Tech, life and everything else
Welcome to the Thoughts section of my blog. Thoughts are better kept on my blog than on Twitter or other online platforms.
Last year for Christmas I got a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB) as a kit with case etc. From the beginning I had no special application, if I had one I could have used my third generation Pi or one of several very old Pis from my father. Admittedly, I just wanted to see what such a small and inexpensive tinkering computer could do.
Another year has passed. Today I went to the cemetery after work and put a flower arrangement on the grave and lit a new candle. I wonder what you can think when you look down from heaven on the world and watch the current events from outside. But I am also a little bit relieved that the whole fate does not take place at this time, because then it would probably not have been possible to visit him in the hospital so often and everything would probably be even more painful.
🖼️ View
Facebook has written a response to the movie “The Social Dilemma” where they try to explain what is wrong with the movie. It is a little bit amusing to read through the document.
Lately I’ve been switching the playback speed for videos mostly to 1.25 or 1.5x. This way I manage to watch videos that I watch to learn something new in less time (and still understand everything). Especially with long videos this makes a difference. Is it only me who feels this way? I was really happy to find out that this feature is not only available on YouTube, but also in native video players in Firefox.
Cloudflare currently celebrate their 10th birthday and launch a new product or feature everyday for a week. Today they launched Cloudflare Web Analytics. Until now you had to proxy your site through Cloudflare to use their analytics, because they collected those stats – “at the edge” – on their servers. But now they are adding an JavaScript-based option, similar to Google Analytics and all the new privacy-focused analytics services like GoatCounter and Plausible. But like GoatCounter and Plausible and unlike Google, they promise privacy, because they don’t make their money tracking users, but selling products (that aren’t users) – at least that’s what they say in the announcement post on their blog:
I ordered some stuff online the last days and somehow all packages arrived today. In the middle of an important conference call. Well, when you order online, that can happen. But I not only ordered a new bicycle helmet (in XL, because my head is too big for most other helmets), I also ordered a new keyboard and mouse.
With Apple launching Fitness+, they launched just another service with an anti-competitive advantage. While they take almost 100% of what’s left after taxes etc., other services are forced to use In-App-Purchases of which Apple takes 30%. I don’t understand how some people defend Apple for this and think this behavior benefits them. Actually, it only leads to a decrease in the quality of non-Apple services, because they somehow have to try to compete with Apple, but get 30% less of the revenues. But in the end I don’t really care, I don’t buy any of Apple’s overpriced products with false privacy promises and platform lock-in anyway.
Today I have dealt with WordPress for the first time in a long time. I’m not planning to move my blog to WordPress (I’m in the process of developing my own content management system), but have set up a site for someone else and migrated a few articles.
Today, I learned that it’s possible to “vendor” Hugo modules. By vendoring Hugo modules, Hugo will add all required module files to your site directory and use them when building your site instead of trying to download them first. No need for me to use a module cache on Drone anymore and two seconds less build time. (But 3000 additional files in my blog repo.)
Next to my Microsoft Surface Go with Windows on it, I often take my Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga S1 with me, when I visit my family over the weekend. The ThinkPad let’s me do some development things on a Linux machine (with Ubuntu 20.04) during the long train trips (6 hours each direction). So I always try to get everything up-to-date before. It’s always amazing how fast it is to do this.