Library: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
A popular science take on motivational systems.
tc3 - Engineering, Management, and Escapism
Articles, blips, and book reviews on engineering, management, and literature
Latest posts
Blip: New Blip
People always look for solutions to problems within their area of expertise. Lawyers look for legal solutions. IT specialists look for IT solutions. Business administrators look for commercial solutions. That’s why commercial managing directors prefer to take out insurance against cyberattacks rather than invest in cybersecurity.
Library: Ringworld
A hard-sci-fi tale in a space fantasy wrapper.
Blip: Complexity vs Chance
Inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s third law , here’s the everyday business version: Any sufficiently complex decision is indistinguishable from chance.
Blip: Moving Folders in Finder Considered Dangerous
When you move a folder in macOS and a folder with the same name exists in the destination, Finder asks if you want to overwrite the destination. Be warned: “overwrite” means replacing the destination folder without any way to undo it. Make sure you have a Time Machine backup ready. I find it perplexing that hard deletion of the destination is the default action, and you must press…
Library: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
An easy read on what behavioral tendencies prevent teams from working towards a common goal.
Article: Pocketbook Era With Koreader
I’d been looking for a new e-reader to replace my Kindle Paperwhite for quite a while. The PocketBook Era with KOReader has turned out to be the perfect solution for me. Because I didn’t have this combo on my radar for a long time, I’m hoping this post helps others who haven’t yet reached the finish line in their search. In short: In my view, the Era offers the best hardware right now but is let…
Blip: Blog Re-Launch
After experimenting with it for the past couple of weeks, I’ve finally decided to publish my new blog. I’m thrilled to have a platform to write again.
Article: h264, h265, and VC1 in Fedora >= 37
Mesa 22.2 made the support for hardware acclerated h264, h265, and VC1 optional due to patent claims. Fedora followed suit and is now distributing the version without hw acceleration support for those codecs. This might affect you, if you’re using the nouveau or amdgpu open source drivers. The patent claims seem to make it illegal to use the accelerated drivers in some parts of the world,…
Article: Extracting Messages from Signal Desktop
While Signal might be the best crypto messenger out there, it is terrible when it comes to simple convenience functions. Sometimes I want to export a chat to archive it or share it with someone who has lost parts of an important conversation due to a key change. But Signal doesn’t offer any official way to create a CSV or even a PDF export. On the other hand, Signal is Open Source , and…
Article: Reading Time & Word Count in Hugo
Many Hugo templates include reading time or word count as metadata of blog posts. I think that’s pretty handy, and I always enjoy a little heads up - especially on long blog posts where this info helps me to decide if I read it now or save (read ‘kindle’) it for later. But what if your favorite template is missing reading time / word count? It’s pretty simple to add it…
Article: Setting up IPv6 on a Web Server
This weekend, I finally came around to enabling IPv6 on my web server. In this post, I describe what I did to get everything up and running on a netcup vServer running CentOS 8, but this should be quite the same for other web hoster services. Motivation My ISP (like many others) primarily uses IPv6 for client IPs and offers IPv4 access via DS-Lite . On random occasions, the IPv4 gateway (DS-Lite…
Article: Solid Color Background in Gnome 3
Gnome is notorious for reducing user options in the GUI to a minimum. So if you want to use a solid color background instead of a wallpaper, your only option using the UI is to select an image of whatever color you want your desktop background to be. As someone who does not like any distracting elements on the desktop, this feels tedious to me. Fortunately, the functionality is still in the code.…
Article: Installing Fedora 34 with an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
I had a little hickup when I installed Fedora 34 on a machine with an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics adapter: the boot process got stuck after mounting /tmp . I assume this was caused by KVM, because booting in basic graphics mode worked flawlessly. This is nothing to be worried about. The bootstick obviously just didn’t include the necessary microcode for this rather new GPU. Since Fedora…
Article: Windows 10 Installation: Missing Media Driver
I had a strange problem when I tried to install Windows 10 on a new machine yesterday: I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from the Microsoft website and used dd to create a bootable USB stick. I could actually boot from the stick but got a weird error message when starting the installation: A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD, USB or Hard disk driver. If you have a CD,…
Article: Why React Seems to Scroll Just Not Far Enough
If your React app’s scrolling seems off, it might actually have nothing to do with scrolling.
Article: Signal Updates Considered Harmful
I usually recommend Signal as a simple-to-use and secure form of communication. Signal is primarily known for its mobile app, but there is also a desktop application based on Electron. The desktop app has a very annoying, long-standing issue which has already been reported on GitHub in 2018: Whenever a new application update is available, the app shows a message box prompting the user to restart…
Article: Migration to Hugo / Relaunch
This week, I changed my server OS from Debian to CentOS 7. Since I don’t appreciate having all those Ruby dependencies on my clients, I changed my static site generator to Hugo. I intend to bring back most of my old posts in the next few days.
Article: The Tale of the Three Little Monitors and the Evil Lenovo Dock
TL’DR: I tried to attach three monitors to Lenovo’s Ultra Dock. At least at the moment, that only works if one of the monitors is attached to the analog VGA port because the Intel Graphics Driver does not support nested MST. For the better half of a decade, my primary laptop has been a Thinkpad Edge 11. The dedicated ATI graphics unit was a major pain: using the open source drivers,…