I did this!

Fight Enshittification

My data belongs to me. And I want to own the products I buy.

In 1999, I registered my first domain and have been an early (and young) adopter of the WWW. It was the times of geocities, sourceforge and phpBB where everybody would build their own (private) website, create new forums for their hobbies or chat with tools like ICQ. Blogs and RSS where new formats and “web 2.0” was not even born yet. Later tools shifted more and more to company controlled service like facebook, google or amazon and the 💩 enshittification began.

I’ve seen a lot of services coming and going. The decline often happened because of decreasing quality but what frustrates me the most is the “lock-in”-model and the lack of interoperability. My enthusiasm for open source might be one of the reasons why I strongly advocate against the walled gardens big tech has introduced. And it induced me to use alternatives wherever I can.

Cycling

Only a few days later, I’ve crossed 100km by bike. The “planned” maximum is flexible and will change throughout the year.

Books in 2025

Reading have been my passion for a really long time. Years ago it shifted from reading books to blogs and eventually more and more websites coming from several RSS feeds. But sometimes I miss focusing on a topic for a longer span. Audiobooks are a really good alternative, but it is not the same as a “real” book. Furthermore, I only make process during periods with longer commutes and with the downside that I lack behind my dose of podcasts.

Learning languages

I am not an avid language learner, but I am about to reach 2,5 years of learning languages with duolingo. My first focus was on Indonesian and since around one year I am getting familiar with Esperanto.

Both are very interesting in different ways:
The basics of 🇮🇩 Bahasa Indonesia are very easy to learn. It mostly uses the order of subject-verb-object, makes intensive use of pre- and suffixes to change word meanings and has no genders, no inflections on verbs nor tenses by changing verb forms. Plural forms are mostly doubling the word and it uses the Latin alphabet.
Esperanto on the other side is clearly planned and when you have some knowledge in European languages, mainly Spanish/French, English and German, you will quickly realize that the vocabulary is more or less a mashup.

Improved Monitoring

TL;DR: I am aggregating my monit data with kuma, have an import script with IaC and better notifications.

I’ve been using monit as my primary monitoring tool for years now. It is low on resources, runs on all my relevant systems (mainly debian/ubuntu servers, raspberries) and is able to monitor both exposed services like webservers and internal metrics, e.g. memory or cpu load. And what I really love is the ability to deploy monit via ansible-playbook including set up a webserver with certs and get and store all my configs in files. This way everything is in a source code repository (git) and can be re-used/restored.

But I was never really happy with the notifications and aggregation.