twm

Pro-tip if you use alkaline cells in low-power devices (e.g. remotes) that need a fresh set only once every few years: don't! No matter what brand or promises: they will all leak eventually.

I just removed two leaked cells and their crusty leftovers from two of my temperature / humidity sensors. Both cells established brands and well within their 10 year "no leaks" guarantee. One of the replacements has already leaked while still unused in storage.

It's not the first time this has happened, but now it's been the last time. Anything using AA / AAA cells will get a ready-to-use / low self discharge NIMHs, no exceptions.

Do you remember when you put those alkalines in that remote / clock / thermometer? Better check them right now - unless you live in a time zone where you should be in bed by now, in that case check them tomorrow.

What is this "sort-of fail2ban?" I talked about in my last post, you may ask. Simple...

I wanted some sort of syslog aggregation but found the popular software packages way too big and complicated (plus in one certain case: cumbersome to configure and poorly documented). Settled on a central syslogd instead.

Having the central syslog was nice, but "grep" was insufficient for more structured searches, so I wrote a small tool to feed it all into a PostgreSQL-DB and a small command line client for querying the DB without having to write a full SQL query every time.

"Hm, when I feed it into the DB I could already extract the interesting parts and have a small and fast index for those?!". Done.

Having that I now can do two things:

1) A single SELECT gets me an accumulated list of bad actor IPs that I can feed into "pf" periodically.

2) A VIEW and another single SELECT gets me an RSS feed of things I like to know about.

These two things were not planned at all when I started with the log aggregation, yet turned out to be incredibly handy.

The whole project has only about 900 lines of code (mostly Perl, some SQL, a tiny bit of Go).

Which selfmade tools do you have?

My tiny allround VPS at Hetzner has a sort-of fail2ban, mainly to prevent the logs from filling up with garbage that won't work anyway. The ban-list usually had around 120 entries of repeat offenders. Starting this year the list had grown to a constant 200+ entries, and this morning it's at 380. I don't have any statistics, but my guess would be the machine sees more abuse attempts than actual traffic. Do you notice a similar trend?

So I've been using Fastmail with my own domain name for several years now. Fastmail is excellent - simply the best e-mail service I know, but it's also a bit on the pricey side, and I'm not sure if this is worth it any longer for my usage.

Many years back my e-mail was mostly personal correspondence with friends. Nowadays it's just bills, confirmations, notifications and newsletters. These things (well, some of them) need to work reliably, too, but I just don't feel "invested" in e-mail any more and think about switching to a simpler and more affordable service, most likely Posteo.

How has your use of e-mail changed over the years?

Yesterday was update jackpot day: iOS update, MacOS update, Slackware update, FreeBSD update and for dessert an OpenWRT update, phew! I no longer work in systems administration, but somehow the work has followed me.

MIT Press Direct has more than 500 books freely available via an open access publishing program, very nice!

However... downloading the PDF will insert a "downloaded on $date from $url by guest" footer on every page that is so wide it breaks automatic zoom and makes the PDF difficult to handle on a tablet.

If you use the web reader instead and peek into the network tab of the browser's developer tools you will see the URL for a rather large json file. Fetch it with curl or similar, base64 decode the "data" field, and you will have the unmodified PDF.

Why do people make things so bad deliberately?

This is probably a long shot, but still... next week, from May 14th till 17th, I'll be in The Hague for the #IntergalacticFM festival 2026. Feel free to reply if you'd like to meet up and talk about nerdy things when you're not busy dancing.

https://intergalactic.fm/events/ifm-festival-2026/211696

Did I say "wasted" the day before? After doing 30km with a healthy mix of steep hills and strong headwinds on the cross bike I may need to redefine "wasted". Still, how could I *not* have gone for a ride on such a sunny and lovely day?

By the way... this is my "Cyclewolf" cross bike. I call it the "recyclewolf" because it's already 25 years old and had so many parts replaced during that time that it has become my personal "ship of Theseus".

I guess the visit to the festival / conference / you-name-it has to be considered a success when you start playing the stream recordings as soon as you get home. See you all again at the #IntergalacticFM fest 2027!

It was too windy to cycle, so I went for a walk in the woods instead. This is a place where I can finally drop all my sensory filters and feel relaxed. Unfortunately my little holiday is already coming to its end, but luckily another little escape isn't too far away.

Can I get a Macbook Neo, but with an Intel N150 and Slackware? Low end, low budget, yet portable and sturdy - that segment is hugely underrepresented in the x86-64 market. My old Acer Swift 1 fits some of these aspects, but not all.

Just updated the small collection of shell scripts and m4 macros that makes up the configuration management for all my machines. Yes, you read that right: m4. How does this make you feel?

Woohoo, new Donny Benét mini album »il basso« is out. Do you like 80s synths and funky slap bass? Then give it a go! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3DF7EHDDU #TheDon

@km@mastodon.babb.no It may sound surprising, but *not* using my own domain for e-mail any more would actually be my preferred choice. Why? Again, prices keep on rising, and using your own domain may not be as permanent as it seems. I once lost a mail domain when an automated process at the registry failed and it turned out there was no support of any kind. Getting this sorted out was quite painful.

Current state, after a six hour train ride and four hours in the cinema for the first part of this year's Italo-Western-Festival at the KommKino in Nuremberg: exhausted, but happy.

When a friend mentioned "Copy Fail 2 - Electric Boogaloo" in IRC today I had to chuckle at the title, but then it occured to me that not everybody might get the reference. If you have no idea what I'm on about and you like a silly & fun movie with the best dance scene in any movie ever, go and watch https://letterboxd.com/film/breakin-2-electric-boogaloo/ and thank me later.

Got concert tickets for Donny Benét and Autechre, yay!