fkr - exploration is key to excellence

I’m lazy. And over the years, I grew very comfortable with certain features and services. One of these is Apple Photos in combination with iCloud photos. We’ve been using it for years. In the life before that, I used Piwigo. But I stopped using my own Piwigo instance in 2021 for good. Recently, ...

I’ve been meaning to dodge audible for ages. I’ve stopped ordering stuff from Amazon years ago, but leaving audible was more of a hurdle. I really like audiobooks. Furthermore, I like reading, but I also enjoy listening to certain books. Some books I have for reading as well, as listening. I’ve b...

At last years Weizenbaum Conference I was invited to participate in a panel on green coding titled “Green Coding – Bridging the Gap from Theory to Practice”. Together with Grischa Beier (“Sustainability in Digitalization” at the University of Potsdam), Lena Hoffmann (Gesellschaft für Informatik) ...

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. An epic intro for an epic year ;) Well, the quote is actually from the fantasy novel series Wheel of Time a...

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. An epic intro for an epic year ;) Well, the quote is actually from the fantasy novel series Wheel of Time a...

Suddenly, AI does stands for Apple Intelligence and with that Apple pulled an excellent stunt. No worries, the keynote, and WWDC is being covered extensively everywhere, I’ll not even attempt to really dive into it. I did come across a few interesting items in the aftermath of the keynote. Matthe...

APELL conference 2024 This week featured the APELL Conference 2024 on Tuesday (June 4th). APELL is Europe’s Open Source Business Association. It was founded in 2020 to bring national Open-Source Software (‘OSS’) organizations into a European network. The OSBA holds the APELL presidency this y...

May, the month with tons of public holidays is about to end and Summer is officially to start. For the SCS project this month was especially important as our SCS Summit happened on the 14th of May. The event was back-to-back with the OpenInfra Day Berlin. The SCS summit (sorry, the long version ...

I belong to the group of people who if they hear the word “crypto” think of AES, HMAC, symmetric ciphers, and how to make sure a VPN can saturate even big links. In the last ten years, I’ve had numerous occurrences where someone said to me “I got interested in crypto” and me going “Wow, wouldn’t ...

This is a follow-up post to the post from a couple of weeks ago on Theranos. In the post, I referred to two resources that I - at the time of writing - did not get around to: The podcast: The Dropout The documentary from HBO: “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley”. I can recommen...

Could there be any better date than April 1st to write about Theranos? I admit, I’m a few years late to the party. Through an article on the conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried over at the New York Times that elaborated on other white-collar crime convictions I came to an article from 2022 by the New...

Over the Easter weekend and the previous week, I got around to some reading. In between reading Bad Blood (which dives into the story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes) and yet another good fable by Patrick Lencioni on Silos, Politics and Turf Wars I also read “A Radical Enterprise” by Matt K. Par...

There are numerous ways to route alerts from Prometheus’s alertmanager to matrix. I’ve been using Go-NEB for the past years but this has been discontinued. Since it has been discontinued, I had on my mind to move my setup to matrix Hookshot which is the recommended successor and also an officia...

A year ago (which ironically is the last time I wrote something here) in a January post I elaborated on timetracking. I’ve now been using timeular for a little over a year. This makes this the perfect time to review not only timeular as a tool but also my use of it and whether I achieved with th...

Obviously - at least where I live - winter is not coming so far. I like seasons and temperatures between 4 to 8 degree celsius and rain are OK for november, but in January it should be around freezing with no rain. Nevertheless if that is all I can complain about, life is treating me well. SCS R...

Everyone[TM] is posting their end-of-year review-of-the-year posts. While 2022 definitly was an interesting year, I don’t want to bore the hell out of you with an in-depth stare in my rearview mirror. Especially since likely one drives of the road if one just stares in the rearview mirror. That h...

While writing together some thoughts on 2022 I wanted to elaborate on one of my side projects in 2022. Initially this started as putting together a simple monitoring stack for a NGO I’m involved in. Instead of simply installing the components I chose to make everything easily deployable via ansib...

