💬 Micro

New year, new fitness motivation? I ordered a foldable pull-up and dip power tower. 😅 Let’s see if it is actually foldable enough to not take too much space in the apartment. And let’s see if it’s just going to be another piece of fitness equipment being mostly unused.

The pull-up bar for the door frame that I used in Kassel unfortunately doesn’t work with the doors in this apartment. And I’ve screwed enough things into the walls to know that the walls here are a disaster.

I couldn’t resist buying a new domain! 👀

I chose janlukas.blog as I’m considering rebranding my online presence. I want to move away from the nickname jlelse towards a stylized version of my first name. It also feels much more future-proof, especially if I end up taking my future wife’s last name.

What will probably be even more difficult than deciding on a surname is moving the blog. Moving an ActivityPub instance to a new domain is no easy task. (If you have already done that, please tell me how.)

Fun fact: While Jan and Lukas have long been the top boys’ names in Germany, the name Jan-Lukas with a hyphen is not that common after all. janlukas.de and jan-lukas.de were also still available, before I registered them.

Many are taking the start of the year as a chance to update their “default apps” lists. I created a post listing mine in 2023. But as I also had a list of “self-hosted services” I use, I decided to merge those lists, and you can find it on a subpage of my /uses-page now. There are also separate lists about the hardware and the browser add-ons I use. And I know, I should find an alternative for OneDrive. I was thinking about switching to a self-hosted OpenCloud with S3-storage at the latest when my M365 license expires in 2028.

I took some time today (since I have the day off for a public holiday) to update the “About Me” page on this blog and make it a bit more personal. It should now offer a good way to get to know me without ever having met me in real life. 😄

Even as an adult, you’re allowed to go sledding! No sooner said than done. Today, with a lot of new snow, I drove out to the Harz Mountains. I hiked up from Bad Harzburg to the Molkenhaus (about 2 kilometers) and then took the sled back down on the return leg. It’s the very same sled my parents used to pull me on through the Harz when I was just a little kid. It was fun! ❄️🛷

Having multiple side programming projects is a good thing. While I enhanced GoBlog with some security features in the recent past (multiple passkeys, hashed passwords, etc.), I worked again on another project, which I haven’t touched in almost two years. My URL shortener. I did some maintenance but also added some quality-of-life features. This time I worked with Raptor Mini in GitHub Copilot. On the small code base, that model worked quite well.

You are welcome to check out GoShort.

I should have set up something like this earlier, but now I finally did: Uptime Kuma. I currently host it on my home server and let it monitor my main VPS, my mail server, and some self-hosted services. Simple to set up and configure with SQLite!

GoBlog not only has a new README file on the repository (replacing the old, cluttered, incomplete documentation) but also has a new share button implementation. No more relying on third-party services for that basic functionality!

I think I did not blog about it, but I switched back to a self-hosted AdGuard Home instance quite some time ago from NextDNS. To reduce my number of subscriptions, but also to increase my control over important infrastructure I use.

As upstreams in AdGuard Home, I used DNS4EU, Mullvad, and Quad9.

However, today, I switched to a self-hosted instance of PowerDNS Recursor. So no more reliance on third-party DNS resolvers, except the root and authoritative nameservers.

I try it with AdGuard Home first, as I later also want to set up a second PowerDNS Recursor instance on my mail server to make use of some more spam protection features.

Let’s see if any problems appear. When yes, “it was DNS”! 😅

I finally have the Internet Phone Book as well. Ordered from Hyper Hypo in Greece because that was the only place with stock. Lots to explore for quiet moments!