Hail, traveller! The roads have been busy with everyone fleeing the Pit of the Demon King. So you're going South I see... Yes, everyone's going South to the Domain of the Shadow Lord. Well not 'everyone'. I'm going North, to the Holy Lands of Eternal Blessings, to live at the Bastion of Righteous Faith. Never heard of …

I've used posteo.de for my email for about four years, and I recommend it. I can't say why I recommend it. It's just email. That's pretty much it. It doesn't have special features. It doesn't have problems. It's email and it costs €12 per year. Actually, it has one feature - it has no 'Spam' folder. Instead, it has …

An anti-open-source narrative has become louder lately. It doesn't say 'down with open source', it begins with 'I understand', and 'listen, we need to talk', 'we must be realistic'. Soon after (but never from the outset) 'you know what I mean, if you understand business'. People want to understand business. More than …

Something stinks about 'social contract theory'. They way we live - the philosophers say - has the form of some contract where we relinquish the complete freedom to do just anything our bodies might do, and in return we acquire peace. This thing, where it's all chilled, and we have an understanding, is very much like a …

Obsidian is a note-taking app with a proprietary licence. This makes it prone to the usual abusive behaviours. But I only hear good things about it: Obsidian is ultimately just a markdown editor, so you can extract all of your notes in plain text any time you want, without fear of lock-in. It sounds like the users are …

Formal education in programming is surprisingly useless. Some people with a formal education in 'Computer Science' can tell you about set theory, but can't pick an appropriate database for a project. They can tell you when to represent a number with hex, but can't clone a repo. And worst of all, most of the …

I see a standard story, repeated in FOSS spaces. It starts with an exchange. Open source projects are not actually as anarchic as people think. They work very much like a corporation, with a single person in charge, in a pyramid structure. I hear these repeated gripes that people do not understand open source …

IT documentation has a disease: in-text links. The disease-inducing thinking is quite clear: someone writing the documentation writes 'install the drivers for your graphics card', and then provides a link to how to install graphics cards because they saw others do that sort of thing. But once you accept the general …