Please Stop Lying

I hate lies, I hate lying and I dislike liars. I am aware that there’s philosophical debate around the issue of whether or not lying is acceptable. There seems to be a social consensus that, to a degree, lying is acceptable and sometimes even necessary or at least advisable. I disagree. Granted, there might be situations where telling the truth might mean the death of a beloved person but for the vast majority of people this situation is contrived and unrealistic. For most of us it’s probably a matter of convenience or personal gain. Some jobs incentivise lying more than others do, I should think, but even so, you’re never compelled to lie to save yourself or others from serious harm. ...

April 29, 2025 · 4 min

On Separating Creator from Creation

This post has been in the making for a long time now. Not so much on paper (metaphorically speaking) but rather in my head. So now the time has come to finally write down my thoughts. They may be meandering or a bit stream-of-consciousness but I’d rather have that than nothing. This may also end up quite verbose. You have been warned. I was prompted by various events in the past, online discussions and, last but not least, one of Kev Quirk’s blog posts about this subject. It is also related to a post series of a dear fedifriend of mine. ...

January 31, 2025 · 11 min

How playing with Duplo led to some recreational maths

This is probably going to be the weirdest blog post I have ever written. If you’re up for it, let’s do this! I recently played with LEGO Duplo. Yes I am an adult, go figure. While building random stuff I came across something interesting (to me). I had a large green board and a small fence. The fence has two points at either end where it can be connected to the board and has a length of five. ...

May 27, 2024 · 7 min

How To: Create a Digital Frame with MagicMirror

I’ve wanted a digital frame at home for a while now. I’m notoriously bad at organizing pictures, even worse at sorting, printing, arranging or displaying them. So when I found out that digital frames were a thing it seemed like this would be a natural solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the commercially available ones either don’t have the features that I want (e.g. some way to connect with my images stored in my Nextcloud) or feature worrying amounts of integration with various third-party services, clouds, phone apps and whatnot. I’m absolutely not inclined to yield control of my pictures to some provider who is supposed to sell me a device for displaying them but maybe that’s just me. ...

February 8, 2023 · 5 min

Self-Hosting or How I learned to stop worrying and love the Cloud

For a few years now, I’ve hosted a small server at home. Nothing too exciting, I’d say. It all started with a Nextclound instance (see here) and sort of evolved from there. After a while I discovered docker and the amount of services saw a dramatic, albeit short-lived uptick. I tried out all kinds of things, like uptime-kuma, FreshRSS, miniflux, portainer, watchtower. At some point I came across what used to be bitwarden_rs and is now called vaultwarden, a self-hostable reimplementation of Bitwarden. I had been using keepassXC and had heard good things about Bitwarden in general so I decided to try it out and liked it so much that I ended up using it instead and depended on it for daily use. ...

February 8, 2023 · 6 min