Miscellaneous – The IT Blog

The truth about (Gen)AI

(✅ clickbait title)
Recently I attended a GenAI event organized by <big company>. All professional, interesting, insightful. Really good. (Really! I mean it! No sarcasm.)

Until it hit me like a blow during a discussion:

I DO KNOW the whole plot already!

The discussions, the argumentation, the problems, the hopes, the promises of the consulting companies. Startups that make good (ok or bad) products and raise the hopes of the rest of the industry.

We’ve seen it all before with big data and data science – EVERYTHING!

<Technology> is a game changer.
<Technology> brings x millions.
If you don't do <Technology>, you won't survive in the market.
<Technology> brings billions of €€€€.
You need a <Technology> competence center, and a <Technology> strategy!

And the problems are the same – not similar, but the same!
When I look at the LinkedIn stream, I really have Groundhog Day.

We really are chasing the Gartner hype cycle. 🙈

Am I against (Gen)AI? Quite clearly: No
But the hype, the exaggerated expectations … do we REALLY need to do this, AGAIN?
Yes, apparently that’s just how we humans / companies tick.

Well .. then: let’s go into the valley of tears as quickly as possible, burn as little money as possible there pointlessly and off to meaningful use.

It’s sad, but there doesn’t seem a way around.

How to: Migrate from Outlook.com to GMail

Microsoft / Outlook.com have silently removed connected accounts from outlook.com on July 1st, 2024.

I only got aware of it as some people told me that my eMails were marked as “unverified sender” on their side. And indeed, eMails were suddenly sent via the outlook email server. Before I sent the mails through the SMTP server of my hosting provider.

Your Company Blog needs RSS! Really

In the last couple of weeks it happened repeatedly that I wanted to follow a company’s blog – just to see that they have a blog but no RSS feed!

It’s surprising and a bit disheartening to see companies investing time in writing / maintaining a blog without providing an RSS feed – even though any proper content management system would provide the functionality.

How to get rid of Cookie-AdTracking – easily

TL;DR: Delete cookies when closing the browser, allow-list only the sites you want to stay logged in. It’s really that easy.

I recently checked my browser settings and was “surprised” to find more than 3.000 cookies. Most of them from sites I didn’t recognize, many from obvious ad-tracking companies. These companies, with whom I have no business, were all able to track my online activity. Seriously? 3.000 companies being able to track me? Okay maybe some of them were not valid anymore – but still – that’s just ways too much.

Good bye posting on LinkedIn?

“Why am I posting on LinkedIn?”

That question recently just came to my mind.

My inital idea was to change from LinkIn posting to posting on another, work/IT related Mastodon-account – just for the sake of getting off a commercial platform. But then I started asking myself the “whys” …

How to filter / hide / ignore News in an RSS feed

Recently I realized that there are certain topics in my news / RSS feed that I ALWAYS scroll over. I’m just not interested in them. Like news about certain brands, manufacturer or products. I wondered, if there is no easy way to simply NOT see them in my feed. I mean I filter by only looking at keywords in the title. Really super simple.

How to fix: Jabra Elite 75T volume too low / decreasing

Problem: Recently I faced the issue with my Jabra Elite InEars that while I was using them, the volume started to continually decrease until I had to max out the volume on the phone. Yet the sound was still barely loud enough to hear it. After not using them for a while, sound was okay again (still quiet but better) until volume started to decrease again while using.

The internet is FULL of advice about Bluetooth settings, resetting the phone, entering developer mode etc. Yet it was ways easier.

Exclude OpenAI GPTBot from future crawling a website

In order to tell OpenAI to stop crawling a website and thus not use the content for training GPT, OpenAI now supports to disallow GPTBot from accessing your site.

The Information can be found on the GPTBot – OpenAI API website:

Completely disallow GPTBot:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Allow/disallow certain parts of a website:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /directory-1/
Disallow: /directory-2/

For WordPress sites, I can recommend the Virtual Robots.txt – plugin.

How to fix: Jabra Elite 75T different volume of in-Ear headphones

I often just use one of the in-ears of my Jabra 75T. Recently I figured out that when I use both in-ears headphones, the right one was significantly louder than the left one. After a quick hearing test, I was convinced that it is not a problem with my hearing but with one of the headphones.

After some back and forth, the easiest solution was:
Simply hard reset the headphones in 2 simple steps.
If resetting does NOT solve the issue permanently: Try cleaning a specific part!

AI Text Generation and Blogging: How AI-Assisted Writing Can Revolutionize Your Blogging Experience

Blogging has become a popular platform for individuals and businesses to share their ideas, opinions, and experiences with the world. However, blogging just occasionally can be a challenging task. It requires getting into the writing flow, writing cohesively throughout an article, crafting a proper introduction, and ensuring the use of correct grammar and vocabulary. For non-native English speakers, it can be even more challenging to write in a language that is not their mother tongue. The lack of proper vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure can hinder their writing ability and prevent them from expressing their thoughts effectively.