Who would have thought six months ago that Twitter would die so quickly and clearly? My choice of words is not exaggerated. We are witnessing the death of a platform. Not that I ever had an account on this so-called social medium. I use its open API with my own Nitter instance, as introduced here as a blog post two years ago. Free of advertising, the collection of behavioral data, a user interface …Read more

Today, I’m excited to write about a special migration. This time, it’s me who’s switching from proprietary to free software. The challenge is navigation - not by car, bicycle, or foot. It’s about flying in the sky with an airplane. Admittedly, this is a niche with only a few players. Finding an open-source project here is delightful! Unfortunately, there’s no space …Read more

10 years ago, the buzzword and digitalisation project “Industry 4.0” first emerged with nothing less in mind than the intention of unleashing a fourth industrial revolution. Revolution as a term and metaphor is, of course, nonsense. Anyone with the slightest sense in the matter knows that digitalisation is rather like a marathon with many intermediate stages and does not come overnight …Read more

Recently I was looking for a very particular music track. It is a song from the 2017 anime adaptation of “Ghost in the Shell” with Scarlett Johansson. More precisely: the official trailer music, which was not included in the sound score and therefore cannot be found in any of the mainstream music stores. That’s the downside of a few keeping an entire industry under technological …Read more

Even measured by Microsoft’s own standards, the half-life of promises is astonishing. Since 2015 it has been said that Windows no longer follows the classic licensing and version scheme. Windows 10 is the “last Windows”. Six years later, everything has changed. That roughly corresponds to the lifespan of a PC office desktop. Compared to the much longer product cycles in SMEs, …Read more

There is an unwritten law in software development and IT operations. An anti-pattern for effective problem solving and complexity reduction. No one is crazy enough to adopt it. No customer on earth willing to pay for it. But they exist, the bright moments in the life cycle of a company, where this law can be applied. Here’s how it can be defined: If you have a task or problem and you know …Read more

There is an uneasy feeling when reading reports of major hacks and data leaks. Am I exposed is the main question. Leak checkers promise to provide answers. The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam runs a well-known plattform, another from the University of Bonn is slightly less popular. Both share the same functional principle: Get an email, compare it with a database full of leaks, send back …Read more

Everyone knows the alert when visiting a website with expired certificates. At least once a month I stumble into one or I receive tickets with questions asking what to do. “Nothing” is my reply in most cases. “The mistake is on the other side”. On this occasion, my very special appreciation to the owners and/or administrators of such sites for the extra work required. The …Read more

Part II - Please Refuel and some new Bumpers Just in time for the new year, the revived Apple Macbook Pro with Debian from the first part is back on my desk. It served well in December. Now, it’s time for a pit-stop: Would you refuel and change bumpers, please? Battery Replacement after 12 years I was way off the mark with the expected endurance: I wrote something about 1.5 hours last month. …Read more

We all knew the Chaos Computer Club’s congress would not happen this year. The big challenge is to find a way to organize something comparable in a more, well, remote and social distanced fashion. In the past weeks I have contributed my two cents. From the early planning, the pre-meetings in Jitsi and Mumble and finally, on location at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in the …Read more