This weekend is all about housekeeping. The reason: PureBasic v6.4 was released two weeks ago. So I spent the morning updating my open source projects built on it. No new features, just recompiling and testing. I also took the opportunity to bring the documentation up to date. The way you would expect from a well-maintained Git repository, including my offer of professional business support for …Read more

Epyy is the name of the new icon and mascot of my open ISMS document workflow on Codeberg. The name comes from the Greek ἐπισκοπεῖν (episkopeîn), which translates to inspect or monitor. Think of it as a friendly, and more importantly “living”, document that guides you through the ISO 27001 and TISAX maze. The ISMS workflow is free and open source. If you need professional support or …Read more

Over the past few days, I once again disappeared down the proverbial rabbit hole. But let’s start from the beginning. On Saturday, I wrote a blog post to outline an automated and deterministic document workflow. To make it easier to follow, I also set up a Codeberg repository. The feedback was unexpectedly overwhelming and raised many valid points. The repository itself had been put together …Read more

On the third DI Day, I am parting ways with Apple’s proprietary Maps app and switching to CoMaps as an alternative. After two confirmation prompts, the app was quickly removed from the phone. Screenshot of removing the Apple Maps app on iOS For quite some time, I have been frustrated with Apple, not just in terms of privacy and digital independence. It is also the steadily declining user …Read more

Second DI Day in the still young year of 2026. This time I parted ways with another US-based service: Automattic. Not a Big Tech giant, but still highly relevant on the web. It is the company behind the well-known site builder WordPress and the Gravatar service. For nearly 18 years, one of my photos has been tied to my email address across countless forums and websites through Gravatar. Looking …Read more

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. By the way, the editable PDF forms are created with …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. This is exactly what automation is for: A clearly defined, reproducible …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. Those were the programming languages I grew up with. Later, others came along, but I never really got …Read more

PureBasic v6.3 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. A self-hosted aviation weather planner with DWD ICON-D2 data, which …Read more

At the end of October I switched my gaming machine from Win10 to Linux. Not without some 2nd thoughts how the games would perform. This weekend it was finally time to tackle the supposedly toughest one: The Microsoft Flight Simulator. It is likely Microsoft’s flagship product, significantly older than Windows. After 43 years, it remains one of Microsoft’s oldest continuously supported …Read more