Tech, life and everything else
Using non-Apple hardware usually has one big advantage: Much better upgradeability.
Even though my laptop isn’t as modifiable as the Framework Laptop (it was a lot cheaper, though), I just upgraded its battery from the 36 watt-hour version to double that, 73 watt-hours. Pretty good for a 14" laptop, I think. Based on past battery performance, this new battery should easily last 10 hours of my typical usage.
Past upgrades: 16 GB to 40 GB memory, 512 GB to 1 TB storage.
Some time ago, I somewhere read about Spaceship.com, a new player in the domain registration business, and registered an account to try it out. Some things kept me from transferring any domains to it (don’t really remember anymore, though), but it was also still in the beta phase back then.
And now January of 2024 is over. Time to take a quick look back.
The last few days, I dived into a new topic in my spare time: Archiving videos from old Hi8 and Digital8 videotapes onto my hard drive.
I can’t really explain why this is happening, but I noticed that my home server is now idling at 7 watts instead of 13 watts as before. I checked powertop, and it seems that the CPU is staying at C7 (pc7) for about 85% of the time, which seems to be the most power efficient state.
Maybe it’s a result of moving my Baïkal instance to my VPS or some other updates? Maybe Home Assistant or Tailscale? The operating system is still Ubuntu 22.04. What else could explain almost 50 percent power reduction without any hardware or major software changes?
Update: I found a likely source: When the powered-off TV is connected with an HDMI cable to the DisplayPort adapter plugged-in into the home server, it idles at about 13 watts. When I remove the HDMI cable from the DP adapter, it goes back to 7 watts. So it might have to do something with the integrated GPU. I guess, I will leave the TV disconnected unless I really need it.
It was a bit cold and quite windy today, but otherwise the weather was beautiful with a clear and sunny sky.
I took advantage of this opportunity and used my pedelec again after a long time to do what I originally bought it for.
I bought it in 2018 (German blog post from back then) so that I didn’t always have to drive to university by car. I sometimes took the bus or train, but the public transport to the neighboring town 15 km away (Wolfenbüttel) wasn’t that great and the journey took a long time, especially at off-peak times (for example in the evening after the last lecture). A normal bike wasn’t a good alternative for me either, as I didn’t want to sit in the lecture hall sweating.
Anyway, today, after a very long time, I cycled past the university where I studied from 2017 to 2021 and completed my bachelor’s degree in computer science. From 2020, mostly just from home, pandemic and all…
It was kind of cool to stop by there again, I got a bit nostalgic. But I’m also kind of glad to have the degree behind me, as I mostly saw it more as a necessary prerequisite for my favorite job.
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Everything in the park is covered under the white magic! ❄️
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I’ve made the sad observation that numerous people started to blog during the pandemic, but stopped in 2021 or 2022. Today, I cleaned up my feed subscriptions in Miniflux and removed many feeds that saw no activity for a long time. At least, I can’t remember of a site I subscribed to that completely disappeared.
My ideals of using open-source software are fading a bit, and I’ve been using OneDrive to synchronize my files for quite some time now. It’s cheap and works reliable at least.
The water is still frozen and there’s some snow on top of the ice. ❄️
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