Hi, I'm Dominik Schwind, friend of the internet. And this is my blog.
The prefered way would probably be with a feed reader - here is my RSS feed.
If you need more direct access, you can follow me here with Mastodon or similar sites: @dominik@nona.social. You can also follow this blog via @dominik@lostfocus.de.
I know this might be slightly controversial for my fellow developers, but: I tend to prefer a (good) GUI over the CLI.
Git? Please, hand me a pretty client with colorful lines and a few buttons and functions to manage my branches. Database? Yes, please. Give me tables! And options to write my own queries and hand them over in a human readable view.
I’ve been handling a lot of WordPress this week. At work, oh boy, and also around here on my blog. My database woes are documented, everything else doesn’t need to be mentioned and can get lost in the rivers of time. At least as far as I am concerned.
I found a book on my Kindle that I pre-ordered a long time ago and started to read it. I decided to reactivate my Bookwyrm account to document that moment and of course I’m now wondering how to get data out of that platform.
I finished my rewatch of The Wire. That last season is rough, oh boy. Many themes of the show are playing out in reality as well, which is not very encouraging.
And again, here are the links I collected this week. What do you think about this format? Too much? Too little? Too late? Did you see these anyway, either on my link blog or on Mastodon? Let me know
Very much this. And maybe start caring as well. This might be the main problem: many people just don’t care.
Of course he did.
Now that’s a very pretty monospaced font!
So would I. Just look at it!
I’m not really all that much into Formula 1 but at least I can say that the new rules seem to produce rather good looking cars
A plugin that collects ActivityPub posts and posts them on a WordPress blog once a week. Looks like worth a try.
I already stopped looking at Bluesky because of these shenanigans and I guess this means I’ll soon stop looking at Discord stuff, too.
This is pretty useful. I switch branches so much and sometimes I need to know what I worked on, so this command might help.
Great interview with Alex Horne and Greg Davies, it’s good to hear them on a format that gives them more time to answer and the questions are great as well.
I posted another short clip to Loops and me being me, of course I started to wonder if I could write a little single-user website that is compatible with it.
Just when I was about to go to bed my phone told me that my blog was down. Very inconvenient. So I poked around a bit, turns out: the disk was full and a computer with no space to work with doesn’t really want to deliver websites.
So. After a bit more poking around, I noticed that the main culprit seems to be MySQL. For some reason someone decided that keeping old binlogs around forever is a smart idea. Cleaned up a bit, changed the purge time to a few days instead of a few months and now I can go to bed. (Thanks to this helpful post on dba.stackexchange.)
I’m altogether thinking about Taskmaster too often. I don’t think there has been a timespan longer than two days in a row for quite some time when I didn’t rewatch single tasks or read/listen to/watch some secondary media.
Sometimes I think I could write a novel. I mean, how hard could it be, right?
And then I realise I don’t really have any stories in me. Best I can do is small vignettes and what’s the point there? It wouldn’t even be a short story. Oh well.
More and more I’m aware of people who talk to AI chat bots like they would with friends – about this and that, their life, just chatting. And while I begrudgingly while completely ignoring the environmental and moral issues see why (some) people actually get usable results for specific use cases, this is actually even more disturbing. I’m not a person blessed with much of a social life and yet I can’t imagine a level of loneliness that would get me to “befriend” an LLM.
Maybe I’m missing something here.
Another rather unremarkable week.
For a quick moment I really got into collecting and posting links, enough so, that I documented my workflow.
All of this is good fun but also feels like something is missing. And weirdly enough it seems to be a feedback loop. I know it’s a bit of a slippery slope towards social media but just seeing something obscure that I linked to appear on someone else’s blog gives me a tiny jolt of dopamine. “Hey, someone actually looks at that thing that I did.” Maybe I should figure out a way to auto-post the links to my Mastodon account, where people can interact with it more easily?
I played with the idea before, even wondered if I should “just” add ActivityPub to the website. Maybe even in a way that it interacts with something like ties. And then I started to wonder if I should add ActivityPub to my neglected photo blog for the same reason. And then I just sigh.
Anyway – another update since last week: my new keyboard arrived. It was sent via UPS which has probably the most scammy looking status text messages ever. The keyboard is a MX Keys Mini and it is very nice. A proper upgrade from my now dead plastic keyboard and I rather enjoy typing on it at the moment.
And as an experiment, I’ll dump the links I’ve posted to my link blog here underneath the weeknotes. Maybe then I won’t feel so imposter-y when being listed on shellshark’s list of people who post links:
I don’t know how I would actually use this but I like it a lot
This is good! (And seems underreported?)
Oh no. 😢
Puh, I don’t know. A Social Media platform run by an ad agency?
Don’t visit that page if you’re hungry.
But to me, the issue is that we have an overabundance of content, and most content is not worth paying for. Most content is not worth anything.
Harsh but absolutely true.
Oh! A native (non-js, but frankly, still a bit js) HTML element for geolocation.
I’m not sure if I like this format – but let’s give it a try until I find a better solution.
My blog shows likes and reposts again. Nice.
TIL: RTFM or rather RTFC – if you’re using DDEV for your WordPress project and you don’t want it to overwrite the wp-config.php every time it starts, just delete the whole comment block on the top. You know, the one where it tells you to do that.
Teymur asked me, probably hoping for some kind of automation. Alas, there is none. And still, here is my “workflow” for my link blog.
I find articles, links, etc. all over the place. Many of them come through Mastodon and almost all remaining ones come from my feed reader. (NetNewsWire, in case you want to know.)
If one of the posts/links look like something I want to read a bit more closely later on, they’ll now (finally!) end up in Wallabag. I used to be a Pocket power user and ever since they closed down, I was a bit unmoored. Enough so, that I stopped after step 1 for quite a long time.
When I feel like it, I read those things again and when I still find them interesting, I throw them into my Raindrop account. Once an hour a script calls their API and puts the link on my website. (Now why would I use Raindrop instead of just putting them directly into the database? Laziness, mostly. It was easier to quickly write the cronjob than to write an admin backend that is as nice to use as Raindrop.)
And there you have it. A workflow!
Last night I played around with some infrastructure as code for my (too many) little side projects and I finally made it work. Sometimes it’s weird little gotchas and the decision not to overengineer everything more than necessary. (Frankly: it is already overengineered, but it was interesting and I have learned something.)
You know how I notice that I don’t have good nap/sleep hygiene lately? I just realised I called my last weeknotes post “Nap Hygiene” because I wanted to mention my bad sleeping patterns during that week and completely forgot about it later on. Didn’t even mention it. Proof-read the post a couple of times and every single time I didn’t notice it. Bloody hell.
I went to a photowalk in Basel this weekend – the folks there and me did some calculations, it had been two years since the last one, which feels long. It has been fun and we’ll do it more often in the near future, I guess.
(Related: meetup.com is a bad website and app, right? Is there anything halfway similar that combines organization and discoverability even for non-tech people? If so, I haven’t found it, yet.)
Today I went to Novartis Pavillon which manages at the same time to be pretty neat and rather shameless promotion. Not something I’ll go visit again in a hurry, but a good way to spend a few hours on a grey Sunday.
In other news:
I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
This morning it was It’s That Time by Marlon Hoffstadt aka DJ Daddy Trance
Same week as the week before. Still in this weird float state. At least today I managed to drag myself out of the house with a camera in my hand, which was helpful. Drowning out the voices in my head with a rewatch of The Wire, which is still so very, very good.