Slowly the FOSDEM 2023 schedule is getting populated. FOSDEM 2023 will happen on February 4th and 5th 2023. It took us (the organizers of the Sovereign Cloud DevRoom) a bit longer than the 15th of december to get our things sorted out, but right before Christman we’ve had the first version of sc...

FOSDEM is one of my favourite conferences. I’ve been going to FOSDEM for ages. I still love to remember the years when we hung out at the OpenBSD booth with a large crowd of OpenBSD devs ;) During COVID I missed the in-person FOSDEM, so I’m really happy that FOSDEM will happen as a in-person in...

One of my machines is a Hetzner root server where I run FreeBSD current (updated once a month) that servers as a virtualization host for couple VMs (that runn FreeBSD current themselves, updated usually once a week). The host boots of ZFS. Initially I deployed that machine in 2017 and for many y...

While it was quite here, I’ve been writing and publishing elsewhere. I need to somehow find a way to manage that content. For starters, I should at least drop it here. Sad news first: I was supposed to travel to EclipseCon 2022 tomorrow and spend couple days there and give two talks: Digital...

Vor kurzem bekam ich - sehr zu meiner Überraschung nicht von meinem örtlichen Buchhändler - eine Buchsendung. Dierk hatte mir immer wieder mal von seinem Buchprojekt mit einigen anderen Autor*innen erzählt - umso erfreuter war ich, als ich die Sendung aufmachte und vor mir das fertige Buch: We...

In January I blogged about an upcoming change for the professional part of my life. Since then I was, apart from items posted to talks, fairly silent. As one can imagine the 50/50 job (50% at gridscale and 50% at SCS) that I did until end of june kept me fairly busy. Not just timewise, but for t...

As we started writing an epic and some stories on confidential computing in Team IaaS at SCS I went through my notes that I took and collected when I looked at SGX a while back. This is a list of various items I’ve collected in relation to Intel’s SGX technology. Beware: some of the stuff is a bi...

Der Satz “Sprache prägt Bewusstsein” ist mir vor einigen Jahren in einem Podcast begegnet und bezieht sich auf die Sapir-Whorf-Hypothese. Da ich kein Sprachwissenschaftler bin, ist mein Anspruch im Folgenden nicht mich tief wissenschaftlich mit dem Thema zu beschäftigen, sondern viel banaler mit ...

This year will bring a bit of change to my professional life. Since October 2018 I had the incredible chance to work with an awesome set of people not only on the most intuitive IaaS- and PaaS-solution out there but while doing that enable other companies to become cloud providers as well. When I...

For a while I had a topic in my backlog that I titled “Why I don’t like complaining about tools” - in which I wanted to elaborate, well actually rant, on why I dislike how often people complain about tools instead of fixing the real cause. I pondered about it for a while and when I was describing...

Just like I refrained from doing a “looking a back on the year”-post, I won’t do a look ahead on 2022. However the last couple weeks I spent starting the yearly fairly slow (also due to an inflammation of my left middle ear. I tell you: one of the lesser fun things to have). Between the years (...

The book I’ve finished on New Years Eve was Debugging Teams so what’s better than to kick-off this year with a review of it. It helped that I was asked on twitter to post my thoughts on it as well ;) I’ve mostly read the paper variant of it (since Lenz sent me his copy). Partially I read it digi...

I’ve started this format couple months ago with the following description: A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool product...

A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across. Feedback is very much welcome - see contact. Last week’s maj...

A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across. Feedback is very much welcome - see contact. Before diving i...

Dirk posted on his blog a goodbye to irc, which triggered me, since irc and I have a long history. Internet Relay Chat is actually what initially got me into all the things that I’ve been doing the past twentysomething years. In ‘96 I spent my senior year at a high school in California and throu...

A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across. Feedback is very much welcome - see contact. Finished  Shows...

This is post covers a topic that I wanted to write on for quite a while. Few weeks ago Dirk asked me on how I employ the timeblocking technique and that got me into the mood of actually tackling this subject. Especially since that week was one of those weeks that - due to my son being sick at hom...

