not sure if I prefer the book or the movie</em></li>
A Gathering Evil</a> by Mike Stackpole (Kindle) - one of those free ones where you'll buy all the following books then</em></li>
Evil Ascending</a> by Mike Stackpole (Kindle) - part 2</em></li>
Evil Triumphant</a> by Mike Stackpole (Kindle) - part 3</em></li>
XIII, Vol. 5-7 by Vance/van Hamme (German) - comics</em></li>
Die Abenteuer des Marsupilamis, Vol. 3,5,8 (German) - comics, used</em></li>
Aetherhertz</a> by Anja Bagus (Kindle, German) - part 1 of an awesome Steam Punk trilogy</em></li>
The Humble eBook Bundle 2</a> - I liked all of those listed</em>

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle</li>
Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton</li>
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow</li>
Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold - later bought 2 more of this series</em></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Books from last year's list I did read after all</h3>

How to Win Friends and Influence People</a> by Dale Carnegie - kinda meh</em></li>
SuperFreakonomics</a> by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner - by far not as good as its predecessor</em></li>
Wolfbane</a> by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth - awesome</em></li>
</ul>
Books I didn't read (but bought anyway)</h3>

Foundation</a> by Isaac Asimov - I think that was a filler to get free shipping</em></li>
Alif the Unseen</a> by G. Willow Wilson (Kindle) - It was 1 EUR and was recommended</em></li>
XIII - Le Origini</a> by Vance/van Hamme (Italian) - found in a used book shop in Venice, but my Italian is not good enough, started but unfinished)</em></li>
</ul>
Movies I saw</h3>

Despicable Me</a> (DVD</a>)</li>
Enter the Dragon (DVD)</li>
A Christmas Carol</a></li>
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer</a></li>
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou</a></li>
The Santa Clause</a></li>
Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland</a> (German, DVD</a>)</li>
Cloud Atlas</a></li>
The Great Gatsby</a></li>
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug</a></li>
Les Misérables</a></li>
Frozen</a></li>
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters</a></li>
</ul>
TV Series</h3>

Leverage</li>
Person of Interest</li>
Once upon a time</li>
</ul>
Hardware I've bought</h3>

AVM FRITZ!Box 7360</a> for VDSL</li>
Dirt Devil M5036-1 Infinity VS8 Turbo</a> -
not a car, not a cpu cooler, it's a vacuum cleaner with an awesome name. It sucks. (Actually, I have no complaints.)</em></li>
Kindle, original model, 6", WiFi - kind of nice, not a must</em></li>
</ul>
Music I've bought</h3>

In Flames - Colony</a></li>
In Flames - Sounds of a Playground Fading</a> -
Limited Deluxe Box-Set, it had a belt in it, awesome, I am even using it</em></li>
Rise Against - Endgame</a> - my first mp3 purchase I think</em></li>
Marina And The Diamonds - The Family Jewels</a></li>
Five Finger Death Punch - War Is The Answer</li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

Belgium: PuppetCamp Ghent/FOSDEM in Brussels in Jan/Feb</li>
Italy: Venice and Friuli-Venezia Giulia in May</li>
Austria: Vienna in December</li>
Hamburg: PHP Unconference and 30c3</a></li>
</ul>


30c3
2013-12-31T17:00:00Z
Back from my first congress (actually last night already) - it was a blast.</p>
The opening event was ok, but uneventful - I really loved the music</a>.</p>
Talks I watched: "Bug class genocide", Keynote, "No neutral Ground in a
Burning World", "Hacker Jeopardy", "My journey into FM-RDS", "The Year
in Crypto", "The Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card", "Fnord
News Show" and "Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this
Presentation" and I liked them all (I think I only rated 4 or 5 stars out of
5) - and right now I'm catching up the ones I missed :)</p>
Somehow the hardware ones impressed me most but I attribute that to my lack of
knowledge compared to the software stuff.</p>
Actually it was a lot like I had imagined, only a few things struck me as odd:</p>

the wifi was horrible. I've been to quite a few conferences, but losing
signal every 10mins except in certain spots is not normal. I'm not blaming
the network people, really, the area is massive and it was worst in Hall 1
with 500? people in it.</li>
I would've expected a lot more BoF meetings like on FOSDEM - there were
some assemblies from bigger projects (most were from hackerspaces) - but I
had imagined more spontaneous meetings of groups</li>
I don't care at all about the "bigness" of the event that some lament (I
know, I'm unworthy as I've never been to one) - but at times it was very
hard to find people again or at all. Missed one guy completely because of
this.</li>
I'm usually the first to be excited about stuff but I just couldn't be
bothered by the Seidenstrasse, I was annoyed at the permanent vacuum
cleaner noise</li>
Of course this is awesome, but apart from one run-in with one person I
didn't see anyone arguing, shouting, being aggressive or annoying. Wow.</li>
</ul>
All in all I think I liked Easterhegg 2012 in Basel a little better, maybe
because it was my first bigger CCC-related event, maybe because I prefer to get
to know people and maybe run into them again the next day - at congress that
only happens if you both generally stay at one place (assembly, infodesk,
heaven) or already know each other. That aside I was sitting at MuCCC assembly
and answered a lot of questions about the flipdots.</p>
I managed to meet a few people I had interacted with online already, I managed
to have some good conversations with former strangers. I probably creeped
someone out by telling I might remember his nick from LAN parties 15 years ago,
but what can I do if I did remember it? :/</p>
Some of the spontaneous sessions revolved around podcasts (and I promised to
listen in to two new podcasts I only learnt about at 30c3) and bunnie and xobs
showing their novena laptops was very cool. Had to snicker a little when I
finished reading Little Brother today and it has an Epilog by bunnie. Such
coincidence. Much laughter. Wow.</p>
Wish/todo list for 31c3:</p>

Get there a day sooner</li>
Get a better hotel closer to the venue (but it wasn't bad, just not perfect)</li>
Know my way around already (will hopefully work out)</li>
Make plans to meet people earlier</li>
Be better prepared for people asking questions - it's not like a conference
booth but always telling them to wait for others is a bit annoying</li>
Make a bigger assembly</li>
Think up a plan to get the assemblies to get better signs, I was so
lost without the awesome overlay plan someone did on evening of day 1</li>
</ul>
Thanks to all the organizers, angels and visitors.</p>
10/10 - would go again</p>


On Twitter
2013-12-22T16:00:00Z
I got thinking about the contents of my twitter timeline. There are a lot of advocacy and political topics in it lately. Sometimes from people who I followed for specific technical contents. And although I won't tell anyone to post or not post about anything, I seem to do it right now.</p>
But I really don't want to read about certain topics on Twitter, as it's discouraging discussions. Well, maybe some people can do it, but I can't argue or even ask anything than very basic questions in 140 characters. You might call that rambling, but I can't argue in a totally succinct way. That's not to say I want anyone silenced, far from it. I do want to read about certain topics, but they're just too important for short quips.</p>
So for me, Twitter really is broken if you can't argue by linking specs or benchmarks or any mostly technical stuff really. Even when there's a much clearer picture of wrong and right, I still find it annoying to discuss anything on Twitter, especially with more than 2 people involved.</p>
Agreeing is surprisingly totally easy, just favorite it. Retweets are for the most part seen as positive promotion as well, unless directly followed upon with a statement of their own - but that happens only seldomly.</p>


The Stack - Two Years
2013-11-10T21:00:00Z
Exactly two years ago on November 10th, 2011 I launched The Stack
(announcement here</a>).</p>
In theory, that should be 51/52 posts, but again I missed a few:</p>

Week 49/2012 (weekend trip to Nuremberg)</li>
Week 06/2013 (being sick)</li>
Week 21/2013</li>
Week 30/2013</li>
Week 32/2013</li>
Week 35/2013</li>
Week 37/2013</li>
</ul>
7 missing (5 less than the year before), that leaves 44 posts - I could
actually compete as an Iron Blogger ;) I have to work on writing down the
reasons more diligently, though. Supposedly lack of time/planning/feeling
like it - if you need one.</p>
OK, so much for copy/pasting last year's post - original content ahead.</p>
What I still haven't accomplished in this year is providing a page of all
links, sorted by tag. I did write a script to have some insight into the
number of tags and their distribution. I even corrected some of them, when
they were close, but not identical (the old tagging problem...)</p>
Here are the Top 10 categories:</p>

48x Clojure</li>
37x Python</li>
28x VIM</li>
24x Security</li>
22x Go</li>
21x Game Development</li>
20x PHP</li>
18x Web Development</li>
15x Fonts</li>
14x Algorithms</li>
</ul>
The only feedback I've gotten this year falls into three categories:</p>

"I like it, please continue."</li>
Sharing it on Twitter/Facebook, what I read as "I tentatively like it."</li>
"Make it an email newsletter!11"</li>
</ul>
Thanks for #1 and #2 to the handful of readers :)</p>
Yeah, thinking about #3, if I find a way to accomplish it without a lot of
hassle, as I think I'll have less than 5 subscribers (the vocal minority).</p>
If you got anything to add, feel free to contact me wherever you can get hold
of me, that shouldn't be too hard.</p>
I do have one wish for this project, I'd love to have more academic papers in
it - obviously related to Computer Science, as that's all where I feel
capable enough to understand them, maybe apart from very light mathematics -
so if you find some, send me links. Of course other non-CS subjects might
interest me as well. You can also send any sources where you find the papers
you are reading</a>.</p>


Setting a default browser on Linux
2013-08-29T10:00:00Z
So I had a little problem recently with a "default browser" in Linux. I am
using terminator</code> with zsh</code> as my terminal and I could click links so that they
were opened in my default browser, chromium</code>, until I had installed midori</code>,
another webkit-based browser. Since then all links in terminator were opened in
midori</code> instead of chromium</code>. In icedove</code> as well, actually.</p>
As I stated elsewhere, I'm running Debian wheezy with xmonad instead of a
proper desktop environment (like GNOME/KDE/XFCE/LXDE) which is hilarious at
times like when I actually forgot how the file manager was called because I
hadn't used it in months. I only remembered the ones I didn't have installed
(mc</code>, thunar</code>, dolphin</code>) and only a day later stumbled over nautilus</code>. Ah well.</p>
Now, as it turns out, the task of setting your default browser in Linux is less
than userfriendly or even practical or sane.</p>
The best overview you find after a little searching is this
forum thread</a> which shows us</p>

update-alternatives --config x-www-browser</code></li>
update-alternatives --config gnome-www-browser</code> (both on Debian-based distros)</li>
exo-preferred-applications</code> (XFCE)</li>
xdg-open 'http://f5n.org'</code> and its config stuff:

xdg-settings --list</code></li>
xdg-settings set default-web-browser chromium.desktop</code> (yeah sure, I
don't have a desktop, but /usr/share/applications</code> is full of
*.desktop</code> files)</li>
</ul>
</li>
gconf</code></li>
the $BROWSER</code> environment variable</li>
</ul>
Actually I lied, and the last two I learned about elsewhere, but whatever.
There's also xdg-mime</code> which I still couldn't persuade to produce any
meaningful output.</p>
Yet none of those worked and after about an hour of fiddling I still had made
no progress.</p>
In this bug report</a> I
had finally found the solution, but see the update note below.</p>
You have to add something like this to your
~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=chrome.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=chrome.desktop
x-scheme-handler/ftp=chrome.desktop
</code></pre>
(I added the last two lines myself, but they were easy enough to guess.)</p>
Update 2014-02-05:</strong> At FOSDEM I just learned that it is now mimeapps.list</code>
instead of defaults.list</code> in the same folder. Syntax seems to be the same.
Detailed infos on ArchWiki</a>.
Thanks, Jerome</a> - and you should totally watch his talk</a>.</p>
Update 2016-01-28:</strong> Apparently emacs also is a special snowflake and doesn't apply any of the above settings.
There is browse-url</code> which defaulted to Firefox for me until I did run M-x customize-option -> browse-url-browser-function</code>
and set it to browse-url-chromium</code> (with a dropdown, setq</code> seems to be the way for real emacs users).
Here some more info on the topic</a>.</p>
End of Updates</strong></p>
Yeah, simple as that. Paste some arcane stuff in a file you don't even have and
it magically works. I'm not often hating on Linux desktop stuff because I am
actually pretty happy and productive, but this is a little insane.</p>


