Injured

On Easter Sunday, I did some kind of “false step” – trying to avoid stepping onto our cat which ran in my way unexpectedly. And some minutes later, walking around really hurt, getting worse…

… so yesterday I went to see my doc (in fact it was Mitchie’s doc, a very nice one). Her diagnosis was a sprained ankle, or as she wrote in Doctors’ German: an OSG Distorsion.

To make sure nothing was broken, she further sent me to another doc who performed an X-Ray on my left foot, but that turned out not to be the case, thankfully. And so I have to take it a bit slow at the moment.

Cracked the 10 million step mark on my fitness tracker anyway, but that one has now difficulties to correctly count my limping around – there’s no “hobbling” program in these… 😉

Anyway, thanks for reading.

One more snapshot of Bella

One-handed snapshot of our cat Bella on my lap – out-of-camera b&w jpg image, based on the Fediverse (on my cupoftea-social account):

Like always, thanks for viewing.

Happy 15th anniversary, Wikiloops!

Today 15 years ago, Richard officially started Wikiloops, a service for musicians to play and collaborate with each other, and I’m so glad he did. I joined in 2018 and soon after also became one of the moderators’ team on that site, trying to help out where I could.

Now Richard wrote a little note about Wikiloops’ 15th anniversary, and he also created an Android app one day prior to that – an iOS app is also ready, but due to delays with Apple, not in their app store yet. Here’s a QR code he published yesterday, which points to Google’s Play Store to get it (and it’s also accessible via the Aurora proxy, but it still needs Google’s play services and a login to run correctly as it seems):

So go ahead and try it – create a cost-free account to try it out either on its web page or via this app.

And congrats again to Wikiloops, and to all of its supporters, without whom it wouldn’t have been possible to go this far and wide. You guys & gals (and all other possible genders who are there) rock!

And as always, thanks for reading.

DST, or TYCC* (the twice yearly collective craze)

Yep, it happened again. You wake up, or were woken up through your suntimes app on the phone, and it’s an hour late. You’d normally don’t even recognize it, because all computers, TVs, and radio wall clocks were adjusted automagically. Except of course those in our cars. Why don’t we stop this?

As always, thanks for reading.

* some would obviously call it BACC, like in biannual 😉 In German, this would rather be HJKW, like halbjährlicher kollektiver Wahnsinn. I don’t care, since time is man-made anyway…

Learning every day…

… if you’re using Linux, and are interested enough, you’ll have quite the journey ahead. The latest “Aha!” moment for me was when I read a post on Planet Debian from Samuel Henrique titled “I use curl with ECH btw (in Debian)“. I hadn’t heard about ECH before, so that was great in itself. Turns out that this TLS Encrypted Client Hello routine took about 7 years and some 10-15k lines of code to be written – but it’s kind of important, so thanks to Stephen Farrell from Dublin for his patience and all of his work! Hear him talk about it on last years’ OpenSSL conference on the tube if you like.

And about Samuel Henrique, a Debian Developer: there’s more stuff to like on his site, for instance his also very interesting post called “Debian 13: My list of exciting new features“. So in case you’re interested in that, it’s a nice read as well.

Also on Planet Debian, and interesting as well:

The Death of Twitter“, by Russell Coker, or

systemd has not implemented age verification“, by Marco D’Itri

As always, thanks for reading.

In German/auf Deutsch: Guter Ansatz, aber zu kurz gedacht…

Kai Schönenberg schrieb einen lesenswerten Artikel in der taz über die aktuellen Preise für Benzin und Diesel. Und darüber, daß – wie wir mittlerweile alle wissen sollten – kein Weg an der Elektromobilität vorbeiführen wird. Wer anders denkt, handelt und redet ist wie die angesprochene Ministerin Lobbyist, sollte aber kein Amt in der Politik innehaben.

Aber Kai denkt zu kurz, leider. Wer die fossile durch Elektroenergie ersetzen will, ersetzt nur alte Abhängigkeiten durch neue – viele der Stoffe die wir heute ohne nachzudenken in Batterien nutzen kommen aus China, Afrika oder sonstwo her und werden dort unter unmenschlichen Bedingungen abgebaut – während der Planet dadurch vielleicht noch mehr geschädigt wird als durch den Abbau fossiler Energien. Ich weiß ich weiß – nur die wenigsten von uns könnten den berühmten Sonnenwagen der Aachener TU fahren, für den täglichen Pendlerweg im Dunkeln wär das keine Option. Die Frage muß also sein ob wir uns dieses Pendeln noch viel länger leisten können wollen/müssen.

So kann nur ein Städter denken, klar. Fahren soweit es die nichtelektrifizierten Fahrräder eben zulassen ist auf dem Land keine Option. Und “buy local”, also der Verbrauch von Lebensmitteln die höchstens 100km von uns entfernt wachsen ist ebenfalls keine, denn während in manchen Gebieten eben Wein und in anderen Kartoffeln wachsen, ist in der Wüste: genau, gar nichts.

Das sind die globalen Probleme die wir angehen sollten/müßten, nicht wie wir am besten Benziner oder Diesel durch völlig überteuerte Elektrofahrzeuge ersetzen. Wer sein Kind mit dem E-SUV zur Schule fährt macht auch nicht alles besser – seit wir wissen daß es mittlerweile mehr adipöse als unterernährte Kinder gibt (obwohl: trifft das weltweit gesehen wirklich zu? Wage ich zu bezweifeln) – sollte lieber seinem Kind ein natürlich nichtelektrifiziertes Rennrad kaufen als einen E-Scooter. Und eine Bahncard natürlich.

Meine zwei (Euro-) Cents zu diesem Thema…

Firefox sync *could* be useful…

… if they hadn’t given up on their Livemarks, which I now use as a plugin on my desktop version of this browser. Sadly, the mobile Android version doesn’t have it, so in case you try to sync, you’ll have some cleanup work to do later… sigh…

Motorola and GrapheneOS announce partnership

Now it’s official: both GrapheneOS and Motorola announced a partnership agreement – which means that if you want to run GrapheneOS, you won’t necessarily need a Google Pixel device much longer, but you’ll have a bit more choice. And choice is always good.

Also: I sometimes get asked by friends who don’t have Pixel devices what other operating system than GrapheneOS would be advisable to run on their devices? And I just learnt through a post on the GOS forum that finally DivestOS has a spiritual successor called AXP.OS – so have a look in case you’re interested in a bit more privacy, and in case you want to have support beyond what the hardware vendors (and GOS) offer. Unlike with other systems, this one offers to relock your bootloader if your device supports that (Pixels do).

You’re welcome.

Free software: a shoutout to Debian – and to KDE Connect

Larry Cafiero wrote a nice review of Debian 13.3 “Trixie” over at FOSS Force, and I have to admit that Debian is also my standard go-to Linux distribution after years and years of use. I second his mentioning of the XFCE desktop especially for older devices like my wife’s old Lenovo SL500 laptop with only 2GB of RAM and a by now ancient Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and his mentioning of KDE Connect (Gnome has something similar called GSConnect, but the KDE guys invented that one) is also worth consideration. Pretty happy with it, and GSConnect always reminds me when my Pixel phones (6a and 3a) or my new Samsung Galaxy Tab A11+ are fully charged.

If you search my site here for Debian or for Ian Murdock, you’ll find an interview I did with him (RIP Ian), and even my late and not so computer-literate brother Willi (RIP as well) did never look back to Ubuntu after I showed him Debian.

Recommended reading for beginners of GNU/Linux.