You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Weeknote 32:2026 I'm back from holidays, and this weeknote tells you if they were successful, how I'm dealing with being back in real life, what I'm doing to focus, how I rediscovered the joy of livestreaming, and that AI thinks I'm an IT archaeologist. Recharged Last week, I returned home from my month-long workation. We spent three weeks on Borkum, a small North Sea island off The Netherlands.…
Weeknote 26:2026 Coding fever On Monday, I started a speedrun cleaning up the modernization issue queue for the freistilbox infrastructure code. I was fed up with our team running into roadblocks all the time. So I rolled up my mental sleeves and got to work. I tackled one infra cookbook after another, adding support for new versions of Ubuntu and CINC, addressing issues as they emerged. The…
Enlightenment The Banned Book Library DIY project is absolutely radical.
TIL: KDE has game controller support And it's not always useful. After giving up WoW after giving up Final Fantasy XIV, I'd like to get back into the latter again. And since I own a Steam Deck, I decided to play it with a game controller, even on my Linux desktop. For an MMO, FF has great controller support. I set up the basics on my Character Settings, but every time I pressed the B button, it…
Scope creep can be anywhere I realized what's been blocking my writing for all these painful months: scope creep . I eliminated it in coding with clear specifications up front. In my task tracking, I'm avoiding it by using a paper notebook. But I increased it in my writing by asking an LLM to give me extensive outlines and prompts for additional angles. What I need instead is a "ship it!"…
Switching my blog to weblog.lol I used to run my blog as a static site generated with Jekyll for many years. For the same duration, I've been struggling with blogging regularly. This had many reasons, one of which being that the Git-based process created significant friction because I'm not always at a computer with the necessary tooling when inspiration strikes. When I joined the omg.lol web…
Going into orgmode I just don't have the headspace to check out every hype topic. But eventually, I catch up on some. This time, it's orgmode , the plain text format for taking notes, tracking tasks, and much much more. Orgmode originated on the Emacs editor, but there's an orgmode plugin for Neovim that I'm trying out myself. Hadn't I switched to a paper-based workflow for task management (which…
I finished the book " The Soul of a New Machine " by Tracy Kidder. How the engineering team at Data General willed the Eagle computer into existence back in the 1970s was an interesting read. But it was also a stressful read for me because witnessing the Eagle project constantly teeter on the edge of failure despite all the blood, sweat and tears getting invested into it hit just too close to home…
Business strategy. Karate progress. Task execution. Fresh business strategy Last week, my business partner Markus and I met in Germany to spend a few days discussing our strategy for the rest of the year. I had the perfect time. Not only did we have intensive, productive conversations. We also got to have them in the ideal environment. The hotel Markus had picked took great care of us, and over…
Bye-bye, Bose QC Ultra I got myself new earphones this week. The Anker Soundcore Liberty 4 will finally replace the Bose Quietcomfort Ultra. While the Anker earbuds are clearly worse in the noise cancelling department, at least they don't fall out of my ears all the time. The Bose ones are a total failure for me for that reason, and according to my research, I'm far from the only one with this…
After maintaining my Now Page for a few weeks, I realized that I'm using it to write weeknotes . But since I kept overwriting the page, things got lost that I'd rather see preserved for autobiographical purposes. That's why I reduced my .plan , as I'm calling my Now Page, to short lists, and am going back to posting weeknotes again as well. Trying Zellij On the tech side, I'll be trying out Zellij…
Since I started practicing Karate again in September of last year, I've been constantly improving my flexibility. I have to. When I stopped training 20 years ago, I already didn't have great range of motion in my hips and legs. And the following two decades of neglect, of just sitting in front of a screen, not only caused unhealthy weight gain, they also let my muscles deteriorate. Especially my…
While updating my Now Page , it dawned on me that it would really help if I made my readers aware that this page exists in the first place! If you'd like a quick update what's going on with me, this page is the place to go. The Now Page was an idea of Derek Sivers, and it's become popular enough among bloggers to warrant an site explaining it further . In honour of the Finger protocol used in the…
Obsidian has been my long-term memory for many years now, but only yesterday I realized how easy it was to also make it my blog editor and thus greatly simplify writing new posts. I use Jekyll to generate the files for this blog; these files then get served from a free Netlify account. The setup required to integrate Obsidian is minimal: I created a new folder named posts that became the root…
One of the best things that happened lately was that I found a Karate club nearby. I have no idea why I didn't earlier, because I wanted to get back into martial arts for years. I did look for dojos in recent years, but for some reason, I didn't find any for Shotokan Karate, the style I trained in before we had kids. Turns that there are two Shotokan clubs in the next town alone! I've been…
Apple seems to have lost its way. It once built computers that would empower their users. Now they're doing everything to cage them in. In his article " Apple as a Petulant Child ", Curtis McHale shares his perspective on how Apple is behaving in the wake of the EU ruling with regard to the Digital Markets Act, and in general lately. "I want to like Apple devices. The software is good. The…
I've been a user and fan of the AeroPress since I get one for my birthday a few years ago. Unfortunately, it's starting to show its age. The AeroPress is a popular coffee brewing device shaped like a huge syringe that uses a combination of immersion and pressure to create a rich and smooth cup of coffee. It consists of a plastic chamber, a screw-on filter cap and a plunger with a rubber seal. It…
Today I've learned that the MAME emulator project did a cooperation with the Internet Archive, Texas Instruments and HP to create software replicas of historic pocket calculators. The result is the Calculator Drawer . While there are emulators for the HP 38G, 48G+ and 48GX, my trusty HP 28S on whose software and hardware design they are based, that I bought for uni in the early 90s and am still…
Recently, I noticed an increasing frequency in which I get presented with Captcha requests. In part, this might have been caused by me switching browsers or reinstalling my laptop. But still, thanks to their annoyance factor, it felt like I was getting more of them than in the past. Imagine my surprise when I listened to the Late Night Linux podcast and learned that the flood of images of fire…
When someone on Mastodon asked for help with a Ruby question, my friend and business partner Markus kindly referred them to me, knowing that I'm always happy to help other Ruby developers. Their question was about executing Mastodon code from a custom script. In this post, I describe how I solved this problem using the Rails console and a custom subclass. The problem the person wanted to solve was…
It's been a while since my last weeknote. This is a good sign that not only I have better control of my tasks again, but also that there's been events and insights worth writing about in the first place. Discovering my early works -- In the back of a cupboard, I found the printed specification and software code of one of my first professional works. It's a maintenance scheduling application that I…
Following up on my recent post on ngrok , I found an interesting alternative via @shakalandy's newsletter . Bore presents itself as "a modern, simple TCP tunnel that exposes local ports to a remote server, bypassing standard NAT connection firewalls." Apart from its simplicity, what makes bore interesting is that its connection server can be self-hosted. That way, you're in full control of who can…
This month, a new intern from Spain started at my company. While we used to use Macbooks for our interns, he was the first to get a Linux laptop. Nothing fits the DevOps use case better, after all. I set up the machine with Manjaro Linux in my office, but I had to solve the problem of later installing and upgrading software after the laptop was handed over. It'll always access the internet from a…
I just finished the first round of my weekly Linux Shell Workshop which I'm teaching live on my Twitch channel . It's been a lot of fun, and getting direct feedback from people who are new to the topic and find value in it felt great. I also noticed a few things that I can do better next time, so in the end everyone learned something today! We'll continue the workshop next Friday at 4pm GMT.
I don't think I ever copied more vim or zsh configuration from anyone than from ChrisAtMachine. Looks like I found a soulmate. 😊 His YouTube channel is well worth watching!