More than enough reasons not to use LLMs
I agree so much with this that I’m putting it here for my own reference. Post by @janl@narrativ.es View on Mastodon
Blogs on FlowFX
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Alpha Blondy - live at POL AND ROCK Festival 2018
Alpha Blondy & The Solar System are probably my favorite live performers. I first saw them play at Chiemsee Reggae Summer in 2010, and once again 2016 in Mexico City . Their live sound is perfect. It’s huge, precise, and clear. Of course I can’t properly describe it, nor would it help you feel it. I can only encourage you to go see them as long as they’re around! Then you will…
Full text RSS feed in Hugo
Since migrating this site to ox-hugo in 2024 its RSS feed only showed a summary of the blog posts — because that’s Hugo’s default. I very much dislike such truncated feeds and yesterday, finally, I have updated the template for RSS feeds to include the whole post content. Of course I’m not the only one with this problem. The information on, for example…
Hugo shortcode for embedding PeerTube videos
So, I have a PeerTube account now. With videos!! 🤯 Naturally, I want to embed these videos on this - statically generated - website. Just like YouTube, PeerTube offers an iframe embed code: < iframe title = 'Los Muchachos feat. The Block Ice Horn Section - Guachiman (live at Jos Fritz Café 15 Feb 2025)' width = '560' height = '315' src = 'https://makertube.net/videos/embed/rpfGXbCVSu46P2ELUzhSjT'…
/music
I have added the /music page to collect everything related to my musical activities. Most importantly, this is where I will list the dates for all my upcoming gigs. More will come later. I have also created a PeerTube account on MakerTube to collect all videos of me playing with my bands. If you’re on the Fediverse you can subscribe to the flowfx_music@makertube.net channel. The most recent…
Live dates autumn 2024
I’ll be playing a surprising number of shows until the end of the year, both with my long-term band The Uplifters & Block Ice Horn Section , the band that I just recently joined, The Offbeat Service (mostly 2-tone Ska from Worms), and the very fun rock-pop-funk cover band Marshall Pfefferle from Heidelberg: 19.09. “Karl” in Heidelberg with Marshall Pfefferle 09.11. Café…
The Uplifters - Live beim Acker-Kult-Festival 2024
This past spring I was looking for a local band to support The Uplifters at a concert I was setting up in Mannheim in June. “Support” meaning: draw a few more people than we would by ourselves - us being from Freiburg and not well known here yet. In the course of this search, I met The Offbeat Service from Worms. They couldn’t play the date, but they told us about a nice little…
EurKEY, MacOS and Emacs' Meta key
Back To The Mac 2 I am building my first custom Emacs configuration , moving away from Doom Emacs . Doom was great for getting started with Emacs after using Vim exclusively for the previous… 15 years?! After the jump back to the Mac there were a number of new issues with my setup that I had no idea how to solve, and there’s so much magic happening in Doom that I didn’t really…
Using Automator to create an Emacs.app for running Emacs Client & Server
Or: Back To The Mac 1 After using only Linux machines for work for the past 5 years, my next machine will be a MacBook. That’s why I’m working on improving my development environment on macOS as best as I can now, something that’s not really been necessary when using my personal Mac. First order of business: how do I start the Emacs server and connect to it with the emacsclient?…
Rhein-Neckar-Tour mit den Uplifters
Dafür, dass The Uplifters eine Freiburger Band sind, spielen wir dieses Jahr außergewöhnlich oft in der Rhein-Neckar-Ecke. Gut für mich, denn dann ist die Anreise nicht so lang. Am 26. August dürfen wir beim wunderbaren Brückenaward in Mannheim spielen. Anfang September geht’s nach Speyer zum Nagelklotz aufs Altstadtfest. Im Dezember spielen wir dann im Café Leitstelle in Heidelberg,…
The Uplifters - Live im Proberaum
I have an awesome band ! In December we recorded a few songs “live” in our rehearsal room in Freiburg, both audio and video. Over the winter everybody but me put a lot of work into pulling both together and making it look and sound good. And what can I say, they did an amazing job. I’m truly impressed. Plus: everything was done using free and open source software: Ardour and…
How to hold a trombone
Last week I bought a brand new trombone. Following my teacher ’s recommendation, I made an appointment at Musik Bertram in Freiburg and spent a good few hours in their practice room trying out different instruments. I fully expected to get a light, small-bore, jazz or pop music tenor trombone. Instead, I somehow chose a medium-bore, classical Bach 36 , with rose brass bell and everything.…
Training week August 6 to 26
Yes, my training week starts on Saturday. Day Exercise Weights and reps timing / notes Sat 6/8 Single Arm Inside Circle 6kg x 11 x 5/5 2min rest before next exercise Single Arm Outside Circle 6kg x 11 x 5/5 2min rest before next exercise Single Arm Shield Cast 6kg x 11 x 5/5 “FlowFX Heel Drop Complex” * 20kg x 3 x 4/4 start every 115s (~35s rest) Sun KB Clean & Press 16kg x 10 x…
Training week Juli 30 to August 5
Since my training log project is going nowhere, I might as well log my training here, if just for a few weeks. After a 11 day training break due to Covid I have to ramp back up slowly into my ongoing volume cycles of clean & press and one-handed club swinging. I am also trying to start a cycle of Goblet squats in order to add … more squats to my training. I think I need them. Day Exercise…
My home gym
Basically everything I need for my training at the moment. Plus clothes - sometimes.
