I’m sure you’ve seen the argument before: “If anyone can now vibecode their own software, why haven’t we seen any viable replacements for industry standard tools like Photoshop?” And for a while that argument seemed like a solid line of reasoning: you could just point to the continuous absence of viable candidates to prove your […]
I’ve written before about the background radiation of the internet: the endless automated noise crawling over every reachable IP. Besides creative filtering on the edge, my preferred tooling answer to that noise is now CrowdSec: an open-source security engine that reads your logs, detects bad patterns, and drops bans straight into your firewall. Fail2ban’s bigger […]
I’ve recently migrated all my work machines from Windows to Linux because I finally grew tired of Microsoft’s adware nonsense. And yet, they still managed to throw a wrench into my workflow. As many of you know, Microsoft has their own little “Authenticator” app that acts as an MFA gateway. When you sign in to […]
Last year I bought an ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406HA) with the sole purpose of running Linux on it. Everything just worked out of the box, except for one minor annoyance: the keyboard backlight. You can turn it on and off just fine. But if you want it to automatically dim after some idle time, […]
Most scam and phishing emails these days get flagged pretty consistently by inbox providers. Your run-of-the-mill bad actor blasts their missive over disposable VPS boxes or compromised machines until IP reputation gets burned. Eventually Gmail or Yahoo just puts them onto a blocklist, so you won’t even see them in your spam folder anymore, they […]
Background radiation in space is a crazy thing. At any given moment cosmic rays, mostly protons and heavier nuclei flung out by exploding stars, punch straight through the hull of a spacecraft and through an astronaut’s eyeball. Can’t do much about it. Apollo 11’s crew reported seeing flashes of light on the way to the […]
Working on non-US keyboards can be challenging when common tools and specs expects standard layouts. For example, I use a German keyboard which has a bunch of “fun” quirks: Y and Z are swapped @ is typed with AltGr (right Alt) + Q double quotes (") are on Shift + 2 forward slash (/) on […]
There is this strange affectation that comes with using tiling window managers: EVERYTHING has to be a hotkey. If you don’t wield a gazillion keybinds you are failing in the Way of The Tile. Don’t want to memorize five-finger chord contortions just to launch your music player? “Skill issue. Git gud.” I think that’s a […]
Adobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives, not because anyone is genuinely excited about these tools. I’m happy to report that I (mostly) make do without Adobeware these days (shoutout to Photopea), […]
There’s a type of writer who just writes. That ain’t me. Hand-cutting and gluing books to sell after readings. Uploading home-made PDFs to an FTP server at 2am. Spending hours in Berlin print-shops agonizing over the perfect glue-binding for a short story collection. The writing was never enough–I always needed to control the whole thing, […]