Responsive layout
2013-08-15T16:00:00Z
Although I don't have any reliable numbers to back it up and I'm also not
expecting many visitors, it's said that more and more web traffic happens
from mobile devices and this website looked not too great on very small
screens (mobile phones, that is - tablet size should've been fine). One of
the reasons was that I had used a static grid via
blueprint</a> when I made the site and hadn't
changed anything since. The blueprint release I used in June 2011 was from May
2011, but that is still the latest release now and
although it had worked, I wasn't particularly impressed either.</p>
So in the last two days I've redone the site in a responsive layout while
keeping the design (if you can call it so) mostly the same, except for some
intentional and unintentional changes to margins, paddings, font sizes and
whatnot.</p>
@ThorstenRinne</a> recommended
Foundation</a> (v 4.3.1 as of now) and I'm quite
happy with it. My tests with a Desire Z, an LG C550 and an iPhone 5 showed
considerable progress, and that's about all the energy I can muster on this
project. Bugreports with screenshots are welcome, of course.</p>
The Stack</a> will probably resume next monday, I've just been
too busy with stuff and didn't actually find a lot of interesting links either.</p>


On devices
2013-02-05T22:00:00Z

Hardware</a>

Thinkpad W500</a></li>
Fujitsu S710</a></li>
nx7010</a></li>
eeePC 900A</a></li>
NOVO7</a></li>
Desire Z</a></li>
Kindle</a></li>
Interlude</a></li>
Software</a></li>
Obstacles</a></li>
Solutions</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Lately I'm not on really good terms with my once shiny gadgets, but I can't pinpoint the problems, really. Well, maybe I have a good guess, but then I'd written this wall of text for naught.</p>
Hardware</a></h3>
Let's start with a list of my current "mobile" hardware.</p>
Lenovo ThinkPad W500</a></h4>
Work laptop, bought in Summer 2010. In general I'm very fond of it. It gets the job done, although it's only a Core2Duo with 8GB of RAM - nothing fancy like i3 or i5. I can run 2 VMs and still do what I need to do. It's usually hooked up to a 24" Dell screen, so I run 2x 1920x1050/1200. There's one huge downside: the battery power is just abysmal. Without high load, it's still dead after less than 3h. There's also my main point of criticism with Debian - there's no "put down lid to sleep" - the feature I envy most of MacBook users. (No, I haven't played around it with it for hours trying to fix it, I have an SSD and can usually hard-suspend and wake without a problem.) Then I'm too lazy to fiddle with putting on full-disk encryption, and I don't remember why I didn't use it when installing in the first time, 2.5 years ago. The backlight is dying slowly, maybe I need this to be replaced soonish. No problem working in a dark room, but in daylight it sucks a little already.</p>
Fujitsu S710</a></h4>
It's not a bad laptop, it has an i5 and 2 GB of memory (don't ask, not my choice), but the battery is even worse. I think I can get 2.5h of any non-compiling work out of it before it shuts down silently without a warning beep. (Again, too lazy to dig into this issue, that's some stuff where I don't want to spend hours of my life.) The fan randomly spins up (just like with most colleagues' MacBook Pros in the office) without any load on it. It also runs Debian testing, and mighty fine I might add.</p>
HP nx7010</a></h4>
Ah yes, my first laptop, bought in 2004 - 1.6 GHz Centrino single core, upgraded to 1.5 GB of RAM. Right now it runs ArchLinux but the last update broke X and I really didn't need it so far so this is still unfixed. If watching HTML5 and/or Flash movies wouldn't bring it to it's knees it might still my number one couch surfing device, as it handled all tasks I threw at it so far, albeit slowly. Pain point (and I guess I'm repeating myself) is the battery. It lasts between 2h and 3h - for once what you do actually matters, but still, this is terrible.</p>
Asus eeePC 900A</a></h4>
It's just over 4 years old and the display stopped working recently, but I'll have to hook it up to an external screen to declare it totally dead. For the price it was actually awesome and I've taken it on more trips to more countries</a> than most of the other devices combined. The keyboard wasn't totally easy to type on, the screen was small and the SSD was kind of slow but it run for over 3h and I could easily pack it to any location. It actually really saved my ass once when the power adapter of my HP laptop died while on vacation in Italy. I (very quickly) copied over a few documents and could continue writing my diploma thesis.</p>
ainol Novo 7 Tornado</a></h4>
My 7" Android tablet I bought in Hong Kong for 65 EUR. Perfect device for those times where all computers are shut down (like just after getting up) to check public transport schedules, play a few games when bored for 15 minutes or light browsing. I just can't get anything closely relatad to work done. The display isn't as brilliant as the Nexus 7 which I originally planned to buy until I found this thing by chance and the touch screen can be a little fiddly - for the amount of use it gets I'm much happier to have saved 135 EUR.</p>
HTC Desire Z</a></h4>
My mobile phone of choice. My first Android was a HTC Click/Tattoo which was cheap at the time and the perfect thing to get me hooked on Android. But the display wasn't exactly brilliant and it was very slow with the stock ROM and still slow with CyanogenMod. The Desire Z has a hardware keyboard and I'm generally very happy with it. That it only lasts for one day doesn't usually annoy me, but if I have to use it for the whole day (because all my other</em> devices are powerless) it's just not enough. I know, I could buy a better battery. The hardware keyboard is fine for using IRC or the eventual emergency SSH login - it's not a full replacement. My number one use case is probably reading feeds on the subway.</p>
Kindle</a></h4>
It's not yet arrived, but I'm looking forward to reading a few more books on the subway. Got it while it was on sale for 59 EUR yesterday, finally a "no more thinking, just try it out" moment.</p>
Interlude</a></h3>
So, yes, I think it boils down to me being pissed a bit about not being able to comfortably use</a> a laptop on conferences if there's no power outlet near. Many people I know have their main machine with them most of the time, this is clearly not for me</a> - I can tell that much. But even juggling mobile devices, on every small or big trip trying to find the right thing... Maybe it's time to move on and buy a "new" machine instead of relying on unwieldy 9, 4 or 3 old ones, if only it wasn't for the steep price of decent ones. Then again my personal laptop usage is far from exhaustive - let's say once or twice per week for a few hours and then a few conferences or other trips per year.</p>
Software</a></h3>
Not a big point, really. I've been using Debian testing for years and the longest I took to fix something seriously broken was about 30min (by debugging and then replacing gdm with xdm). Dual boot would be nice but is in no way obligatory and Windows would probably be booted as much as now - once a month for a movie. (Again I couldn't be assed to make it work on Linux when it already has Windows on it and I'm booting anyway. It seems I've really gotten lazy over the years. I won't fix broken things if I don't need to.)</p>
Obstacles</a></h3>
Unlike other people I'm not actually looking forward to new stuff. Installing, configuring, meh. I'm not really needing it either, the current setup works well enough to not get angry enough to replace something. And, mostly, I'm to cheap to buy a laptop for 1000 EUR if I have a somewhat working setup.</p>
Solutions</a></h3>
From what I've seen the Lenovo x230 seems kind of perfect for my use case. It's big enough to get work done, I tried the keyboard and actually liked the new clicky keys and it seems to run forever. The downside is the price and I'm also not sure the screen is big enough to be able to work on it for 8h a day. Speaking of battery life I'd probably even be happy with a MacBook Air, especially while travelling. I'm still no fan of OS X</a>, but when I'm not at home or in the office being able to use the computer trumps being totally happy with all the small details. Of course there should be a few more light 13" laptops out nowadays, but so far I've been absolutely happy with the 2 Lenovos I used and I don't really want to buy a Mac, especially when the only reasons are battery life and some minor conveniences regarding WLAN usage (from what I observed). Maybe I should just buy a few additional batteries and be done with it.</p>


PuppetCamp Ghent/FOSDEM 2013
2013-02-03T23:00:00Z
I got the offer by my employer Mayflower</a> to go to
Puppet Camp Ghent</a> and also
FOSDEM 2013</a> this year and so I gladly accepted the
offer. There were actually 6 more colleagues coming along, a respectable size
for a travel group.</p>
We decided to take a 7:00 plane (which is kind of a bad idea when your airport
isn't actually near the city) from Munich to Brussels on Thursday, which wasn't
a problem in itself, it just turns out that 9:09 train from
Brussel Nationaal Luchthaven</a> to Ghent takes
90min when there's one doing the trip in 30min. Ah well, why wouldn't anything
go wrong on a trip, so it better be over soon.</p>
Despite Google Maps giving us weird directions we managed to walk to the Venue
and only miss the first two talks (which is a shame because after I talked to
Eric Sorenson at the evening event I would've loved to see his).</p>
So I watched 3 talks and then spent the afternoon chatting with people. That
actually was so fun and interesting that I missed the talk about "exec" I
wanted to attend.</p>
After that we went to put our stuff in the hotel rooms and grab a quick dinner,
then headed for the drinks event. There I had some beer, got to know even more
people, talked to the folks from afternoon again, played some billiards, had
some more beer and then went to sleep when the bartender poked us to go home.</p>
</p>
So unfair, there were nearly as many Belgians there at the end :P</p>
Anyway, on Friday morning there were even more talks and the afternoon spent
chatting with people, before we went to Brussels (this time taking a fast
train though :P) and getting to our hotel there.</p>
Found a nice Italian restaurant for dinner (which was fun with 2 people
ordering in French, 2 people ordering in Italian and 1 in English) and then
went to the Beer Event.</p>
As this was my first FOSDEM I was a bit dismayed how crowded and airless the
venue for the beer event was. No chance at all to find the one guy I had
actually made plans to meet. We only had one beer then decided to go
somewhere else which proved to be very good idea. I did see 2 people whose
blogs I read through Planets, but that's actually not something to strike up
a conversation with (in these cases) so headcount of people met: 0.</p>
On Saturday at FOSDEM I first went into Peter Saint-Andre's talk "XMPP 101"
on the slim chance to learn something new, but more to have seen him talk,
he's done his share to make XMPP awesome after all. I then went to
"What’s wrong with php?" which wasn't bad, but too short and a bit onesided.
Met someone I knew from Hamburg's PHP Unconference and had a little chat about
PHP release policy and adoption, visited the BuddyCloud booth, asked for a
Jenkins sticker, talked a little to one of the booth guys: "Thanks for doing
Jenkins, we love it." - "Hey, we got an evangelist, take another sticker."</p>
By pure chance I noticed there was a ZeroMQ BoF planned, so I rushed there to
catch the folks just in time as they were heading for the bar, then talked for
a while with Ian</a> and
Pieter</a> and some more people whose names I
didn't manage to memorize. Sadly there was no latenight plane home, so mine was
supposed to start at ~17:00 so that I left at 15:00 basically mid-conversation,
which really sucked :( The plane got delayed so I might've taken 30 more
minutes but I don't plan to miss one anytime soon, so the timing was actually
ok.</p>
Interesting stuff I learnt about:</p>

