This Is Just a Test.

I was in first grade of ground school when my teacher noticed that I always squinted hard at the blackboard. It turned out I was near-sighted, probably since birth. So I got my first pair of glasses at the age of 6 or 7, and I remember vividly my excitement that I was suddenly able to see sharply - the myopic fuzziness was part of my life until then. Ever since, I wore glasses. My eyesight gradually worsened until I reached adolescence, and for the last 30 years I lived with approx. 5 diopters on both eyes - so I can see without glasses, but everything is very blurry. ...

I have one of those cheap Brother laser all-in-one machines - an MFC-2700DW - that you buy and then forget about for years because they reliably do their job. It’s connected to my LAN, and I can print without any problems from the Macs or the iPhone, without even setting it up thanks to the magic of AirPrint. Recently however, it has started to give me some headaches. I decided to digitize some of my paper records, mostly letters, documents, or receipts, that don’t really need to be kept around in their original forms, but nevertheless should be archived somewhere. ...

When Redhat announced in 2020 that CentOS as we knew it is dead, we had a problem: the bulk of our fleet ran on CentOS, with the occasional RHEL server here and there. Weighing our options, we had to choose between converting all servers to RHEL (and shouldering the subscription costs) or moving to nascent distributions like AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux that emerged soon after. At the time I worried what would happen to these distros if Redhat decided to restrict access to their sources - which all the clones depend upon if they want to be “bit-by-bit compatible” - and so we decided to bite the bullet, choose the save route, and buy Redhat subscriptions. ...

Something that’s driving me crazy - everytime I have to reinstall the stupid Citrix Receiver the setting, that enables key repetition if you hold down a key in an RDP session, gets lost. I’ll write it down here, so I won’t have to search the web again next time this happens: defaults write com.citrix.CitrixReceiverLauncher ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false defaults write com.citrix.receiver.helper ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false defaults write com.citrix.receiver.icaviewer.mac ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false defaults write com.citrix.receiver.nomas ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

I’m still a bit shocked: following the announcement of Reddit to start charging insane fees for third-party API access, Apollo - probably the most popular Reddit app on iOS and the one I’m using on a daily basis - is shutting down. The sad news are coming just a few days after the app was featured in the Apple WWDC keynote. I can’t blame Apollo’s developer, Christian Selig, for giving up, and I’m afraid many other third-party apps will follow suit und shut down. Ultimately, this desperate grab for money will be a desaster for Reddit, as their own app and website is, frankly, unusable crap and I predict that lots of users will leave the platform or at least cut back their interaction, which is the beginning of the end for a social media platform. ...

I’m a fairly satisfied customer of the Apple ecosystem. iPhones, iPads, Macs - you’ll find all of those in my family; I like the quality of the hardware and the seamless integration with their software. I’ve reached an age where I want things to “just work”, where I don’t have to tinker for hours to get two systems to cooperate - Apple usually lives up to these expectations. When we thought about buying our son his own personal phone we factored in the parental controls of the iOS system and the abilities to limit his usage - i.e. we don’t want him to watch videos for hours on end. ...

If you are Austrian and listened to the Ö3 radio station within the last 25 years, chances are you heard some report on the radio traffic service about the A23 autobahn and the “closed exit Simmering”. The A23 is a Vienna city autobahn and sees some of the worst traffic in Austria. It’s notorious for frequent traffic jams and accidents. Some decades ago it was planned to connect this expressway to the A3 autobahn, and the junction would have been at the Arsenal area in Simmering. ...

You can run a service for years without any problems, and then you add TLS, and then everything changes. At my job, we operate an internal PKI. We have a Root CA, which signs Intermediate certificates, which in turn sign all the hosts certs in use. This week, one of the Intermediate certificates expired, which in itself could be a major disaster, but hey - we were prepared! we knew it would happen on that day two years ago, a new Intermediate certificate was generated all host certificates in use can be verified with the new Intermediate cert So, the expiration of the old Intermediate cert was expected to be a non-issue. The expire time came and went, and very soon services left and right started to fail with certificate verification errors - WHAT?!? ...

A young male blackbird has decided that the tree outside our bedroom window is now his territory and for the last couple of weeks every morning around 5 o’clock he would come and raise hell with his incredible songs and calls, some sort of avian free jazz bordering on Tourette’s. It’s one of those noises that my brain simply cannot filter out, and so I lie awake at the break of dawn, highly annoyed but also in awe of the bird’s vocabulary and creativity. ...

If you thought that I would just give up after my recent adversity regarding coffee, you were totally wrong, of course. It bothered me quite a bit and I considered that maybe I shouldn’t think of coffee as a simple beverage but rather approach it as a ceremony, like they do with tea. If you read up on the subject the most important suggestions for improving the quality of your brew are: ...