Recently I stumbled across two threads regarding Cloudflare that somehow left a bitter taste. I think it’s a big red flag when users have to seek support via public forums because their accounts have been banned from a service, but no help comes via support. | Continue reading
My smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite, which has been my daily driver for a year and a few months, has a 4500mAh Li-Po battery ("lithium-ion polymer" – like lithium-ion, but with solid or gel-like electrolytes that allow a thinner design). My smartphone can be charged with a m … | Continue reading
In response to my teasing post about my new Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, James suggested I share my experience with the watch on my blog and asked what my reasons are for wearing a smartwatch. So here is my answer. | Continue reading
I am currently experimenting with whether a Scaleway Stardust instance will also suffice for me as a code server. Scaleway offers this at an incredibly low price and if you then also select that no IPv4 address should be used, then the instance costs less than 0,50 € per month. | Continue reading
At work today I came across an Eclipse feature for cleaning up Java code. It helps you to improve the code, for example to add final to attributes or parameters, or to improve boolean expressions. | Continue reading
Speaking of web comics that I follow via RSS, ATOM or JSON feed: ideally I would like to see the comics directly in my feed reader (Miniflux). Some feeds already show the images directly in the content, others do not. | Continue reading
JavaScript is a controversial topic, especially in privacy and open source circles. That’s because JavaScript is often used to execute code on website visitors' devices that does things that aren’t so cool. For example, tracking users across the entire Internet. That’s why the us … | Continue reading
While other people get excited about new Apple devices, I get excited about new features of online services or tools that I use. 😆 | Continue reading
Microsoft’s open source strategy is interesting. Microsoft currently publishes 3836 repositories on GitHub. By chance I came across the following new repository: Extensible Storage Engine. It is published under the MIT License. | Continue reading
Sometimes I find it quite interesting to read through articles that I wrote three or four years ago, back then still on the platform Medium. Some time ago I deleted them on Medium and published them on my blog in a “Medium Archive”. | Continue reading
Today I have heard again a discussion about WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Threema and there was the question to which messenger one would switch from WhatsApp. | Continue reading
Oscar Benedito writes about how to give back to free and open source software (FOSS). | Continue reading
I spent months coding and it’s finally time to say “Hello World”! | Continue reading
Michael Lewis had a pretty great idea, he created a search engine for personal websites. I really like that idea because I like exploring personal websites and especially reading personal blogs. It’s always interesting to read about people’s thoughts, hobbies, lives, experiences … | Continue reading
I don’t like Twitter and I’m a fan of Nitter as an alternative frontend. Whenever there’s a link to Twitter, I use Nitter to read it. Especially the mobile web version of Twitter is terrible, even more with a slow network connection. Not to mention the bad user experience when re … | Continue reading
I recently took a closer look at Cloudflare’s new project Radar. Besides statistics about internet usage, attacks and popular domains, the site also shows statistics about the market shares of browsers. | Continue reading
Cloudflare currently celebrate their 10th birthday and launch a new product or feature everyday for a week. Today they launched Cloudflare Web Analytics. Until now you had to proxy your site through Cloudflare to use their analytics, because they collected those stats – “at the e … | Continue reading
I recently rediscovered the ability of Visual Studio Code to develop on remote machines. Just connect to a server via SSH and develop there. | Continue reading
Medium is bringing back support for custom domains. And in general they seem to listen better. In addition to custom domains, Medium is reducing the amount of annoying pop-ups and banners and will also offer more customization options. | Continue reading
Recently, there has been a lot of talk in my blog bubble about email self-hosting again (here is one example, here is a second one). I myself switched to a self-hosted mail server over a year ago, only to switch back to a hosted version a few months later.For me there were no tec … | Continue reading
I know, Cloudflare is often criticized in privacy groups and also I do not find everything good. I myself use Cloudflare actually only for two things, which do not concern the privacy of the visitors of my websites. DNS hosting and domain registration.Cloudflares DNS management i … | Continue reading
