Posts
It’s time again to take a quick look at the books I read in April 2024.
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I think we’re fast approaching a world where it doesn’t matter in what language you post your content (blog posts, Youtube videos etc.) in, because everything can just be translated on the fly into every other (major) language in reasonable quality.
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Last year I wrote an article titled “Living in the (technological) past”, in which I talked about my approach to buying, or rather refusing to buy, new electronic devices. If you haven’t read it or don’t remember it, don’t worry - I asked an AI to summarize it, so you can get up to speed quickly:
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Recently I came across a Post by Kev Quirk where he talks about how he uses a service called “Echo Feed” to cross post his blog posts to Mastodon. I had thought about implementing something like this too for a while, and this gave me the motivation to look into it again.
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That is not a typo in the headline, I really bought a watch for 46 (Euro)cents recently from Aliexpress. How come?
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I realize I haven’t written any book reviews this year so far, even though I’ve been reading constantly, but more slowly than in the past. So in order to catch up I’ll just summarize the books I read so far this year here, and I’ll try my best to be brief and not ramble on forever like I normally do.
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Yesterday I wrote about using an image from Playboy as a test image for testing image compression algorithms, and that reminded me of another anecdote from university where a piece of popular media was used in the development of a new technology.
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The IEEE Computer Society announced a few days ago that they will no longer accept publications about image processing research containing the “Lenna” image.
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I thought about whether I should have one RSS feed for everything on the site or separate feeds for posts (longer articles) and thoughts (shorter ones). After getting some feedback and also thinking about it for a bit, I decided to have separate RSS feeds.
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I added a new microblogging section called “thoughts” to this site.
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In September I started the 100 days to offload challenge, in which I decided to write 100 blog posts over the course of a year. Today I’m ending the challenge.
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The world seems to be going mad recently, with wars breaking out left and right, so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about my long held pacifist beliefs and if they’re still applicable in 2024. Content warning obviously, this is political.
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Here’s a quick summary of the two books I read in December 2023.
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I read only two books in November, and I’m a bit late with this post, nevertheless I want to quickly summarize my thoughts about them here.
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First blogpost of the year, happy new Year everybody!
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Using Whatsapp and other similar messengers on my phone has been making me anxious for a long time now, but I could never quite figure out exactly what the problem was. Until now.
Due to being sick, I had a lot of free time these past few days, and out of nostalgia I started playing around with setting up an ICQ server, so I could use the old ICQ clients of my youth again (only to find out that nobody I know cares about using ICQ anymore, and so the only person I can connect with is myself… but that’s maybe a story for another day).
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I saw a post from Dustin, who saw a post from someone else, who probably saw a post from someone else about writing up which apps and services you are currently using. So let’s jump on the hype train while it is rolling and see which apps I am using!
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In October I read two non-fiction books I only recently came across, and one novel that I’ve had for quite a while and which I wanted to read to relax, but it didn’t turn out to be so relaxing in the end…
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I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi 4 as my homeserver, it’s running off an SD card. Or it was, because the SD card died recently, and I don’t know why.
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The other day I mentioned in passing on Mastodon that I am using two USB-Sticks as a RAID array on my homeserver, which is a Raspberry Pi 4. Much to my surprise, two people actually asked how this was done, so I promised I would write it up as a blog post. And so here we are. Let’s have a look at how it works.
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I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, and a conversation yesterday with Rogue over on Mastodon brought it to my attention again: I’ve never been an early adopter of anything tech related. I live in the technological past. Let’s explore if this is a good or a bad thing.
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September was not a great reading month for me. The month started with a week of being sick, during which I couldn’t do much at all, and even after that I found it difficult to concentrate on reading. Nevertheless, I read three books (more or less), which I’ll summarise here.
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A few days ago Whatsapp renamed the status page to “Updates” and introduced the “Channels” feature. And suddenly, the messenger I use to communicate with friends and family shows me recommendations for profiles of people and corporations I don’t know and don’t want to hear from.
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Around 1999, the future arrived in our home: From then on, we had internet access, and quite unusual for the time, not via modem, but via ISDN with a terrific speed of 64kBit/s! While the others were still using their ancient 56k modems, we were already surfing the information superhighway with the speed of tomorrow!
