2020

Published on 2020-05-24 in 💬 Micro

Yesterday evening I hinted that I will give my blog a new design in the next days. I woke up relatively early today and thought that I could just finish it quickly now.

My goals were on the one hand to simplify the design significantly, but on the other hand to save as much HTML and CSS as possible.

Now the page should load even faster than it did before. Almost every page on this blog (except the ones with images) uses less than 10 KB for transfer. All generated files of the blog now only need about 30 MB instead of 60 MB.

Did I succeed?

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Time and focus

Published on 2020-05-23 in 💭 Thoughts

It’s crazy how quickly time can pass when you get very engrossed in something. When it grabs you and you forget almost everything around you. When you’re in the flow.

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Habits

Published on 2020-05-22 in 💭 Thoughts

I use one of my domains mainly for services that I use personally. My Miniflux instance for example. For a long time I ran Miniflux on a device from home, before I moved it to my virtual private server in the “cloud” a few weeks ago. To also adapt the subdomain I use for it to the scheme of the other subdomains, Miniflux now runs on a different subdomain than before. However, I have set up a redirection so that even if I enter the old subdomain, I will be redirected to the new one.

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Thoughts on owning my run data

Published on 2020-05-21 in 💭 Thoughts

I use Strava as my tracking app on runs. I used to use Runtastic (now Adidas Running), but unfortunately there is no native app for my Samsung Galaxy Watch. But since Strava has now implemented some more restrictions for free users and I’ve been toying with the idea that I need a different system to own my run data (self-hosted) for a while anyway, I’ve now started to program something myself (as always when my desired solution doesn’t exist…).

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Windows Package Manager

Published on 2020-05-19 in 🔗 Links

I didn’t believe my eyes when I saw this: Windows has an official package manager now. The lack of a package manager was the thing that annoyed me most about Windows. That’s why I always used Chocolatey on Windows, but even that has room for improvement.

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Microsoft is bringing Linux GUI apps to Windows 10

Published on 2020-05-19 in 🔗 Links

Last year I wrote a tutorial about how it’s possible to run Linux GUI apps on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux. WSL 2 (with an integrated Linux Kernel) is coming soon, but Microsoft announced they are bringing support for Linux GUI apps to Windows 10 too. While I still prefer to use Linux directly, I think it’s still a great announcement and new feature. It’s definitely the year of Linux on the desktop.

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Corona-Warn-App

Published on 2020-05-19 in 💭 Thoughts

The German government tasked SAP and Deutsche Telekom with the development of an open-source contact tracing app (named “Corona-Warn-App”) using the APIs from Google and Apple. Now they’ve published the code for the backend server. I took a quick look at the code and I’m quite a bit surprised about the quality and best practices used. They are using the Java-based Spring framework and use Postgres and minio to store data. Everything running in Docker. Even the Docker images are build using multi-stage Dockerfiles.

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Published on 2020-05-18 in 💬 Micro

Yesterday I wrote about a new “blog feature” showing below a post places on this blog where the post was mentioned. Unfortunately this has a high complexity and is not very fast. Today I tried (and managed) to improve the algorithm so that the complexity is just O(n). However, the code does not work as I expected it to, because Hugo does not provide a way to use global variables.

I wonder when the point comes where it is too much effort for me to find workarounds and I just build my own page generator according to my own needs… Most of my blog setup I have already developed myself.

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Published on 2020-05-17 in 💬 Micro

Updated on 2020-05-19

To give readers a bit more context, I’ve extended my Hugo theme so that it will be displayed below each post if it is mentioned or linked in another post on my blog. This increases the build time from about 7 to about 17 seconds (on my machine it takes 2 seconds, but it is also much faster than the VPS), but I don’t know how I can make it more performant. After all, for each article it is necessary to iterate through all the other articles and see if the content contains a relative link to the post.

Update: I disabled this again, because I don’t like this much increased build time.

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Experiences with email-based login

Published on 2020-05-17 in 🔗 Links

It is interesting to see that I am not the only one who has a problem with email logins. I find email logins make everything much more complicated than simple password-based authentication. I use a password manager both on the computer in the browser and on my smartphone and can easily have complex passwords filled in automatically.

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