Vagueant</a> - "vaguely like Vagrant
for linux containers (lxc)" which
Frank</a> mentioned</li>
PuppetDB</a> - it is
written in Clojure, let the code reading begin :)</li>
puppet-playground</a> and
puppi</a></li>
</ul>
Summary:</p>

Puppet Camp was awesome, most talks I watched were really good, some were
just ok, but none was bad.</li>
FOSDEM could've actually been even more awesome if I had time to catch up
with and meet everyone I've corresponded with online in the past</li>
Met some folks again after a few months/over a year, met some new folks</li>
Don't go to FOSDEM only on one day</li>
You might be interested/involved in too many technologies if you know
people by name, face or nick from Linux Kernel, Debian, Red Hat, Python,
PHP, FreeBSD, XMPP, GNOME, GRML, ZeroMQ (from the top of my head)</li>
</ul>
People I wanted to say hi to but missed:</p>

@mr_ud, @mikagrml and @ch2500 (GRML guys who I met in Graz)</li>
@mgdm and @h (PHP)</li>
</ul>
Thanks:</p>

Mayflower for travel</li>
Booking.com for free drinks</li>
PuppetLabs and Inuits for organizing PuppetCamp</li>
FOSDEM organizers for what seemed to be the start of a great conference
(when I left early)</li>
</ul>


Mac Tales
2013-01-04T23:00:00Z

Introduction</a></li>
Day 1</a></li>
Day 2</a></li>
Summary</a></li>
</ul>
Introduction</a></h3>
About two years ago I had the plan to borrow a Mac and finally (first time since
either Summer 2000 or 2001 when my colleague upgraded his work Mac from an OS 9
one to an OS X one and let me play with it fresh after the installation) give at
a more thorough try than all the 5 minute uses when struggling to use a
colleague's Mac during a presentation. Well, it finally worked in September,
but only now I found time to compile my notes, have fun :)</p>
Day 1</a></h3>
First steps</h4>

Setup</em>: Very nice, at least compared to last pre-installed Windows box.</li>
Asking for Apple account twice</em>: annoying</li>
"Connecting to Apple" after choosing to use only a local account</em>: WTF?</li>
Oh god why can't I just scroll in the right direction?</li>
Possibility to add a mugshot on account creation</em>: nice</li>
Calling the machine "Florians MacBook Pro"</em>: braindead</li>
The dock on the lower end</em>: Are you kidding me?
1680x1050 is bad enough for a 15" notebook bought in 2011 - why waste 100
Pixel for a huge dock? At least putting it to the right side was easy.</li>
Settings</em>: nice, found "tap to click" very fast</li>
</ul>
Apple Mail</h4>

Autoguess is far worse than Thunderbird</li>
Why do you need to give a password at this stage? How will I know you won't
just try plaintext authentication?</li>
Why do I have to reenter my address?</li>
Why don't you check for MX records yourself?</li>
Why can't I use tab?</li>
Why do you suggest POP if there's no POPd running on that hostname I gave?</li>
Plaintext: Redeeming quality</li>
Changing settings gives instant feedback: nice</li>
Signature feature: Broken? Why no automatic "-- "?</li>
</ul>
Keyboard map</h4>

why? Why? WHY?</li>
@</code> is bad enough (I finally learnt not to quit random apps), but I can't
remember |</code> at all. Same with \</code>.</li>
But it doesn't feel too bad typing on the keyboard itself. Illumination is
discreet and looks very good.</li>
</ul>
Software update</h4>
Definitely better than Windows Update :)</p>
Photo Booth</h4>

Why ESC to quit?</li>
Whitescreen as a flash? WTF</li>
</ul>
Address book</h4>
Arr, anachronisms (and alliterations) ahead! Looks a little funky as well.</p>
App Store</h4>

Is there no "free" category or am I just not seeing it? Weird ideas, I know.</li>
Why do I need an Apple ID to download free stuff? :(</li>
</ul>
Hardware</h4>

Why did you have to switch cmd and ctrl again?</li>
after 2h, it's quite warm. From installing apps and idling at less than 10%
cpu used</li>
</ul>
Safari</h4>

Why can't I rightclick? WTF.</li>
Downloads: animation is cool, the clearly visible target button is cool</li>
</ul>
Font tool</h4>
Looks nice, but why would you put fonts into a "fun" category by default?</p>
Messaging</h4>

iChat</strong>: Why do I find "create account" under system settings (which is cool)
but the app is only findable via spotlight?</li>
** Colloquy**: hmm, out of the box: confusing</li>
</ul>
Quicksilver</h4>
Best install dialog ever</p>
Installations</h4>
Why "drag to install"? - why not just "do you want to install? yes/No"?</p>
Misc. Apple stuff</h4>

Modal dialogs sliding in from the top: nice</li>
Why do I have to doubleclick on Programs when the icons in System Settings
open with a single click? That's more inconsistent than Windows...</li>
Why do some apps close on X and some won't?</li>
"Don't Save" buttons: so much saner than Yes/No/Cancel</li>
Why the hell don't I find the Terminal under Programs?</li>
Password dialog on screensaver + wrong password: looks nice and wobbly</li>
Auto-Resizing dialogs: nice</li>
DigitalColor Meter: nice</li>
Grab: nice</li>
Java Preferences: Tells me that Java is not installed. Weird.</li>
Preferences: Either hit or miss, and sometimes really hard to change.</li>
Network utility: Has finger, geek cred points.</li>
VoiceOver (Screenreader): Haven't tried it, but nice that it's packaged by default.</li>
The Maximizing +: Why is the behaviour so weird? Full height, full screen,
nothing. And I thought some custom styled Windows apps (Winamp) were bad...</li>
Gestures: Too many, but seem to work like a charm overall.</li>
Spaces</strong>: I can't imagine anyone would find them in Mission Control without
googling. Even I as a total non-Apple user knew the term "Spaces" or could
have made sense of it - but that was up to 10.6. m(</li>
</ul>
Github for Mac</h4>

First impression: sweet</li>
Clone repository to "Documents" -> "code/bar" and what do I get?
/Users/foo/Documents/code\:bar</code> - WTF?</li>
</ul>
iTunes</h4>
Oh hey, compared to Windows this is actually really nice. As in, it doesn't
crash on first launch and is even able to play some web radio station.</p>
Summary for day 1</h3>

Overall handling with only one hand: very good so far</li>
Biggest Plus so far: the font rendering engine, everything looks really smooth.</li>
In general the gui feels integral, most apps look alike - in a good way. The
Exception is: Safari</strong>.</li>
Podcast Publisher: First beachball of death. Uptime 2:36</li>
</ul>
Day 2</a></h3>
I gave in and got an Apple ID in order to use the Mac App Store. The Xcode
download seems to be huge and while the progress bar looks kind of slick, I'd
preferred some info like size or time left though...</p>
Major WTF: the Productivity category. Why not label it "Misc. crap" or
"didn't fit anywhere else?"</p>
I switched to English in OS X - that went well. The App Store was English, but
the contents were German. After clicking the German flag I was asked about my
country. I clicked USA and the contents were English, but I was logged out.</p>
Is that a different App Store? Who knows?</p>
At least the back button works.</p>
Safari doesn't let me copy/paste my apple id password. Can't tell you enough
how glad I was that I picked a very random 16 or so character combo of stuff...</p>
connect.apple.com</code> doesn't know UTF8.</p>
I like the screensaver, although it's kind of generic if you're used to people
with macs.</p>
Stuff I'd really love to try, but it's payware (which is not bad per se, far
from it, but I can't just test it for a day):
Pixelmator</strong>, Acorn</strong>, GarageBand</strong>, Coda</strong>, Cathode</strong> (iirc)</p>
Actually, Safari is more usable than what I imagined. Haven't tried doing any
web dev work though.</p>
So, after finally getting homebrew to work, which needed Xcode, which needed an
Apple-ID and was a huge download that took forever, then needed me to click
through a lot of Xcode dialogs, then install the forgotten CLI tools I have
seriously forgotten for which tool I wanted brew originally.
I really can't make this shit up.</em> After some pondering I think it was
Textmate 2, but I've since installed Sublime Text, Chocolat and PHPStorm. Oh,
and MacEdit is a really nice default editor btw, I think I could get used to
that one.</p>
Laying on the sofa and coding some python, I once again notice that I like the
keyboard. Even the Cmd seems to make some sort of sense now. Just when I get a
positive vibe I come to the point of having to type my first square brackets.
After around 5 pairs I already want to punch someone. Maybe using US layout
helps, but if I use US Intl (which I'm not 100% confident with yet) plus Mac
special keys I'd be more than lost. On German keyboards...
programming is definitely worse than on PC keyboards.</p>
The volume up/down buttons are really nice and I use them all the time and they
work better than on some of my laptops. As I write this I notice that the
speakers are quite ok. Not perfect though, but I've seen worse.</p>
Why the hell do all the key bindings have be slightly, but not completely
different? cmd-tab</code> instead of alt-tab</code>, alt-left</code> to skip words,
cmd-shift-left</code> to select towards line start, alt-n</code> for tilde.</p>
The major takeaway from this experiment is that everything somehow feels new
and fresh and I'm using new tools and workflows for basically everything I do.
I've installed a big pile of stuff, really.</strong></p>
Running now: Safari, Chrome, Terminal, iTerm2, TextEdit, Twitter, PHPStorm,
Adium, Appetizer, MacVim, Quassel.</p>
I like the automatic space switching, I'm missing a shortcut to send a window
anywhere, but for now Expose? and dragging works. It's also annoying that some
minimized apps show up in cmd-tab</code>. Or all? Minimizing/closing behavior is
really weird, anyway.</p>
Tried and not used really: TextMate2, Colloquy (didn't like it at all),
Sublime Text 2 (didn't need it yet), QuickSilver (bit useless, so far Spotlight
was good enough)</p>
The MBP getting really hot on your lap/under your palms without any meaningful
load is really annoying.</p>
Summary</a></h3>
Yes, I think I could work with a Mac. No, I don't think I'd fall in love.</p>
I'm not often working with a laptop literally on my lap (like just now,
making a blog post out of my messy notes, on a train), but if I would, I could
definitely rule out the MBP (late 2010 model, iirc) - it's just running too
uncomfortably hot, whereas my Lenovo, Asus and Fujitsu ones stay cooler even
when compiling.</p>
What I hate most is the keyboard layout, but I think after a switch (and I
think I'd really prefer US keyboard layout) I could get my work done in the
same speed after a week or so.</p>
In general, I was sometimes positively surprised that stuff really is that much
better and nicer than on Linux and Windows, but at other times I was shocked
how weird and inconsistent some things were, especially as I'd heard this a lot
as a pro-Mac argument.</p>
So, all in all I tried to be as fair as possible and not think about price
differences, the closed gate model, etc.pp - I really just wanted to explore
and try to get stuff done.</p>
Personally I don't think I'd gain anything buying a Mac, given that I can't get
rid of Windows</a> anyway and am still a lot
happier with Linux or FreeBSD. But if my employer forced me to use a Mac (no, a
slight nudge won't help) I'd cope with that, unlike having to use a Windows
machine for web development, that feels like working with both hands tied to a
hot waffle iron, or something.</p>
Farewell MacBook Pro, I don't see us meeting again soon (but it was still fun).</p>


