Posts

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Happy 14th to Wikiloops!

Today, 14 years ago, Wikiloops founder Richard opened the gates, and now at more than 250,000 uploads and tracks later, we can all only thank him for it. Read what he wrote, and/or do this:

Go to my profile, and in it, select the tab “Playlists”. Scroll down a bit past my albums, and select the playlist called “Even more hit singles”. Enjoy, and then submit a few dollars or Euros to keep the thing running, so that we all can provide more like this to you. Thanks!

And thanks to Richard and his family, and to everyone who contributed until now – it’s greatly appreciated!

And: still remember this one? It’s also in that playlist, the music was made by some fellow ‘loopers:

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Springtime, finally…

Bella, our white female cat sitting on the outer window sill, with a blurry Kindergarten as a backdrop

Like always, thanks for viewing.

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Goodbye Firefox, hello Librewolf

Enough is enough. The Mozilla Corporation has lost it, see here for instance.

Thankfully, there’s Librewolf. I had enabled its repository in Debian already, and had it installed both there and in Arch Linux – tho in the latter I recently had decided to get rid of all AUR packes and their yay helper tool, for Librewolf I now made an exception – so I reinstalled (cloned from git) yay, and using it, reinstalled librewolf-bin. I hope that the Arch package maintainers soon decide to make Librewolf (plus the precompiled -bin file) one of their supported packages, so that I won’t need the AUR (Arch User Repository) for that.

Now I wonder if soon I’ll have to do the same with Thunderbird, and replace that as well (with Betterbird for instance?). Sigh…

Update from Monday, 3rd of March 2025: see here as well…

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First selfie of 2025

Although I currently have a small abscess on my lower lip, I still took a photo of myself today – here it is:

7e9_1216814-wolfgang

I used both a studio strobe and a speedlight, cropped the resulting image into a 5:4 format, and used an Ilford HP5+ black & white film simulation to get this.

And as always, thanks for viewing.

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RIP DivestOS…

Oh my – bad news from last December which I saw only now: Tavi, lead and sole developer of DivestOS (see Wikipedia EN, DE) announced in his project news that he ends support of the project immediately:

“I believe the projects were highly successful in their goals, however this month will mark the end. DivestOS and its apps will not receive any further updates.”

Very sad news indeed, as this was the one project which saved us all from throwing away our old devices, keeping up updates and thus, security as long as it could. Which means that from now on we have to rely solely on the time span provided by our hardware vendors like Apple, Google, Samsung, or Xiaomi to name a few. And even GrapheneOS, the most secure system of them all only supports (google only) devices only as long as hardware vendors (of the internals, like Qualcomm and others) do. After that, they’re toxic waste.

Maybe it’s time to go back to dumb phones next time, me thinks – for those of us who really need mobile phones at all (I certainly don’t). Let’s see.

As always, thanks for reading.

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Yddoh

“Your daily dose of horror”. Or so I thought after more or less “innocently” clicking on a video link to the intenet’s biggest video site to watch Nat King Cole’s “Calypso Blues“. And no, I’m not using a login on that site, and my browser also doesn’t save any cookies from it – but on the right hand side, in their “suggestions” about what to watch next, I saw several video links which point to the extreme far right party here in Germany (won’t even name them), or to “reports” about them from some self-centered “influencers” or “mentors”.

Enough of that; really. Enough of automatically tracking my IP address coming from Germany and suggesting such far right crap. Oh, and have you tried using their main page without being logged in? You won’t see much, and if you do, you’ll see what’s “trending” – which makes you shake your head about mankind, really. Try it via some 3rd party site to save you from your own filter bubble, and which at least covers where you’re coming from… that is what I’d call “Yddoh”.

So at the moment I’m really considering to boycott that site once and for all – with deleting all of my own stuff there first of course. And to do that, I’d have to log in one last time.

And yes, it really would be the last time, since I don’t log in into anything Google or Apple even when using my mobile phone – I have something far better than their clouds, and I also can do without their “app stores”, thank you very much. I’m using Flickr far less since I unsubscribed from their paid “Pro” service, and opened an account in the Fediverse instead – not much to see there yet, but who knows? And maybe I should do the same with video – I’m not a big “content creator” in that art form anyway. So in case I will delete everything from that big video site, this will also be the end of my accounts with Google – deleted the Apple one right after I had to give back the iPhone SE to my last employer.

And for now, back to more pleasant things. And thanks for reading, as always.

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2025

A new year has started, but there isn’t that much to report, or so I think.

This is the year that Microsoft will stop supporting their operating system Windows 10, so everyone including the ARD and the CCC are recommending to upgrade rather sooner than later, and if Microsoft thinks that your machine isn’t fit for Windows 11, try Linux instead. I still remember that old joke where someone wrote: “The box said to install Windows 7 or better – so I installed Linux” 😉

Yesterday one year ago I bought a fitness tracker, and started to investigate in free software for it, using Gadgetbridge since January 10th, 2024. You can search this page for the term “Xiaomi” in case you’re interested. The main thing for me is the step counting, and that my data isn’t saved in some 3rd party cloud, neither in China nor in the USA. Anyway, since last year I have now walked over 4.2 million steps, so that’s a bit more than 10,000 steps a day, and I’m planning to continue this. With a step length of about 75cm, that would sum up to over 3,100km so far, so I’d say that I’d have covered Europe by now… and maybe reach my father-in-law’s after some 3 years or so 😉

What else is new? Oh, I volunteered to assist with the upcoming elections here in Germany. In case you’re not sure whom to vote for, from 6th of February you could consult the “Wahl-O-Mat” again. What would also help to reach informed decisions is to stop living in your “filter bubble“, or “Filterblase” like we say here in Germany. So it could help to stop using search engines which belong to giant companies, and also to avoid (a-) social media sites and services which belong to tech billionaires, like my friend Peter just did – bravo to him!

So – let’s hope that this year will be better than the last one, and that we can continue using more and more renewable energy; Germany is on a good way here even if we broke the 1.5° barrier already. So don’t throw away your old PCs which I mentioned above, and also your old mobile phones – use alternative operating systems instead, and save money and toxic waste. I wish us all a good new year 2025.

And like always, thanks for reading.

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In German /Auf Deutsch: Denk ich an Deutschland…

“Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht”

Heinrich Heine, Nachtgedanken, 1844

Was Heinrich Heine von 180 Jahren schrieb fällt mir ein wenn ich Nachrichten und Umfragen wie diese sehe…

Edit: … und ja, natürlich weiß ich daß er das vom Exil in Paris aus schrieb, und daß er vor Allem seine Mutter vermißte die er nicht sehen konnte. Heine meinte das also weniger politisch, auch wenn man zwischen den Zeilen einige Hinweise auf seine eher unfreiwillige Ausreise bekam – Deutschland mochte ihn zu dieser Zeit nicht.

Egal; an diese Zeilen denk ich oft wenn ich an Deutschland denke… auch wenn meine Gründe andere sind als die von Heinrich Heine. Einen frohen vierten Advent wünsch ich Allen die das feiern.