dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

Articles


RIP Omnivore

Sorry for using some French here, but FUCK this. I have been using Omnivore since June this year as alternative for Pocket and have been loving it. I normally don't love (web)applications, but this one ticked a lot of boxes: it looked good while keeping out of the way …

Literata

Lately I have been reading quite a bit, and while doing so I came across the Literata serif font. I really like its style and how well it reads in both regular and italics, and decided to play around with it on my weblog. It escalated quickly, and now you …
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When Power-over-Ethernet isn't

At the start of this year I bought this cute little bugger: It replaced an ancient Netgear WNDR 3700v2 WiFi router running DD-WRT that had been serving our home internet for ages, but was showing fraying around the edges by not being able to fullfill QoS, for example when Steam …
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Brain fog

The brain fog is real. You know that feeling, when you have a cold or the flue, and aside from the incessant sniffling (or just total lack of air), you are aware that you are a magnitude less clever than your regular self? I call that brain fog. Fog messes …
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Reading challenge: a start

I have a problem. I have too many hobbies. Thankfully, that's actually a pretty good problem to have, and it is not even the actual issue. The matter at hand is the limited time in a typical day. This is nothing new, but it provides certain... challenges when wanting to …
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Fixing i915 display glitches

Lately I've had two laptops randomly glitch their screens at me. At first I worried their hinges were starting to give out (the connectors in those things are scarely fragile), but I noticed a message in dmesg: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun That …

The age of average (encore)

It is not you. It is the music. It is decidedly average. If you were wondering if there is a trend of music converging into some kind of homogeneous soup, you might not be entirely correct, but also not wrong. The article linked here has some really interesting numbers - but …
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"Is This Project Still Maintained?"

If you - like me - regularly check out sourcecode (read: Git) repositories of projects that you stumble across or use in a hobby project/product or at work, you will now and then find one or more issues in their tracker with a title similar to the above, often with remarks …


GitHub Spam is out of control

Dan Janes writes: Spam is nothing new, spam on GitHub is also not particularly new. Any site that accepts user-generated content will need to figure out how to prevent people from submitting spam, whether that is for scams, malicious software, or X-rated material. I have been getting tagged in Crypto …
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Have an uneventful 2024

Today was the first day of a new year. 2023 is behind us, but we are not done with the things we started during it. It was a year of both struggles and good times. Sometimes simultaneously. 2024 should be a year of improvements. Improving the situation at home, improving …
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Twenty years of blogging

Twenty years ago - not long after the turn of the century - I was tinkering with some PHP code to replace a static HTML page I had been experimenting with. It was becoming my private website, in the classic sense of the word: where I put stuff I am interested in …
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NerdFonts on ChromeOS

I get way too much 'kick' out of a good font, and the Nerd Fonts project has been doing an awesome job at combining about every monospace font with glyphs/icons from FontAwesome, Devicons etc, for use in vim, terminal prompts and more. Of course I combine my frequent use …
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Playing audio/music on Steam Deck from other device

Recently I acquired the Linux gaming handheld better known as the Valve Steam Deck, pictured above sitting on top of a cozy plaid as winter is here. Getting one was kind of a gamble for me, as I was not entirely sure I would be into handheld gaming, but I …
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nginx atom feed configuration

Today I got an email from the Google Search Console about a page, or pages on dammIT that are "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". That generally means that a website has two (very) similar pages that contain the same content, without having a element in the duplicating pages …
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Monaspaced

As some of you might know, GitHub with their GitHubNext team recently released their own monospace font, Monaspace in five variants. I was intrigued, because they actually made for an interesting take on the concept, and it was not just one font, but a whole family with each their own …
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On YouTube, adblocking, the state of our ad-driven internet

Internet 'fundamentalist' Louis Rossmann on YouTube, adblocking and the state of the ad-supported internet that's currently our reality. There are some good points made about how the internet turned to shit, basically because the race to the bottom we made with for example jumping on Gmail in 2004 with its …

Free Public WiFi

Remember Free Public WiFi? Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student …


Get Hooked

Are you tired of doing everything by hand, having to remote into a build server to switch to that certain user account, then type in a bunch of commands, looking them up in your shell's history? Or has your CI failed you again? Is the company behind it forcing some …
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