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.
Shortly after the official announcement I pre-ordered the 12 GB version of OnePlus Nord on Amazon for 499€ minus 30€ Prime discount. It should have been shipped tomorrow and arrived at my place on Wednesday. However, I cancelled the pre-order today after I came across an article about display problems with this and other OnePlus devices (this is apparently not a rare problem with 1+).
After trying to write my own static site generator as an experiment, I now started to write my own CMS. Written in Go, SQLite as database (SQLite is awesome!) and focused on performance and simplicity. Currently I’m using Hugo with a number of dynamic additional services (for Micropub, Webmentions, ActivityPub, …), so it’s almost questionable why I use a static page generator at all. If I use my own lightweight and high-performance CMS, I could save myself all this extra stuff or at least reduce it in complexity.
I just dropped a lot of feeds (mainly news) from my feed reader. I can’t scroll through about 900 new entries every day and then have 60 bookmarks that I spend all my time working through. Even though there are no algorithms that want to get me addicted to never ending timelines, I have to set limits.
Recently, there has been a lot of talk in my blog bubble about email self-hosting again (here is one example, here is a second one). I myself switched to a self-hosted mail server over a year ago, only to switch back to a hosted version a few months later.
I use hnrss.org to follow Hacker News and stay up-to-date with the tech and developer community. I followed the /frontpage feed, so that my feed reader would collect all submissions that reach the front page of HN. However that’s a lot of stuff and it got too much for me. I then noticed that one is able to filter the feed to just include submissions with more than 50 points (https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=50). That removed a lot of stuff and left me with only the top voted submissions.
This might sound like a post by a Microsoft fanboy, but honestly, WSL 2 on Windows 10 2004 is really great. It allows me to use Windows on my Surface Go, but at the same time use Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) on it, in a small optimized VM. For example I can run Hugo inside WSL 2 at Linux speed (fast) instead of Windows speed (slow). I just need to take care to save the Git repository with my site files inside the filesystem of the VM and not on Windows (passthrough is really slow). And it’s easy to start Visual Studio Code from inside WSL 2 by just tiping “code .” and the current directory will be opened in Code. I’m really waiting for official GUI support so that I can even use graphical applications under Linux. The best of both worlds.
It sometimes happens that I fall down a rabbit hole. Suddenly a subject catches my attention and excites me very much. The latest topic where this is the case is the software Sonic Pi and making music by code, basically “music programming”. I played the recorder for many years, but I do not have a real feeling for beat and rhythm. I like to listen to music, especially electronic music, but I couldn’t make music myself, I would miss the musical feeling.
For those who haven’t noticed, I’m blogging more regularly in German again 🇩🇪, the last days even more often in German than in English. And this although there will be much less people reading these articles. Somehow it is much easier for me to write texts in my mother tongue. The words flow much better and it is much easier for me to express my thoughts. I will probably write more about my life and stuff like that on my German blog, while my English blog will be more about technical topics. Some things, like my monthly reviews (the next one will be this week) I will also publish in both languages.
I know, Cloudflare is often criticized in privacy groups and also I do not find everything good. I myself use Cloudflare actually only for two things, which do not concern the privacy of the visitors of my websites. DNS hosting and domain registration.
I’m currently looking for a possible replacement to my Xiaomi Mi A1 (it’s showing signs of aging and has an annoying GPS bug). I’m evaluating previous-generation refurbished phones as well. While iPhones look great on the surface and aren’t really more expensive than premium phones from Samsung etc., I won’t buy an iPhone though. First, iOS is locked down so much, the only smartwatch you can use without problems is the Apple Watch and I won’t buy one to replace my Galaxy Watch. You also can’t install any apps Apple hasn’t approved. Second, the whole drama about in-app-purchases and Apple’s uncompetitive behavior is annoying as well. I won’t take an iPhone unless someone gives me one for free. Apple sucks! 🙅♂️