Blogs

As a passionate, but ultimately unsuccessful Counter-Strike player, 2023 was a big year for me. But surprisingly CS2 wasn’t the only new game that I played: Here is my gaming year 2023. ...

Everyone knows this situation: You are surfing the interwebs, and are coming across some audiofiles. You would love to listen to in your podcast player of choice. But there is no RSS feed - the very thing that makes a podcast a podcast. 1 ...

I knew it would happen eventually. The bare wires visible in two places of the flimsy cable for years. The earpads long compressed into solid flat pancakes. And my friends on Teamspeak reporting a cracking sound every time I un-muted myself using the little switch. But when the microphone stopped working altogether, it was time to say goodbye to my first second ever headset. Time to say goodbye to my Sennheiser PC150....

Last week I selected a new GPU driver from the “Additional Drivers” list in Ubuntu 22.04. Big mistake. The system seemingly crashed and I was left with a blinking cursor on a black screen. Here is how I fixed it. The situation After selecting a different GPU driver 1, my system crashed to a black screen with a blinking cursor and eventually I hard-rebooted my system. GRUB worked, I could decrypt the SSD, but then nothing would happen, just a Ubuntu/Lenovo loading screen....

The indieweb is all the rage, especially as we saw the large social media conglomerates, that once replaced it, start to crack. But what is the indieweb? And how do you get there? All this, and more, in this blogpost (on the indieweb I guess). The indieweb - a web of good intentions The indieweb describes the web of personal blogs, homepages about special interests made with love, and handcrafted personal web presences....

The current Reddit Inc. leadership seems to be hell-bent on prettifying the platform for either an IPO or a new owner. This news has even made it into mainstream media, so I won’t go into details of what’s happening, but rather give my perspective of what Reddit used to be for me, and what I intent to do now. ...

I like to read incident reports, accident investigations and (technical) post-mortems. Maybe a bit too much. But I feel like I’m getting a lot out of it, both for my professional work as a software development manager and my volunteer work as a lifeboat helm. Here’s why. ...

In this blog post I’ll give a quick introduction to OpenStreetMap, and how I started contributing back in 2021. I would still consider myself a beginner or at least not a power-contributor, so I hope that this guide will be the easy to follow for everyone. ...

I’m a professional software developer.1 I get paid to understand customer and business needs and come up with a software solution that fulfills them, while being secure, correct, maintainable, and scalable. But I am also a hobby software developer. And for some time I forgot about the freedoms that the latter gives you. This is the story of how I rediscovered some of the little joys of writing software creating something. ...

At a recent hackathon event at work I looked into RDAP - the Registration Data Access Protocol. It aims to be the standard to query and present data about the owners and responsible parties of domains, IPs and ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers). This data used to be accessible only via WHOIS protocol (so much so that the data is sometimes referred to as “WHOIS data”), in plaintext via port 43. That was not great in case you needed to figure out the abuse e-mail of a domain registrar programmatically of course....