Thoughts about tech, politics, and more
Yourls URL Shortener for Turpial
Maybe you know Yourls, a pretty cool URL shortener which you can set up on your own server very easily. Link shorteners are nice to have because
- you can share long links with short urls and
- you can view and organise all links you ever shared (incl. statistics and so on).
There are many alternatives like bit.ly, ur1.ca and so on, but Yourls belongs to YOU and you don’t have to pay attention to ToS changes or the provider’s financial status. AND you can use whichever domain you own, for example in my case it’s s.mehl.mx/blabla.
Next station: Tanzania
As some of your already may know, I’m going to Tanzania for six months starting in March this year. In the city Moshi I’ll work as a volunteer computer teacher in a local institute for computer education.
In the upcoming weeks and months you can hopefully see some updates and pictures on this blog. Until then I’d like to answer some frequently asked questions:
Where the heck is Tanzania or Moshi?
Tanzania is on Africa’s east coast, Kenya on its north coast border, Mozambique on its south. Some important localities in Tanzania are Lake Victoria, the Kilimanjaro or Zanzibar island.
Sharing is caring – my Git instance
Some days ago I noticed another time that I have far too little knowledge about Git.
„Time to change that!“, I thought and set up my own Git instance and also installed gitweb for better usability.
Upside 1: I can keep track of the many (mainly bash) scripts I wrote in the past and all the changes I will adopt in the future.
Upside 2: You can hopefully benefit from using and reading my code. All code is licensed under GNU GPL v3 so please feel free to use, study, share and improve my work!
Freie Kommunikation ist die Essenz des Menschseins
Im Folgenden werde ich – durch meinen Gemütszustand etwas angefeuert – darlegen, wieso digitale Kommunikationsüberwachung Gift für unsere Gesellschaft ist, weil sie nichts anderes als Millionen Abhörwanzen und Kameras in unseren privatesten Räumen ist.
Seit einigen Monaten hat sich ein Grundkonflikt in den politischen Debatten verstärkt: Welche Kommunikation sollte überwacht werden dürfen und welche nicht? Ausschließlich inländische Kommunikation? Geschäftliche E-Mails? Telefongespräche über 20 Sekunden Dauer?
Und parallel dazu bekomme ich seit mehreren Monaten regelmäßig Wutanfälle, nämlich wenn ich Kommentare von „Experten“ und Laien lese, die solche künstliche Trennungen von Kommunikation und deren unterschiedliche Bewertung immer noch ernsthaft in Erwägung ziehen.
My internship at FSFE
I recently saw that the Free Software Foundation Europe is offering a new and very interesting internship position. That’s a great opportunity for every student interested in Free Software and political activism — and for me to write about my internship I completed from October 2013 until end of March 2014. Here’s a report I wrote some time ago:
Starting from October 2013 I was able to work 6 months as an intern for the Free Software Foundation Europe in Berlin. This was an internship required by my bachelor degree course at the University of Konstanz (Germany) where I study Politics and Public Administration. Some years before my internship I already was an FSFE Fellow and then decided to apply there.
Setting Openstreetmap as default in Thunderbird’s contacts
If you use Thunderbird and its contact functionality, you might already have stumbled over the „show on map“ feature. If you add addresses to your contacts (no matter if directly in Thunderbird or via CalDAV) there appears a button which enabled you to open a map with the contact’s location.
The default search provider is Google Maps. If you don’t like this service and prefer free and open systems like me, you can also add openstreetmap.org as your default map service. You only have to change a value in the advanced configuration.
Birthday Calendar with ownCloud via CalDAV
Not a big issue in this blog post but an important one. Maybe I can save you some valuable time if you ever look for such a function.
As you know I’m a heavy user of ownCloud and you also might know that synchronisation is a big topic for me. And the third thing you should know that forgetting a good friend’s birthday really su… well, it’s no good style. This almost happened to me some days ago because I couldn’t check it on my Notebook with Thunderbird. My setup looks like this: All contacts (with birthday tags) in ownCloud, and these CardDAV address books are synced with my Android phone and Thunderbird/SOGo-Connector on my notebook, as well as the CalDAV calendars with Lightning.
Guter E-Mail-Stil
Heutzutage ist schriftlicher Stil in E-Mails ebenso wichtig wie eine angemessene Sprechweise oder standardisierte Floskeln und Höflichkeiten in Briefen. E-Mails sind trotz Short Messaging wie per SMS, WhatsApp oder Facebook weiterhin die bedeutenste digitale Kommunikationsmöglichkeit.
Das ist auch der Grund, weshalb ein guter E-Mail-Stil so enorm wichtig ist: Wir werden von E-Mails regelrecht bombardiert, auch wenn man den Spam nicht einmal mit einberechnet. Daher sollten wir uns und unseren Kommunikationspartnern die Sache erleichtern, indem wir einen guten, effizienten und dennoch freundlichen Umgang und Stil pflegen.
Wirklich sichere WhatsApp Alternativen
Nachdem diese Woche bekannt wurde, dass Facebook es endlich geschafft hat, WhatsApp-Gründer Jan Koum und Brian Acton mit einer stolzen Summe von rund 16 Milliarden US-Dollar zum Verkauf ihrer Firma zu bewegen, fragen sich viele, was sich nun in Sachen Privatsphäre ändern wird – und wie man dem entgegenwirken kann. In diesme Artikel werde ich erläutern, was man bei der Wahl des richtigen Messengers beachten sollte, warum Threema nicht die Lösung ist und was wirklich sichere Alternativen sind.
I love ZNC because #ilovefs
Today is I love Free Software day 2014. Using the slogan „I love Free Software but I love you more“ this day should not only be used to thank our significant others for their love but also to say „thank you“ to people who work hard to ease one’s everyday tasks with the software they develop.