Unsolved problems
2013-01-01T21:00:00Z
What better day than New Year's Day to compile a list of problems and
annoyances that weren't solved in 2012, just as the years before.</p>

The storage dilemma</a></li>
The Windows problem</a></li>
The movie problem</a></li>
</ol>
The storage dilemma</a></h3>
This one's probably more a personal problem than one of mankind, but that
doesn't make it less complicated, at least for me :)</p>
In a perfect world, I'd have all</em> my data on all</em> my devices, encrypted</em> and
also backupped</em>.</p>
A bold claim, but it won't work:</p>

My main machine has enough disk space, most of my devices don't</li>
My laptops are encrypted, my main machine and my phone aren't</li>
I can't keep a basement file server like I used to have, the flat has no room for it</li>
Said file server would have too bad a connection to make my "own private cloud"</li>
I'm not putting all my data onto a dedicated server out of my physical reach, for cost and paranoia reasons</li>
I do keep backups, but I'm not really sure everything will work or is backupped</li>
I probably fail at backups like everyone else, having too many copies of some data and too few of other data</li>
</ul>
So, where do I stand now?</p>

Everything written (emails, text) is stored in git or somewhere with daily off-site backups, that's a start</li>
At least for Linux boxes, my homedir is in git, stripped of all sensitive information (a pain in itself, but it works)</li>
Main machine gets backupped sporadically, most annoying is the MP3 collection of all my CDs/digital purchases, as it is quite large</li>
I totally fail at backupping anything Windows-related. Too much registry voodoo and special files, plus savegames being put anywhere</li>
Firefox and Chrome sync are a good start, plus keeping bookmarks at pinboard.in</a> and RSS in Google Reader</li>
</ul>
Oh, and while the solution to this problem is already easy or done to some, I
simply can't foresee how I can solve it without a huge investment of time,
money and restructuring year-old workflows.</p>
The Windows problem</a></h3>
So, my main machine and one other machine (desktop workstations) are running
Windows 7, as they're mostly used for playing Games. As mentioned above this
presents a lot of problems, first and foremost lack of encryption (my last
test of TrueCrypt for full disk encryption didn't end well) and second, backups.</p>

Games I play don't run on Linux, for the most part</li>
I don't have a problem with Windows per se, just that I can't work - all non-Java development at home happens via PuTTY + VIM</li>
There's still the security problem and booting up a Linux box for every homebanking use really sucks</li>
</ul>
For many people I know these and other reasons led to an exodus to pure console
gaming, but I've noticed that it's not for me.</p>
I do have an Xbox 360 S and am quite happy with it, actually, but all of the
games I've played most in all the years are PC titles. Since 2004 (iirc) most
of my gaming time is used up my MMORPGs, a typical PC genre. I'm also running
those windowed whenever I can and my second screen is for irc, browser, mail
and all the other usual things. This is also why I'm not worried at all by the
hugely inflated /played number on some of my WoW characters. It's just not
100% gaming time for me, I'll often leave the client running for hours just
chatting with a few people from time to time. That said, those /played numbers
still look horribly high ;) But as I said, The Xbox 360 is fun, but as with
the GameBoy Advanced before it and the SNES before that I'm just not the
die-hard console games freak. Before I played MMOs I mostly played EgoShooters,
which didn't even exist at the time (according to Wikipedia, Halo 1 was
released in November 2001).</p>
Oh, and I didn't even mention how I switched on my Xbox a few days ago to play
a new game, only to be greeted by Error 68 (broken HDD) and am still unsure
whether I'll get to keep my Savegames on the USB stick after replacing the
disk. (I lost them once already because on the second day the first USB stick I
had used now only contained garbage...) Just got it working again, btw. \o/</p>
The movie problem</a></h3>
I used to be an avid watcher of movies, but recently do not enjoy it as much.
From time to time I end up buying DVDs for Movies with the real intent to
watch them as soon as possible, but most end up not being watched for months.</p>
Yep, I've already cut that back, so I spent around 20 EUR for 3 DVDs in 2012
and even watched one of them already, that's hardly worth mentioning in terms
of money, but I still wonder why this development happened and why the
interest is still strong enough to think watching a certain movie might be a
good idea. Which it usually is, can't remember ever buying a movie (or going
to the cinema) and hating it.</p>
Conclusion</h3>
So, that was one major problem, one annoyance and one nitpicking, so I'd say
I'm pretty thankful there's not more to rant about right now (although it could
be fun...)</p>


2012 in Review
2012-12-31T17:00:00Z
2012 comes to an end, might as well think about what happened last year.</p>
Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3>

WoW: Cataclysm (PC) - first few months of the year</em></li>
WoW: Mists of Pandaria (PC) - came out in September, fourth expansion (Am I playing this game for 7 years now? Seriously?)</em></li>
SW:TOR (PC) - Launched in late 2011, was subscribed until March.</em></li>
Runes of Magic (PC) - more meh than yay</em></li>
Rock Band/Guitar Hero (various titles) (Xbox360) - I think I like LEGO Rock Band the most.</em></li>
Skylanders (Xbox360) - Awesome</em></li>
Diablo III (PC) - I liked Diablo 2 better, but was a nice experience in the summer</em></li>
Ingress (Android) - I seem to live and walk in the most remote parts of Munich... not so much fun</em></li>
Mirror's Edge (Steam) - Refreshingly different. Nerve-wrecking in a way.</em></li>
Portal 2 (Steam)</li>
WH40k: Dawn of War II (Steam)</li>
Audiosurf (Steam)</li>
Borderlands GOTYE (Steam)</li>
WildStar Online</a> - Signed up for the Beta, haven't heard back. Can't wait though.</em></li>
MechWarrior Online Beta (PC) - Did not like it.</em></li>
</ul>
Books I've read</h3>

The Shockwave Rider</a> by John Brunner</li>
Snow Crash</a> by Neal Stephenson - I loved it, reminded me so much of Neuromancer and all the better Shadowrun novels.</em></li>
JavaScript: The Good Parts</a> by Douglas Crockford - Reread it, it's quite ok. I especially love how Crockford points out all the flaws in JavaScript's design without blaming the people responsible.</em></li>
The Joy of Clojure</a> by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser - I learned so much from this book.</em></li>
Steampunk - kurz & geek</a> by Alex Jahnke and Marcus Rauchfuß - A nice introduction to Steampunk and one of the few O'Reilly titles in my shelf</em></li>
Dubliners</a> by James Joyce - My first Joyce book, and I really liked it.</em></li>
A Short History of Nearly Everything</a> (German version) by Bill Bryson - Birthday present by my employer, loved every page of it.</em></li>
Expert C Programming</a> by Peter Van Der Linden - Reread it, not done much C coding, so probably didn't stick.</em></li>
Freakonomics</a> by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner  - Awesome fun, picked it up in an airport bookstore after my boss had recommended it a lot earlier.</em></li>
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid</a> by Douglas R. Hofstadter - There was a new subreddit</a> to have a guided readthrough, but not very far into the book I kind of lost interest :(</em></li>
Fray, Vol.1</a> by Joss Whedeon - Buffy comic</em></li>
</ul>
Books I didn't read (but bought anyway)</h3>

How to Win Friends and Influence People</a> by Dale Carnegie</li>
SuperFreakonomics</a> by by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner</li>
The Sandman Vol.1</a> by Neil Gaiman</li>
Burning Chrome</a> by William Gibson</li>
Stars My Destination</a> by Alfred Bester</li>
Creatures of Light and Darkness</a> by Roger Zelazny</li>
The Demolished Man</a> by Alfred Bester</li>
Wolfbane</a> by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth</li>
</ul>
Hardware I've bought</h3>

Buffalo AirStation WZR-HP-G450H-EU - Blame Amazon Cyber Monday</em></li>
Raspberry Pi - didn't do too much yet, but it looks really nice</em></li>
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS16EG-K - cheap digicam for the big Asia trip, quite happy with it</em></li>
Noppoo Choc Mini Cherry Mx-Black - I wanted to have a "real" mechanical keyboard. I actually have two of those now, but that's a different tale to tell...</em></li>
Sennheiser PC 320 Gaming Headset - Finally replaced my old SpeedLink headset. I love this thing.</em></li>
Soehnle 63750 electronic bathroom scales - Didn't help, still overweight :|</em></li>
Roccat Kone - Replaced my dying Razer mouse after they discontinued the model I loved. Very happy with it.</em></li>
A new main machine</a></li>
</ul>
Music I've bought</h3>

The Hives - Lex Hives - Awesome.</em></li>
Wintersun - Time I - OK.</em></li>
Skrillex - Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites - Very good.</em></li>
Deichkind - Befehl Von Ganz Unten - Good.</em></li>
Amanda Palmer - Theatre is Evil - My third Kickstarter, and very happy to have done it.</em></li>
Necrocomiccon - Mjölnir for Nothing - Awesome.</em></li>
iGame Music Bundle - Very good.</em></li>
</ul>
Social network usage</h3>

Twitter - often, i.e. several times per day - responding to mentions and DMs asap</em></li>
Facebook - once or twice daily, unless extremely bored or involved in a discussion, which doesn't happen often</em></li>
soup.io - reading /friends maybe once or twice per month, for a few hours each - posting music videos every few days/weeks</em></li>
App.net - see below</em></li>
Tumblr - at times posting to special interest blogs (that no one reads), completely ignoring the community aspect</em></li>
StudiVZ - did I cancel my account? Does that thing still work?</em></li>
StayFriends - Oliver Thiel tries to get me back with his monthly? messages in vain.</em></li>
</ul>
Messaging</h3>

IRC - nearly always connected, not much active usage, but very much passive, i.e. skimming logs or PMing people</em></li>
Jabber - very often</em></li>
Email - very often, but apparently much less than some other people - I don't know this "drowning in mails"</em></li>
Twitter - often, see above</em></li>
Facebook Messages - I usually respond to these 12-24h late :)</em></li>
WhatsApp - got it installed and actually using it to communicate with about 3 people, yay</em></li>
</ul>
Trips</h3>

Switzerland (Zurich in January and Basel in April)</li>
Singapore</a> (August)</li>
Indonesia</a> (August)</li>
Hong Kong</a> (August)</li>
Had to cancel my only talk in 2012 due to illness (Grazer Linuxtage in April)</li>
</ul>
Other misc. stuff</h3>

Joined the muCCC</a></li>
Travelled a lot more by train than in any other year (if I'm not mistaken)</li>
Started with Wing Chun</li>
Tried using Mac OS X for the first time since 2001 - got a half-finished blog post prepared</li>
Using TweetDeck (Chrome) as my main Twitter client nowadays</li>
The Stack</a> turned 1 year old in November</li>
I only wrote 7 blog posts in 2012, and converted my old blog codeschmie.de</a> to use telegr.am</a></li>
</ul>
Online services and software</h3>

Paid just shy of 10$ for pinboard.in</a> - Absolutely happy</em></li>
Joined app.net</a> - I have no clue why. Let's pretend I was drunk?</em></li>
Started using booking.com</a> - excellent experience</em></li>
Cancelled VPS at 2host.com - horrible service and performance</em></li>
Cancelled VPS at prgmr.com</a> - good experience, but didn't need it anymore</em></li>
Got a VPS at de-punkt.de</a> - excellent experience</em></li>
Still got a low end box at proplay.biz - much better experience than 2011</em></li>
For the first time in many years had problems with my primary hoster, Strato AG</li>
Started using Evernote and Dropbox a lot more - Nothing important or secret there, but oh so handy sometimes</li>
Light Table (Kickstarter)</a> - Haven't had time to look at the previews :(</em></li>
</ul>
Online services I've signed up for but never used after the first week</h3>

