I live my life in a bunch of different contexts. I’m a father, and a husband. I’m a professional in my job, and an amateur in a million things. I’m an outdoors person. I have little bunny rabbits in my brain that constantly hop every which way, and come up with ideas anytime they like. Accordingly, I have too many ways of keeping track of stuff I need to remember. There’s various todo lists at work, in a plethora of tools.

It’s been grey and overcast here for a while. Last Saturday I simply couldn’t take it anymore. Something had to be done! So I put on my hiking boots, and went up a mountain. If the sun didn’t come to me, I would just have to go and find the sun! The Brünnstein is a not-terribly-high mountain nearby, peaking at 1634m. I picked it because a) I hadn’t been there before, and b) the relevant apps offered a tour that looked like what I wanted.

[This post is above all for my own reference, so I’ll know what to do the next time this problem occurs.] My Thinkpad’s SSD has an impolite tendency to run out of disk space, even though I might not really be adding lots of data. It seems to be mostly cruft that Debian accumulates, perhaps out of a desire for thorough record-keeping. Looking for ways to free up disk space, I found this StackExchange post.

We already have fusion power. It comes from the sun. We just need to collect it. The goal I have a new pet project. I want to build a solar powered web server. It occurred to me that I want to do this when I came across a post by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert who had done just this. The article also reminded me of an older post by Lowtech Magazine that I had read with great interest at the time.

I want to build a solar powered web server! First off, let’s draft a todo list. Build the server and website I’ll use Debian Stable, because I have a life, and don’t constantly want to upgrade the system. The static build system will be Hugo, because that’s what I’m familiar with. The web server will be Apache or nginx. I don’t know much about either of them, so I’ll go with the one for which I find the best howtos.

CW: contains extensive discussion of the finer points of whitewater paddling. Probably boring to non-kayakers. You´ve been warned. Autumn is now definitely here. The mornings are misty, and most days we don´t see the mountains in the distance until the fog has burned off. The trees wear their most glorious fall colors. It´s beautiful! But it´s still time to declare the end of this year´s kayaking season. For the season finale, our club traditionally puts on an outing on one of our home stretches: a lower section of the Saalach, just over the border in Austria.

There’s a consensus that search has been getting worse. It used to be the case that search engines were actually good. You could be fairly confident that it would return useful results, with the most pertinent sites mostly under the top 5. Today, that’s no longer true. I often find myself sifting through a list of search results that have only a tangential relevance to my search terms. At the same time, the amount of text on websites is growing quickly.

This site is built on Hugo, a static site generator. There are many themes for Hugo sites, and until recently, I was using hello-friend-ng. I liked the look, and it worked well for my purposes. But there were some recent changes to Hugo itself, and the theme apparently is no longer actively maintained. At least, my site wouldn’t build anymore after I upgraded my local Hugo version. So the hunt for a new theme was on.

It’s Friday 13th, and I got some bad news that make it necessary for me to be at the other end of the country tomorrow. There’s one upside to the sad occasion: I get to ride on the new Nightjet train that OEBB put in service last winter. Here are some first impressions. Outside The train rolls into the station while it’s raining hard. This time last week, we were throwing the summer’s last BBQ party.

Those of us living in Apple’s golden cage know that the fruity phones offer a pretty decent user experience. But try rattling the bars, and you’ll find out that Cupertino has done a solid job of locking you into their system. One of the nicer functionalities of iOS is Airdrop. This lets us transfer files between devices over Bluetooth. It’s as easy as sending a file by Signal. But disappointingly, it only works with Apple devices.