Weeknote 34:2026

This weeknote got delayed by many days full of work, including the weekends.

New office

At least it feels new. Thirty minutes after we got the landlord's confirmation of our lease renewal (with the yearly rent increase, of course), I placed the IKEA order I had been sitting on for a while. I was in such dire need of storage space that even moving my office chair had become precarious because of all the stuff dumped on the floor. Moving and extending the shelf meant moving the desk, which in turn required a smaller one. I got myself a 1.4 m Mittzon desk.

In the end, sacrificing desk surface was worth it. The new desk still has enough room for my two monitors, the speakers, and the teleprompter. After spending an hour grouping and routing cables, my cable management is much cleaner than before, too.

Apart from finally having enough shelf space to get all the bits and bobs off the floor, the greatest improvement came from the idea of facing the desk away from its wall. I spent last weekend painting that wall in "midnight teal", which makes for a great neutral background for video calls and livestreams.

In the process, I also identified an embarrassing number of things I don't need any more. Some of them I'll give away, others can go straight to the recycling centre.

I'm delighted with the refurbishment, and both work and play are more enjoyable because of it.

A little room to grow

That could describe my office too, but it is the motto of Greenhouse, my new web project. I am building Greenhouse to help me and other online educators engage participants on a video call or livestream. It will start with a Q&A function: participants can submit questions and upvote those of others. The host can then select questions and show them individually on screen. That lets hosts focus on explaining the topic rather than tracking chat, while giving participants a clearer way to contribute.

The app is free to use and will remain so for at least the basic feature set, even after I have finished the first version.

Registered for SREcon

SREcon is coming up in autumn, as it does every year, and for the third time in a row, I'll be attending. An SRE conference full of insights and inspiration, and within reach by bus, is simply too good an offer to refuse. I'm already excited, and if you're going to be in Dublin too, I'd love to meet you!

Getting ntfyed

I had always thought that ntfy could be useful beyond its Uptime Kuma integration. Lately, I realized that it is a great way to get notified when a long-running task is finally done. One example: the test suites for our central Chef cookbook take more than 90 minutes to finish. Of course, I switch my attention to something else during this time. But all too often, I then forget to check back with kitchen, which makes the time it takes to finish a Chef cookbook change much longer than it already needs to be. Once I signed up for an ntfy Pro subscription for the added privacy, I quickly found more uses, such as sending a webhook from Proxmox if the nightly backup fails.

Big red ball

Having my Corne-ish Zen with me on my holidays last month rekindled my appreciation of split keyboards. A trackball goes well with those, and normal keyboards too, especially a finger-operated one like my Elecom DEFT Pro. I also have an older Logitech M570, but this kind of trackball seems to put quite a strain on my thumb. A trackball frees up valuable space on the new desk and is easier on my wrists and arms. I had stopped using the DEFT because its pointer tracking gets wonky from time to time. But that happens only every few days, and is easily fixed by switching it off and on again.