Readmill - hmm?</em></li>
Streetspotr - I was terribly bored. Maybe this + Ingress = epic?</em></li>
Adminium - some Heroku addon maybe?</em></li>
New Relic - thanks for the shirt, but the product wasn't my cup of tea</em></li>
Quote.FM - I got referred there but I don't see the point. Still using it a bit for The Stack</em></li>
grove.io - looked nice, but I want a real application irc client</em></li>
Wunderkit - it could have been useful, but not for me it seems</em></li>
Spotify - annoying ads, wonky Facebook login, horrible UX, only when I really want to try a spotify link given by someone</em></li>
</ul>
Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours</h3>

PHP - mostly at work, hardly at home</em></li>
Clojure - more learning, more using</em></li>
JavaScript - after resisting for so long...</em></li>
Python - trying not to get too rusty</em></li>
Lua - Took over maintenance for a WoW Addon</em></li>
Ruby - Started to dig a little deeper, mostly due to puppet, after a long aversion of several years</em></li>
Java - Hardly used at all this year</em></li>
Haskell - tried to give it another chance, the syntax is still irking me</em></li>
</ul>
Programming languages not used</h3>

Scala - not worth the effort right now after my failed experiments in 2011</em></li>
Perl - trying to use more one liner stuff, but not really getting better :(</em></li>
C - no time and ideas for real projects</em></li>
Go - not more than a few hours</em></li>
</ul>


The Stack - One Year
2012-11-10T23:59:00Z
Exactly one year ago on November 10th, 2011 I launched The Stack (announcement here</a>).</p>
In theory, that should be 52 posts, but I missed a few:</p>

Week 50,51/2011</li>
Week 01/2012</li>
Week 14/2012 (having much fun in Switzerland)</li>
Week 20/2012 (playing too much Diablo III)</li>
Week 25/2012</li>
Week 30,31,32,33/2012 (trip to Asia)</li>
Week 39/2012 (playing too much WoW: Mists of Pandaria)</li>
Week 43/2012 (been sick)</li>
</ul>
So, 12 missing, that leaves 40 posts (and often the first one after a pause was bigger than usual) full of bookmarks, reading recommendations and a little music.
In general, I've got a lot of positive feedback, despite the contents being highly focused on my personal interests. There hasn't been a huge ton of feedback though, but I think I'll continue doing this for now - at least until I run out of time (It usually takes 30-40 minutes of preparation every Sunday evening/Monday morning and then ~5 minutes to deploy).</p>
As I'm writing this I haven't yet tried to sort all links by tags, but my guess is that it will look like this (sorted by occurrence)</p>

programming languages</li>
ops/devops/servers</li>
programming/software engineering</li>
vim</li>
games</li>
graphics/design/fonts</li>
algorithms</li>
</ul>
What I did only very rarely was commenting on single links - sometimes it could be helpful, but in the end I decided it's best to let the original author's title try to catch your attention.</p>
What I've planned to do for a while but haven't gotten around to was doing a special page with all links sorted by category.</p>
So, if anyone's reading this one year review, I'd love to get some feedback (don't worry, I won't ask again until next year) via mail, twitter, irc or wherever you can get hold of me :)</p>

What did you like best? (Weekly format, Contents, Focus on X, Whatever)</li>
Any ideas how to improve?</li>
Any channels where you'd love to be informed about new posts? (Right now it's Twitter, Facebook, App.net, Google+ and quote.fm I think - If I can automate it, be my guest)</li>
Would you like to submit links?</li>
</ol>


Anatomy of a social graph
2012-08-27T23:59:00Z
In the aftermath of Twitter</a> announcing</a> all kinds</a> of changes</a> and app.net</a> launching and people expressing concerns, hopeful anticipation or ridicule</a> due to the signup fee of 50$.</p>
All this, and the unsuccessful search for an awesome Twitter client since I started using it in 2008 (I'm using the Tweetdeck Chrome App</a> nowadays, but it's a crutch) led me to analyze how I use social media by first looking at the supposedly most important part - the users I'm socializing with.</p>
I am following about 130 accounts on twitter, give or take. It's 127 now, I unfollowed 4 while creating this list and I am one off somewhere I think - so let's keep 130. I filed them into categories:</p>

29 colleagues and ex-colleages</li>
23 people I've got to know/learnt about due to my involvement in PHP</li>
14 people I got to know on IRC</li>
11 people over whose websites I stumbled and that somehow got stuck</li>
11 people from university (not necessarily graduating with me)</li>
8 accounts that are hilarious to read or somehow entertain me</li>
6 people doing clojure</li>
4 companies/websites (usually small ones that I somehow have a relation with)</li>
3 events/conferences/etc</li>
3 bots stating facts or posting stuff</li>
2 real life friends not in any other category</li>
2 scala guys</li>
2 devops</li>
1 python guy</li>
</ul>
So one could say it's mostly people I interact with in real life or via mail, irc, facebook anyway.
There are roughly 10 accounts (10%) that are held by organisations or projects, the rest should be humans.
Of the 90% supposed humans there might be 5 accounts max I have never interacted with on any medium.
Of the 90% supposed humans there are about 25 accounts (20%) with whose owners I have never interacted in real life.</p>
So, does that make me an atypical user? Am I supposed to follow some celebrities? At least there's two programmers with wikipedia pages, I hope that satisfies my celebrity quota.</p>
Next up, Facebook - 156 friends, of whom I've never met 7 in person.</p>

79 colleagues and ex-colleages, that's what you get for signing up because of work actually</li>
12 people from uni</li>
16 people from school</li>
18 people mau</li>
10 people from PHP (of whom I've never met 2 in person)</li>
15 people from irc (of whom I've never met 4 in person)</li>
5 misc, mostly friends made through other friends, if not included above already</li>
1 relative, yay</li>
</ul>
The overlap is ~40 people that I got in both social networks.</p>
Taking into account texting, jabber, irc and email the only reasonable conclusion I can draw: I'm communicating too much?</p>


Travel journal - Conclusion
2012-08-20T08:15:00Z
I've left Europe for the first time at the end of July to visit Singapore, Indonesia (Bali) and Hong Kong and I've written up a few things. Maybe I'll add some pics later.</p>
The Good:</h3>

Prepaid SIMs in .sg/.hk for 15/10 EUR - awesome when going around town.</li>
My 5 EUR Crumpler Camera Belt Bag. I always hated those things, but this one was so small, easy to open and close and lightweight, I might just buy my next bag from Crumpler as well, no matter the price.</li>
Cathay Pacific. I haven't taken an intercontinental flight before, but this was all I ever hoped for - except for room for my knees and I don't think any airline will do better. The entertainment system was superb, the food was quite ok, I got all I asked for - only boarding seemed a little less organized than in Germany.</li>
Flu masks in the subway, wish Europeans would adopt that. I surely would if I'm not the absolutely only one.</li>
Soda cans for less than 1 EUR, even in venues where you can sit and eat. Screw you German shops and takeaways.</li>
Soda, juices and tea in 100 flavors, even without sugar - not only Coca Cola.</li>
Schweppes offers Dry Ginger Ale and Ginger Beer. I miss it already.</li>
Evernote for sketching these posts.</li>
No problems at all communicating in Singapore.</li>
</ul>
The Bad:</h3>

Annoying merchants trying to drag you into their shops (Bali) or generally annoy you on the streets (fake Rolex dealers in HK).</li>
Many people in Hong Kong don't speak more than a few words English. We didn't really have huge problems, but not understanding at all and having to point and guess or having to repeat or let them repeat two or three times can be a bit of a hassle.</li>
</ul>
The Ugly:</h3>

It's over :(</li>
Compared to the flight price the expenses for hotels, admission fees, transportation (public and taxi), food and drinks and souvenirs was ridiculously low. When taking out certain expenses that fall into the "would have bought at home anyway" like one pair of shoes, an android tablet or an additional cabin luggage bag we averaged less than 50 EUR per person per day, excluding hotel room and breakfast. So the bad part really is the cost of flying, money- and timewise (~30h inside a plane, ~13h on airports).</li>
</ul>
Greatest surprises:</h3>

How nice the Singaporeans are. Never have I got so much offers to be shown the way or answered questions, sometimes when only consulting a map for like 10seconds.</li>
How many people use their smartphones on the subway, in Singapore and Hong Kong. And how many people older than, say, 40 play games on their smartphone on the subway.</li>
Maybe it was just bad luck, but I had the feeling that Europeans in general are more likely to step out of your way or let you through a narrow spot whereas Hong Kong people stay where they are, ignore you and won't let you through. To be fair, sometimes people just squeezed through where I had no chance due to larger size, width and a backpack, but I had to take the long way in shops or narrow spots so often that it struck me.</li>
</ul>
There are part 1</a>, part 2</a> and part 3</a>.</p>


