Articles

Energy efficiency of programming languages

Servers are taking an ever growing share of our electricity usage. Of course, they exist to run applications. And the energy consumption is, to a large degree, determined by the applications running on them. Ironically, servers turn electricical energy into thermal energy and thus contribute to global warming in a very concrete sense. When I look around, I don’t see a lot of discussion happening around the responsibility of application developers regarding energy usage and the impact this has on climate change.

Website tech update

It was time for several updates. This site is now hosted by Codeberg instead of GitHub, Edit: doesn’t work yet, so for now it’s still GitHub. created using Hugo instead of Jekyll, using a different template/theme. I’m also contributing a few additions to the Hugo theme.

Mit dem Mountainbike auf den Grünten? Nein.

Wer ins Oberallgäu fährt und eine Leidenschaft für das Radfahren mitbringt, wird vielleicht auf die Idee kommen, mit dem Mountainbike auf den Grünten, den “Wächter des Allgäus”, zu fahren. Spoiler: es macht keinen Sinn und ist gefährlich. Mir ging es auch so. Der Grünten ist ein alleinstehender, attraktiver Gipfel und mit 1738 m höher als viele andere Berge in der Umgebung. Außerdem gibt es (außer für Mitarbeiter_innen des Bayerischen Rundfunk) keine Bergbahn.

Gekommen, um zu bleiben: Gründe, jetzt das Fediverse zu betreten

Zuletzt aktualisiert am 22. Juli 2022 In meinem vorigen Beitrag Wir treffen uns im Fediverse habe ich über dezentrale soziale Netzwerke und das Fediverse geschrieben. Verglichen mit den großen, zentralisierten Vorbildern ist das Fediverse im Moment klein. the-federation.info listet noch nicht einmal 3 Mio Accounts. Etwa 500.000 davon waren innerhalb der letzten 30 Tage aktiv. Lohnt es sich da, Zeit zu investieren, sich ein Netzwerk aufzubauen und Tools zu testen? Oder sogar darüber zu reden und andere Menschen, die wir im Fediverse vermissen würden, zum Mitmachen zu überreden?

Wir treffen uns im Fediverse!

Der Jahreswechsel steht an, und damit drei Gründe, sich mit Alternativen für die zentralen sozialen Netzwerke zu befassen: Wir brauchen natürlich einen guten Vorsatz für das neue Jahr (oder eher für die ersten paar Wochen des neuen Jahrs) Wir haben vielleicht ein bisschen Urlaub und Zeit Die Bekanntwerdung des neusten Facebook-Skandals liegt erst wenige Tage zurück Die Facebooks und Twitters können nicht unsere Zukunft sein. Brauchst Du Gründe? Die Macht, die diese Konzerne konzentrieren, ist gefährlich.

ESP8266 publishing DHT temperature and humidity via Web Thing API

After reading through some of the Mozilla IoT examples, I got an ESP8266 to publish temperature and humidity values via the Web Thing API. Here is the code: Link

Zusammen braucht man weniger

Vom (Gedanken-)Experiment des Müllvermeidens zu einer hyperlokalen Tauschplattform für den täglichen Bedarf Language notice: this is a post about how to share resources between neighbours. As I am living in Germany and my neighbours speak German mostly, I feel like I have to write this in German. Eigentlich möchte ich gar nicht erst anfangen, zu erklären, warum. Eigentlich möchte ich einfach voraussetzen, dass wir alle der Meinung sind, dass wir unseren Fußabdruck so klein halten sollten, wie möglich.

Re-claiming my content

Yesterday I was stuck in a commute situation, so I had a rare moment of boredom and reflection and decided to google jekyll microblogging to find out how easy it would be to make my blog fit smaller content chunks. I felt like gathering what I’m emitting on my home turf, at www.sendung.de, which is a Jekyll site served by Github Pages. What I found was a great post by Fiona Voss that shows a way to re-claim my content by using my own blog as the center of my conversation in other channels.

