In 2023 I started cycling along the D11 ( Ostsee-Oberbayern-Radweg ) across Germany, doing 500km on that trip, then 300km in 2024 . This is part 3, four days and 430km. Planning 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.…
For some reason or other I currently don't have a tower PC with a CD-ROM drive connected, or even an available slot. But I have this 2004 nx7010 laptop which has a hopefully functional CD Writer. # dmesg | grep ^cd Yep, it shows up. For some reason I have not yet found out you need to use cd0c though and not cd0 . This just works, as cdio is preinstalled: # sudo cdio -f cd0c cdrip And then…
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,…
In theory it's really easy, in practice the manpage didn't help me. Assuming my interface is available because it's supported by default: # cat /etc/hostname.rtwn0 join 'net name1' wpakey 'secret' join 'net name2' wpakey 'secret' inet autoconf # ifconfig rtwn0 media # ifconfig rtwn0 scan # sh /etc/netstart Notes: join works…
Apparently there is no uniform way to find out when an OS was installed, so here are several ways I found, which might or might not work: Linux # This is btrfs on Arch # stat / ... Birth: 2026-01-07 12:22:11.134890097 +0100 I checked 1-2 machines and even after log rotation the oldest files in /var/log matched the date from stat . I could not find any apt-logs from installation but…
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. So when I heard about a Korg nanoKONTROL2 being used I thought I'd also want to try that. I bought mine at Hieber Lindberg in their shop in Munich for 55 EUR. As I mostly…
In older Windows versions you had to download Sysinternals' junction.exe in order to create symlinks/hardlinks. Apparently the first positive thing about Windows 11 is that this is now included, but of course in the worst possible syntax. New-Item -Type Junction -Value C:\target -Path .\new-name To look at them: Get-ChildItem -Attributes ReparsePoint Remove with Remove-Item .
Once in a while (like on a freshly installed OpenBSD) I only have vi and not vim (or neovim) and it usually sucks. If backspace doesn't work: ESC B J
The macOS dock doesn't just let you add spacers, but this can be fixed. These are a built in way, but not great: # Default size: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}' # Small size: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="small-spacer-tile";}' killall Dock Someone posted a debatably better way…
The command aws cloudformation describe-stack-resources is handy aws cloudformation describe-stack-resources --physical-resource-id BUCKET_NAME --logical-resource-id RioCloudWatchDistribtionFrontEndBucket550600D4
I wrote about tools on Windows in 2019 and I wanted to write an update to that post for a while already. Now with extra content! Windows Browsers Firefox as the default, with several multi-account containers Pinned browser tabs for Matrix, Slack, WhatsApp, Mail Vivaldi for some stuff instead of a container E-Mail kinda got into the habit of using webmail and have not set up Thunderbird IRC Quassel…
This arch box does not have cron installed so I tried systemd timers for the first time. First I planned to do a user service, but this seems to have problems . It needs two files, one .service and one .timer . $ cat /etc/systemd/system/my-service.service [Unit] Description=Runs my-service Wants=my-service.timer [Service] Type=oneshot ExecStart=/bin/uv run --with…
Windows does not have ldd it seems, but if you have Visual Studio installed, (in my case 2022) then you can do: dumpbin /dependents filename.dll/exe And of course it's not on the PATH, but it works inside VS' terminal. The macOS version I regularly forget is: otool -L /path/to/binary Maybe now.
Discord has terrible defaults and apparently you need to set them again every time you install it. Windows Settings: [ ] Open Discord on Startup [ ] Close Button Minimized to Tray Data & Privacy: [ ] Use data to improve Discord [ ] Use my Discord activity to personalize Sponsored Content Notifications: Sounds: [x] Disable All Notification Sounds Streamer Mode: [ ] Enable Streamer Mode [ ]…
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. The problem is usually that you need to fiddle with various versions of exec or popen or whatever the language calls their wrapper around the underlying C functions (or POSIX functionality, whatever). The task is usually to…
What happens if you don't read the manual properly? So I've been using TextAdept as sort of "not as an IDE/Code Editor per se, but a good Text Editor that can also do code" for years (because it's excellent) but I've always been missing VS Code's "Open folder". So of course I started looking into implementing that but I really couldn't be bothered to dig into the…
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition. ( 2024 / 2023 / 2022 / 2021 / 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 / 2013 ) Non-Board Games I've played/bought World of Warcraft EVE Online Diablo IV Final Fantasy XIV (no change, really) Movies I've (re-)watched Ant-Man…
I've not properly used Python for a bit, so here are some random notes so I don't have to search through scripts and shell history and docs: uv I'm not one of the people who were desperate before and now all problems are solved, but uv does a good job so far. # just run it, if it has numpy and scipy deps uv run --with numpy --with scipy example.py # two methods to run something that…
If I look at my environment.zsh (just the part of my zsh config that handles PATH - I see the following customizations, although not all are active on every machine at every time (the curse of shared dotfiles): add rustup's bin/ and source .cargo/env add /usr/local/go/bin add JDK via SDKMAN (partial dogfooding for leiningen-sdkman Homebrew nvm for node.js And…
It's been over 7 years that I last wrote about keyboards. There have been a few changes, some only recently. 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…
The go version in go.mod , i.e. go 1.17 does NOT work like in Rust or Java - it's not "using the installed compiler to produce something somehow backwards compatible". I found this out by seemingly rebuilding an old project with an old directive with a new installed go binary. Turns out it will apparently download that old compiler and compile it like it is written there - including all old…
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. So I was looking to buy some Thin Client (Fujitsu Esprimo or similar) and put Linux on it and then have something to remote…
You can open a VNC connection in the Finder by pressing cmd-k and then connecting to vnc://HOST:PORT . Neat.
