Profile for alex
About alex
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Bio
Biology, Plants, Birds, Photography, Switzerland, Emacs, Wiki, Programming, Perl, Go, Tea, Drawing, Music.
Languages: gsw de en fr pt.
He/him.
Born at 330ppm of CO₂
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Pinned posts
jump to recent"Bechdel license: You may distribute, copy and modify the work freely, provided you talk to the recipient about something meaningful that isn't the work."
The weird reality of hospital life. A room, a bed, a nurse, two, three, friendly, smiling, people dressed in white, rooms in beige, and then the passage into the underworld where the surgeons and the other nurses work, where lights are bright and people are dressed in blue, with gloves and masks, and to pass by the various halls, and stand in that in-between space where a nurse dressed white hands you over to the nurse dressed in blue, the repeated questions of your name, your birthdate, the reason for being here, everybody wary of making a mistake, to catch a peek of the operation theatre where doctors are at work, patients covered, like objects, and feel the intravenous needle and the cold salt water in your arm, the pads that monitor your brain waves, the pads that monitor your heart, the machines and the beeps, the mask, the dizziness, turning into an object yourself, wondering whether you’ll be a good object for them to work, to pass out … and to open your eyes again, to hear your name, to hear whispered conversations, to be brought back into those upper levels, to see a familiar face, to regain a voice, a face, to be a person again.
My wife had a lot to tell.
I had some free time today and so I wrote up the technical part of my dynamic ASN banning setup.
https://transjovian.org/view/fight-bots/index
I was reading to the blogpost by @rubenerd and was reminded of my trip to Armenia and Georgia with my father-in-law. It was a super touristy trip with a lot of English speakers in a bus, but it worked very well for him. He loves Armenia and years before he had been on an organised bicycle trip through Armenia. And when we visited the two countries, I loved them, too.
Of course, the spectre of Russian meddling was already hanging over the political situation.
Anyway: This is the post that led me to it all:
https://bsd.network/@rubenerd/115303549808248075
The blog post Ruben wrote about Nagorno-Karabakh:
https://rubenerd.com/dubious-nagorno-karabakh-anniversary/
My short post about Armenia:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2019-06-01_Armenia
And the long post with all the pictures:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2019-armenien/index
My short post about Georgia:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2019-06-23_Georgia
And the long post with all the pictures:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2019-georgien/index
#Armenia #Georgia
Speed testing #Oddmu as a static site generator on my blog. 16099 files, of which 7659 Markdown files. Using -jobs 4 it runs in 72 seconds. 
Executed in 72.32 secs fish external
usr time 276.97 secs 0.00 millis 276.97 secs
sys time 2.59 secs 3.69 millis 2.59 secs
All this news I'm reading is making me want to buy put options on the fabulous seven.
Cory Doctorow's article is shorter than Ed Zitron's article (estimated reading time "71 minutes").
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/
For all the struggling Mastodon admins suffering from harassment campaigns on their servers, I just recalled that @tek has a project called Spamhammer. It's a fix for the dreadful situation where admins can't simply block whole phrases, regular expressions or whatever. I understand that this is easy to abuse. But the lack of this kind of preventive measure is also easy to abuse. So if you're tired of one kind of abuse, try this:
"What you're looking at is a PostgreSQL check constraint that applies a function I wrote to every status insert into the database, and rejects ones that contain text I don't ever want to store on my instance."
https://dev.honeypot.net/kirk/spamhammer
As you might have guessed, it's for those that don't mind meddling with the database.
#MastoAdmins
I wrote a tiny blog post about release v0.19 of #Oddμ – the software I use to run my site. Sadly, I ended up writing about the #ButlerianJihad, too. Ugh! In any case, I ended up looking at the man page containing the release notes and that felt pretty nice. 
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/oddmu/oddmu-releases.7
Yesterday I found a lot of files and directories in /tmp that seemed to be old trash that I should delete. Today I found that my GoToSocial instance hadn't received any new posts in 11h or so. Checking the logs, I found that it couldn't write files into those pesky tmp directories I had deleted yesterday. I hope this information helps somebody make the right decisions in their system administration future. 
