I think I have never written so many emails during my entire studies as in the last few weeks. But hey, I like to write emails and I’m really glad that my studies are continuing despite Corona (and therefore without any attendance events). Especially the flexibility that I can schedule most things freely is really good. I have not yet quite decided how I will proceed after my studies, but the idea of correspondence courses (possibly alongside work) sounds quite tempting.

regex101.com is my favorite tool for testing and debugging regular expressions too. It can even generate code. 🤓 Very nice tool! 👍

It seems like I’m currently a bit obsessed with creating new Go-based projects. Yesterday, I announced my new Telegram channel, where it’s possible to receive notifications about new entries on my blog (I created another channel for the German posts too). First, I tried to use IFTTT, but somehow IFTTT’s behavior is a bit unpredictable and I thought it’s probably easier to just code my own solution. It was only a task of about an hour, but now it works the way I want it to work. To trigger updates on the Telegram channel, I configured my blog build pipeline (I use Drone CI to build and publish my blog) to always make a webhook request to my new tool after the updated site got deployed to the server. I have to say that the Telegram Bot API is a really nice and simple API. Sending a message is done with just a single HTTP call. Although there are a couple of libraries that can do that too, I noticed it’s easier to just write some simple code for the request myself.

It was a very spontaneous decision, but it is now possible to follow my blog via Telegram: https://jlel.se/tgblog

It’s nice weather outside this weekend. Yesterday I went cycling with my girlfriend, today I go for a walk. A good change from staying in the apartment all the time.

Yes, I got a webmention! I always get a notification on Telegram when a new webmention comes in. 🤓 But I don’t know if Mastodon shows a notification for my reply. :thinking_face:

Yesterday GitHub had an outage and it also resulted in some failures in the build pipeline for this blog. That’s why I decided to host myself a second Gitea instance on a VPS just for this purpose, where I mirror all the dependencies that are needed for a successful build, host some private repos or backup mirrors.

Having two Gitea instances (one at home, one on the VPS - both are backuped daily) also enables me to not have to use Codeberg for not-open-source things. And if I have a sudden internet outage at home, I can still update my blog (the blog repo was hosted at home until today).

Currently I use DuckDuckGo (DDG) as my default search engine, especially because I have the feeling that it is quiet fast. But DDG also has many features. For example, you can quickly and easily create a QR code by typing “qr code” + (what should be displayed as QR code).

In the browser you can then right-click on the picture and select “Show picture”. The picture will open. But the image is not stored as JPG or PNG file on a server, but is displayed using a base64 data URI.

I copied this URI and shortened it with my new URL shortener. Whenever I need a QR code that redirects to my website, I can now call https://jlel.se/qr.

I love doing stupid things.

I just upgraded my PC with a WiFi M.2 card with an Intel AX200 chipset (and two antennas), which supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5. No more adapters for Bluetooth! Now I’m just waiting for my “Microsoft Designer Bluetooth Desktop” mouse and keyboard and I have a few cables less on my desktop. 😄