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.

Telegram Premium allows you to convert voice messages to text. But Telegram Premium isn’t officially available in Germany. So why not develop your own solution? That’s exactly what I did this morning: I created a Telegram bot that takes the voice message and transcribes it using OpenAI’s Whisper API. The bot runs as a serverless container on Scaleway. The source code is published on my Gitea instance.

When you submit a GDPR request to American Express (Germany), you get an “Encrypted Mail” (for which you have to log in again somewhere and set a password), which then contains two PDFs, one of which is full of screenshots of mainframe terminals.

At work, we call such terminals “black holes”. And mainframe is certainly even more widespread than many believe. Not everything runs in fancy Kubernetes clusters developed in Go, NodeJS or Rust.

Really nice weather today, you don’t even need to wear a jacket. 🌞 In less than 24 hours, I will probably already have my bachelor’s degree. 😱

What I like about Go: It’s quick and easy to create small programs, including support for Docker and everything. For example, today I developed a minimal URL shortener that stores the entries in a SQLite database: https://jlel.se/goshort

Now I have finally found a good use for the domain I recently registered. 😄