Travel journal - Hong Kong
2012-08-20T08:00:00Z
I've left Europe for the first time at the end of July to visit Singapore, Indonesia (Bali) and Hong Kong and I've written up a few things. Maybe I'll add some pics later.</p>
10.8.</h3>
Grabbed a CSL</a> prepaid SIM in the morning for 11 EUR, coverage is again better than at home, woohoo :( (Originally planned to get a Three SIM as recommended, but I took what I could get.)
Sightseeing tour at 10, saw a huge part of Hong Kong Island and Victoria Peak, Aberdeen and Happy Valley. 30min Sampan tour in Victoria Harbour. Strolling along Nathan Road, the malls are packed with brand stores, reminds me of Singapore's Orchard Road. Had a frozen Fanta smoothie ice cream float (had I not heard of a root beer float I probably would have been puzzled) in Kowloon Park</a> and had a look at Statue Walk, the maze and the aviary. Visited the Night Market</a> and fended off a few fake Rolex dealers. Dinner at a weird Dessert Shop that also seemed to have a few normal dishes like the Pork Skin, Squid and veggies curry, microwaved that I had. Edible, but not so great.</p>
11.8.</h3>
Took the tram towards Central (it only costs ~30 cents, no matter how far you go without changing cars, but it's slow due to so many stops) and hopped off somewhere near Causeway Bay. Had a look at Sogo</a>, a huge Japanese mall. After that we took the Star Ferry</a> to Kowloon and visited the Avenue of Stars</a> (like the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Hong Kong's stars. Didn't know too many names, but there were: Sir Run Run Shaw, Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh and Wong Kar Wai.
Visited the Central-Mid levels escalators</a> (a bit disappointing, in fact) and went for a walk through SoHo and the Man Mo Temple.
Quick rest at Victoria Park, dinner at some place possibly named Fairwood. Looked like fast food, but tasted excellent.
I don't exactly remember the day, but one time something funny happened to me on the MTR. I have to elaborate a bit and say that the trains aren't exactly as high as our ones, so I had to slightly duck my head to enter and leave and on certain elevated spots I reached the ceiling, in the tram I couldn't even stand upright anywhere. So, anyway, this one day I'm standing in the MTR near a door, ducked a little and some huge Swiss guy (I think he was 2.05m or so) enters, totally ducking his way inside and standing in a weird pose. Then he saw me, looked at me, looked at the ceiling and we both burst into laughter.</p>
12.8.</h3>
Tried to find the Jade Market (this time the map was bad) and ended up running in circles until we found it. Saw the Tin Hau temple nearby. Watched the show at Kung Fu Corner in Kowloon Park (14:30 every sunday) that consisted of tributes to elder sifus</a> and children students (at least sifu was the only repeated chinese word I could understand), dragon dances, short gong play intermissions and kung fu performances by children and also adults.
Then went to Sha Tin to find the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas</a> (that Google Search and Google Maps failed to find when I looked, but I used "10000") so we ended up in the part of the monastery that seemed to be a cemetary for local people, as there wasn't a single English word written anywhere. Gladly the third guy we asked spoke English and told us to follow him all the way down again to the other entrance. Seems it's quite hidden, a little path next to the parking lot without any signs. The venue was supposed to close in a few minutes so I sprinted (ok, I tried...) uphill for a few hundred metres until I ran into someone and asked him how far it would be. "What do you mean, how many steps?" he said but could indeed sooth my doubts by estimating it to 5-10 minutes on the winded path. Managed to get up in time and take a few photos but that climate isn't too well-suited for sports, especially for foreigners. Had a quick look at a mall near the MTR station that turned out to be a furniture-themed mall (they even had an IKEA) like the one we saw in Singapore. Went back to the city and had dinner at YanYun</a> Sichuan, very delicious. Run into it by chance by actually looking for another restaurant in that mall that doesn't seem to exist anymore and not getting a table at a Korean restaurant next door.</p>
13.8.</h3>
Planned to go to Ocean Park</a>, read the ambiguous leaflet incorrectly, missed the bus by 30sec and had to wait an hour. Arrived at 1215, went through an enormous queue in an amazingly short time. The 10% off voucher also worked, woohoo.
The "shows" leaflet was also not very helpful, so we got into a children's play in Chinese and bailed out early. The bird show was quite okay, with a little bit of a plot of someone chopping down a tree, thus destroying the birds' habitat and being scolded by a talking tree. Again more for children and with a strong focus on environmental problems, also mostly in Chinese, but you got a good close up of the birds. We also visited some dance show that looked a little like Grease, but on a stage with a lot of running water and the first four rows being labelled "wet zone" for a reason. I haven't mentioned yet that umbrellas used as parasols are very popular in Hong Kong, so the poor park employee was busy 10mins before the show to tell people to put their umbrellas away. We were pretty much alone in those first four rows, so getting wet seems to be as popular as getting into the sun apparently. Gladly we really got wet and could continue walking around in the sun a little cooled down :) The dance performance was very good as well. Apart from the shows there were a lot of exhibits, mostly with sea animals, but we also saw four Pandas, a fire fox (Red Panda) and alligators and a walrus, seals and penguins.
Managed to get a seat at the awesome dolphin and sea lion show at around 17:30, and 20:00 was the last performance, Symbio. Thought it would be some water and light, turned out to have sound, flames, fireworks and a story as well. It was awesome. Dinner at McD next to the hotel before hitting the hay.</p>
14.8.</h3>
Putting Mong Kok off till tomorrow, having a walk through the electronics malls instead. Got an Ainol Novo 7 Tornados</a> with case, a cheap orange gaming mouse and an additional duffel bag to carry all the stuff home again. Also bought some packs of tea leaves and received some telemarketing calls on the week-old mobile number. What was planned as a shorter day still ended in 10h on the road. Dinner at dimsumbar</a> at Harbour City.
You know the card slots at the hotel room door to enable electricity? We're finding new stuff in ours each day as it's the last room on the floor and the maid seems a little forgetful. Or we're supposed to keep the second card in there for A/C. Who knows...</p>
15.8.</h3>
Feeling a little sick, going to grab a quick last certain gift, then to the Museum of History</a>. Turns out it's overbooked or something. Science Museum</a> is next to it though. The exhibition on the Chinese space flight is nice as well. The Science Museum is really more for kids, but was still good for a quick visit. Paid ~3 EUR for a special exhibit, the museum itself was free on Wednesday. Found out I could after all visit one of two main areas of the History Museum, The Hong Kong Story. Took the short route from the Opium Wars to modern times, left out prehistoric up to the Chinese Dynasties. That museum is awesome, especially the shops and street corners they built inside.
Shuttle bus is supposed to get us to the airport at 2020 with a 60-90min ride, flight is at 0020. Looking forward to s01e07-10 of Person of Interest on the Cathay flight.
Boarding got delayed, takeoff got delayed, got hardly any sleep.</p>
16.8.</h3>
Scheduled landing at 06:20, turned out to be more like 07:00. Luggage took a while, so did the way to the station in Frankfurt. ICE at 08:37, arrived in Munich at 12:10. Quick visit to Subway and took a Taxi. Home at 13:00, 23h after leaving the hotel - up for ~31h by now, yay.</p>
There are part 1</a>, part 2</a> and part 4</a>.</p>


Travel journal - Bali(Indonesia)
2012-08-19T10:00:00Z
I've left Europe for the first time at the end of July to visit Singapore, Indonesia (Bali) and Hong Kong and I've written up a few things. Maybe I'll add some pics later.</p>
5.8.</h3>
Breakfast at 6:00, then a taxi at 6:30 to the airport, flight was around 9:00. Arriving at Ngurah Rai International Airport (Denpasar)</a> at noon, rogue taxi driver trying for quick money (250k instead of 95k rupiah). The taxi driver we got assigned then is startingly happy about a 10k tip (it's only 1 EUR, so my usual 10%). So is the poor guy trying to carry the suitcases. He is about 1.5m and doesn't seem to be in shape for 20kg suitcases. I'm a bit shocked about the huge hotel with a 500m entryway and guards checking cab trunks - definitely not my style. But the room and the service make up for it. Hit the beach for 2h in the afternoon. Boy does it get dark here early.
Strolling around town, or to be more precise, the Hotel Street, is tiresome. Everyone wants you to browse his shop, take you for a ride or worst of all, massage you. Dinner at Jegeg</a>, had Nasi Campur</a>, very good. Bir Bintang</a>, advertised as "Pilsener Beer", is really awesome and totally unlike what I had in Singapore. Got a little sunburnt, but not sure why.</p>
6.8.</h3>
Up early and to the beach, this time with lots of sun lotion. First time I had lunch since the flight to Hong Kong a week earlier, even if only a few bites. Sleeping in the shade for a while obviously gives you the mother of sunburns on Bali. It doesn't hurt much, but the color is interesting. More strolling, more avoiding to be talked into purchases. Dinner at a place that I forgot to write down the name, had Magibung</a> - but the name seems arbitrary as the link shows, but well, it was a very delicious mixed plate with rice and like seven types of meat in different sauces. Bali Hai Beer</a> is quite ok as well, but I prefer Bintang. Probably the only time in my life I'll withdraw 1.5 million from an ATM. The bundle of 50k notes is about a centimeter thick.</p>
7.8.</h3>
Recovering from bad sunburn, 1h at the pool, extended nap, pool and pool bar, mostly with shirt on. Met the hotel's PR guy who asked us to fill in a small survey. We've been totally happy so far, so nothing spectacular to write. Seems they only get two weeks of vacation per year here like I heard from Americans. Dinner at Jegeg again, Nasi Goreng, totally not like at home, in a good way. Today I bought a Bintang T-Shirt - yes, I'm won over.</p>
8.8.</h3>
Casual pool attendance with a guided tour in the afternoon. Guide arrived at 15:15 in a Land Rover and spoke near perfect German. As it seemed we were the only people attending he had a lot of time to tell us stuff about Bali, Indonesia and everything else. The drive was about 2h and he really managed to convey a lot more than we've read and heard earlier. When we arrived in the middle of nowhere we put on Sarongs and I got a headdress and we headed a little into the jungle to witness a Hindu temple ceremony. At least according to his explanations they all seemed to be a lot more laid back than Christians, be it regarding to talking (in person or on the phone) during a ceremony, letting nonbelievers take part in ceremonies or anything else. Got some red rice</a> tea and a tasty dinner with red rice and meat. Arrived at the hotel again around midnight. Best trip I booked ever. After a little thinking I finally remembered the company's name, it seems it was this trip</a>, but the program doesn't match exactly.</p>
9.8.</h3>
Spent the last rupiah on some souvenirs, interesting how easily you can haggle down from 25 EUR to 14 EUR by emptying out your wallet including coins.
Flight is scheduled for 1610, so the first evening in Hong Kong will be short. The airport is huge, so is Hong Kong, so a 20:35 touchdown ended in a hotel</a> checkin at around 23:05. No evening at all. Hotel is right next to the Quarry Bay MTR</a> station.</p>
There are part 1</a>, part 3</a> and part 4</a>.</p>


