The IT Blog

The 3 pillars of transformation & change

You can talk a lot about agility and transformation etc. – I believe there are 3 basic pillars and EVERYONE can contribute to “change”:

People who dare to speak up
People who listen to it
People who are willing to change

Those three tings alone are already a turbo for many small things that are simply super boring in the masses.

But also the other way round: if one of the three points is missing, save the energy – it won’t be successful.

The bonus is public praise for everyone involved in the project (project participants != only project managers) – but let’s start with the basics 😉

Social Media Platforms vs Entertainment Platforms?

I often like to listen / read when someone tells about his or her experience on different social media platforms. And when it comes to Mastodon, I’ve noticed a recurring theme: Many users describe how other social networks fill their timelines with entertaining or funny content and that they were missing this in the beginning of their “Mastodon-experience”.

And at some point I thought by myself: “Wait wait wait – Are we still talking about social networks?” Is it the purpose of a social network to keep me entertained? I mean – this isn’t the expectation from my real-world-social-network, is it?

Why do I feel triggered when Managers talk about AI?

I still don’t know why it triggers me so much when managers talk about “(Gen)AI” with such fascination. Maybe because I get the feeling that they tell themselves that IT problems will magically disappear?

But … what does ChatGPT say … the AI for sure must know (*cough*)

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!

How to: Migrate from Outlook.com to GMail / Fix connected accounts

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

TL;DR: Connected accounts are gone and cannot be fixed 🙁

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.

Mastodon is how the Web should be: OPEN

TL;DR: just add “.rss” to a mastodon profile or tags or user-tags to get an RSS stream! My photography profile @hikingdude@mastodon.social for example can easily be followed by an RSS Reader by following https://mastodon.social/@hikingdude.rss.

No account required! And that’s not even the end! 🤯

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.

Making the Best of a Bad Presentation Experience

Recently, I attended a conference and sat through a particularly bad presentation. I was tempted to leave, but my colleague insisted we stay until the end. So I somehow had to make the best out of it. This gave me the opportunity to analyze what made the presentation so ineffective and “bad” for me (maybe it was interesting for other people, I just didn’t like it.

So I regarded it as a case study to probably improve my own presentations.

Good Conference Talks aren’t just Success Stories

Recently, my colleagues and I attended the World of Data conference. (The conference is an event in the data and analytics industry, where latest trends, technologies etc are presented in workshops and talks/presentations. It’s pretty nice to be honest!)