I love Mastodon. I am a believer. Not that I think it will replace Twitter or anything like that. But it is definitely its own thing. True to the original ideas of the internet. There are however a few things I would really like to see. In no particular order. Threads Threads in the timeline feel clunky. I see replies to long running threads scattered through my timeline. They are… Read More »Five things I’d like to see in Mastodon
The green links on your Mastodon profile indicate that you are the owner of that link i.e. that website. You can achieve this by adding a little line of code to your website (see Link verification). When you have a basic HTML website, adding this piece of code is this trivial. However when your site runs on WordPress, it’s a bit different. I found a tutorial that only works with… Read More »How to get green links on your Mastodon profile with WordPress
I’ve been on a bit of a Jonathan Franzen bender lately. I frequently write about him on my other site. The kickstart for all this was a book club meeting about Crossroads for which I not only read the book, but also watched and read a dozen or so Franzen interviews. Older and newer interviews. What really struck a chord with me was not so much the specific Crossroads discussions… Read More »Jonathan Franzen on reading and literature
It was 2017 when I signed up for the Dutch instance of Mastodon. The newfangled thing. But it wasn’t until last week that it *clicked*. It clicked for two reasons. Forget the Metaverse Mastodon is part of the fediverse. Meaning it shares the core principles of the fediverse. With a little bit of reading, I got a better understanding of what the fediverse actually is, and how Mastodon fits in.… Read More »Welcome to the Fediverse
I am back to running Windows Terminal + Cygwin, after a stint with MobaXterm. I blogged about it before. Why: In the end MobaXterm just had too many quirks. Specifically when changing screens — docking / undocking which I do a lot during the day. However, one thing I really did like about MobaXterm was the integrated SSH agent (MobAgent). That part worked really well. That was what kept me… Read More »Using Windows OpenSSH Agent with Windows Terminal and Cygwin
Yes, you. The person reading this. You should have a place on the internet that is completely yours and where you are in complete control of what you post. How often, you ask? Let me reiterate what I said last week on Twitter; so I can point people to this post in the future and because I can point people to my own site instead of Twitter (see how this… Read More »You should blog more
WhatsApp is my most used app, but its development seems stagnant. Which is not always a bad thing for software, but WhatsApp could really improve some things, especially when those improvements seem trivial. Some wishes could even be classified as bugs: which they should really fix. In no particular order (for iOS). Multi-select on media searchWhen you use the global search (pull down on iOS) and select a category (Photos,… Read More »WhatsApp should really fix these issues
When the pandemic started in early 2020, I needed something to get my mind off things. Frustrated with most database form generation solutions I created Cruddiy and put it on GitHub. Two years later Cruddiy reached 100 stars on GitHub. Something which I did not expect. We could argue a long time on what a GitHub star as a metric actually represents, but for this post it represents: hey, more… Read More »Reaching 100 stars on GitHub: what I learned from putting code online
[UPDATE July 2022: I switched to using MobaXterm which does the job just fine. I don’t like that it is not free/open but I do like that it comes with an integrated SSH agent, which makes life a lot easier] I had been a happy WSL1 user for many years, but after switching laptops I more or less had to upgrade to WSL2. Which is the same thing but not… Read More »Windows Terminal + Cygwin
I recently switched my VPS from Linode to Hetzner. I got more CPU, RAM and storage for less money. Pretty good right? However it wasn’t after I migrated that I found out Hetzner blocks all outgoing port 25 and 465 traffic. At least; for the first month for new customers. This means my new server cannot talk SMTP with the rest of the world i.e. my server cannot send mail!… Read More »Bypassing Hetzner mail port block (port 25/465)
Here’s a list of software tools I either started using this year or tools I think everyone should be using. Bitwarden The best password manager. Free if you like, or only $10 per year if you want to have a little bit more features or just want to support the project. My advice: pay the $10, Bitwarden is the best bargain for a great password manager and you support development… Read More »Ten 2022 Tool Tips
I recently switched my LAMP virtual server to a different VPS provider. The LAMP server that is serving you this site. So the migration worked! Here are the steps, for future reference. Mostly for myself, but maybe you — someone who came here from Google — can use this too. This should work on any small to medium sized VPS. Let’s go! Lower your DNS records TTL value When you… Read More »Migrating a LAMP VPS