I see a lot of people blogging about really clever knowledge base systems like Zettelkasten or a tool called Roam. But that isn’t something for me for a couple of reasons. | Continue reading
On my blog there is a section called “Links” (recently not only in English but also in German). But how do I find links that I find interesting and worth sharing? In this post I will describe my process.What I like to read most are blogs of other people. I don’t know many of them … | Continue reading
Yesterday, I asked the Hacker News community why they don’t have blogs, even though they have the necessary technical skills. Many Hacker News readers and contributors have the technical skills to run their own blog and post their opinions. But instead they prefer to use Twitter … | Continue reading
I admit it, I am a big fan of pre-packaged software. Software that I simply set up by typing a single command or just adding a few lines to my existing configuration. I like simplicity and this kind of software makes things a lot easier and lets one focus on getting work done.I s … | Continue reading
I just added the feature to my blog that allows you to have any article read to you. For some articles I already add an MP3 file with a natural sounding pronunciation, but now it is also possible to get articles read aloud that don’t have an MP3 file (if the browser and operating … | Continue reading
After Microsoft (GitHub) acquired npm, I think it’s only a matter of time before Docker (the rest that’s left after selling Docker Enterprise) is also taken over by Microsoft or GitHub.What makes me think so? Docker needs to find a new way to make money after Docker Enterprise is … | Continue reading
During the last weeks I saw a few reviews (like this one) about long time experience with the Surface Go. I have mine for a couple of months now and finally finished the first semester where it accompanied me for a couple of different tasks.I planned to use my Surface Go to take … | Continue reading
Like two or three weeks ago, I was a little bored and thought about installing something new on my server again. Yes, I really like installing “things” (it's actually just adding some lines of configuration to a file), especially when those things improve my life in some way. I i … | Continue reading
In this post I want to show with which services and tools it is possible to run a completely free website. An own website not only offers the possibility to create your own professional web presence, it can also make you independent from silos like Facebook, Twitter or Medium. It … | Continue reading
DHH, CTO of BaseCamp, tweets the following: Google is not a search engine, it’s an ad engine. You search to find stuff, they respond with a full page ad. This is so ludicrously user hostile that it’s only tenable when you operate a monopoly. Break. Them. Up. Later he adds: This i … | Continue reading
In this series I want to share my experiences of using Windows on a private device again.If you want to use Linux applications on Windows you have multiple options. Using the Windows version of the application if it's available, cross-compile the app, use a VM or Docker, or use t … | Continue reading
There are some online services that use email login. This means that instead of a combination of user name and password, only the email address is entered and a login link is sent to it. Basically, this is a good option to increase security a bit. The service only needs to store … | Continue reading
Matt Baer, the creator of the writing platform write.as, writes about Apple’s privacy focused marketing and how that doesn’t matter when your iPhone is full of apps like Facebook, Instagram or Google. Though I appreciate the ads for what they are, it’s silly to see iPhone adverti … | Continue reading
I use at least eight different operating systems on a daily basis. Windows 10 on my Microsoft Surface Go Ubuntu Desktop on my latpop (Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga S1) Fedora Silverblue on my desktop PC Android on my smartphone (Xiaomi Mi A1) Tizen on my smartwatch (Samsung Galaxy Watch) … | Continue reading
It seems like there’s a new trend popping up: Newsletters and paid newsletters.I prefer to read content using a news reader, with which I can subscribe to countless RSS (or JSON) feeds. I can also decide when to consume new content and am not bothered with reminders etc. that the … | Continue reading
Yesterday, GitLab sent an email to all users (and wrote a blog post) telling that they are updating their terms & services (to which you have to agree) to include a new third party service to track and analyze the behavior of their users, so that they better understand how their … | Continue reading
I hope I don’t have to explain why Google is bad, but just to give a few reasons to switch to alternatives: You’ll probably get better privacy because those alternatives collect less data about you, your data won’t get sold to advertisers or government organizations that easily a … | Continue reading