The IT Blog

Month: September 2026

  • Read: The Boring Internet

    The internet we know isn’t gone — it is being hidden under platform noise. And it seems like big platforms want to make us forget that this internet still exists. But while platforms rise and fall, the real internet is built on simple, open protocols like email, chat, and feeds — and they remain.

    Terry Godier’s essay “The Boring Internet” is a reminder: the web’s heart beats in the quiet, reliable tools. No algorithms, no ads, no need for growth, no monetization, no corporations, but freedom to create, explore and connect.

    Check out the Essay: “The Boring Internet“

    And follow him on Mastodon as well: @tg@indieweb.social

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  • It’s All About Adoption (Or: We Just Don’t Want to Change)

    One thing I’ve seen a lot is how we love to debate whether Tool A is better than Tool B — especially when we already have Tool B in place. Or we ask if Tool A, which might be 5% better, is worth the switch. Yet, the problem we often like to ignore? We forget the most important but inconvenient part: the users and whether they’ll actually use it.

    Even if a new tool is slightly better or cheaper, I always point to the adoption rate. Sure, replacing a tool with one that’s 5% better sounds great. But have you checked how many people are actually using the current tool? If only 10% of your team is on board, a 5% improvement for that 10% won’t improve your situation lot. On the other hand, increasing adoption from 10% to 50% means 5x the people are leveraging more efficiency — just by getting more people to use what’s already there.

    Of course, if you can improve the tool and the adoption rate, that’s ideal! But in reality, you usually have to choose — time and budget don’t stretch forever. And even if you switch tools, don’t expect miracles if you haven’t thought about adoption as well.

    But even if you do get users on board, there’s another problem we rarely talk about: the learning curve. Introducing a new tool —especially something like AI — comes with a cost.

    (more…)
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  • GPT-Live … And the Engineering Behind It

    Finally I took the time to read OpenAI’s post about their GPT-Live Realtime system.

    If you’re interested in how to build such low-latency systems, I definitely recommend to check it out. But what I also had in mind while reading the article was the “no one needs programmers anymore in the age of AI” … Oh really? Well I don’t know how many people were involved in the whole project – and I’m pretty sure they used AI in the coding parts. But the whole process to get there, knowing how / where to measure latencies, how to circumvent them, enhancing the WebRTC protocol and designing a new, faster standard, checking geo-location impact, shadow testing, etc … Oh boy, do I see people talking and engineering tasks there.

    (more…)
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  • How to configure LogRetention with journald

    Whenever you have a regular process, you definitely want to have some proper logging. But the very next thought after mentioning “logging” should be “LogRetention”. Especially when the process is executed automatically. No matter how often — as soon as the execution isn’t a one off, log rotation & log retention are a topic.

    LogRotate

    Especially on linux, it’s just so easy: use logrotate for example. Just one simple config file /settings and you’re set up with log rotation, compression and retention.

    journald & journalctl

    On my miniPC, I tried to avoid writing a lot of own log files but whent with journald and piped all logs into it. And never thought about retention. – Until today.

    I just set up another process and during testing, I noticed that I had more than 2.5gb of log files (journalctl --disk-usage) … dating back until very long. A quick check of the /etc/systemd/journald.conf confirmed that I missed some settings.

    journald has quite an elaborate set of options, just check the man page. Without big evaluation, I’ guess I’m fine with:

    Compress=yes
SystemMaxUse=100M
SystemMaxFileSize=5M
MaxRetentionSec=1month

    Also, don’t forget to reload …

    sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

    And don’t spend a second thinking about overflowing logs any more…

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