Cultural Comments Ep. 24
“Bist du noch bei der C3S? Gibt’s die noch?” Diese Frage höre ich zwar nicht häufig, aber doch ab und an. Und jedesmal denke ich dann, dass ich unbedingt mal wieder mit m.eik reden muss. Neulich war es wieder soweit und das Ergebnis ist gar nicht schlecht geworden. Erstens weil m.eik gut reden kann und zweitens weil die C3S lebt und ihrem Ziel, der Zulassung als…
Vim and the system clipboard
Vim config of the week: I can now copy & paste between vim and the rest of my system. This has been something I wanted to have for a long time, and the Stack Exchange answer sounds like it’s standard stuff. In any case, I am now directly yanking and pasting to and from the system clipboard anytime I use y or p in Vim. And all with a simple set clipboard+=unnamedplus in my vimrc .
Der Posdcast
Es ist ja nicht so als hätte ich zu viel Zeit, oder dass mir langweilig wäre. Aber dieses Ding schwirrt schon lange genug in meinem Kopf herum, so dass ich es auch einfach mal machen kann: Der Posdcast Was es ist, wird sich glaube ich mit der Zeit erst zeigen. Erstmal ist es ein Ort, wo ich Episoden abladen kann, die ich aufnehmen möchte, für die es aber keinen eigenen Podcast braucht. Den Anfang…
YouTube channel RSS feeds
For mostly unknown reasons I want to delete my Google account at some point in the future. The Google services that I am regularly using are Search, Maps, and - increasingly - YouTube. The latter is the only service that really benefits from an account that remembers subscriptions, lists and the history of watched videos. What I will continue to use are RSS readers. And it turns out that you can…
The Tracks Of My Tears
I love cover songs. I love bands that take a good song and make it better. Bands like Cake , Reel Big Fish , Guano Apes , and Rainer von Vielen . Joe Cocker made a whole career of it. That’s why Napster was the best! . Napster had everything, every cover and live version anyone had ever published. Napster would have had this super, mega, uber amazing live version of Hard To Handle by the…
3 episodes in one day
Recently, Nick and I published 3 episodes of Several Ways To Live in a single day. How did we do that, do you ask? Easy: Record several times over the span of many weeks Edit and upload 3 episodes Let Nick do his thing Nick does his thing and adds shownotes to all 3 episodes in one evening Publish all 3 episodes at the same time Here you go. :) ⎈
A simple new theme
A few weeks ago I updated the Nikola that powers this site to version 8. At the same time, I started looking into how I could get rid of all external dependencies, e.g. JavaScript and fonts. The first step now is to switch to the very basic base-jinja theme . So far, I’ve only changed the main color to the familiar red, added a .video-container CSS class that helps making embedded YouTube…
Linktipp: Zeitplanung und Heimarbeit
Es ist kein Geheimnis, dass ich großer Fan davon bin, meine Arbeit außerhalb des Firmenbüros zu erledigen. Meist passiert dies in meinem Heimbüro, äh, zuhause. Letzte Woche war ich aber zum Beispiel auch ganz woanders, im tiefsten Niedersachsen, in einem dunklen Keller ohne Mobilfunkempfang, und das hat ebenfalls sehr gut für mich funktioniert. Der Nathan macht neuerdings einen Podcast , in dem er…
Copy & paste from tmux to system clipboard
For the first time in many years I am using a Linux machine for my work. In general I am extremely pleased with the system I’ve set up. But of course, there are things that don’t “just work”. Like… copy selected text from a tmux pane to the clipboard. As usual, StackOverflow knows the answer. In short: # .tmux.conf set-option -g mouse on set-option -s set-clipboard…
How to get rid of GitHub notifications
I don’t like notifications. I’ve minimized the number of notifications I receive on my phone to basically: direct messages, and phone calls from my wife. I also don’t like notifications on my desktop system. I’ve turned everything off on every system I use. But there’s one place that I visit constantly, every day, every hour, where I couldn’t get rid of the tiny…
Auf geht's Freiburg, kämpfen und siegen!