Travel journal - Singapore
2012-08-18T23:00:00Z
I've left Europe for the first time at the end of July to visit Singapore, Indonesia (Bali) and Hong Kong and I've written up a few things. Maybe I'll add some pics later.</p>
28.07.</h3>
Train to FFM</a> at 1728 - let's hope DB wont kick us off the train as per faulty data on behalf of the travel agency we shouldn't be allowed to take one today. It proved to be no problem and the train ride itself was uneventful and boring. FFM airport is huge and confusing. Took a cab to the hotel</a>. Driver wasn't amused by 7 EUR fare. Turned out the shuttle bus is 6 EUR for 2 persons. Hotel room was small but nice with semi-working air conditioning.</p>
29.07.</h3>
Up early, breakfast was ok, but expensive. I hate to pay 9+ EUR for a few rolls and stuff. Much too early for checkin, the shops weren't interesting either. Luggage was only 34kg with one of the suitcases being quite heavy, we'll see how that'll work out on return. Entered the boarding area 2h before takeoff, security guy was rather puzzled by that. To all the people who told me that such flights had more room for my legs: well played... Takeoff was around 3 pm, so one hour late. Farewell, connecting flight?</p>
30.07.</h3>
Well impressed by Cathay Pacific</a>'s inflight entertainment system, it actually works better than when I last tried XBMC or the sorts. Started with Pirates of the Caribbean  4</a>. Not too bad, but not good either. Next up: I am Bruce Lee</a>, awesome documentary. Then Vertigo</a>, a Hitchcock movie I've always missed to watch somehow, really impressed. And the soundtrack rocks. Then I started with Season 1 of Person of Interest</a> -  the main setting screams facepalm, I suppose its endorsed by CCTV proponents worldwide, but the series in general is quite ok. The last hour I randomly selected Chinese pop music which turned out to sound like China's answer to Celine Dion, just a bit more enjoyable.
Arrived at Hong Kong International Airport</a> still an hour late, at Gate 63. Managed to sprint ahead of the security check queue. Connecting flight: Boarding in 20min at gate 3. Doh. Managed to get there with like 1min spare as it is literally on the other side of the huge airport (I think there are Gates 1 to 70) but there was still a queue. Hooray for 4h more to Singapore. Managed to get some sleep in. Grabbed 2 Prepaid StarHub</a> SIMs for 15 SGD each  at Changi Airport</a> (and bought a 1 GB data plan for 7 of those prepaid Dollars. It turned out to sometimes have better signal than o2 at home...) Took a cab to the taxi after some shenanigans of not queuing up for the taxis inside the building. (Queuing up is huge here, I suppose thats what being a crown colony does to a country and there are several signs reading "Please Q!"
20 SGD for the ride, I like those prices. The room wasn't ready, so went out for some cool drinks. The hotel</a> room turned out to be big and clean with a hellish sort of air conditioning. Took a 3h nap, then went out to stroll around a bit between the MRT stations Chinatown</a> and Clarke Quay</a>. Dinner at the Maxwell Food Centre</a> and had some Laksa.</p>
31.07.</h3>
WHOA THE BREAKFAST. Chicken Teriyaki and Baos, Grilled Salmon and Chicken Pies. Oh well, at least the coffee was horrible or I'd called shenanigans. We had booked a city tour and were to be picked up at 8:30. No bus in sight and just as the chief luggage concierge took charge (I was really impressed that for once this hotel seemed to employ really competent people, something totally unheard of) it arrived. Our guide (before we met her I already imagined it would be someone who couldn't speak German or English) turned out to be fluent in German and 6 other languages and originating from France, but speaking with a Dutch accent. Wat.
It was a good idea to get a tour around and be able to recognize some buildings early on, despite generally not being a friend of being guided much. Saw the inside of the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, the National Orchid Garden</a> and Mt. Faber.
After the tour we stayed in Little India and went around there and moving towards Arab Street. In the afternoon we bought some EZ-Link</a> public transport cards and went to Vivocity</a>, a huge mall at the waterfront. Hardly any interesting shops in there if you're not keen on brand clothing, but it was nice anyway. The top storey holds a popular Hawker centre where we had dinner. Prices were still ok (5 to 10 SGD per meal), but the Maxwood one seemed much more legit and less touristy. Or let's better say it didnt look like built like a Chinese village into a shopping mall to attract the customers of said mall.</p>
01.08.</h3>
Up late, breakfast was a little less awesome (spicy Indian mutton chop and pancakes) but still excellent. Took MRT and bus to MacRitchie Reservoir</a> and started the 10km tour to the TreeTop Walk and then back to another bus station. Took a while and before we even reached the main attraction we got soaked by a tropical rainshower. Bought some flu meds just in case, air conditioning is bad usually,  but in a wet t-shirt I started shivering. Sipping on some hot Green Tea as I write this. Dinner was the famous Chicken Rice that I got to takeaway at the Maxwell again. 4 SGD, spicy, perfect. As I just mentioned my hot tea, the Hotel left a water cooker and tea and nespresso and bottled water for free here, never in my life have I used seen such a thing, especially as there is indeed a pricy minibar in the room. Singapore has Schweppes Ginger Beer</a> by the way, Im already trying to figure out how to ship a crate of it home. So much better than their Ginger Ale. Apart from that there's also Mango and Lychee juice in cans, Root Beer and Cream Soda and best of all, freshly made Sugar Cane juice. Yummy. Havent seen many local sweets/snacks yet. A bag of tapioca crisps lacked salt. A lot of salt. Noteworthy? things I saw but didn't buy: Trolli gummy bear chocolate, Hershey's chocolate bars, Bockwurst in jars, chicken feet.</p>
02.08.</h3>
Spent the morning on Orchard Road</a>, many expensive malls and one that seemed to house mostly Filipinos. Nothing too interesting apart from better Bubble Tea than at home and Strawberry Fanta. Ended up in a mall with only small designer furniture shops. Took a nap in the afternooon, then a boat tour on Singapore River. Sampled a delicious Singapore Sling</a>, then more strolling along Clarke Quay and Chinatown. Dinner at Maxwood again, this time with Ais Kachang and Durian</a> Milkshake. First sip smelled and tasted like a blended Roquefort cheesecake, but after a short while it was more cinnamon/vanilla flavored.</p>
03.08.</h3>
Plan for the day: Singapore Zoo</a>. Located a bit remote, so it's MRT and bus. Weather seems fine though. The Zoo is pretty awesome, the compounds are large and still easily accessible from all sides to get a good view. Spent around 6h walking, looking and taking photos. There's even a boat ride on a reservoir to get from one end to another. Watched a Sea Lion show and some fire-eaters. Apparently standing near the front and impressing one of them with your size makes them take you to the stage and let you take your shirt off and do silly things. Was fun though. Had excellent Indian food at the Zoo for dinner.
Sadly now it began to rain and we only did the Night Safari</a> on the minitram (twice actually), not by foot. Wasn't bad actually, just a little disappointed we missed some parts. Finally saw another trained animal show. Not only in that one they often lay some focus on environmental issues and tell people what to do and not to do. You could think it's a bit much, but the general tone of the presentations make it not bad actually. Best part here were some animals trained to sort trash into different recycle bins: cans, paper and plastic. This ~15min show was the only one not cancelled due to rain and exactly 5min after it finished it began to rain again, lucky indeed. Took the bus home and only then noticed that the MRT stops at around midnight, so first we tried 3 different stations for connecting trains citybound, but had to take a taxi in the end as the last trains all only operated away from the city centre, probably to get people home. I really do wonder what the people working in shifts are doing...</p>
04.08.</h3>
Did some souvenir shopping in Chinatown, found a Tintin store</a> and did some sightseeing in Katong. Sadly we'll miss National Day</a> on the 9th, as there are flags and decoration around already everywhere and we even saw a helicopter carrying a huge flag today. Then it's packing time already.</p>
There are part 2</a>, part 3</a> and part 4</a>.</p>


Hardware Upgrade
2012-06-07T21:00:00Z
For my own reference, the recent hardware upgrade:</p>

Intel Core i5-3570K</a>, Socket 1155, 6 MB Cache, 3.4 GHz, boxed, 216 EUR</li>
ASUS P8Z77-M</a>, mATX, 99 EUR</li>
16 GB (4x4GB) G.Skill RipJawsZ PC1600 CL9, 99.80 EUR</li>
Crucial M4</a> 128GB SSD, SATA-III, 108.80 EUR</li>
Mach Xtreme Adapter 2.5"/3.5", 6 EUR</li>
Sapphire HD6870</a>, 1024 MB, 2xDVI, HDMP, DP, 148 EUR</li>
</ul>
Total: 677 EUR</p>
Replaced this:</p>

Intel Core2Duo E6850, Socket 775, 4 MB Cache, 3.0 GHz, boxed</li>
Gigabyte GA-G41M</li>
4 GB RAM</li>
Asus EN8800GTS 320 MB</li>
</ul>


Pushing To The Stack
2011-11-10T21:00:00Z
For a while I've been annoying my colleagues with random links I've found
interesting. They might be related to the project we're working on or stuff
we've talked about. Maybe they're not that random after all, but the infamous
mails titled "Linkdump" might be useful to someone, so I've started
The Stack</a>, where I'll hopefully manage to push a list of links
every week, starting with last week, Week 44 / 2011</a>.</p>
Many of those links are from Hacker News</a>,
and some inspiration is taken from the left fold</a>
(sadly not updated anymore) and trivium</a>.</p>
Maybe I'll post the months prior to November 2011 in monthly sets, but probably not.</p>
Oh, and there's a separate feed for it: The Stack</a>.</p>
Update 2016-11-09:</strong> I'm always interested in more link dumps for various topics.</p>
So here's a list of related lists. (How meta.)</p>

trivium</a> is still going strong</li>
fogus</a> has been posting links for a while now</li>
R.I.Pienaar</a> recently started, sadly it's a newsletter</li>
</ul>


Oneiric-Oh-no-you-didn't...
2011-10-17T21:00:00Z
I've never been a great fan of Ubuntu, but I'm using it on two of my laptops

(that aren't my main workstations) because it used to be low-maintenance.</p>
You could say I was into the whole "it seems to just work[tm]", especially on
laptops, with suspend and fancy hardware. So last weekend I set out to upgrade
my eeePC 900A from Natty Narwhal (already had switched to GNOME classic from
Unity, but I'll ignore that, no hard feelings for Unity, it just wasn't my
cup of tea) to Oneiric Ocelot.</p>
Booting up, "Do you want to upgrade"-dialog, all fine so far. I remember faintly
at one point one of the dialogs had been hugely long and on the eeePC's low-res
screen I had problems clicking on the buttons at the bottom end and this was
no problem anymore, awesome (part of terminal output could be collapsed).</p>
All went smooth, one reboot after it's done - there's the new login manager
(LightDM it's called, had to look that one up) - which looks kinda ok on the
small screen. So I enter my password, Unity loads, and something's wrong.
Sooo, touchpad not working. Uhm, I just had moved the cursor in LightDM to
select my user. Ah well, got an USB mouse, plugged it in - touchpad worked.
Removed the mouse, touchpad still works. Weird, in a funny kind of way.
Switching back to Unity2D because it's a bit slow on 3D, but whatever.</p>
So I pack up the eeePC this morning and carry it to the office to act as my
trusty build monitor, displaying Jenkins on Firefox on an external display.
I arrive at the office, unpack it, plug it in, boot it up, select the other
user account, login, open up Firefox... No connection.</p>
So, first step, replug cat5 cable, nothing.
Second step, ifconfig. Aha, eth0 has no ip. Weird.</p>
sudo /etc/init.d/network restart
</code></pre>
error: User2 not in sudoers (from memory)

Wait, there's this fancy user switcher, let's go.

So I login my original User1 (who did the upgrade).</p>
ifconfig
</code></pre>
Wait, what? eth0 has an ip? How'd that happen. Nevermind, all fine, right?

Switching users again, back to User2.</p>
ifconfig
</code></pre>
eth0 has no ip. WTF?

Back to User1. Got an IP.

Back to User2. No IP.</p>
What the hell? Since when would a system service depend on being logged in?
Wait, there's NetworkMonitor, the bane of people who despise magic.
So, finally someone gave me the hint that one can "share the config" for
other users. Turns out, my main user (first one created I suppose?) can tick
"Allow all users to use this fucking cable connection", yes indeed.</p>
What the hell is wrong with you people? I mean, I could maybe understand
that you may not want to share your WPA2-WLAN keys to all users of the
machine, but it's a fucking network cable on a fucking computer running a
fucking multi-user operating system. How the hell can that be user dependant
on a user that is not called fucking root?</p>
During all this user switching I noticed the next fuckup.
User1 switches to User2. What I expect is this:</p>

screen turns black</li>
password input appears</li>
after entering password the other user's desktop appears</li>
</ul>
What I do not expect:</p>

I see the other user's desktop for 5 sec</li>
screen turns black</li>
password input appears</li>
</ul>
And what I call a fuckup:</p>

I see the other user's desktop indefinitely</li>
password dialog appears halfway hidden below other user's windows</li>
nothing turns black</li>
my face turns red instead</li>
</ul>
But hey, there's exactly one thing that could be worse</p>

other user's windows accept my user input</li>
</ul>
Hey, at least that one didn't happen.</p>