A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across. Feedback is very much welcome - see contact. I’m currently r...

A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across. I’m still playing with the format of these weekly summary art...

For a while, I’ve been looking for ways to get even more out of the books I read. For the most parts, I’m referring to non-fiction books in this case. What I already do is that I highlight and annotate. With some books I capture thoughts in a mindmap. Couple months ago I came across readwise. Th...

A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across. One book I read this week that I really want to recommend is ...

A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across. A few years old, but I came across that when reading more ...

The first post in the series “Let’s look at the series of Ted Lasso through the eyes of a manager” ;) Quick links for the ones who don’t know Ted Lasso: Wikipedia Apple TV+ IMDB S01E01 - Pilot Link to this episode on IMDB and to directly watch it: Apple TV+ I’m not going to bisect it i...

A weekly collection of items that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across. My colleague Andrej has a blog that is definitly worth taking a look at...

This is a follow-up post to this Infinitybook Pro Gen6 post. Susped to RAM and Hibernation on OpenBSD were two things that didn’t work, when I initially started working on the Infinitybook Pro Gen6. One thing that I had on my last was to see whether there is a BIOS update in order to check wheth...

Yesterday ‘aired’ the final episode of season 2 of Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso is one of the Apple TV+ productions. I’ve been actually sucked into the Apple TV+ cosmos - I find that most of their stuff is really really good. However, especially Ted Lasso is great. For the ones not knowing Ted Lasso: Th...

(Update: there is an updated hardware compatibility table in this post - as suspend/resume and hibernation as well as SD card reader work now with OpenBSD) I’ve spent the last week with the InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 6 as my primary laptop, so it’s time to give a first review. The one I’m using is ...

Tuxedo Computers is known to be an awesome vendor in regard to supporting open source developers, enthusiasts and does offer a good variety of devices. For years they’ve been sponsoring events with devices, see for example this tweet. That they’re also a seriously good choice when it comes to s...

Apple has released the 11.3 macOS, well actually Darwin, sources. The sources are up on: https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-113.html For very few projects, like xnu, the sources are also imported into git repositories up on github: https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu With macOS 11 I sta...

My workflow for various items involves working with a git repository on my iPad. As a git client I use working copy. The git repositories are self hosted on one of my FreeBSD servers using gitea behind an apache2 server with a reverse-proxy setup. Recently I ran into the issue that pulling the re...

A while ago I got hooked by the concepts and ideas published in the book Team Topologies. Together with Luca and Dierk I wrote an article giving an overview of the concept of Team Topologies: Team topologies in adaptive organisations The article was originally published on german. Aside from t...

Within the last year a gazillion of blog posts popped up around the net on how companies deal with the remote situation that has arisen from the pandemic. So while I will elaborate on a remote scenario it is not pandemic special (even though with the context of the last year, it might seem so). I...

Reading recommendations from 2020 Just like last year, I’d like to shortly dig into my readings from last year and want to throw out a few recommendations. From the books I read in 2020 two were really outstanding. Outstanding in the sense that they will keep me company for a while - to the deg...

Earlier this year, I wrote a post where I collected resources on the subject of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Here is an updated list of podcast episodes. DevOps - auf die Ohren und ins Hirn This is a german podcast, but the episode on SRE is in english. SRE at Google The New Stack ...

Since the first Apple silicon-based (M1) machines are shipping there is more and more stuff popping up around the net regarding go on these machines. Folks like Filippo quickly jumped on the bandwagon and started hacking away on getting stuff running. Filippo has a nice document where he keeps tr...

Podcast Empfehlungen 2020 Im Herbst 2018 hatte ich bereits einmal einen Beitrag mit Bezug “hörenswerte Podcasts”. Da ich, nach wie vor, sehr viel Podcasts höre, hier mal wieder ein paar Podcasts die ich als empfehlenswert betrachte. Ich hab mich diesmal auf die beschränkt, die ich regelmäßig - ...

