marco's blog

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I’ve decided to put this blog to rest for now. I might write in German every now and then over at racemat.de . 🐟 So long, and thanks for all the fish 🐟

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I switched from Zwift to Rouvy some time ago for reasons. Today, now this: Ride Into a New Chapter

Not interested either

Not Interested : The truth is I’m just not interested in pretty much all the things I cared about before. Phones, laptops, operating systems, who’s the CEO of what and whose company turned over a trillion dollars this quarter, none of it does anything for me at the moment. I’m feeling almost exactly the same way right now. However, I don’t think it’s simply because of my age. What…

Tree Trunk

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Finished reading: Reset Thriller : die Wahrheit stirbt zuerst by Peter Grandl 📚

Thoughts on AI and Privacy

It still baffles me that so many people are willing to completely give up their privacy out of fascination with the possibilities of AI. Personally, I don’t think it’s proportionate to feed all my notes and thoughts to Claude Code, for example, just so it can clean up my Obsidian Vault. I mean, the tech giants may promise to respect their users' privacy, but hey, these companies…

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Project Hail Mary : Loved the book and enjoyed the movie. 🎥

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Finished reading: Die Mitternachtsbibliothek by Matt Haig 📚

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Finished reading: Die Känguru-Rebellion Der fünfte Band der Känguru-Reihe by Marc-Uwe Kling 📚

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TIL that when using WireGuard to connect remotely to your home network, and you have configured Pi‑Hole as a local DNS server in your Fritz!Box, if the IP address of the Pi‑Hole server changes, it is not enough to update it in the Fritz!Box; it must also be reflected in the WireGuard configuration on every client you use it with. Once this becomes clear, many things suddenly become so much simpler…

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Successful products : Every time I stumble on articles or posts discussing tech products, I’m perplexed when someone uses the word “successful” to describe a product with a lot of users. There’s a better word for products like that, and that’s “popular”.

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TIL that on macOS Tahoe, you can use an user default to turn off menu icons: defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool false

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I really appreciate Apple’s attention to details and software quality.

Itsyhome

Your entire smart home in the macOS menu bar. Cameras, lights, thermostats, locks, and more - just one click away. Itsyhome , the Home Assistant app I knew I wanted but didn't know existed 🥰. Screenshot Itsyhome Home Page (2026-02-19) itsyhome.app

RSS: Phantom Obligation

Enjoyed reading Phantom Obligation . An answer might be Current . Thanks canion for the heads up. I haven’t tried the app yet, but its concept seems interesting. In my RSS reader, I already have one special folder for a while - it’s called ‘People’. Here, I’ve gathered a few selected blogs that I always read. Often, I just click on the title to directly go to their…

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Finished reading: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow 📚

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Watched: The Last Viking 🍿 I love this kind of movies and this one, too.

Defaults 2025

Another year has passed, and it’s time to update my app defaults . A lot has happened in the world since Andrew , Martin , and Jason of Hemispheric Views listed their defaults for the first time. I’ve tried to ditch big‑tech companies and move my data and services to more open platforms, some of them self‑hosted . Indicated are unchanged entries (🔒) and updated entries (✨). I still use the…

PSA macOS and iOS Apps on Sale

PSA: Right now is a good time to buy Indie Software for macOS and iOS. There are lists online with hundreds of discounted apps, e.g. indieappsales.com or github and Lou has a Roundup of his AppAddict Reviews on Sale . But it’s even easier than this. Just buy all the apps you don’t own yet from the Editor’s Choice bundle. You’re welcome ;-)

Down the Self-Hosting Rabbit Hole

For a couple of years, I’ve had two Raspberry Pis running on my home network. One was for a Magic Mirror 2 server instance with a few self-written Python scripts. A very cheaply acquired Fire Tablet hangs on the fridge and displays its website in Full Kiosk Mode. The other Raspberry run Pi-Hole and filters ads for the entire home network. To become a little more independent from the big tech…

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Watched: Rushmore 🍿 - enjoyed it

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Babo: The Haftbefehl Story (2025)

LM Studio

Run local LLMs like gpt-oss, Qwen3, Gemma3, DeepSeek and many more on your computer, privately and for free. LM Studio is the app I now use for running local LLMs. 1 In LM Studio I mainly use gemma‑3‑12b , mostly for alt‑text generation, and the gpt‑oss‑20b model. Both run fine on my Mac equipped with 32 GB of RAM. Screenshot Homepage LM Studio (2025-11-09) lmstudio.ai/ I switched from Ollama…

Print and Play - Dungeon Pages

In the latest Hiro report , I read about an app called Roll N' Write for iPadOS. I had never heard about these print and play games and was wondering what they were about. I found the idea compelling, although I’m not a big RPG guy. I’ve downloaded the app, which looks decent, but as I am not a heavy iPad and Apple Pencil user anymore, I was more interested in the paper version.…

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TIL that you can’t connect to your Fujifilm camera with your iPhone via its local wifi if you have a VPN service running in the background 🤦‍♂️. So, don’t blame the camera, blame yourself.