The Portable Document Format (PDF)1 is a great example of how an originally brilliant concept for displaying print documents has been ruined over decades. Initially conceived as successor to PostScript,2 it has degenerated into a universal container format. Text, images, vectors, scripts, fonts, form data, even complete 3D models there’s hardly anything, that can’t end up in a PDF, including Doom. Read more

Today on public holiday (in Germany) I polished my Nautilus script collection and uploaded it to Codeberg.1 For everyone who enjoys automating recurring tasks such as OCR on PDFs, creating animated WebP images from a selection of pictures, or encoding videos in h.265. The script collection will be updated from time to time. Read more

Next Friday and Saturday (September, 19th + 20th 2025) you find me at the Kiel Open Source and Linux Days, also known as Kielux.1 As guest, I’ll be attending a few talks and workshops. Looking forward, Yours, Tomas Jakobs https://www.kielux.de/ ↩︎

A Bash script I’ve used for many years got some love recently and I’ve uploaded it to Codeberg.1 The HTTP Limiter is my answer to the bots, scrapers, and pentest tools that constantly hammer on my public facing hosts. Though “hammer” might actually be an understatement. Read more