Visualizing the Tour de France General Classification Build-Up

The 104th edition of the Tour de France is in full swing. Time to have a look at how the General Classification developed so far. Wait, what? General Who? Tour de WTF? OK, sorry. If you have no interest in the sport of riding bicycles and never heard of the most popular bike race in the world, maybe start with a Wikipedia article. To the rest who knows at least that there is such a thing as the Tour de France, let’s revisit how that race works.

Idea: DIY Sourdough Incubator

The idea of breaking bad baking bread, really good bread, is super-fascinating to me. I got recently amazed by this guy named Lutz Geißler, who seems to be on a mission and already published nearly 800 bread recipes in his blog called Plötzblog. I found him via an episode of the radio show Alles in Butter on local radio WDR5. If you want to find out more about him, bread and his driving forces, check out this lengthy and fascinating talk with him and Tim Pritlove (all in German).

Re-claiming my content

October 16, 2018

Yesterday I was stuck in a commute situation, so I had a rare moment of boredom and reflection and decided to google jekyll microblogging to find out how easy it would be to make my blog fit smaller content chunks. I felt like gathering what I’m emitting on my home turf, at www.sendung.de, which is a Jekyll site served by Github Pages.

What I found was a great post by Fiona Voss that shows a way to re-claim my content by using my own blog as the center of my conversation in other channels. And it opens a door to phenomenons like the IndieWeb, MicroPub, and POSSE.

Shortcut into a possible future: Fiona has given this approach up by now. She abandoned her own Jekyll site for performance reasons. Publishing became too slow over time, as the number of posts grew. Read more about it in her update if you like. I for my part decided to deal with that problem once/if I actually have it, which is not now.

Here is what I am doing now, roughly:

My POSSE schema

Depending on what content I am publishing, I can use one of several methods.

  • Longer articles that contain both text and images, like this one, I write in a text editor and commit them into my Github repo.

    All content in my repo is picked up by a micro.blog site via my blog’s RSS feed. From there, content is cross-published to Twitter, following a few rules. In the case of an article like this, the title and URL will be posted on Twitter.

  • Photos that I am publishing on Instagram are automatically picked up by OwnYourGram (thanks Aaron Parecki!). The service also pushes new (and older, to my surprise) photos into blog posts in my Jekyll/Github Pages site.

  • Little notes, i. e. texts that don’t justify opening a text editor and fiddling with git, I can now write on the PC or on the mobile.

What is that thing called micropub in the center of the flow diagram?

It is really the component that enables fast and simple publishing into the Github pages repository. It offers a Micropub API with OAuth authentication on the one side. This opens up publishing to a variety of compatible clients, be it mobile, desktop, web or whatever.

As recommended by Fiona in the post mentioned earlier, I am using webpage-micropub-to-github by Pelle Wessmann. It is especially designed for Jekyll sites hosted on Github Pages. The configuration (via environment variables) is flexible enough for me to run it in a Docker container without code changes.

One of the Micropub clients I have tested out and found helpful is micropublish.net. It seems to be more than sufficient for quickly posting a link or a note of a few lines.

So this leaves me with a couple of options.

  • Small notes can be posted via any device. If I want them to appear in my blog as well as on Twitter, and in my micro.blog of course, I can simply use a Micropub clients like micropublishing.net.

  • Publishing a photo is easiest using my Instagram account. This will also appear in micro.blog, in my blog, on Twitter. It’s just that I don’t want my Instagram feed to be about everything and nothing, but that’s a different problem to talk about.

  • If I don’t want something to appear on my blog, maybe because it’s just not important enough, but want it in micro.blog and Twitter, I post to my micro.blog. The iOS app has good support for a combination of image and text and makes it nearly as easy as using the Twitter iOS app, with the difference that in micro.blog I could also send the content elsewhere.

  • Longer articles I will likely still write in an editor and then push to my blog directly. It will be picked up by micro.blog, which then syndicates it to Twitter and potentially other outlets.

The other outlets part is still open. I might get there.

My blog supporting smaller formats now at least lowers the barrier, giving me the feeling that this is not a dead channel. The next best question for me is no longer: Where to publish? How to publish? What to publish with?

The next best question is: What to publish about?