Mental dump
The last days I was quite busy mentally. So here are some thoughts I just need to write down to get them off my head and give you something to read. 😄
Tech, life and everything else
The last days I was quite busy mentally. So here are some thoughts I just need to write down to get them off my head and give you something to read. 😄
To reduce my dependence on USA-based products, I switched from using the OpenAI API to Scaleway’s Generative API for my blog. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s based on open-source models, hosted in Europe. 🇪🇺
It was straightforward to just add an option to change the REST endpoint in my GoBlog plugins, and then use Scaleway’s API for creating the post summaries and the image descriptions. For the post summaries, I am now using llama-3.3-70b-instruct, for the image descriptions pixtral-12b-2409.
Let’s hope that there will also be a model that supports audio transcriptions until April 2026, so I don’t have to renew the credits on the OpenAI API for my Telegram Voice-To-Text bot. 🤞
Yesterday, I started my new bike season and took my bike for a fun ride of about 25 km. I rode the first part of the “Städtepartnerschaftsradweg Braunschweig - Magdeburg” (City partnership cycle path Braunschweig - Magdeburg) between my hometown and a village called Königslutter. The weather was perfect and I truly enjoyed it. For the way back, I took the train that I reached just in time.
🖼️🗺️ View
💭 While some people like to jump between blogging software all the time, or go back to Hugo from a custom one, I don’t really miss Hugo after switching to GoBlog in 2020, but enjoy having my own system quite a bit. Not that Hugo, WordPress, etc. are bad blogging systems, but I really enjoy being able to quickly code a fix without having to research docs, StackOverflow, or the source on GitHub. And when I have an idea for a new feature, it would often not be easy to implement in the existing systems.
After reading this tutorial about how to mirror a Gitea repository to other Git hosting services like GitHub, I decided to follow a new strategy regarding my projects. I will use my main Gitea instance for all my public repositories and then mirror them on Codeberg and GitHub. I will also migrate projects from GitHub and Codeberg to my Gitea instance and replace the repos with mirrors. The first repo is this one with a mirror on Codeberg and a second mirror on GitHub.
This method gives me full control over my projects and I can create new mirrors or remove old mirrors at any time and I am not dependent on any service.
I admit it, I am a big fan of pre-packaged software. Software that I simply set up by typing a single command or just adding a few lines to my existing configuration. I like simplicity and this kind of software makes things a lot easier and lets one focus on getting work done.
I used Pagekit for quite some time with my personal homepage. Pagekit gave me a nice Admin UI and there were also nice themes and plugins, which I could use. But Pagekit is PHP and the setup isn’t that optimal. So I switched back to a static site setup with Hugo.