Hi, I’m Benedikt

Welcome to this obscure spot of the interweb that I call mine own! This is where I write up thoughts, observations, notes for myself and/or others and the like. If you want to get to talking to me about anything I write, there is a “Reply by Email” button at the end of each post. If you’d like to suggest changes, you can use the respective button above each post, it will lead you to the repository where the code for this site is hosted where you can file an issue. You can also hit me up on mastodon and yell at me there.

Integrating analytics into my website

I’ve been blogging (on and off) for a while now. Originally, I just wanted a place to write down things I’d done, tutorials, idle thoughts, stuff like that. But since I’m also active on Mastodon (or recently GoToSocial) and link to my posts there I started wondering if anyone ever actually reads my posts or if I’m shouting into the void here. You know, idle curiosity. The obvious answer to that question comes in the guise of website analytics....

December 16, 2023 · 6 min

How To: Run shell scripts containing relative paths from anywhere

Have you ever had the problem that you want to run a script but because it handles relative paths it depends on the directory it’s called from? Well, today I learned about a shell function that helps with that, called dirname. It can be fed a path and will return it with the last non-slash component and trailing slash removed. So to refer to the location a script sits in you can do simply:...

December 8, 2023 · 1 min

Reproducible development environments with Nix

A while ago I became aware of Nix, NixOS and people who actually use it. I was intrigued by the proposition: configure your whole system declaratively so you can avoid configuration drift and combat issues with reproducibility. I tried it out and found that Nix is not straightforward to learn. Also, the documentation is gruesome. I decided that knowing Nix and applying it might be nice but I just don’t want to learn it right now....

December 7, 2023 · 7 min

Playing Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy again

“Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy” celebrates its 20th anniversary this year! Reason enough to dust it off and play it yet again. This time I went to hunt for mods to make it more interesting this time around and I found JKHub. This has a list of recommended mods for the game here featuring cosmetic ones, new textures, new lightsabers, new character models but also conversion mods, new missions and more!...

December 7, 2023 · 2 min

How To: Fix duplicated characters (and other artifacts) in your shell

A few days ago I started noticing strange behaviour of my shell. When typing commands or working with pasted ones, especially with tab completion, duplicated characters started showing up at the beginning of the line or in the middle in the case of working with a pasted command. Something like hx became hxhx or docker became dodocker. These duplicated characters were not editable, I could only clear the line and start fresh but the same thing would occur again, although not quite deterministically....

December 5, 2023 · 2 min