Musings
I write about various IT-related things, enabling others to do cool stuff (aka: being a manager), free and open source software, selfcare, IT infrastructure as well as anything that interests and drives me. Most posts are in english, some in german. Currently there is no direct way to comment here - however I’m very open to feedback and am always happy to be discuss matters I post here. Feel welcome to reach out to me. See contact.
2024 - CW 24 - The one in the week when the meaning of AI changed
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. Matthew Green posted on mastodon his thoughts on the Private Cloud Computing announced by Apple. I do think if Apple does it properly, they can turn this whole AI hype into a proper product that is embedded in a way that it actually feels natural while being very sensitive about privacy aspects.
Speaking of Mastodon, recently I switched from my profile at digitalcourage.social to my new profile and was — once again — amazed at how simple the account transfer (including all followers) is done.
I came across LanguageTool (Wikipedia Entry) last week. I was searching for alternatives to Grammarly and LanguageTool popped up in a search. Couple closer looks later it turned out that the people behind LanguageTool are open-source minded and even LibreOffice has a native integration of LanguageTool. My use-case for LanguageTool (and what I used Grammarly previously for) is to go over texts either for clarity, better wording (usually if I’m not writing in my native language) and to do grammar and spelling checks. I am now test-driving LanguageTool and will report back on that.
While I’m on the subject of tools and software: If you’re using the brave browser, reconsider whether you really want to use it. Article is not really new and this is not the first time I come across it.
I’ve been using Obsidian for the past 1 1/2 years. So far, I really like my journey with it. Last week, I explored (again) ways to use reveal.js from within obsidian. Since the ‘Advanced Slides’ plugin has been discontinued, there is a fork, called Obsidian Slides Extended which is actively maintained.
ALASCA announced that Krake, one of their projects, won the Saxon Digital Prize 2024 - their announcement. Congratulations! Furthermore, some of my colleagues and I got the info that some of our proposed talks for the ALASCA summit have been accepted. The schedule should be available soon — but you can mark your calendars for 29th and 30th of October 2024.
I finished The Cuckoo’s Calling the first book in the “Cormoran Strike” series by Robert Galbraith. Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym and actually J.K. Rowling (the one who wrote Harry Potter - and I have to admit, so far I’ve only read the first Harry Potter). The “Cormoran Strike” series is about a private detective (Cormoran Strike) and his assistance Robin. Really enjoyed it (one of those five out of five-star ratings).
Next week I’ll be at the Weizenbaum Conference on Day 2 and at the Berlin Open Source Tag organized by the Chamber of Commerce of Berlin.