Site stats, and some first news

Looking at the statistics of this website, I see the following for the past year:

awstats for lonien.de

Yes, that’s about 40,000 different visitors coming in about 200,000 times in the past year – never thought we’d get that many visitors; cool. Thank you for your interest.

News, category bad: Anita Pointer died last night, the third of the four Pointer Sisters. RIP, and thank you for everything you did, ladies. I embedded one of their songs into a forum on Wikiloops in case you want to hear a great and funky tune.

News, category good: LineageOS 20 which is equivalent to Android 13 is out. When I looked yesterday, the download images weren’t online yet, but they seem to appear right now – I saw the one for my Pixel 4a, so I can prolong its life when Google will drop the support for it in August. Maybe until then there’s even the version with microG available so that I won’t have to install the original Google services. Please do this if you own older phones, instead of throwing them away.

Like always, thanks for reading.

We moved

No, not in real life. But I just moved this domain you’re reading – lonien.de – from a small self-administered vserver to a new managed hosting, run by these guys & girls from Hamburg (although physically, we moved from Aachen to Frankfurt):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/49897907577/
webgo

We have almost the same specs as on our previous machine, but this one’s administered by professionals, so that I can concentrate a bit more onto other things and hobbies.

So far, a very pleasant experience, I’d recommend this one if you need some web space and don’t want to do it all alone…

As always, thanks for reading.

Having fun with our server again…

Something broke again, so instead of making music or photographs or reading I’m spending most of my evenings with our server. I can hardly complain tho, because except for the rent of this small virtual server we’re not paying anything – using free and open source software throughout, so we’re responsible for it to work.

Sometimes tho I’d love to have some time for myself, or for some friends and family and other hobbies than this one… during my daytime I’m asked to do totally different stuff, so I’m not that much of a server admin anymore like I used to be. Hard to keep up if development is accelerating and you also have less and less time to keep up.

Anyhow, as you can see the webs are currently working. Next is email.

As always, thanks for reading.

Ummm no. Thanks, but no thanks.

I like the new WordPress, but the Twenty Twenty theme? Not so much… so I’m back to the old one (and looking for others if I find the time to do so).

Oh, and I decided to change both the header image of my Twenty Seventeen theme as well as the tagline. Not my bass in that photo, but it has music, photography, and thoughts… and again, thanks to Diana or to Richard – whoever of you took that one 🙂

Thanks for reading, as always.

“Developed” using RawTherapee

I’m still “having fun” with our server, and with some of the software on it. Not much time for music, photography, or any other hobby. So I thought I’d show a photo which I took lately when I had the 50mm macro lens on my camera to “scan” some negatives (from Zuleikha’s films). And while I had RawTherapee open on my Linux box, I decided to use that to make a jpg out of the raw file from the camera. So here’s Tuna from last Sunday or so:

7e3_9291589-tuna
Tuna the cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2019

Love the colours in this one. A good contrast between the cat and the sofa. Oh, and I cropped it into 3:2 like all the “scans” I made from Zuleikha’s films.

As always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.

3rd party planned outage

If you are reading this blog since a while then you probably know that I’m hosting almost all of my photos on Flickr. I have a paid account with them of the old sort, which gives me unlimited storage (an offer which doesn’t exist anymore since a few years).

Flickr was bought by Smugmug, and they’re finally moving all content from Yahoo’s servers and infrastructure to Smugmug’s hosting provider which is Amazon AWS. My pictures will move into the cloud…

This all will happen on Thursday 12am GMT which means 1400 CEST, and it will last for maybe 12 hours. Here’s what’s written in Flickr’s public announcement:

On May 22, 2019, Flickr will be down for planned maintenance for about 12 hours starting at 5pm PDT (that’s 8pm EDT or 12am GMT on May 23).

This will of course lead to the fact that you won’t see most of my photos on this page for about 12 hours, and so I’ll have to apologise for this.

A screenshot of my stats at Flickr, before they move everything…

As always, thanks for reading.

