[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.

Around here, April is when the whitewater kayaking season starts. Due to the unseasonably warm weather (ugh, climate catastrophe), I’d been out on the water a couple of times already after the winter. But today was the official season opening with our local club. So the 14yo and I went. The Saalach river is our home stretch, just over the border in Austria. The bit from Au to Unken is a perennial favourite.

I’ve been listening to Tom Waits on and off for maybe the last 30 years. Not obsessively, mind you; more whenever the mood takes me. The mood in question is typically one of sadness and weltschmerz. I’ve encountered it much less frequently in recent years, which is a good thing overall. Still, when I stumbled across a 2023 remaster of Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs a few days ago, the feelings were still all there, and the memories came back.