Gestern war ich das erste Mal seit 20 Jahren beim Eishockey. Nachdem ich damals einige Spiele der Providence Bruins miterleben durfte, war es diesmal ein DEL-Spiel zwischen den Adlern aus Mannheim und einer Brausetruppe aus München in der SAP-Arena hier um die Ecke. Da ich weder die Regeln noch die Taktik dieses Spiels verstehe, habe ich mich auf die wichtigen Beobachtungen konzentriert. Die…
Anki vs. the RZL
Last week I went to our local hackspace, the RaumZeitLabor , and I talked to Cheatha about my recent adventures with Anki . There were a few other people there that listened to my ramblings as well, and their reactions were not at all what I had expected. It wasn’t a well-prepared talk or anything, but the ensuing discussion was eye-opening. There were a few firmly held opinions: memorizing…
Better Anki Learning Steps
I’ve been playing around with Anki , the spaced repetition application, A LOT in the last few weeks. This will certainly not be the last post about Anki, but I’ll start with a simple reference post for me to remember where I learned how Anki’s learning steps work . Check out this video: It explains the different types of cards in Anki, how learning intervals are calculated , what…
What I've learned about the Irish
I spent the last few days in Dublin, Ireland, visiting a very good friend of mine. These are a few observations I made during my stay: The Irish consider themselves much less European than I had thought. Mainland Europe is simply called “Europe”. They hate the English. Until recently, Ireland had been living in the Middle Ages, as is accurately portrayed in the 1991 movie The…
Jason Swett: How I write characterization tests
Let’s say I come across a piece of code that I want to refactor but unfortunately a) I don’t understand what it does and b) it’s not covered by tests. Yupp. That’s a problem. How I write characterization tests shows a technique for how to deal with this situation. I, too, use tests to figure out how a piece of code actually works. Works better for me than actually reading the code. 🤨
Speeding up RSpec with bundler standalone and springified binstubs
Testing Rails with RSpec is slow, or at least it feels slow to me in all the projects I am working on. Any speed gain helps my productivity when it reduces the time I’m waiting between writing code and running tests. There are quite a few posts out there that tackle this problem. But most are pretty old, and none really worked for me, so I’m not going to link to them. The book…
Teach vim-rails about request specs
Slowly but surely I’m getting to know the really interesting Rails-related Vim plugins. First and foremost: vim-rails . A new feature that I started using recently is the :A alternate file command. Basically, this makes it super quick to jump from a model file to its model spec file. Or from a controller to its spec. Since Rails 5.?, controller specs have fallen out of DHH’s favor. We…
Running RSpec with a single keystroke in a separate tmux session
This is a tiny update to Running Specs from Vim, Sent to tmux via Tslime from the thoughtbot blog. Go read it, and realize that it’s six years old. vim-rspec has not been updated in two years. It probably still works fine, but there’s a new vim plugin that does what vim-rspec does, just better: vim-test . I finally set this up yesterday: ' Add vim-test and tslime to vim plugins. Plug…
Unit testing and test parametrization with RSpec?
Last year I made the switch from developing with Python and Django to working with Ruby and Rails. With that, I also had to learn a new test runner. No more pytest :(. For some reason, a very popular test runner for testing Rails apps is RSpec . Its domain-specific language (DSL) is written with Behavior Driven Development in mind. Hence its tag line: Behaviour Driven Development for Ruby. Making…
Update August 2018
Working a full-time job in an office is something different. Add 3 hours of commute each day, and my life is a lot different than it was a year ago. I firmly believe that I’m about as productive now than I was when I was working fewer hours but alone in my home office. But that’s for another day. More time to and at work means a lot less time for other things, which is something I am…
Moving back to Germany
My search for a new job has been successful. I’m starting a new position as a Ruby-On-Rails developer with a company at the Frankfurt Airport on May 2nd (I will commute from Mannheim). In the end it took me 4 months, 7 applications, 5 interviews and 2 job offers. This doesn’t sound too bad, but still, it’s not an experience I want to repeat anytime soon. Check my Now page to see…
How to listen to your audio books using your favorite podcast app
This post talks about two things: how to save backup copies of your Audible audio books how to create an podcast feed of your audio books Update 2018-05-27: Audible stopped offering to download the audio files in “Format 4”. There are solutions out there, but I haven’t gotten around to studying them, yet. Update 2018-05-29: The solution is on GitHub and is called…
The Xochimilco Trilogy
A few months ago I started a new podcast project Several Ways to Live in Mexico City with my friend Nick . We talk about Mexico and food and culture. And now I think we have created our first highlight of the series, a 3 episode expedition to the town of Xochimilco, where we talked to my friends Jahshua and Edgar. Episode 8 is a short preview, recorded on the way back from Xochimilco. Episode 9…
A short work history. Looking for more.