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In the last post I introduced Cal Newport’s “Deep Life Stack”, his program to put your life on a more solid foundation. Today I want to expand on this and have a look at the fist layer, “discipline”.
If we want to start some meaningful changes in our lives, the first step, according to Cal, is to change our peception of ourselves.
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I usually stay away from the “productivity” genre on YouTube as far as possible, because there are just too many influencers on there who boast about how great they are at being productive, how super sophisticated their productivity system or bullet journal is, or who produce these quite frankly ridiculous “study with me for 13 hours” videos.
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This is the first post of what I hope will be a monthly series in which I take a look back at the books I read the past month.
In August, I didn’t really reach my goal of one book a week, which was partly due to the fact that I started some books and put them down again after two or three days, because I realised that they just weren’t right for me.
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Inspired by Noisy Deadline’s post “Bringing back the Blogroll” and by the blogrolls I’ve already seen on some other sites, I wanted to set one up for myself too.
I like the concept of a blogroll, which as far as I understand is a list of blogs I like and follow (which I already have on my links page), but I thought I could do one better and create a list of all the latest posts from these blogs as well, ordered by date.
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Sometimes there are things that you read or just see somewhere and you immediately think “that’s cool, I’ll do that”. Some time ago I came across the 100 Days to offload challenge, and this was one of those things.
What is it about?
The challenge is to write 100 blogposts within one year.
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Who doesn’t know it: You only want to change a minor thing on the theme of the website, but you can’t seem to get it right and in the end escalate completely and rewrite the whole website from scratch.
Back story: This website was created with Hugo and originally had the theme “Papermod”, then “Hugo Blog Awesome” and finally “Console”.
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Just a little announcement today, I have added two new sections to the website: Links and Bookclub.
Links should be pretty self-explanatory, on this page I collect links to interesting blogs, articles, documents…. everything I find interesting or worth knowing and want to share or remember for later.
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The site is barely two months old and already the first redesign is coming.
I didn’t really warm up to the old theme, but luckily Hugo makes it really easy to change the theme. Of course, you’re still going to spend days tinkering to get everything exactly the way you want it, and it’s still not exactly the way I want it, but that will come in time.
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So the OCC 2023 ended almost three weeks ago and everyone went back to the year 2023 and to using their modern computers. At least I did. But let’s explore what remaind for me.
I want to take a moment to look back and examine what was good, which tools and workflows stuck with me and what is better left back on the old computer (which was really just a VM in my case).
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So the last two days of the Old Computer Challenge went by in the blink of an eye, and not a lot has happened, so I’m putting them together in one post. But I still wanted to note a few things down, and I might also a wrap-up some time next week.
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Note This is only semi-related to the OldComputerChallenge, but I revisited the idea of downloading videos from Youtube and putting them on an old iPod. I had already figured out the commands a while ago, but I had to refresh my memory from my bash history and because I figure this might actually be of interest to some people, I wrote it as a tutorial.
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I want to take this post to get out some thoughts about the internet, social media and mental health.
How is this related to the OldComputerChallenge?
Let’s take a look.
For the longest time now I didn’t have a facebook profile, and I never had a twitter profile or a tiktok account or a profile on any of the new social media platforms that are en vogue these days.
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On this day I was sick, so not a lot has happened, but I would like to still briefly share a few thoughts.
I’m spending far less time aimlessly surfing the web or watching youtube-videos for hours on end, simply because it’s not very much fun.
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Day 2 is coming to a close. Today I was at work all day and so didn’t spend a whole lot of time on my slow computer.
However, A thought occurred to me recently, because since I subscribed to mastodon a couple of weeks ago and especially since I started following some retro computing related postings (where I discoved the OCC in the first place), I discovered that there’s a thing called
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Okay, Day 1 is almost over, what have we learned?
Modern software sucks!!
I mean, it doesn’t really, a lot of it is quite beautiful and easy to use, but boy, everything consumes so many resources! Just starting up a web browser (firefox or chrome doesn’t really matter) takes a good ten seconds or more, and then we haven’t even loaded a single page yet.
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This year I learned about Solene’s Old Computer Challenge, and I thought hey, I might give it a go!
So this year the rules for the challenge are as follows:
Let’s use a SLOW computer for 7 days. This will be achieved by various means with any hardware:
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