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! ❄️🛷

My blog still has a long way to go when it comes to accessibility, but I’m excited about two new plugins I’ve just added to make things better.

The first plugin uses AI to generate image descriptions for me – far better than I could write myself. It even works in multiple languages, adapting to the blog’s language settings. The second plugin improves how these descriptions can be accessed on mobile devices. Now, you can simply tap on an image to read its description (on desktop, the descriptions are still available as tooltips when you hover over the image).

Since image descriptions aren’t created automatically for older posts and I haven’t manually updated all of them yet, you can check out this post as an example of how it works.

Sometimes things happen that you did not expect: You hear a song, you really like it, you research who made it, and you find out that person lives in the same town as you: AK – Discovery.

I hope to ignore US politics as much as I can in the next few years – it can really bring you down. Let’s also hope Trump and his oligarch friends don’t cause too much harm until then.

To continue my recovery today, I didn’t do much other than lie in bed and watch Netflix (I’ve been binge-watching a lot since we subscribed to Netflix a few weeks ago): I watched the miniseries The Playlist.

The Playlist tells the story of the founding of Spotify. In each episode, the story is told from a different perspective. What’s exciting is that the artists’ point of view is not left out.

I was using my 5G router setup with Vanilla OpenWRT and QMI Cellular as a protocol for quite some time, but there were irregular disconnections etc. Updating the firmware of the modem didn’t help. Some days ago, I noticed that it’s also possible to configure with Modem Manager (which provides connection information directly in LuCI) and put the Quectel modem into MBIM mode. It’s running without hiccups now! Also updated to OpenWRT 24.10.