Should I up my bathroom game and get one of those little trays for the bathtub to keep stuff while taking a bubble bath?
Latest linkblog entries
-
Where is all of the fediverse? • I mean I host stuff there, they're great #
-
Let's Make the IndieWeb Easier • I absolutely agree - all of this is way too complicated. And I do this stuff for a living. #
-
A vaccine for depression • I guess disassociating while taking K is better than depression? #
-
20 Years Later, the Y2K Bug Seems Like a Joke—Because Those Behind the Scenes Took It Seriously • Praise the infrastructure nerds. They're the real heroes of our times. #
On the one hand it is good to notice one has written absolutely dumb code before it goes out into the world. On the other hand it’s still rather humbling to realize one is able to produce such idiocy.
Something I might have to do during the weekend: Figure out how I can get the ActivityPub plugin to tag posts with a language. (Not that I post much in German anyway, but I do have a little custom taxonomy for languages.)
I just posted a “Developers vs Product Managers” meme to the work Slack and I feel like I finally reached peak “middle-aged IT guy”
I ran out of coffee and now I am grumpy.
Like for any old person my Spotify Discover Weekly is only old songs this week.
Hello internet friends,
happy New Year and welcome to the first weeknotes post of the new year and as you can probably see I am still very motivated. First a bit of meta but then we’ll try to have a bit fun together.
A few weeks back Mailchimp announced that they would shutdown Tinyletter, the tool I used for my old newsletter.
This gave me the very smart idea to use the old format, including speaking directly to you, dear readers, for these posts and also reactivate the old mailing list. So if you got my emails back then, you’ll get them now – I did warn you, though.
Of course you’re still more than welcome to unsubscribe if it gets too annoying – after all, newsletters are not the hot thing anymore. There are options to follow along via RSS or the fediverse. (And if you don’t know what these things are: oh well. Maybe email is the right medium for you. Or are there any other ways you want me to remind you of new posts? Let me know.)
So – the first week of the year, what do I have to report? Gloriously little. One day I spent trying to write my own newsletter software (because of course I did) until Martin rightfully told me that I should just get over my first nerd instinct and use Buttondown like all the other cool kids. So that’s what I am doing now.
Otherwise I was mostly using up the remaining days off from 2023 to decompress. December – as great it was in many and often surprising ways – was quite a bit draining and just being a sloth for a few days helped a lot. I watched a few movies, caught up on my shows and now I’m weirdly motivated to get into this year. I’m even looking forward to the corporate All-Hands Kick-Off 2024 next week and if that’s not weird, I don’t know what is.
I’ve been known to complain about the lack of hardware keyboard on modern smartphones, so Clicks is exactly up my alley. I’ll need to look around how to get one for my phone.
I really enjoyed this article on all the work the infrastructure nerds did before the turn of the millennium and how they’re mostly forgotten about because their hard work payed off and most things just kept on going.
That’s it for this first week – I hope you stick around. Have a good week and see you next Sunday!
Toodles
I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
This morning it was Chase The Sun by Planet Funk
There is not much you can absolutely rely on these days. But at least one can always be sure that the online content of the Dakar Rally is rubbish.
A clear sign that I haven’t been to work in a while: I was too slow switching off the camera before my poker face broke during today’s all-hands meeting.
Doubled my VPS’s resources in the hope that my blog can now withstand the pretty substantial onslaught of fediverse servers that say hello after each post. The kind of stuff one does on New Year’s eve.
Yay, I wanted to log into my linkblog using IndieAuth but for some reason that’s not working anymore since the last update of the IndieAuth WordPress plugin. Guess that’s something to debug in the New Year then.
The last day of the year, the last week of the year, therefore also the last weeknotes of the year.
Given that I’ve included Monday and Tuesday in last week already because they felt like week 51 this one could be a bit shorter. I’ve been in the Austrian alps for a few days with some of my family to go and find some snow. Lo and behold: we did. And so we did some skiing. The first day was mostly to entertain the nieces and get them used to standing on skis and then yesterday we actually made it up to the big slopes.
I’m a bit surprised how well it all went – the last time I’ve been on skis was a couple of years back and that was quite the struggle and given that I haven’t been getting fitter, stronger or lighter since then, I was a bit worried. But besides the fact that I probably could have been more daring in the choice of slopes everything went pretty smoothly. And now that I’m sitting here writing the week notes I’m not even feeling sore. How nice. (It will probably come during the day. Just because I mentioned it here.)
Now there’s only a wild new year’s eve party (I’ll probably be in bed by ten, as per usual) and then that’s it for 2023. See you next week, maybe in a different format if I get around to it. Maybe in the same format, if not.
What newsletter tool might one want to use for a personal newsletter, now that they shut down Tinyletter? Substack is out, for obvious reasons. Buttondown would probably be the right choice, but doesn’t quite vibe with me. Hm.
Yes, it is Tuesday. But it is Christmas, too, so as far as I am concerned, the week goes on until today.
And what a week it was – it started in Cologne, the final two days of work for this year. I picked a friend up at the airport and on the next day we went to the very rainy and quite busy Düsseldorf for some gift shopping, ramen and coffee. On the way back we stopped at a Malaysian restaurant (yes, there is one. Hard enough to find those in Germany) and quite enjoyed their Nasi Lemak Rendang. Luckily we decided that we still have the energy to go to the Christmas markets because that wouldn’t be so easy on the next day.
Thursday was very rainy indeed. And even more so: it was windy. Very windy. So windy that they closed all the Christmas markets and for a good reason: there were fallen bits of decoration and trees all over the city, some of them smashing in cars as well.
Meanwhile the two of us and a whole bunch of my colleagues were inside and watched yet another ice hockey match. The match itself was a bit of a tragedy but hanging out in the lounge with nice people is always a welcome way to spend an evening.
The next few days were a bit of a blur – driving home, wrapping all the gifts for everybody, family Christmas one, family Christmas two, a lot of food, and now here I am.