Links to Jason, for colleagues, friends, and family

At LinuxMusicians, we have some really good producers (like for instance user ‘singforme’ and/or ‘bluebell’). And in this thread on LM, one of them pointed me to an article written by Jason Evangelho for Forbes, here.

That article is about UbuntuStudio, which Zuleikha was using until recently (she’s now running the KXStudio stuff on a ‘normal’ Ubuntu on what used to be Mitchie’s Dell notebook, now hers). The article also covers the Jack Audio Connection Kit, and Ubuntu Studio Controls, which together bring a bit of nice automation into the game, taking out some complex steps of setting up a productive audio environment on a PC. As Jason concludes in his article:

I tried Ubuntu Studio 18.04 last year in a short-lived attempt to see if it could replace my macOS + Logic Pro workflow (my last hurdle to using Linux full time), and I honestly walked away a bit disappointed. But 19.04 is shaping up to worthy of a second chance. You’ll have my thoughts when the final version releases this Spring.

But so far this is interesting for musicians and/or creative people only (which covers some of my own family, but not many other people). So if you’re in this ‘other people’ group, stay with me just a little bit longer, because the other interesting finding in his article on Forbes were links to Jason’s own site Linux For Everyone, and to his music on Soundcloud.

And while Jason’s music might be interesting to you or not, I’ve read just one article on his site called “Ditch Dropbox: Create A Personal Home Backup Server With Raspberry Pi 3” which made me write this link collection, and recommending it to colleagues and friends (who aren’t musicians or other creatives) as well.

What Jason is describing there is simply how to set up a small and low cost home server based on Linux which everyone could use, together with some useful stuff like apps for your desktop, and your Android or iOS device to make use of it all – without having to touch a command line even once. He shows how to sync your PC and your phone with that small server automatically using NextCloud, so you have basically replaced Dropbox or any other commercial service provider (you have to read some additional stuff on how to open ports on your router, or to connect to your home from outside via DynDNS-like services if you haven’t done so, but that’s stuff for another article).

So at this point, Jason concludes:

Wait A Minute….
Did we just setup a Linux-based file server without using the command line once? Yes. Yes we did.

Thanks for reading.

I know I have some colleagues who are interested in just this. And I don’t know about you, but I am interested in something like this myself. And besides, I’ll go on reading Jason’s other stuff as well, so I have set up an RSS-bookmark to his site, so that I can see new headlines when he comes up with new articles. So, in a nutshell, I consider this recommended reading for everyone who’s an admin of their own home network. You. Me. Everyone.

P.S.: Jason’s articles on Forbes are good reads as well. I’ve short-scanned only the last 2 months or so, and found these three very interesting ones:

I Can’t Believe I’m Writing This Linux Article About Loving The Xfce Desktop Environment

Warning: Internet Explorer Just Became A Silent But Serious Threat To Every Windows User

Here’s The Shocking Reality Of Completely Blocking Google From Your Life

Like I said/wrote: interesting (tho he still is new to the Linux desktop experience, but this might apply to you as well, right?). As always, thanks for your interest, and for reading.

Statistics at year’s end

For whatever it might be worth, here are my website stats over this year (with today not being over, so this last day of the year is missing):

Usage statistics for wolfgang.lonien.de

I don’t know if my joining of Wikiloops had anything to do with the increase you are seeing, but since I joined in February and returned from my first members’ meeting in September, I guess that yes, some came and looked (and listened) because of the music.

And all in all it’s pretty impressive. Over 400,000 visits a year with an average of over 1,000 a day means that more than each one and a half minute someone from somewhere is looking at my website. I haven’t checked how many bots (like the infamous Google search) are part of this, and yes, it would be easy to do with simply “drilling in” and following the links, but I’m not really that interested in all that stuff.

Anyway, year’s end is the time to say thanks – so I thank all readers for their interest. Have a good new year 2019, and thanks again for visiting, reading, listening, and whatever.

Cheers, and to a happy 2019!