Reviews and summaries
Going forward I will write review/summary posts about movies I’ve watched, podcast episodes I’ve listened to and books or articles I’ve read1. By formulating my thoughts in reviews, I hope to a) memorize more from the content and b) have a quick lookup option in case I forgot stuff after all. And if my reviews are helpful to others, I’ll be doubly happy.
Reading freely
I like reading. And ever since I bought myself an ereader1 after having to move with a lot of physical books one too many times, I have never regretted that purchase: It is light (and thus I can always have it with me), can hold thousands of books, allows me to read in the dark (as it has background light), has an integrated dictionary, and (given my reading habits) is also more environmentally friendly than buying paper books.
However, not all is well with the current ereading ecosystem.
Setting up my Pinebook Pro
I bought myself a Pinebook Pro in December1. The current Pinebook Pro batches come shipped with a default Manjaro ARM plus KDE as a desktop environment installed on the laptop’s eMMC. Apart from some weird sound issues (for which workarounds are discussed in the same thread), the software works fairly smoothly. However, Manjaro is a somewhat problematic distribution. Additionally, it also is not lightweight enough for me for a lightly powered device like the Pinebook Pro. Thus, I spent some time adapting my new laptop to my needs.
Working on my blog
Over the Christmas break I have (yet again) overhauled this blog. I had reworked it earlier this year already, when I moved the blog from the www to the blog subdomain and changed from the hydeout to the minimal-mistakes Jekyll theme. However, I was not convinced of the result for various reasons.
On blockchain based crypto tokens
Disclaimer: I do not hold any stake in any blockchain based crypto token.
WhatsApp und die Domestizierung von Nutzern
This post is a translation of Rohan Kumar’s English post WhatsApp and the domestication of users from the beginning of 2021 into German.
Reverse tethering with Android
You’ve most likely found yourself in situations where you needed internet on your computer but had no WiFi network close-by. What do you do? Fire up a hotspot from your smartphone and share its internet connection with the laptop. The technical term for sharing a phone’s internet connection with another device — be it over WiFi, Bluetooth or USB — is tethering.
Recently, however, I found myself in the opposite position: I had internet on my laptop but not on my phone! Reverse tethering to the rescue!
Dodging Digital Colonialism
Under construction …
Citizen Science with BOINC
After I replaced my old smartphone, which hasn’t been receiving Lineage OS security updates for a long time anymore, I was looking for good uses for the device. Given it’s age, looks, and lack of software updates, selling it would have been a challenge. Porting postmarketOS onto it would have been interesting, but realistically I lack time (and skill?) for that. Throwing a working device away was definitely not an option; but just having it lying around also felt wasteful.