Jan-Lukas Else

I couldn’t resist buying a new domain! 👀

I chose janlukas.blog as I’m considering rebranding my online presence. I want to move away from the nickname jlelse towards a stylized version of my first name. It also feels much more future-proof, especially if I end up taking my future wife’s last name.

What will probably be even more difficult than deciding on a surname is moving the blog. Moving an ActivityPub instance to a new domain is no easy task. (If you have already done that, please tell me how.)

Fun fact: While Jan and Lukas have long been the top boys’ names in Germany, the name Jan-Lukas with a hyphen is not that common after all. janlukas.de and jan-lukas.de were also still available, before I registered them.

Many are taking the start of the year as a chance to update their “default apps” lists. I created a post listing mine in 2023. But as I also had a list of “self-hosted services” I use, I decided to merge those lists, and you can find it on a subpage of my /uses-page now. There are also separate lists about the hardware and the browser add-ons I use. And I know, I should find an alternative for OneDrive. I was thinking about switching to a self-hosted OpenCloud with S3-storage at the latest when my M365 license expires in 2028.

I took some time today (since I have the day off for a public holiday) to update the “About Me” page on this blog and make it a bit more personal. It should now offer a good way to get to know me without ever having met me in real life. 😄

Even as an adult, you’re allowed to go sledding! No sooner said than done. Today, with a lot of new snow, I drove out to the Harz Mountains. I hiked up from Bad Harzburg to the Molkenhaus (about 2 kilometers) and then took the sled back down on the return leg. It’s the very same sled my parents used to pull me on through the Harz when I was just a little kid. It was fun! ❄️🛷

Having multiple side programming projects is a good thing. While I enhanced GoBlog with some security features in the recent past (multiple passkeys, hashed passwords, etc.), I worked again on another project, which I haven’t touched in almost two years. My URL shortener. I did some maintenance but also added some quality-of-life features. This time I worked with Raptor Mini in GitHub Copilot. On the small code base, that model worked quite well.

You are welcome to check out GoShort.

I should have set up something like this earlier, but now I finally did: Uptime Kuma. I currently host it on my home server and let it monitor my main VPS, my mail server, and some self-hosted services. Simple to set up and configure with SQLite!