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.
Yesterday, I finally took my new bike for a longer ride. Instead of 30 km like the last time, this time I chose another way about 36 km the other way along the river. And instead of getting on the train back home, I went both directions with pure muscle power.
🖼️🗺️ View
Wouter Groeneveld wrote about his new website theme. His old one was too minimal for his taste, and so he decided on a more fancy theme.
One of the things I hate, yes, I really hate it, is cigarette smoke. I get angry when I smell the smoke of the neighbors who are smoking directly in front of the entrance door of our apartment build, while we are trying to let fresh air in. But situations like smelling smoke at train stations or bus stops make me feel really uncomfortable as well.
It seems like my interests fluctuate a lot. I have a topic that interests me, do a lot of research, learn many new things, get excited. And then suddenly another topic pops up, which at the same time reduces my interest in the previous topics.
The hosted Miniflux finally contains my newly contributed feature to save descriptions for feeds. The exported OPML also contains them, and that’s why I’m finally able to show some context on my blogroll.
You know, I’ve found a pretty effective way to reduce my addiction to certain websites: blocking them at the DNS level using NextDNS. It’s a trick I picked up after realizing I was spending far too much time on Hacker News (my addiction to that is gone for quite some time already!). And now? I’ve extended it to a forum I used to frequent multiple times a day.
From my father, there’s still an old Commodore 64 he used when he was young. I kept it since I thought I might try some retro-computing. But now (some years later) in the process of cleaning up my flat and throwing out things I no longer need, I tried to connect it to the TV, but somehow didn’t get it working. It might be the wrong cable, the wrong adapter, or just a faulty graphics unit in this device. I will just sell it on eBay untested. In the end, I think I wouldn’t enjoy that device much anyway. I grew up with much newer computing hardware and, unlike my dad, software is my passion, not hardware.
What a week! This week I was on vacation, but I didn’t relax at all. I worked harder than on workdays. Since my mother and I finally emptied all the furniture from the apartment I grew up in and moved out of two years ago (I even moved again after it).
Today, I woke up and noticed that my home server, located in my second flat, and also the router, all behind a 5G connection (that was showing as working fine on the provider’s website), were offline. No VPN connection anymore, and also Tailscale showed the nodes as being offline. I’m glad that I had automatic backups and was able to easily restore the three important services from that server on my VPS, without the need to travel to the second flat first.
Scaleway continues to build a European AWS alternative. Today, I tried one of its new products: Serverless Jobs.