Now I am 26 + 1 years old. My better half made me this delicious cake and gave me these beautiful flowers and some cool presents!

Upgrading the valves on my bike to Clik valves is a real game changer. Straightforward to use and fixes a few annoying issues with the previous Presta valves (for example, accidentally unscrewing the valve while removing the pump). Another cool thing: there are conversion kits from Schwalbe available for both Presta and Dunlop valves, so I can also upgrade my other bike and my fiancé’s bike. Inflating tires is now a piece of cake!

Stalwart v0.16 was released, and with it support for automatic DNS updates for things like TLSA records (DANE). It also supports Bunny DNS, so it’s interesting for me. Will I replace my current mail server (with docker-mailserver) with Stalwart soon? 👀

I made a list of the bikes I use. 🚲️

My 5G internet has worked again flawlessly since Friday afternoon. I have the suspicion it’s because, since today, there are new laws that define when mobile providers underperform and people have the right to reduce their bills; but it might also be just a reconfiguration or upgrade of cell towers nearby. I noticed the internet got faster as well, now with download speeds often about 400 Mbps (instead of 350 before, with a contract limit of 500) and upload speeds of 60 Mbps (instead of 35 before, with a contract limit at 50). So at least in one direction I get more than I paid for. 😅 But on Thursday I will also get a fiber connection and can set up dual WAN then.

When I switched to Linux, I also enabled that Firefox setting to disable custom fonts on websites. And you know what? It actually looks better this way! No broken fonts, because some fonts are mapped to ugly fonts. Just my default font, which is Noto for now.

I’m currently on my third or fourth attempt to protect my Forgejo (formerly a Gitea instance) from AI crawlers and other bots. Yesterday, I set up Anubis, that bot firewall you now see on some sites, and it actually seems to be helping. Let’s see how long that lasts…

Anyway, due to the price hike, unused resources, and the fact that rescaling is finally possible again at Hetzner in Falkenstein, I downgraded my VPS to a smaller instance. And I’m not about to let those annoying AI crawlers take my blog offline. They can scrape my source code from GitHub; I’ve got mirrors for most repositories there anyway. 🙄

I’m back to Ubuntu and Linux on the desktop! 🥳

The spare time this weekend, I used for migrating my laptop to Ubuntu 26.04 (beta). With the Windows 11 installation continuing as a QEMU/KVM virtual machine in case I still need Windows for some things.

In 2020, during the pandemic, I spent 50 euros on a 1080p webcam. It worked fine, but I rarely used it: most calls at my old job were audio-only. Fast forward to 2026 and my new job: video calls are much more common. So I invested another 50 euros in a refurbished Logitech Brio 4K. The upgrade is night and day, especially in my north-facing office, where lighting isn’t ideal. The Brio’s low-light performance and 4K clarity really impress me so far. Sure, the recommended price is much higher, but this deal on eBay was worth it.

I haven’t really warmed up with Bluesky and ATProto yet; somehow the whole ecosystem seems very complex to me, but I haven’t really looked into it in depth yet and had similar feeling with ActivityPub in the beginning. But I do have a profile there. I’ve now moved it from bsky.social to the European eurosky.social. No one should have noticed, because I use my own domain as my handle anyway. I have to give ATProto credit for that compared to ActivityPub: migrations work great!