Personal

Have you ever thought or talked about “normies”? If you’re reading this, odds aren’t bad that you have. We, the technically adept (or at least not completely clueless), often use this term to talk about the kind of person who doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the small web, Linux distros, infosec, blogging, the Fediverse and a gazillion of other obscure subjects. At this point in my life, I’ve come to realize that all the things I care most deeply about are nothing a “normal” person (whatever that may mean exactly) can easily relate to. I can get enthusiastic about self-hosting, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, RPGs, dungeon crawler board games, data privacy, the issues of browser monoculture, online ads, Doctor Who, the dangers of LLMs (a term to many people probably don’t know). And all of this makes me what people usually call a “nerd”, even in my non-English-speaking country. ...

I hate lies, I hate lying and I dislike liars. I am aware that there’s philosophical debate around the issue of whether or not lying is acceptable. There seems to be a social consensus that, to a degree, lying is acceptable and sometimes even necessary or at least advisable. I disagree. Granted, there might be situations where telling the truth might mean the death of a beloved person but for the vast majority of people this situation is contrived and unrealistic. For most of us it’s probably a matter of convenience or personal gain. Some jobs incentivise lying more than others do, I should think, but even so, you’re never compelled to lie to save yourself or others from serious harm. ...

This post has been in the making for a long time now. Not so much on paper (metaphorically speaking) but rather in my head. So now the time has come to finally write down my thoughts. They may be meandering or a bit stream-of-consciousness but I’d rather have that than nothing. This may also end up quite verbose. You have been warned. I was prompted by various events in the past, online discussions and, last but not least, one of Kev Quirk’s blog posts about this subject. It is also related to a post series of a dear fedifriend of mine. ...

This is probably going to be the weirdest blog post I have ever written. If you’re up for it, let’s do this! I recently played with LEGO Duplo. Yes I am an adult, go figure. While building random stuff I came across something interesting (to me). I had a large green board and a small fence. The fence has two points at either end where it can be connected to the board and has a length of five. ...

I’ve wanted a digital frame at home for a while now. I’m notoriously bad at organizing pictures, even worse at sorting, printing, arranging or displaying them. So when I found out that digital frames were a thing it seemed like this would be a natural solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the commercially available ones either don’t have the features that I want (e.g. some way to connect with my images stored in my Nextcloud) or feature worrying amounts of integration with various third-party services, clouds, phone apps and whatnot. I’m absolutely not inclined to yield control of my pictures to some provider who is supposed to sell me a device for displaying them but maybe that’s just me. ...