This Is Just a Test.

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: ...