Update 04/04/2018: There’s been a development . My wife Kathrin will not like this post. She will find it self-deprecating and underselling my abilities. But this is my blog, so I don’t care. TL;DR: I am looking for a job as a Django/Python web developer or a test (automation) engineer, working remotely or in the Rhein-Neckar area in Germany. Starting now. 2017 2017 was a pretty good…
Speeding up Django unit tests with SQLite, reuse-db and RAMDisk
Recently, Harry wrote a post about how to speed up Django unit-testing by using a persistent in-memory SQLite database. While Harry uses the default Django testrunner and a Linux machine, I use pytest with pytest-django on a Mac. This changes a few things, and this post will show the differences. So it’s very specific to: Django pytest macOS Create and mount the RAMDisk /dev/shm is a Linux…
Test-driven Python learning
Bugs are nice because I can learn from them. Recently I found a bug that taught me about floats in Python and how not to use them. I found it thanks to an automated test. The test In a legal contract I had to print a monetary amount in a format similar to MXN $11,600.00 (eleven thousand, six hundred pesos 00/100 cents) My tests check the LaTeX source of the resulting PDF, looking for the correctly…
Several Ways To Live In Mexico City
There are several ways to live, and many more in Mexico City. Nick Farr and I have joined up to talk about life and food in Mexico. We named this English language podcast Several Ways To Live In Mexico . Today we released episode 2 , and we have enough topics to produce quite some more. Check it out, and give us feedback on the Twitter or Mastodon!
Test Django with Selenium, pytest and user authentication
When testing a Django app with Selenium , how do you authenticate the user and test pages that require to be logged in? Of course: StackOverflow has the answer . The following is the actual code that I use to make this work with pytest . It requires pytest-django . pytest fixtures In pytest everything is contained in neat test fixtures. Browser The first fixture provides a broser/webdriver…
pytest parameter matrices
A few months ago I explained how I efficiently test Django forms with pytest parameterization . Last week, I learned a new trick from Raphael Pierzina ’s post about ids for fixtures and parametrize , which is: You you can add multiple parametrization markers to a test function which then create a test parameter matrix. The list of test cases can thus be written much more clearly. Compare the…
Continuous deployment of a Django app from Travis CI to PythonAnywhere
This post describes the configuration of a continuous deployment pipeline that deploys a Django project from GitHub via Travis CI to PythonAnywhere . All code samples come from a pet project of mine: Unkenmathe ( GitHub repository ). Please note that this is no introduction to Travis CI, PythonAnywhere nor Git. Here are the steps that I take. 1. Deploy Django project PythonAnywhere’s guide…
Use Django in-memory file storage with pytest
In my current project, I create PDF files from Jinja2/LaTeX templates. In each test run, several PDFs are created and saved to disk. How do you test this without filling up the hard drive? I use an in-memory data storage. For Django there is a package that makes it really easy: dj-inmemorystorage . A non-persistent in-memory data storage backend for Django. Using pytest fixtures : #…
Neue Podcastfolgen Juli 2017
Nach langen Monaten habe ich diese Woche gleich zwei neue Podcastepisoden veröffentlicht. Mexiko Schon im Januar hatte ich die zweite Folge von Tacos und Limetten aufgenommen. Es wurden zweieinhalb spannende Stunden über die Geschichte und Gesellschaft Mexikos. Außerdem gibt’s Reisetipps! C3S Und auch der C3S-Podcast ist wieder am Start . In der neuen Episode berichtet mir m.eik von der…
Reggae Freiburg
Reggae Freiburg hat ein neues Zuhause und läuft endlich unter der würdigen Domain [**www.reggae-freiburg.de**](http://www.reggae-freiburg.de/) Checkt das!
Install an extra LaTeX font package on PythonAnywhere
This week I installed a LaTeX font package in my PythonAnywhere account. The TL;DR : just install it manually. I've been using LaTeX on and off for more than 10 years now. But I never dove into the depths of the system, typesetting mathematical expressions was fun enough for me. So I rely on Google a good bit. But that’s fine, as there are always new things to discover. Plus: the…
How to test django template tags
Testing django template tags by Krzysztof Żuraw.