Now I am 26 + 1 years old. My better half made me this delicious cake and gave me these beautiful flowers and some cool presents!

Upgrading the valves on my bike to Clik valves is a real game changer. Straightforward to use and fixes a few annoying issues with the previous Presta valves (for example, accidentally unscrewing the valve while removing the pump). Another cool thing: there are conversion kits from Schwalbe available for both Presta and Dunlop valves, so I can also upgrade my other bike and my fiancé’s bike. Inflating tires is now a piece of cake!

My music listening is inconsistent. I don’t listen to much music, sometimes weeks without any music streaming at all. And when I do, I often listen to some automatic playlists with recommendations from YouTube. I don’t have any specific artists I always listen too. Furthermore, I don’t even have a specific genre I like the most, often it’s something electronic.

However, it appears that I listened to a lot of ambient or atmospheric electronic music lately. One artist popping up in my automatic playlists that I like quite a bit, is The Ambientalist (YouTube | Bandcamp).

Documenting it here on my blog, to maybe find it again in a few years and remember back. 🎧

As everyone recommends Signal as a Telegram alternative, I actually gave it a try again. Turns out it still does not support multiple devices, even unlike WhatsApp.

But after some more research, I found Molly, a Signal fork for Android that adds some features like multi-device support, but uses the Signal servers. I am not sure if it violates the Signal Terms of Service. But as long as Signal only supports Desktop or iPad as linked devices, I need to use this, as I want to be reachable on my second phone as well.

Before I start annoying friends and family, though, let’s test it first. You are welcome to message me and say hello! 😊

https://jlel.se/signal (I might invalidate this link though, when I receive too much spam.)

Today, I did my longest bike tour this year so far. I went north to a lake in a neighboring district, mostly following the Weser-Harz-Heide route, which I already partly followed on my journey from Kassel to Braunschweig last year. There I sat down on a bench for half an hour and then returned. I had plenty of headwinds on the way there and a bit of tailwind on the way back, although the wind was mostly from the side. This time, I luckily did not mess up the OsmAnd tracking. Despite the wind, it was a lot of fun!

This morning I was in a bit of a bad mood and got the idea that I needed to do some exercise again. I had taken a break for a week due to a cold. I also wanted to get out a bit because the weather was good. Then it was a spontaneous but perfect decision to go for a bike ride again.

There’s a big river nearby and another town about 30 km downstream, but there are regular trains from there. So I cycled the 30 km downstream at quite a fast pace on my non-electric city bike. I then took the train back.

It was definitely fun and a mood boost!

I had Tor support in GoBlog for over three years now, but I decided to disable it on my blog (and the GoBlog blog) for now. Several times, Tor randomly started using a lot of memory on my VPS and even crashed my block one or two times. It could have been the Go library used to integrate Tor, or something else in the Tor code itself, I don’t know.

I think I’ll leave the Tor support in the code for people who want to use GoBlog with it, but I, personally, won’t use it anymore. It was a nice experiment, but I don’t think it adds any real value.

More memory for my new GoToSocial instance. 😄 (which isn’t using a lot of memory, though)

Feeling extra special at 25 with this amazing strawberry cake made by my girlfriend. Grateful for her love and culinary skills on my birthday! 🍓✨

Google Bard or BingGPT are actually quite useful to answer simple questions without having to scroll through many pages of clickbait and AI-generated babble blogposts. I’m currently preparing for the AWS exam (I finally signed up!) and Google Bard explained the differences between Cognito User Pools and Cognito Identity Pools in a simple and understandable way. Even with a tabular overview and examples how to use both services. Now my knowledge is refreshed again. 😄

It’s green again outside. 🌳