Posts

bits 0x02: switching to orion as a browser

The most interesting thing I wanna share is my browser switch. I’ve always been using Arc. As that is done, I made the switch to Zen. Pretty buggy but ok. The biggest problem I had was the power draw. As I’m preparing a more nomadic lifestyle, I really need to care for my battery. The power draw is really just way too high. By accident, I stumbled upon Orion. I’ve had it in the back of my head but for whatever reason never even looked at it. I’ve been using kagi as a search engine on and off for a while now.

burnout, letting go and getting lost

This year has been very interesting so far. The first half absolutely sucked and went by in a second. There was a lot of shit going on at work, leading to me being burnt out and needing to quit the startup I co-founded. It was a forced break.

What followed is pretty interesting. You need to reorient. You need to regain strength. The first four weeks I couldn’t really do anything and got sick again and again. My body needed to rest.

blocking google sso popups

Using ublock origin, we can block the pesty Google SSO popup that seems to be added to random websites all over right now.

screenshot of the ublock origin settings page

Head to the uBlock origin settings, the “My Filters” tab and paste the following:

1||id.google.com^
2||accounts.google.com/gsi/$3p
3||smartlock.google.com^
4! Block "Sign in with Google" iframe in top right corner of websites ||accounts.google.com/gsi/iframe

et voila: no more SSO popups. source NB: this might fuck with any google logins you actually wanna use. I figure you can whitelist

bit 0x01: 1984 and solarpunk

I’ve finished reading Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. I always felt that this must be a very boring read, but the recent rise of trumpism, MAGA, dark enlightenment and all these dystopian things finally made me pick it up. 5/5, highly recommended. Not boring at all.

It paints a picture of a totalitarian regime that utilizes new speak, surveillance and propaganda to control the population. Written with Stalinist USSR and Nazi Germany in mind, we see new crops of totalitarianism rise today trying to use similar tactics. The left makes heavy use of identity politics to restrict language and the right uses propaganda and fake news (like the ministry of truth), especially in trumps current administration.

Book Review: Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

I recently finished reading “Vom Ende der Einsamkeit” (The End of Loneliness) by Benedict Wells. It’s a novel about the life of Jules Moreau, who loses his parents in a car accident at a young age and has to grow up alone with his two siblings. The book follows Jules through his life, from childhood to adulthood, and tells the story of his relationships, his struggles, and his search for meaning over a span of multiple decades.

How to Build a Startup Without Funding

I think Peter Levels doesn’t need an introduction. He’s the guy behind Nomad List, Remote OK, and Makebook. He’s a serial maker and has been building profitable startups for years now. He’s also a big advocate of building startups without funding.

There’s quite the well known talk from him from six years ago on YouTube.

Here’s a quick guide on how to create startups based on the key points from the talk:

The overall process is: Idea > Build > Launch > Grow > Monetize > Automate > Exit. Trust your intuition, be nice, and keep shipping new projects to find what works. Coding and self-learning are essential skills.

My New Camera: Canon Ae 1 Program

I just had a very special delivery that I was looking forward to for a few days now. I received my Canon AE-1 Program from 1981. I’m drawn towards the simplicity, haptic, connectedness to the past and less arbitrariness of digital photography or life in general.

Just a few months ago I also bought a new notebook, the Midori traveller’s notebook. Although I’ve been journaling on paper for a while now, I replaced digital notes with this as well. It has it’s place and time, I’m still a heavy obsidian user for tasks and such. But the traveller’s notebook has one notebook for work, one for notes (especially brainstorming), and one for journaling. It’s in daily use and I love it to pieces. I’m constantly reminded by people of the contradiction of me being a tech guy and being drawn to analogue things so much. I was just thinking about this the other day and I think as tech people, we have so much exposure to digital things, that it forces us to note the good and bad more, we have more contrast. That’s why the love for analogue, nature, and simplicity is so strong in us. It’s a balance thing. And maybe a part of us knows that what we build is making us less happy as humans? I don’t know, just a thought.

On The Microweb And Multiple Topics On One Blog

I want to switch things up here. I always considered this blog to be the technical perspective on my live. I always felt that focussing on one topic at a time (and thus, if you want to write about multiple topics, have multiple blogs) is the right thing to do. This is not the case anymore. I’d like to write more and show more of my other passions.

