danielpietzsch

[danielpietzsch]

This blog is now retired

I’ve decided it’s time to go more independent. And as a result of this I will no longer post new content here on Tumblr. My new home is now https://danielpietzsch.com and you’re very welcome to continue to follow me there.

Here are all the ways you can currently get my updates:

https://danielpietzsch.com (RSS-Feed)

My Photo Journal (RSS-Feed)

Twitter

[danielpietzsch]

Boom! Another journal entry!

[danielpietzsch]

Finally wrapping up 2018.

[danielpietzsch]

I wouldn’t call it “catching up on my photo blog”, but at least here’s another post.

[danielpietzsch]

Damn! What a song (and video, too)!

Really getting into this band! 

[danielpietzsch]

I stopped writing every day

For the last five months I’ve been writing some form of text every single day. And last week I stopped. I didn’t specifically plan for that – at least not at that point. But it just happened. I missed one day. And then didn’t write the next day, either, etc etc.

I had occasionally thought about giving up on this project, because it often felt like a chore. It was too much self-imposed pressure for me to write something every day. So, I think it was just a matter of time. But that I stopped already was accidental. I guess once I missed a day, the pressure fell and I simply thought “fuck it, who cares!?”.

I still want to write more regularly than I did before this project, though. I hope I’ll find the motivation to do so, even without a fixed schedule. Time will tell.

[danielpietzsch]

I got some feedback on my “Super Simple Dark Mode” article and made an update to it to incorporate that. 

[danielpietzsch]

Merging two Git repos

Today I learned, you can indeed merge two Git repositories and keep the history intact. Not quite sure, if I will need this ever again, but it’s good to know I could. Here’s the code snippet of Andresch Serj’s answer on Stack Overflow:

If you want to merge project-a into project-b:

cd path/to/project-b git remote add project-a path/to/project-a git fetch project-a --tags git merge --allow-unrelated-histories project-a/master # or whichever branch you want to merge git remote remove project-a

[danielpietzsch]

Das vorläufige (deutsche) Ergebnis der Europawahl macht mir etwas Hoffnung, ist aber dann doch leider wieder relativ ernüchternd (und teilweise besorgniserregend). 

[danielpietzsch]

Inspired

IndieWebCamp keeps inspiring me. Having had so much interesting conversations with interesting people that care about similar things, motivates me to work on my own homepage, blog and other web projects.

And so I'm currently still excited about IndieWeb stuff and am researching potential tools, hosting options and workflows for my personal sites.

And I'm still fancying going static with my blog, too. Most of my other projects are static already. It's either indeed a plain hand-written static site, or generated via Jekyll, my SSG of choice (so far).

While researching, I found the following (somewhat random) articles and resources interesting and helpful so far.

By Aaron Gustafson:

How this site was built

Enabling Webmentions in Jekyll

Jekyll repositories on GitHub

By Michael Ummels:

Going Static

Secure Hosting with GitLab Pages and Let’s Encrypt

By Christopher Kirk-Nielsen for Smashing Magazine:

Switching From WordPress To Hugo

Chris Ferdinandi’s whole website seems to be a treasure trove in this regard. So far I've read:

Static Websites

Static sites and CMS's

Automating the deployment of your static site with Hugo and GitHub

How to schedule posts with a static website

How to create a vanilla JS search page for a static website

I think as a first step, I might neglect the "hosting" part of my upcoming solutions a little bit. I want the hosting and deployment to be as simple as possible. And so I might sacrifice my other principles about server location and using renewable energy sources in the short term. I'm currently looking into these hosting options:

Github Pages

Gitlab Pages

Netlify

Keeping my shared webspace and use FTP.

The good thing about static sites is, that they are very easy to move and host somewhere else, should I decide to do so.

[danielpietzsch]

Wie ich wähle

Am Sonntag kann man hier in Deutschland seine Stimme zur Europawahl 2019 abgeben. Ich habe bereits diese Woche meinen Stimmzettel per Briefwahl abgeschickt.

