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.

Warm weather, a bit of sun, and a Saturday without appointments. A perfect day for one more longer bike ride this week. For me, today meant heading out through the surrounding area, including through a valley (Reitlingstal) that I always find beautiful to ride through, but also for hiking. (Here are also some photos from November.)

Today I tried my new Magped pedals for the first time. Why Magped and not proper clipless pedals? I’ve already had bike accidents and appreciate being able to free myself better in emergencies to avoid falling. And yet today I still managed to damage my new shoes a bit right away, because when starting off after a traffic light, I got caught on a pin of the pedals. 😅

The tour was nice; even the climbs in between were okay. Only on the last part was there quite a headwind that slowed me down and made me tired.

First ride with my favorite bike this year. Just a quick round around the local airport. But I saw Highland cows on the way, a beautiful sunset, and got to breathe fresh air. It’s finally a bit warmer again. And most important: It’s not dark already at 5pm!

To decrease my reliance on US-based services, I just switched to Actalis, a fully European CA. They offer unlimited, free domain-validated certificates via ACME, making the transition seamless.

While I’m grateful for the massive innovation Let’s Encrypt brought to the web, it feels good to rely on one less entity subject to the CLOUD Act, especially for a piece of infrastructure as critical as the trust chain.

That’s the weather for me lately. Either so cold or so wet. And always so dark. It’s no wonder I hardly ever leave the house and even have my groceries delivered. I can’t wait for spring to arrive again. 🌞