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. 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…
While I didn't really plan to (or need to) replace my 2019 Ryzen 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…
There's been a German blog post 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. I found it quite interesting and of course I went along with the list and what I use: "change your e-mail provider" - been self-hosting mail for decades,…
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition. ( 2023 / 2022 / 2021 / 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 / 2013 ) Non-Board Games I've played/bought World of Warcraft - The War Within EVE Online Diablo IV Final Fantasy XIV - Dawntrail Movies I've (re-)watched Rebel Moon…
While learning Kotlin I had brief look at KotlinNative. The main downsides I see (currently) are: no access to the Java ecosystem of libraries, not even basic ones like java.util.File no static binaries For even the most basic file access it seems you need a library like Square's okio. implementation("com.squareup.okio:okio:3.9.1") `` I tried to build a minimally viable `cat` binary and it…
I have been using includeIf in my .gitconfig for years, usually to separate out my personal git config on my work machine. Typically the only directory I have checked out that I am regularly committing to is my dotfiles repo , but it can happen. So anyway, usually it looks something like this: # wrong! [include] path = ~/.gitconfig-default [includeIf "gitdir:~/code/winks"] path =…
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 that wer kept for a year or longer at at time. Maybe I can even extract…
Less of a TIL than a "I have to look this up every couple of years". When you connect a Quassel Core to ZNC: File -> Networks -> Configure Networks... Manually specify... Network name: whatever Server address: localhost or your ZNC server Port: 2000 or what you have Server password: username/network:password Weechat for example has a dedicated password field, but here you simply have to make…
The feature I was missing most on the mac was window management like I knew it from i3. I'm not yet sure if I could exactly replicate that (i.e. Win+1-9 for different workspaces, shared over all screens) but I'll try something else now. Assigning the main apps I had on those workspaces to keys and just focusing/launching them, via cmd-shift-[`1-9] with Hammerspoon . This is my very…
I wrote about self-hosting stuff in 2022 , since then I've made a few changes: server 1 - a blog Debian 12 with podman (not happy with the rootless setup) Caddy, Tailscale, grafana-agen on the host MySQL in a container PHP + Wordpress in a container server 2 - irc, websites Ubuntu 22.04 + Docker some containers: Caddy for a few static sites quassel-core for IRC server 3 - mail Debian 12 +…
// User.kt import kotlin.properties.Delegates class User { var name: String by Delegates.observable("<no name>") { prop, old, new -> println("$old -> $new") } } fun main() { val user = User() user.name = "first" user.name = "second" } // # output: // <no name> -> first // first -> second Docs: Observable properties Source: 7 Features in Kotlin's…
Cmd-UpArrow in Terminal.app lets you jump to the last time you pressed enter. Maybe there's a better official definition but it inserts a grey [ in front of your prompt and that's the mark where you can jump back to. [user@host $ seq 1 100 # START 1 2 3 ... 98 99 100 user@host $ # press cmd-UpArrow here to jump to START cmd-k will delete screen + scrollback cmd-l will delete screen and…
Last year I started my first long bicycle tour, along the D11 ( Ostsee-Oberbayern-Radweg ) 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. Planning As I already had some experience, it was just finding good stops along the route this time. The plan was:…
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition. ( 2022 / 2021 / 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 / 2013 ) Non-Board Games I've played/bought World of Warcraft EVE Online Diablo IV Books I've read Debugging by David J. Agans Gamma Draconis by Eldo Yoshimizu/Benoist…
Maybe skip this intro 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…
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. Intro 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: listening to music using (Google) Maps (trialing GraphHopper atm) some…
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. So the idea was to do the first part of the D-Route 11 in reverse. This is an official long-distance cycling route from the Baltic Sea to Upper Bavaria , but my plan was to start in…
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition. ( 2021 / 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 / 2013 ) Non-Board Games I've played/bought World of Warcraft - less, but still mostly that EVE Online - tied with WoW this year Final Fantasy XIV - came back very briefly Books I've read…
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. TypeScript + Deno Deploy…
Last week I finally bit the bullet and, after changing the font, made the few remaining switches. This website is now generated via nextgen . 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 folder. Oh, and themes are now called blueprints, because it makes more…
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. Back in October 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. So I started from zero and only ported what I needed from my SASS file, then imported…
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. 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? a production mail server for 4 users, and some static websites behind nginx a WordPress blog on another VPS, using…
Today is a weird day. First I read about Snikket (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…
The 7DRL , or 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, is a yearly one week long event where you build a game. A roguelike . 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…
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. Many years ago I discovered the perfect…
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. Linux environment variables The usual proxy variables:…
These review posts have proven useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition. ( 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 / 2013 ) Non-Board Games I've played/bought World of Warcraft - subscribed for the whole year, played a lot in the first half of the year EVE Online - subscribed for the whole year, played a lot Final…