Wahlkämpfe an sich ignoriere ich meistens so gut es geht. Klar, man bekommt verstärkt (angebliche) Positionen und Leistungen der Parteien mit, aber ich stempel’ die Plakate etc. unter "Werbung" ab. Es ist mir auch äußerst suspekt, dass sich anscheinend viele Leute davon beeinflussen lassen.

Mich interessiert hauptsächlich die grundlegende Haltung und Position einer Partei und wofür sie sich in der Tat in der Vergangenheit eingesetzt hat. Und da tut sich bei den einzelnen Parteien immer nicht viel. Seit Jahren gibt es für mich eigentlich nur zwei, die für mich wählbar sind.

Und auch wenn ich den Wahlkampf versuche zu ignorieren, checke ich vor einer Wahl trotzdem nochmal verstärkt, ob "meine" Parteien für mich immer noch die beste Wahl sind, und ob die nicht-wählbaren Parteien immer noch solche sind. Das war in den letzten Jahren immer der Fall.

Und so brauchte ich auch dieses Mal nicht lange überlegen.

[danielpietzsch]

Tonight, I decided to host my Focal Length Equivalent tool on Github Pages using a custom subdomain: fl.danielpietzsch.com.

I’ll probably start using Github Pages more for these kind of static, simple, open-source sites. I really like the simplicity of the whole workflow and that you can easily get going with a custom domain and – crucially – a free, auto-renewing SSL certificate to serve it over HTTPS.

So, it’s still a PWA, which means it can be added to the home screen on a mobile device and will also be available offline.

[danielpietzsch]

As someone who’s worried the keyboard on a new Mac can stop working properly, it’s good to know Apple has a service program already in place for that particular problem.

Also, according to John Gruber, if a 2018 model breaks (mine is one of those), it’d supposedly even get an upgrade to the further improved keyboard of the just-announced new MacBook Pros:

Also, for existing models with the third-generation keyboard — last year’s new MacBook Pros and the new MacBook Air — if they require a keyboard replacement, they’ll get the new tweaked keyboard with the purportedly more durable mechanism.

Makes me feel a little more comfortable with this new machine.

[danielpietzsch]

Nifty text highlight styling

Wanted to jot down this nice text highlighting CSS snippet I just discovered on basecamp.com:

With its varying opacity, it's simulating a person's variable pressure when marking text on an actual piece of paper. I like!

Here's the CSS:

border-radius: 1em 0 1em 0; background-image: linear-gradient(-100deg, rgba(250,247,133,0.3), rgba(250,247,133,0.7) 95%, rgba(250,247,133,0.1));

Instead of using <span class="highlight">, though, you should probably rather simply use the <mark> tag, which is more semantically correct.

[danielpietzsch]

Early this morning, we drove back from our short camping trip. It was supposed to only take an hour to get back. But it took us two, because we had a flat tyre. Never had this before. And luckily, nothing bad happened, despite it happening while on the Autobahn.

And fortunately, we were able to stop next to an on-ramp, where right next to you everyone is not as fast as the rest. Still, I wasn’t exactly relaxed changing that wheel.

[danielpietzsch]

The weather is better than expected and so we’re staying a night longer than planned. Good times!

[danielpietzsch]

Remapping ⌘` to ⌘^

I only found out once I switched to an English keyboard layout that macOS has a useful and intuitive shortcut to toggle through windows of the current foreground app: ⌘` (CMD-backtick).

This makes perfect sense on an English layout, because the backtick key is right above the Tab key. And so it’s a very similar shortcut as CMD-Tab, which toggles between windows of all currently open apps.

On a German keyboard layout, it’s the same shortcut by default: CMD-backtick. This makes no sense at all, because the backtick is next to the backspace and requires the Shift-key modifier, too.

Of course I was missing this handy shortcut once I switched back to a German layout again. And so I remapped ⌘` to ⌘^ to keep my muscle memory working for switching windows. Because the ^-key on a German layout has the same position as the ` on an English one.