About five years ago I had an idea for a small tool. Whenever I wanted to share a book with a friend, I had no good way to point them to a place to actually get it. I wanted something simple: give it an ISBN, get back a list of independent bookshops nearby where they could buy it, libraries where they could borrow it, and sites where they could track it. I bought the domain, created a repository…
I am currently making my digital life better and more sustainable for every party involved. One of the topics I am changing is music. I want music artists to get a fair share for the music I am listening to. The only way to do that is to actually buy music from them. If possible, through Bandcamp . I cleaned up my old library of music files and am slowly adding all the music I love and used to…
Last week we came back from a camping trip to Soulac-sur-Mer . Roughly 1600 km through Germany and France to the Atlantic coast. In an EV camper van. An e-Vanster , to be more specific. We got that car two years ago, and we absolutely love it. This car is a modified e-Spacetourer with an added pop-up roof, a small electric stove in the back, and electrical equipment to make it possible to use…
Recently, I had a post go somewhat viral (at least for my standards). The post currently has around 4,200 boosts and 3,700 favorites. The last time this happened was a couple of years ago. And this time it was different. In many interesting ways. So let’s go through some of the most noteworthy findings: It just worked . Last time, the website had problems with the number of notifications. But this…
In a bit over a month, Germany votes for the next government. It looks like conservative, right-leaning parties might win a lot of votes. Let us all try to prevent that. One way to do that is to go out on the street and protest to show others that we fight. That we haven’t given up hope for a better world. Clicking a ‘Sign the petition’-Button is not as important as thousands protesting on the…
Yes, it’s true. Another year passed. And with it another CCC. Again with me sitting at home, enjoying a nice hot drink and watching the streams. Last years talks were great, but somehow this year’s even topped it. If you need some nice talks to watch in this cold and gray time of year, here is the list of talks that I can recommend: Correctiv-Recherche „Geheimplan gegen Deutschland“ – 1 Jahr…
According to Overcast these are the podcasts I listened to the most: I do not listen to as many podcasts as I used to do. Manly because I don’t have a commute and the school of my kid is just a 10-min bike ride away, but 281 hours still sound like a lot of hours 😅. 99% Invisible , the outstanding breakdown of The Power Broker was my surprise delight of the year. Really worth a listen. Planet…
One of the problems in our apartment was this: A really dumb thermostat. Since we have floor heating, this little thing created tons of problems. Floor heating behaves like a big cargo ship. You cannot quickly move it around. The floor needs time to heat up, and if the desired temperature is reached, you cannot simply shut it down. It will continue to radiate heat to the room. With this dial, a…
If you mention email validation, most developers only think about the technical aspect of it. What is a valid email? Basically, there are two ways of thinking about it: Regular expressions are enough or Regular expressions don’t cover 100% of the email standard . For that I can only say: yes, a regular expression does not work for your esoteric email addresses, but who cares? The w3c spec for…
Note: previously you needed a custom quirk, but since September the Tuya IR Blaster is natively supported in Home Assistant After years of playing around with Philips Hue and never being really happy about it, I switched to Home Assistant. I installed it on a Raspberry Pie , added a ZigBee USB-Stick and never looked back. It’s simply amazing. Fully customisable, everything local. And zero…
At the end of last year, I realized that I somehow stopped reading technical books . There was just too much going on to read that kind of content in my leisure time. Why learn a new thing when you also could escape to Teixcalaanli ? But I started to crave some technical content and I looked at my pile of unread technical books. Luckily, one of the books I chose was this one . Naming things is…
The last time I did a CCC event retrospective was 4 years ago . I skipped 36c3 for reasons, but with 37c3 I’m back. I wasn’t in Hamburg this year, and I’m not sure if I want to join 38c3 in Hamburg, but time will tell. But let’s start with the talks I’ve watched and liked. If you think I missed something, please let me know . Breaking “DRM” in Polish trains This was the talk that had the most…
Back in 2019 I started a digital fathers* community . We have a really nice Slack channel with tons of activity. In that channel, we share countless interesting links. I didn’t want those links to be lost in that massive pile that is the Slack history. And for that reason, I started to collect them on this page . Hopefully, this page is also useful for you. If you have any suggestions that fit…
Story points are just smoke and mirrors. Yes, hear me out. People can’t stand chaos; we crave order. Many folks view story points as a way to inject some order into the chaos of, say, agile development. This is especially intriguing for large enterprises, those companies with a waterfall mindset that decide to casually slap the word “Agile” onto their established way of doing things. Now, let me…
Have you heard of Deadloch? The chances are rather high that you haven’t yet, which is a shame. It is one of the hidden gems of streaming. There are so many shows released currently that some fantastic ones fall through the cracks. Deadloch is a show about a female police detective in a small New Zealand town who has to investigate a murder. Sounds like a typical murder mystery so far, but…
In 2017 I did an interview with Sweet Setup and talked about all the apps I was using at that moment. Last week I stumbled upon this post by Matt Birchler and saw more and more people doing the same . So I thought it would be fun to do the same and see how my setup has changed over the years. ✉️ Mail service: mailbox.org 📬 Mail client: Apple Mail ✅ Tasks: OmniFocus 📰 RSS service: Self hosted…
Every time I join a team as a freelancer I check a couple of things during my initial code review. Some are quite common, like: Is the onboarding document and README still up to date? Are the tests green? How much do they test? …and many more. Besides all those rather common checks I also check a few things regarding the design of the API (if the project has one). Most of the time there are some…
A couple of years ago I was lucky to be in the first round of the Prototype Fund and was able to build SignDict . A German sign language dictionary that now has around 88,500 unique visitors a month and is one of the leading sign dictionaries in Germany. I couldn’t believe my luck when I got accepted to the 9th round with another project. Starting this month I will be working on a project called…
If you have a website with a lot of text on it, you might discover that iOS and Internet Explorer will sometimes add links when they think they discovered a phone number. A lot of the time the detection is wrong and might even destroy a bit of the layout of the page. To fix this you have to add some attributes to the page to disable the automatic format detection. For IE you have to add the…
I really love my Kobo eReader. Cheaper than Amazon, I can put epubs on it and buy ebook at every store that is not called “Amazon”. Most ebooks are just watermarked and don’t have any DRM attached to them ♡. You can even lend epubs from your local library using awesome services like OverDrive . There is just one problem. If you own a Kobo eReader you might have seen this: Your eReader is not…