Being a parent opens up a new angle on viewing things. While I’ve been in a managing position at work for the majority of my worklife, this role is fairly new to me in the context of my own family. Not surprisingly there are similar patterns and I want to share a few thoughts on these. For today,...

Ich hatte das Vergnügen, das ich letzte Woche an einer Online-Simulation teilgenommen hab. Der Trainer und Coach Dierk Söllner hat, gemeinsam mit einigen Trainer-Kollegen, das Business-Spiel “The Phoenix Project Business Online” (TPP-B) von GamingWorks in die deutsche Sprache übersetzt und dies w...

SRE resources I’ve started to assemble some resources on the topic of Site Reliability Engineering in order to pass this to colleagues and friends who want to dive into the topic and are in need of good starters. Aside from specific SRE resources it does make sense to have a common understandin...

A few years ago I managed to pick up my reading habit again. As a teenager I read constantly. Somehow I lost that during the early twen years. Probably due to me reading a lot on the screen already. For the past years I’ve tried different reading practices and ways to approach books and it basica...

Vacation time is time to hack on stuff. I updated gridscale-check to make use of the version 2 of gsclient-go. Alongside with that came a few minor additions and fixes to gridscale-check. 0.3.0 of gridscale-check. Binaries can be downloaded from the releases page. For some intro on gridscale-ch...

I’ve always been a morning person. And I’ve always been a person who enjoys staying up late, tinkering with stuff and hacking on things. Until our son was born last year, I’ve always had the pleasure of being free in the way I spend my time. Belonging to the group of people that need some time to...

Reading recommendations from 2019 I’ve always liked to read - however in 2019 I adjusted my reading habits and got much more out of my reading than previously. Since I travel a lot - by train as well as by car - I took this into account and started consuming books not only by reading but by list...

This is a follow up to the blogpost from a year ago. I’ve went back and tested the InfinityBook 14” Pro V4 with OpenBSD-current (as of 2019-09-13). Last year, hibernate as well as Suspend/Resume did not work properly, this is now fixed and works like a charm. A complete dmesg can be found here. ...

Vacation time is time to clean things up and as such I can now release 0.2.0 of gridscale-check. Binaries can be downloaded from the releases page. Since gridscale has released the stable version of gsclient-go - our go SDK it was time to move gridscale-check from using libretto to gsclient-go. ...

Last year I’ve added preliminary support to libretto. Back then the libretto project already seemed a bit abandonded. Now it is gone. Since gridscale has released a go sdk it does not make sense to keep the fork of libretto around - especially not, since I’ve updated gridscale-check to work with ...

Since I recently changed my lastname to include our family name, moving from Kronlage to Kronlage-Dammers, it was time for a new gpg key. rsa4096/824CE0F0 2019-09-07 [SC] [expires: 2023-09-07] Key fingerprint = 2082 651E 5104 F989 4D18 BB2E 0B26 6738 824C E0F0 The new key is available from ke...

TL;DR The InfinityBook 14” v2 is a fanless 14” notebook. It is an excellent choice for running OpenBSD - but order it with the supported wireless card (see below.). I’ve set it up in a dual-boot configuration so that I can switch between Linux and OpenBSD - mainly to spot differences in the d...

I’ll be publishing a few articles around the german hardware vendor TUXEDO Computers shortly. Before I proceed with those here a short disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with TUXEDO Computers in any ways nor do I have any financial benefits from talking and blogging about them. However TUXEDO Compu...

It’s been a quite year - at least to the observer from the intertubes. :) Let’s quickly recap last year. After a four months of a work-break (first time in 20 years - really something I can recommend, but I will likely come back to that subject in a different post), I started at gridscale in Octo...

The past week was a conference week for me. It started with the 2018 edition of OpenRheinRuhr, continued with the 13th Open Source Monitoring Conference (for me it was the fourth one I attended, yet the first one as a speaker) and the third one was the Open Source Day of the OSB Alliance. OpenRh...

