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After thinking about this for a few months now, I have made up my mind. Despite all the friends I made and the fun I had1, I decided to boycott Twitch for good. I won’t be watching streams on Twitch at all, blocking the site entirely, and I definitely won’t stream on there again. The reasons are actually quite simple: Twitch, owned by Amazon, is exploiting its users on multiple levels such as income, privacy, and a healthy life.

It’s been a few years since I’ve used Reddit myself, but through Louis Rossmann’s videos I’ve been following the current drama a bit. I must say, I’m not the least bit sad or surprised about Reddit’s current situation. Quite the contrary: I’m happy about it. The site has been a shit show at least since they introduced the new Reddit. It became a sluggish, JavaScript ridden mess that I wanted to avoid using at all costs, and so I did.

Around half a year ago, I wrote an article about Password Managers. Since then, a few things have changed, so I wanted to write down my reasons for the current situation. If you don’t feel like reading too much of this, my current password manager of choice is KeePassXC. For the people that would like to continue reading, here are my reasons for using it. At the time of my last article about password managers, the one I used was Bitwarden, although I was already looking for a different solution, with the alternatives being pass and KeePassXC.

Quite a while ago I set up a backup solution that works for me but isn’t ideal. I have an external hard drive that I plug into my workstation, run my usual backup command using restic, and disconnect it again. This works, but it’s not handy. Getting the drive, connecting it, running the command, waiting for it to finish, ejecting the drive, and unplugging it is tedious and so I only do this about once a month.

The speedrunning community is big: Speedrun.com notes that, at the time of writing, 3.5 million speedruns have been registered on the site by 1.4 million users.1 Speedrun.com is the website for all your speedrunning needs. It sports a database of runs grouped by games, with groups of categories per game, a forum, news, and a “streams” section which lists speedrunners that are currently live. It is the most used platform by speedrunning communities and the first stop to building a new one.

Soju is an IRC bouncer that is easy to host and use. I was introduced to it from chat.sr.ht, Sourcehut’s hosted IRC bouncer available for paying customers. Recently, Sourcehut had an outage. I didn’t mind this, it didn’t impact my workflow at the time, and it was also a fairly short outage that was addressed and resolved quickly, but it reminded me that other services do have down time from time to time, so I decided to start hosting Soju myself, on my own server.

End of 2017 was once again the time to get a new phone. OnePlus was loved back then for their cheap phones with have comparatively amazing hardware to the more expensive smartphones during that time. This has changed radically since then and their phones are almost the same price as other flagships. I remember paying around 550€ for it and was very happy with my purchase until 3 years later, end of 2020, that I decided it’s time to get a new phone.

I’ve been annoyed by the state of smartphones lately, and one of the top contenders in “Most Annoying” is instant messaging. Currently, the options for instant messaging outside of communities like tech (IRC), gaming (Discord, which has a bunch of other problems), etc. is an app. At the top of this list have been WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and Telegram, to name a few. What similarities do all of them have? Requiring a phone number to sign up.

About 1 1/2 months ago, I published a post on my microblog about GitHub Copilot and why I decided to leave GitHub for good, switching to SourceHut completely. What I failed to explain in that post is why I decided to go with SourceHut specifically, and not any other git forge. SourceHut is a 100% open source git forge that uses git with E-Mail and patches, the way it worked before GitHub et al.

I’m thinking about changing password managers yet again… Why? Because I’m not happy with my current one anymore. As of now, the password managers I’ve been using (in order) are: KeePassXC pass Bitwarden When I used KeePass, at some point I felt like I needed to switch to a different one (although I don’t remember the specifics), which is why I used pass. Quickly, I noticed pass doesn’t fit my use case properly.

Disclaimer At the time of writing I’m still a student, have only relatively minor experience with working in companies and am in no way a trained project manager. I’m solely giving my thoughts on how the following has worked for me so far and describe what problems I’ve had. If you’re reading this and are more qualified to talk about this or think I’m wrong (or right!) in some places, please reach out via E-Mail.

Microblog I got a place for microblogging on my website now. You can find it here. Twitter is almost deprecated for me, I guess. I just need to set up a way to simply create posts for my microblog now. We’ll see how hard that will be… This is published on my usual blog as a way to introduce the microblogging section, in case you missed it. There is also a new link in the menu which you can use.