Did you know that I’m also an avid (long distance/ultralight) hiker? I’ve done this for over 15 years now. In my spare time I also (partially) restore a Land Rover Defender Td5 of ‘03. With Google becoming ever more irrelevant, and search engines like kagi or marginalia and the rise of AI-generated garbage SEO becomes less irrelevant anyhow. I think, we’ll move a bit back into the direction of the microweb and personal nieches. No more lost content on facebook, insta, twitter or reddit. More personal blogs, more personal websites.

My Tribe of Builders Interview

I did my first “interview” with Mat from Tribe of Builders and it was an interesting experience. He provided me with a list of questions and I could choose the ones I wanted to answer most. I got so into it that I answered quite a lot. After editing I could review the post, but it was good as it was. It was an interesting experience and I really like the outcome. Be sure to give Mat some love, he is gathering advice from builders all over the world and it is a great resource for anyone who wants to start building something or needs some motivation.

Authz via SpiceDb

At digital office we are building a new authorization system. We’re using Spring Security ACL at the moment, but we’re seeing a number of issues with it. Namely:

On top of that, we’re seeing a number of issues with the way we’re using it. I always disliked how bad the testability is. How do you have a meaningful check for an annotation like this?

Quickly Free Up macOS Disk Space

There are two easy things to clean up a lot of disk space on a mac. The first one will remove all stopped containers and unused volumes.

docker system prune --volumes

The second one will remove all old versions of installed packages.

brew cleanup

Also check out this apple guide  Find and delete files on your Mac

Status Quo of Newsletterify

So it’s been a while since my last update and a lot has happened. I launched 2markdown) over the course of a weekend. digital office has taken most of my time while we’ve crunched the last two months. I didn’t have the necessary time to work on newsletterify I’m afraid. I still believe the idea is great and I’m still convinced that it’s worth a shot.

Let’s address some technical decisions that have become stumbling blocks for me. In terms of the tech stack for newsletterify, I initially opted for Golang, Gin, and GraphQL via gqlgen for the backend, along with TypeScript and SvelteKit for the frontend. However, a few unforeseen issues have surfaced:

Getting Lost in Internet Obscurity

For whatever reason, people always felt drawn to mysteries, especially unsolved ones. On this page I would like to collect the ones that drew me in, fascinated by the curiosities of life and tragedy. I fell into a rabbit whole the other day and was procrastinating on modern mysteries and search and rescue stories which I’d like to document here. It’s really interesting as a data point about our modern civilization, where we often get the feeling of absolute security. Sometimes it’s good to shift things into perspective. We can still walk into nature and vanish. We can still board a plane and never arrive at our destination and no one knows what happened. This could be a good reminder about living a purposeful live.

Nomad Guide: Working In Tbilisi, Georgia

I spent the last week working from Tbilisi, Georgia and want to share what I experienced and where I could work and couldn’t. It’s not very easy to find a good place to work sadly. The friendliness from people working at coffee places and hotels leaves somewhat to be desired, sadly. I’m not quite sure yet it it’s their communication style or if it’s because I’m a foreigner (and might be mistaken for a russian somehow?).

What's the minimal set of user stories for a Micro-SaaS MVP?

As mentioned earlier, I am implementing a SaaS-base to be reused for every project idea I have and that makes it through the meat grinder. If you start building something without a clearly defined scope, you will find it very hard to stop and succumb to feature creep. So let’s define the scope an MVP for a Micro SaaS should have.

We have one general area of code that’s always needed in a new project:

Starting the Micro-Saas Journey

I’ve build products for as long as I can code. It started with game hacks (basically apps that employed cheat codes, sorry!) to forums, IRC bots, a youtube downloader, and an app for macOS where you could share images by dragging them onto the app logo. All before I turned 18. Then I went to uni and started working on the side. I had less time and energy to focus on what I loved most: building stuff. I joined a startup in 2014 at 23 years old and quickly became the CTO, all while still studying computer science. Working in a startup and studying is hard. But in 2019, while I co-founded another startup, I finally finished my studies. Since then, I’ve been working on said startup full-time. I had no time, no energy nor inspiration to work on my own projects. But this changed. I want to follow the calls of the promised land, being a solo founder building products while traveling full-time. I don’t know if it’s better, I don’t know if it’ll work, I don’t know if it even suits me. But how can I know if I don’t try? How do I know what kind of life suits me at this moment by merely hypothesizing about it? The answer is: I don’t. So I try.