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!

According to the weather forecast, today was supposed to be the last day of reasonably good weather and warm temperatures for the foreseeable future. So I really wanted to go on a short bike ride today after work. In the end, the ride wasn’t that short, but because I made sure not to overexert myself, it wasn’t any more tiring than a 20 km ride, even though it was 40 km. And that was despite the fact that I still had sore muscles and didn’t sleep very well and much last night. Towards the end of the tour, a few drops of rain fell from the sky, but I’m not made of sugar.

I would never have thought that blocking just one country and one ASN would be so effective in reducing the spam reaching my email server, in addition to using Postscreen and Rspamd, of course. Over time, I had built myself a pretty sophisticated filter with Sieve and added a long list of domains to reject, but automatic blocking with iptables is even better.

Now I have this setup: automated blocking of country/ASN ranges with iptables + Postscreen + Rspamd with Abusix integration + Sieve rules. And my inbox is quiet again, and only legitimate mail reaches me.

I have to say, I’m really happy with my almost silent belt drive on my bike. Compared to the loud clicking of some racing bikes, it’s like an electric car compared to a noisy combustion engine. I prefer it quiet.

Of course, I had to take a photo of my bike with the sunset in the background… Sadly, the camera on the Galaxy XCover 7 isn’t the best to catch the beauty of the sunset. But the bike setup has changed quite a bit since September. And when I got home from this lovely tour, my lovely fiancé had French fries for me. 😄

Mastodon finally has an official share button. Or at least a page you can use that enables the sharer to select their Mastodon instance and then get redirected to the share page there. I directly used that to replace the share to “Mastodon.social” with share to “Mastodon” in GoBlog. 😊

If you are searching for a European OpenRouter alternative that also supports audio transcriptions, cortects might be an alternative. Given the recent controversial developments at OpenAI, and as I was already on the search for European alternatives, I deleted my OpenAI account and switched to Cortects for the few places where I need an AI API. The UI and feature set still aren’t as polished as OpenRouter, but at least it has the audio transcription endpoint, which I use for a voice-to-text Telegram bot. For now, I mostly use the Mistral models.