Keyboard journey Recently, I got sick of my Anne Pro 2 keyboard, which is a 60% keyboard I’ve owned since the end of 2020. Previously I was using the Logitech G810, an all around horrible keyboard (as expected from Logitech products).1 Logitech G810 The Logitech G810 was my first mechanical keyboard after a few cheap membrane ones I found lying around. It was a truly horrible introduction to mechanical keyboards, but I still enjoyed it in the beginning because it was new.

Previous state of the server I’ll be honest: my server was a mess. I had quite a few things running, like a PrivateBin instance, ZNC for IRC, searx, discord_covid19, a lazy instance of a mail server, and some other things. For instance, I actually had no idea how ZNC was running: as a systemd service, in the background, docker, etc.? So, eventually, I thought to myself: You have to clean this mess up sometime, preferably soon.

“Arch is a hard distro to {install,maintain,use}” Elitist and meme culture There has been a sentence on the internet for a long time now that I very much hate to hear or see. It’s the neckbeard’s introduction to a Linux topic and the nerdy zoomer’s favourite meme. If you haven’t figured it out from that description, it’s the computer science nerd’s favourite meme expression: “I use arch btw”. It is a sentence that, if used unironically, is supposed to convey the superior intellect and skill of the person running that specific Linux distro over other Linux users, and, if used ironically, is supposed to be the latest hilarious meme in the computer science community that has been around for decades.

This post was written in 2021. I don't condone the use of Discord for any purpose whatsoever. Use open platforms that don't censor their user base at will. The article remains online for archival purposes but should not be followed for ethical reasons. Free and open source alternatives that respect the user include, but are not limited to: Matrix Signal IRC XMPP About a month ago I decided to get into Go a bit.

After taking quite a break on working on my website I decided to finally add pagination support for the blog on my website, which you are currently reading. Since I set up my website on blogc it just made sense to keep using that and even though I had quite a hard time figuring stuff out, again, as there is only documentation to work with, I pulled it off. As it is now, the blog shows 1 blog entry per site, which I might change in the future once I modify the CSS a bit to make distinguishing between posts easier.

Introduction to mbsync mbsync is an alternative to offlineimap. I decided to recently switch to mbsync because offlineimap’s development stopped and I started having problems with SSL/TLS that I wasn’t about to fix. Setting up mbsync is easy and tedious, but I’ll show you how my setup looks like so you have a simpler time than me. Setting up mbsync Configuration file mbsync’s configuration file is located at ~/.mbsyncrc, but you can specify a different location via the -c flag when calling mbsync.

Introduction Up until now I’ve been working on my sites in pure HTML; the only tool I used had been ssg to convert the little “wiki” I put op on GitHub to HTML and use it on my website. Creating a HTML file every time I wanted to post something on my website is not a viable alternative, though, which is why I was looking for an option to make my life easier.

msmtp msmtp is a commandline smtp client that reads the message body from stdin. configuration You need to first install msmtp with the package manager of your choice. After installing, create a confi file. msmtp looks for those in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/msmtp. The config file simply needs to be called config. Here’s a sample configuration file which you can edit: defaults auth on tls on tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt logfile /home/{user}/.config/msmtp/msmtp.log account {account1} host {smtp hostname} port 465 from {from field} user {smtp username} passwordeval "gpg --quiet --for-your-eyes-only --no-tty --decrypt $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/msmtp/.

This describes how to setup Arch Linux similar to my setup. This is rarely up-to-date, so be mindful when you type in your commands in the commandline, and be sure to check the Arch Linux Installation guide or the Arch Wiki in general, if you’re unsure about something. Mirror List Location: /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist Select the mirror(s) you want to use for the package manager pacman. Delete every other entry or mark it as a comment to ensure that pacman is using the right mirror.

offlineimap offlineimap is a commandline util allowing you to sync a local repository with an online one via the E-Mail syncing protocol IMAP. configuration After installing offlineimap you will want to create a config file. This is by default located in ~/.offlineimaprc, with further configurations in ~/.offlineimap/. The configuration syntax of offelineimap’s config file is pretty simple. Here is a sample configuration file you can change to your liking: [general] # list of accounts to be synced, seperated by a comma accounts = {account1} starttls = yes ssl = yes # Path to file with arbitrary Python code to be loaded pythonfile = ~/.