« I think my answer to “Why would anybody start a website (in 2025)?” is the same answer for the content creator in the age of AI problem: I don’t know, but you gotta want to. Money sweetens the deal when making content or websites, but we’ve shaken the money tree pretty hard over the last couple decades and it’s looking bare. Increasingly, you’ve got to find other sources of inspiration to make a website – which by the way are still the coolest fucking things ever. »
https://daverupert.com/2025/09/why-would-anybody-start-a-website/
« A lot of people have also asked me to teach them "how to make music". It has taken me 20 years of trying out, experimenting and failing by myself until I've reached this level. I don't have resources or time to be your teacher. No one can teach you to become productive or creative. Don't think that it's an easy road to become a composer. It will take years or tens of years, so forget about the money and fame, pick up an (virtual) instrument and start practicing. »
https://anttimartikainen.com/#faq
I could not help but see… #ChatControl
https://digitalcourage.social/@echo_pbreyer/115258539623550357
Trying to resist the urge to add fake utm_campaign, utm_source and utm_medium query parameters to all outgoing links from my blog. Campaign: "Education must be free for all!" Source: "The best blog there is." Medium: "Gopher" Stuff like that. Maybe a marketeer or search-engine-optimizer gets a chuckle out of it. Or maybe a boss pivots from AI to blogs!
Some people don’t understand that a boycott now is the mildest of the lukewarm reactions to the genocide. What should instead happen is what all the signatories of the Genocide Convention have promised to do: to prevent and punish actions of genocide in war and in peacetime.
Hearing the In Our Time program about Keynes makes me wonder about the plans we have for after the war. Even if “we” win, what will happen? If our plan seems very fair, perhaps we can skip right there. I’m afraid not, of course. But still. Give back Ukraine’s land. Perhaps there are border regions who want to leave? Enable a framework where this is possible. A framework for Krim independence? Let’s ask the Tartars for their opinion. Confiscate the billions of the Russian oligarchy to pay for the reconstruction – on both sides? They are not the same, but I’m not opposed to improving Russian lives if we take the money from billionaires. And perhaps that can send a signal. Billionaires. We’re making plans for your money.
"A PTnet é um serviço de chat em português, sem fins lucrativos, baseado no protocolo IRC. É constituída por entidades interligadas em rede, preferencialmente com presença na Internet portuguesa. Pretendemos desta forma prestar um serviço de excelência ao público português, embora aberto a todos, sem dependência dos gigantes internacionais.
Somos a maior rede de IRC portuguesa, desde 1997!"
https://www.ptnet.org/
Força, IRC! ✊
I’m in the sofa room, chilling after lunch. My wife returned to work and is in a meeting where they decided to switch on video – which they usually never do. My work laptop is in the next room and I can’t get there without getting caught on camera. Or low crawling into the next room, maybe? What am I supposed to do, take an hour off? 😬
I wrote a crawler-less search engine called Xobaque. If you have a site that can provide a “complete” feed (see RFC 5005), you can use it to index whole sites, not just the current news. I also wrote a wiki called Oddmu that only offered the last ten items in feeds. There was a way to generate a complete feed from the command line and then send that to the Xobaque admin somehow but that only works for me. 😅 So I added feed “pagination” (see RFC 5005, again) to Oddmu. And now I wonder if the bots will come a-slurping. How shit is this timeline when you wonder whether it’s a good idea to make features discoverable? Where the basic assumption must be that most user agents are adversarial? This is the shit timeline and I’m not even talking about politics. 🤮
Melvin Bragg stopped presenting In Our Time!! 😱
“while the pen might be mightier than the sword, the wallet is mightier than the pen” – George Monbiot
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/20/journalist-40-years-forces-profession-power
He ends by listing a dozen UK options that can speak truth to power. For me, in the German speaking part of Switzerland, that’d be @woz and @republik_magazin – any other recommendations?