Tech, life and everything else
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. 😄
Yesterday I wrote my third monthly review and since I think it has become a habit by now, I will summarize here how and why I am doing this:
March 2020 was the strangest month I have experienced in my almost 21 years. While in February I only noticed Corona slightly, today Corona determines the everyday life of most people worldwide. Corona is suddenly there as a danger that one could not even have dreamed of. Suddenly public life is completely at a standstill, only shops for essential goods are open, millions of people do home office and it is (in Germany) forbidden to meet more than one person in public.
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. 😄
Today I watched a movie. Not a very good one, but one that entertained me. It was funny and I didn’t feel bored, as I do with some other films. And although the niveau of the film was not very high - my mother probably wouldn’t like it - I still don’t see it as a waste of time. There are good boring movies, just as there are also not so good, but entertaining movies (which kind of makes them good, doesn’t it?). What counts is not so much the niveau of the movie (or how low the jokes are), but more whether it was worth the time to watch the movie. Only when I think that I wasted my time with a bad, boring movie, then it was the wrong decision to watch it.
What a coincidence: I wanted to look in my mails when I registered the domain jlelse.blog and it was exactly one year ago today. So congratulations to myself for one year jlelse.blog! 🎉
Annoying Technology is a site by Manuel Grabowski and Philipp Defner, where they share typical annoyances with technology. Situations that probably everyone knows: annoying software download pages, dark UI patterns while shopping at Amazon or design flaws.
Reply to: A question by Henrique Dias
Since I use many different devices and want to access the same files from all of them, I run my “own cloud” at home with an Odroid-HC2 (a Raspberry 4 or similar device should work just as well). A 2 TB NAS hard disk (Seagate Ironwolf) is connected to the HC2, where all files are stored. Using Docker I have installed Nextcloud for files (documents, photos, etc.) as well as Gitea (code repositories). Encrypted incremental backups are done daily at night using restic and uploaded to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage (they are quite cheap and now also have a European data center).
The last few days I use my Spotify Premium subscription much more than before (I don’t usually listen to that much music). Especially if you spend most of your time indoors and only talk in videoconferences, on the phone or with bakery staff, it’s nice to break the silence with music. Sure, it is never quiet in my apartment in an apartment building with rather thin walls. Often I hear the music that the neighbours play (it’s always the same music), I hear the neighbours talking loudly to each other and I hear them watching TV.
It’s amazing how fast time can go by when you’re in a flow state. It’s an incredible feeling. Especially at the moment, when one usually has rather too much time.