The IT Blog

Month: August 2026

  • My code vanishes from the web

    As a lot of people, I had most of my code published on GitHub. During my (reduce the amount of US services), I decided that I want to move my code somewhere else. Codeberg came totally handy and was recommended a lot.

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  • (why) I do not like Excel / Spreadsheets

    It seems like I’ve earned a reputation at work for hating Excel.

    We recently had a workshop with different stations and flipboards about how to improve some processes etc. And well – I added a lot of “less spreadsheets” sticky notes. After a while someone approached me and asked what my problem with Excel was – if I maybe just don’t know how to use it.

    But no, my reluctance to spreadsheets comes from the very bad experience together with automation. Let me explain: Very often, Excel (or any spreadsheet) is used as a not-very-well structured database in some process. And whenever you try to add more automation to this process or want to re-use the data, we come to one of two scenarios:

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  • Against Information Hoarding

    I am an information hoarder. I am somehow unhappy if I don’t get new information, new insights, new aspects. That’s not limited to technology but to literally everything.

    And since I do more and more self-hosting, I have two services on my candidates list: Readeck and Linkwarden. Then, with the rise of AI, the whole topic of AI managed second brain “LLM Wiki” came up, allowing to hoard even more information.

    And yet … I still do not use either of them.

    And even though it would be cool to play around with the technology, my main questions before setting up one ofthe tools are:

    • Did I ever miss something?
    • Does it solve an actual problem?

    And currently .. both are no for me.

    I just stumbled across Joan Westenberg’s article “5 Rules for a Second Brain You’ll Actually Use” with the more than accurate subtitle: “Tend a Garden, Don’t Fill a Warehouse”.

    And that just nails it so well for me: I do have my note taking (currently in Joplin) for all kinds of intersting stuff, plus the articles that I share here in the “Recommended Read” category. And .. I do not NEED more.

    I achieved to live a simple enough life so that I have no projects or so that are so complex that I need more organization than that. And I’m happy with it :-)

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  • How to fix: VLC long startup time

    Since a while I noticed that when I double clicked an MP4 file, VLC took really long (like several seconds) to open and show the file. Actually really annoingly long. But as I don’t watch a lot of movies, I never really bothered debugging it.

    BUT recently I came across on itsfoss.com and a tweet on X from VideoLan themselfes that explained the problem and solution:

    The Problem:

    This is because of a « bug » from Microsoft Defender in one update of Windows 11, who magically made VLC plugins cache quarantined by Windows.
    Reinstalling VLC or regeneration of the plugin cache will fix this.

    VLC Team on X

    The solution(s)

    Clearing the cache by one of the following steps:

    • Regenerate the plugin cache: launch with vlc.exe --reset-plugins-cache
    • Clear VLC’s cache under the user profile at %APPDATA%/VLC
    • Reinstall VLC from the official build (download here)

    But this won’t prevent Defender to possibly kick in again.

    Therefore, excluding vlc.exe (exclude the process, not just the file) in Microsoft Defender should be a sustainable solution!

    The exact clickpath might change. But it should be under (german):

    Einstellungen >
    Viren und Bedrohungsschutz >
    Einstellungen für Viren & Bedrohungsschutz - Einstellungen verwalten >
    (ganz unten) Ausschlüße hinzufügen oder entfernen

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  • Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI – acm

    Actually, I just posted this on Mastodon, but I so agree to all those points that I want to reference them here on the blog as recommended reads as well.

    Generative AI is reshaping software engineering—but the narrative has gotten ahead of the evidence. Marketing claims, anecdotal wins, and misread studies have given rise to a set of persistent myths that are quietly driving poor decisions about AI adoption, tooling, and how to measure success.

    This article examines eight of the most common misconceptions.

    https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3807963
    • Developers Spend Most of Their Time Writing Code
    • Writing Code Is the Bottleneck
    • Lines of Code Written by AI Is the Best Measure of Impact
    • AI Helps All Tasks and Engineers Equally
    • AI Will Turn Individual Developers into 10x Developers
    • It’s Up to Each Developer to Make AI Workgg
    • High-Performing AI Tools Will Be Adopted Automatically
    • With GenAI, Enterprises Can Innovate at Startup Speed

    See the full article here: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3807963

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  • Backup your Crontab …

    Yesterday evening I just quickly wanted to change something in my crontab .. I was tired, I was distracted, I just SSH’ed into my machine and typed crontab -r.

    Ahh typo! I obviously wanted to crontab -e which is just ONE key away from -r. But … no error, no “unknown option”? This left me in a “eh what is -r and why is crontab -l empty?” – and I sensed a little disaster …

    A quick check with man crontab confirmed my discovery:

           -r     Removes the current crontab.

    Oh man. I never thought about backing up my crontab! Until yesterday. Now I have a fresh crontab and new line in in it, too:

    crontab -l > crontab.bak && git commit -am "auto commit" && git push

    Luckily there wasn’t TOO much in my crontab, but still, this was an anoying experience. Maybe there are smarter ways to backup scripts in my home directory – but it’s okay for now.

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