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(why) I do not like Excel / Spreadsheets

It seems like I ve earned a reputation at work for hating Excel. We recently had a workshop with different stations and flipboards about how to improve some processes etc. And well I added a lot of less spreadsheets sticky notes. After a while someone approached me and asked what my problem with Excel was [ ]

Against Information Hoarding

I am an information hoarder. I am somehow unhappy if I don t get new information, new insights, new aspects. That s not limited to technology but to literally everything. And since I do more and more self-hosting, I have two services on my candidates list: Readeck and Linkwarden. Then, with the rise of AI, the whole [ ]

How to fix: VLC long startup time

Since a while I noticed that when I double clicked an MP4 file, VLC took really long (like several seconds) to open and show the file. Actually really annoingly long. But as I don t watch a lot of movies, I never really bothered debugging it. BUT recently I came across on itsfoss.com and a tweet [ ]

Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI – acm

Actually, I just posted this on Mastodon, but I so agree to all those points that I want to reference them here on the blog as recommended reads as well. Generative AI is reshaping software engineering—but the narrative has gotten ahead of the evidence. Marketing claims, anecdotal wins, and misread studies have given rise to [ ]

Backup your Crontab …

Yesterday evening I just quickly wanted to change something in my crontab .. I was tired, I was distracted, I just SSH ed into my machine and typed crontab -r. Ahh typo! I obviously wanted to crontab -e which is just ONE key away from -r. But no error, no unknown option ? This left me [ ]

Debugging with Mistral: Learning, Not Just Fixing

Depending on which social bubble one is into, people are drawn to letting LLMs do everything. Latest tools promise to fully configure or even manage entire server setups. While that sounds amazing (and I want to try it out some time) that approach has some downsides: So, while these tools are impressive, they’re not for [ ]

Local Models for Coding

Coding agents are becomming more and more popular (well I guess). Yet the dependece to LLM providers is pretty obvious: Starting in June, GithubCopilot changed to usage-based billing. In April and June Anthropic s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 being available, then not, then limited, And since then I read more and more about [ ]

Should IT Departments Embrace being Hosting Providers?

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken to people across a variety of companies, and one thing has become quite obvious: with today’s tooling, employees are eager and able(!) to build their own applications. Whether it’s a small script to automate a tedious task or a full-fledged web application to solve a very specific problem, [ ]

The Myth of the 2-Day Workweek: What History Tells us about AI and Labor

I’ve heard this claim now really often: at conferences, in keynotes, even in casual conversations: With AI, we’ll soon only need to work two or three days a week. The narrative is seductive, I admit: technology will finally liberate us from the grind, freeing up time for creativity, family, leisure, hobbies who would not [ ]

Impressions from the TNG BigTechDay 2026

End of May, I attended the TNG Big Tech Day (https://www.bigtechday.com/). TNG describes it as a one-day conference on science and technology, with a focus on IT. The speakers often come from the field of information technology, but some also come from other scientific disciplines such as physics, mathematics, or mechanical engineering . It s a fairly [ ]