A new publication written by me has been published in today’s c’t 3/2026. It shows step-by-step how data from PDF forms can be automatically extracted using the open source tool pdfcpu and subsequently imported back into ERP or ticket systems using jq or curl. Completely without media breaks, proprietary software or subscriptions. Read more

In case you need a shell script or Ansible playbook to update your own Forgejo instance, I’ve just uploaded mine to Codeberg. The specific reason: There have been a series of updates in quick succession over the past days. I noticed some people expressing frustration about having to redo all their updates all over again. Read more

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, you still had to dive deep into the hardware to get decent software. This meant checking hardware-related register values to get mouse coordinates via interrupt 33h, for example. Or write inline assembler within Turbo Pascal procedures or PowerBASIC functions. Read more

PureBasic v6. came out yesterday. A real good occasion to recompile my projects based on it and make them more visible. Especially in times of heavyweight frameworks, these tools show that functional software can be done differently: single binaries with native performance, extremely small, transparent and easy to maintain. Read more