A week of clojure
2011-10-06T17:00:00Z
The basics</h2>
Having started playing around a bit with Clojure</a> in late July after reading a post named
Clojure on Heroku with Noir and Mongo in 10 minutes</a>, a holiday week
gave me a bit more time to dig deeper and continue my project.</p>
At times I felt like a complete newbie, never having touched any LISP dialect and only dipped
my toes into some functional programming (OCaml and SML at university, despising the former and being at
peace with the latter, some hours trying to decrypt Haskell, which seems ok but is not really my cup of
tea, and to a degree JavaScript, for which I've not got a single positive thing to say).</p>
The official Clojure docs</a> are somewhat helpful, I've been pointed at ClojureDocs</a> for an experience
more akin to the excellent PHP manual</a>, with fancy code samples and stuff, but I've not yet had to use
it very much. Then again there are several</a> entry-level</a> articles I've read over and over which proved to
match my approach to language-learning a bit better.</p>
I'm somewhat familiar with Java, so Clojure running on the JVM was a big bonus point, I thought.
So far I've been doing stuff basic enough that I hardly needed to call any Java APIs, still I found it
somewhat helpful that this ecosystem isn't a complete stranger.</p>
The project</h2>
This time around, I just took a piece of software</a> implementing an API</a>
and ported, err, rewrote it in a new language: Clojure.</p>
For all of you not familiar with World of Warcraft, it's an online game where you kill internet dragons
together with friends and acquantainces. This aforementioned API lets you pull machine-readable data
about your avatar, your guild, the server you play on, etc.pp. and do fancy stuff with it.</p>
If you're more interested in the code, it's on github</a>.</p>
Project setup</h2>
Whatever you plan to do, get leiningen</a> first. Yes, it's that good. It basically gets you running with
a clojure project faster than you can read your introductory tutorial, but still not being a beginner-only
tool (or so it seems). Doesn't get in the way, does everything you expect it to do - just awesome.</p>
As an IDE I'd started with vim</a> and vim-clojure</a> in July, but decided to try counterclockwise</a> on
eclipse</a> this thime. Apart from missing autocomplete the colorized parentheses alone was worth it. Plus,
if you know eclipse already, you've got your standard set of tools and shortcuts. In short, it works fine.
See this post</a> for instructions to integrate leiningen into ccw.</p>
For testing purposes, as I wanted to start as small as possible, I've just used clojure.test</a> for unit and
integration tests. A call for some coverage tool yielded radagast</a>, which is easy enough to use and does its
job, although I couldn't get the ignore-feature to work. PEBCAK probably.</p>
Apart from that, I'm developing on Windows 7 (mock me if you like), and 2-3 open cmd.exe and also GIT bash (which
seems to be my standard windows shell lately) and it works.</p>
Progress</h2>
I think I've accomplished most of the goals I've set myself, translating most API endpoints into something accessible,
without the need to think about any json. Yes, you still need to know the internal setup, but I'm not sure just how many
of these helper functions make sense:</p>
(defn get-name
  [input]
  (:name input))
</code></pre>
When I was mostly finished with my API wrapper, I decided to make a frontend. Or maybe that was the plan all along.
Enter Noir</a>, the web framework already mentioned in the article I linked in the first paragraph.</p>
Again I might sound easily excited but after using a ton of frameworks in various languages I claim the right to
suggest you have a look at it, it's tremendously fun to use and, for my limited understanding of clojure, makes a lot
of sense. Plus it's built on top of some libraries that seem like the de facto standard in clojure web development,
always a huge plus.</p>
The noir project is also on github</a>. Right now I'm using a file-based h2</a> database which
also seems to be the culprit of low performance when doing DB stuff. My bad, but didn't feel like getting a mysql on
my workstation and forget redis or mongo on windows. Tough luck. Clojure+Noir alone, without DB access, seems blazingly
fast, or at least decent, my performance tests aren't even worth publishing.</p>
Problems</h2>
When you're coming from an object-oriented background (hey, at least I didn't say procedural) it sometimes is
very hard to leave your tried-and-true practices behind and try to write code that seems to fit. I don't think
I'm anywhere near writing decent or pretty clojure code, but I hope the people aren't bursting out in tears either.
One example was my seemingly good idea to convert the data model into plenty of defrecords when in the end the map
that read-json yields is perfectly well suited to do the job.</p>
One thing I'm not really accepting as "solved" is that of deployment. I've found several blog posts and SO answers,
but for my testing needs I'm still at "lein run" in a screen behind nginx, no luck deploying an uberjar or building
a WAR file. Probably PEPCAK again, but not easy as pie either.</p>
Getting help</h2>
For simple problems, the aforementioned websites answered most of my questions, but still the most positive experience
has been the irc channel #clojure</a> on Freenode</a>. I tried to ask concise and not-completely-stupid questions and
was still quite surprised about the fast, detailed and enlightening answers. I know from experience what complete nuts
you can experience on various channels, so this was a bit unexpected - and very helpful.</p>
When I had completed some major parts I even asked if anyone got a spare minute to look over the whole code of the two
projects and while the general feedback was surprisingly positive, and I spent a few hours fixing my mistakes. That is
to say it was that much feedback, not that the code was that bad, of course ;)</p>
The future</h2>
It's been a fun week and I'll definitely try to learn more about clojure and maybe even get something useful live out
of my project. Not useful to most people, but the battleweb</a> project is something I've written
twice already in PHP and once in Python+Django, because there are some features I use :)</p>
One of my key interests is always the development of tools for developers (like my eclipse plugin Cinder</a>) so maybe
the tool chain of a clojure developer is worth a deeper look and something's missing that other language's users are
using.</p>


Hello World
2011-06-18T15:00:00Z
Playing around with Hyde</a>, Blueprint</a> and Sass</a> at the same time.</p>
The layout: Basically Hyde's default layout, made valid and with blueprint.</p>
The result: this.</p>
The future: unclear.</p>
f5n - Blog posts

Cycling on the D11, part 3

CD-DB

Hardware Mute Button

Tools: 2026 edition

Windows</h2> Browsers</p>

Linux</h2> As I am currently writing this on my NUC</a> via RDP and it's a pretty new setup (and I'm not using Linux for work at the moment), this will be shorter.</p> Browser Firefox</code></li> </ul> </li>

Shell scripts

2025 in review

Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3> World of Warcraft</li> EVE Online</li> Diablo IV</li>

Podcasts and other media</h3> Not a lot this year.</p>

Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3> visiting a bike park</li> </ul> Stuff that would be nice next year</h3> keep on cycling a lot, more mountain biking</li> monthly board game night hopefully comes back</li> some concerts</li> </ul>

Stuff that would be nice next year</h3> keep on cycling a lot, more mountain biking</li> monthly board game night hopefully comes back</li> some concerts</li> </ul>

Package Managers

Mechanical Keyboards Revisited

A New Dev Environment

A Podcast Tracker

Hardware Upgrade 2025

Unplugging

2024 in review

Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3> World of Warcraft - The War Within</li> EVE Online</li> Diablo IV</li>

TV Series I've (re-)watched</h3> Secret Level</a></li> The Rookie</a> - Season 6</em></li> </ul> Podcasts and other media</h3> Again, mostly YouTube.</p>

Podcasts and other media</h3> Again, mostly YouTube.</p>

CDs I bought</h3> KMFDM - Hyena</li>

Stuff that would be nice next year</h3> keep on cycling a lot, but do more mountain biking</li> monthly board game night is at least planned already</li> </ul>

A Few Changes

Self-Hosting Update

Cycling on the D11, part 2

Planning</h2> As I already had some experience, it was just finding good stops along the route this time.</p> The plan was:</p> Hilpoltstein (where I left the route last year) to Bamberg, 109km</li> Bamberg to Himmelkron (near Bayreuth), 103km</li>

Expenses</h2> Preparation:</p>

2023 in review

Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3> World of Warcraft</li> EVE Online</li>

Other stuff I bought</h3> a new (used) bike. ~8 year old ROSE gravel bike for 200 EUR</li>

Social networks</h3> Fediverse - this is my main platform now</em></li> Facebook - logged in like three times</em></li>

Messaging</h3> IRC - mostly every day</em></li> Matrix - several times per week</em></li> Email - no change, but I feel it's getting less</em></li> Slack - work and 2 other communities</em></li> Signal - yes</em></li>

Stuff that would be nice next year</h3> keep on cycling a lot, but do more mountain biking</li> bringing back board game night</li> </ul>

Theme Systems

Mobile Phones

Intro</h2> Important things first. I am not a phone person. I like to have a small computer in my pocket when I am not at home or near a desk, but that's about it. My main uses are:</p>

History</h2> Let's look at a list of all the smartphones I've owned and ignore the dumbphones in the years before that:</p>

Do I regret any of the purchases?</h2>

HTC Tattoo</h4> Android was pretty young and I still wasn't one of the real early adopters. This device wasn't perfect but it was an affordable option and it worked mostly fine. The touch screen was not great (resistive) and pretty small (2.8"). I think it only ever ran Android 1.</p> specs</a></p>

LG Nexus 5X</h4> This was basically the perfect phone except that it died too soon, and with the exact problem that many of them seem to exhibit. Still, 3.5 years.</p>

Bikepacking the D11

Footnotes</h2> I know some people might take offense that by sleeping in hotels and not in a tent it's not bikepacking, but bicycle touring but I honestly don't care. I did plan to go with a tent but it didn't work out. Maybe next time.</li> </ol>

2022 in review

Non-Board Games I've played/bought</h3> World of Warcraft - less, but still mostly that</em></li> EVE Online - tied with WoW this year</em></li>

Books I've read</h3> finished Laika's Window</em> which I started in 2020</li> reread the Sandman comics</li> quite a lot of pen & paper RPG material</li>

CDs I bought</h3> Sleigh Bells - Texis</li> Sleigh Bells - Jessica Rabbit</li> Soilwork - Verkligheten</li> Soilwork - The Ride Majestic</li> Arch Enemy - Deceivers</li> Amon Amarth - The Great Heathen Army</li> Battle Beast - Circus of Doom</li> Blind Guardian - The God Machine</li>

Social networks</h3> Twitter - daily light usage until November, then I stopped</em></li> Facebook - logged in like three times</em></li> Instagram - account sucessfully deleted</em></li>

Messaging</h3> IRC - still daily</em></li> Matrix - nearly daily</em></li> Email - no change, but I feel it's getting less</em></li> Slack - work and 2 other communities</em></li> Signal - yes</em></li>

Trips</h3> other countries: Czech Republic for a weekend</li>

(Online) Services</h3> Subscribed to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime</li> some MMOs subscriptions</li>

Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3> mountain biking fell flat due to health problems</li> </ul> Stuff that would be nice next year</h3> more cycling and mountain biking</li> </ul>

Stuff that would be nice next year</h3> more cycling and mountain biking</li> </ul>

Trying out some hosting options

Podcasts and other media</h3>
Not a lot this year.</p>

Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

visiting a bike park</li> </ul>
Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

keep on cycling a lot, more mountain biking</li>
monthly board game night hopefully comes back</li>
some concerts</li> </ul>

Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

keep on cycling a lot, more mountain biking</li>
monthly board game night hopefully comes back</li>
some concerts</li> </ul>

Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

keep on cycling a lot, but do more mountain biking</li>
monthly board game night is at least planned already</li> </ul>

Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

keep on cycling a lot, but do more mountain biking</li>
bringing back board game night</li> </ul>

HTC Tattoo</h4>
Android was pretty young and I still wasn't one of the real early adopters. This device wasn't perfect but it was an affordable option and it worked mostly fine. The touch screen was not great (resistive) and pretty small (2.8"). I think it only ever ran Android 1.</p>
specs</a></p>

LG Nexus 5X</h4>
This was basically the perfect phone except that it died too soon, and with the exact problem that many of them seem to exhibit. Still, 3.5 years.</p>
specs</a></p>

Footnotes</h2>

I know some people might take offense that by sleeping in hotels and not in a tent it's not bikepacking, but bicycle touring but I honestly don't care. I did plan to go with a tent but it didn't work out. Maybe next time.</li> </ol>

Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't</h3>

mountain biking fell flat due to health problems</li> </ul>
Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

more cycling and mountain biking</li> </ul>

Stuff that would be nice next year</h3>

more cycling and mountain biking</li> </ul>