(Disclaimer: At the time of publishing I worked at gridscale.) OpenBSD 6.4 with nested virtualization at gridscale Since OpenBSD 6.4 was released the other day I wanted to give it a shot on our platform. Especially since we offer nested virtualization support (as a beta) I wanted to see how wel...

Im Rahmen der Kielux 2018 hab ich einen “Vortrag” eingereicht der von vornerein als Panels ausgelegt war. Idee war, das Teilnehmer*innen jeweils zwei oder drei Ihrer liebsten Podcasts vorstellen. Dazu hatte ich auch im Vorfeld etwas Werbung gemacht und auf diesem Weg bereits netterweise, zb. vo...

Der Open Source Business Award (OSBAR) wird jedes Jahr von der OSB Alliance verliehen. An sich möchte ich aber schreiben: Wird jedes Jahr von uns verliehen. Ich bin ein recht aktives Mitglied der TF-OSBAR und freue mich, das wir jedes Jahr aufs Neue von der OSB Alliance aus die Möglichkeit bekomm...

Disclaimer: I came across the Tuxedo Computers InfinityBook last year at the Open! Conference where Tuxedo had a small booth. Previously they came to my attention since they’re a member of the OSB Alliance on whose board I’m a member. Furthermore Tuxedo Computers are a sponsor of the OSBAR whic...

Taken the list of features from part 1 of this series, let’s go to select how we can achieve what: local users a good candidate seems to be: pstore, this is because we will use postgresql in the main application anyways. The same author has released several libs that can be i...

A few weeks ago a good friend of mine and me had a discussion about the usefulness of frameworks and libraries mixed with the desire “to know how things work” and such build them yourself. For a certain application the userhandling was still one of the missing pieces and I suggested “why not use...

I wanted to give Ubuntu 18.04 a spin on my FreeBSD box and threw it into bhyve. There is a good tutorial for Ubuntu 16.04. Once I installed with that the vm got stuck in grub. The bhyve config file for an ubuntu 18.04 machine needs to have the following line for grub: grub_run_partition="2" F...

With the recent addition of the relations to the VM layer in the gridscale support for libretto, it’s now a matter of a few lines of code to check for certain criteria. See this blogpost on some notes on relations. Before we dive into the examples: gridscale-check lives at g.hazardous.org. Che...

Since most of the currently existing libretto drivers mainly do the provisioning I did the same thing for the first addition of gridscale support and concentrated on the provisioning of an instance. I now went back and started(!) to add support for retrieving for complete set of items. Gridscal...

Echtzeit jetzt? Im Folgenden gehe ich davon aus, das die grundsätzliche Idee ein interaktives Werkzeug zur internen Kommunikation keiner Diskussion bedarf. Nachdem Slack vor einigen Jahren sehr populär wurde und alle - die bis dato einen grossen Bogen um Jabber und irc gemacht haben - auf einmal...

Since I was fiddling with libretto and gridscale anyways and I had the urge to monitor wether or not there are always five snapshots of a certain storage with the youngest being two hours old at maximum, I came up with a small check command for icinga/nagios: gridscale-check Checking the number ...

A while ago I started on adding support for the german IaaS-provider gridscale to the golang library libretto. libretto is used to orchestrate various IaaS-solutions such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, on-premise solutions such as OpenStack and others. For a complete list take a look at ...

Heute war die Veranstaltung, die ich gerne als Neujahrsempfang der Open Source Business Szene in Deutschland bezeichne, in Bremen: Der Univention Summit 2018. Das Motto - ich find es wirklich gut: Reclaim your identities. Dieser fand heute zum 10. Mal statt - ein Jubiläums-Summit. Dazu kann man...

imapsync is a well-known tool for migrating e-mail boxes from one server to another. I’ve been using imapsync for many years and over at bytemine it is our tool of choice for this job. Aside from general praise of imapsync, I want to show couple of nice options for archiving stuff. I use the pas...

I’ve been asked repeatedly to make my old OpenDarwin content available. Here it is: od_public_html I’ve left the OpenDarwin project in 2005.