While I'm taking some down time from work - which is rather a bunch on my mind lately, which is both a good and less good thing - I will be spending a lot of time with my loved ones. My intention is to almost not touch computers in the upcoming few …

I finished watching Mr. Robot yesterday and it was amazing. If you like to watch an intriguing TV series, with good use of technology for once (ohai Hollywood, yes you suck at portraying real tech) and an unusual protagonist, treat yourself to the four seasons (45 episodes) of this mighty …

Ever needed to unzip a bunch of zip files into their own directory and you don't want to do so one by one? No? Well, here I have a oneliner for you anyway: ls -1 *.zip | while read zf; do echo ${zf::-4}; unzip "$zf" -d "${zf::-4}"; done This …

Today this little web corner has existed for sixteen years. Funny thing is that 'sixteen years' does not even sound that long anymore in my ears, while it is enough for a newborn to grow into a person nearing maturity. While I would not say this weblog is really mature …

Do you know that cozy feeling of having thoughts of your work almost never leave your head? Waking up in the night and having your mind stray to unfinished tasks? Yeah? It sucks. (I need a vacation, and some more milestones behind me).

I like taking pictures, and having some of the nicer ones as a background to my daily computer shenanigans is a nice extension of this. Lately, I've been playing around a bit with having pictures show up differently (more abstractly, with less details so they distract less, like those nice …

Today I've been busy with a family party and with a total restyle of this weblog based on Pelican Alchemy Bootstrap 4 and the Bootswatch Lux theme, with my own twist in dark-ish grey. Currently it is generating from my own fork with isso comment support and article images. Breakage …

Today I came across the forum post Don’t report bugs, contribute to bugs hunting about more directly helping (open source) developers help you. Developers really try to write working solutions and like Aurélien Pierre notes: We are the developers. That means we can guarantee you that the software works …

Editing and even viewing (raw) photographs can be a bit taxing on your CPU. If you have an Nvidia GPU, you can supercharge your photo editor by using its OpenCL extensions to offload operations to. Using darktable myself, I had to do a minor bit of research before it worked …

To be able to receive Sentry notifications on Telegram (without using the plugin which only works in the self-hosted Sentry server), one can use webhooks. As I have webhaak to ducttape together webhook all the things, I created a script to send messages to our dev chat, filtering away some …

If you're not using webhooks yet to automate things from automatically generating documentation, running tests, updating websites and web applications based on events, please go read up on them. In the meanwhile, I've basically hooked up all my personal projects based on webhooks in GitHub and gitea, powered by my …

It's over half a year ago that I switched jobs, coming from a big media company and now leading a new, young team at basically a startup. It switched me on again, giving me an energy for work stuff I had not felt for a while somehow, and made me …

So you have this (web) application and you are growing a bit tired of having to manually bump the version number it tells to its users. Also, you would like to see if you are using an up-to-date edition of said app. Enter your Git repository. When you are running …

Today I want to talk to you about the web and how it sometimes sucks. At least, the experience can suck a bit, especially when it is not open enough so you can set things to your own hands. Take for example YouTube, where overlays can ruin the end of …

Lately I've been making some changes in how I interact with social media, and also how I consume its news and blurps. I started using Mastodon and basically moved my interest there (I tend to double post to both Mastodon and Twitter, as Twitter is still where most of my …

I very recently moved this weblog to a new host, and in the process finally changed from Apache running mod_wsgi to nginx with uWSGI and supervisor (well, at least for the Python based web apps, as dammIT is a flat site). I'm using isso as commenting system, which runs as …

I remember writing (yes, writing) short weblog updates in the train on my Sony Clie running PalmOS, using the fast glyphs of Graffiti, in 2004. I want to go back to that, realising that my weblog had turned into a collection of longer articles as of late, spaced quite far …

In my ~/.ssh/config file, I have been using a socket file for every host that I connect to, so TCP sessions can be re-used for faster connecting to a host I already am connected to. I had several iterations of the exact filename for this, as with longer hostnames …

Andromeda is a way to theme an Android device with Substratum without needing root. You need adb though, so a desktop or laptop computer is needed to initiate the connection between the Andromeda app and Substratum. On regular machines this is not much of an issue, but Chromebooks are both …

Because it's Friday, I was bitten by a filled-up volume on my VPS again, because Prometheus somehow is randomly crashing my VPS, and because I like thinkering and Python, I wrote a little notification script. Yes, it checks for available disk space on your nodes, with configuration per hostname (it's …