About the Increasing Wealth Inequality

I’ve had that interesting discussion again. The discussion almost every time starts with something along the lines of “Eat the rich!” and then people basically start to ask “Who do we eat exactly?”. I personally would start with the closest person to you, that earns your yearly salary from passive income within a day. If you can’t find a person within a 300 mile radius, throw a barbecue for yourself (you know, just to get more intel from others, for your friends, not for eating you, please don’t do that). ...

2025-06-30 · 4 min · 714 words · Jan Kapellen

Fediverse Global Switch Day on 2025-02-01 and a few thoughts on my expierience entering it

I just read an a post on Mastodon with some welcome illustrations to promote the Global Switch Day on the first of Februrary 2025. There are a lot of Fediverse based alternatives for services that are by now heavily affected by enshittification. Here is a list of the replacable commercial platforms with their Fediverse alternative and (if you are interested), where I live on them. Plaform Fediverse Alternative My Home X/twitter/bsky/threads Mastodon @maub@23.social instagram Pixelfed @maub@pixey.org (barely used) reddit Lemmy @maub@slrpnk.net Facebook Diaspora jakap@nerdpol.ch WhatsApp Signal/Element(*) maub.23 / @maub:ccc-ffm.de (*) neither of those is officialy part of the Fediverse, but both offer reasonably secure e2e encrypted communication with no corporate interference to your privacy. ...

2025-01-24 · 3 min · 597 words · Jan Kapellen

Dunn's Law of Information

Here’s the law in full rescued from its original wiki page. “What you don’t know, you don’t know - and you can’t make it up”. This law is attributed to former Raytheon vice president Bruce Dunn. Although Bruce used it in the context of evaluation of evidence for scripture, it is highly applicable in the case of cluster failure where all that is observed is inability to communicate. Because in this case, one knows very little - except that we can’t communicate with the given node. Nevertheless, the temptation is great to pretend to greater knowledge. ...

2024-09-02 · 1 min · 190 words · Jan Kapellen

Playing with Jan.ai

It was about two weeks ago when one of my coworkers asked me, if I was already replaced by AI. I was baffled. Jan.ai looks quite like me, it is friendly, it uses the waving hand emoji (👋) as a logo and it genuinely seems a great way of experimenting with a lot of different open source LLM’s. So i tried. I have used this as a soundtrack: Billy Idol - Dancing With Myself (Youtube) ...

2024-03-09 · 7 min · 1431 words · Jan Kapellen

What it might cost to run a service like Twitch.tv

Today I watched a German reaction video revolving around several unfortunate developments in the gaming industry. Whilst a lot of absolutely valid points were made, one of them was “the server costs of twitch can’t be that relevant to their business”. Now, I’m working in cloud infrastructure and I know, that live video streaming is one of the most expensive digital services you can offer. So I did a bit of research and a few calculations. On my day off. Because I’m an Idiot. ...

2024-02-11 · 6 min · 1083 words · Jan Kapellen

Imposter Syndrome Is Only Toxic to Yourself

I have just watched a video about a narcissist made by somebody exposing that person together with the person the narcissist copied and then had the audacity to hint to her followers on multiple occasions that it is the other way around. The thing I’m taking issue with is not anything the creators in the video are talking about. It’s one of those stupid duty calls moments. It is that @nerdcity at one point in that video - very likely on accident - says the word ‘imposter syndrome’ to describe the behaviour of the narcissistic person. That triggered me in particular, because I identify as a person suffering from the imposter syndrome. ...

2023-11-14 · 3 min · 552 words · Jan Kapellen

I did a few things again.

So, a few years ago I made a small flask-app, just to keep myself entertained. This was a few years after I did another minimal webapp in React. Since I just migrated to a new set of servers I thought, I fluff those apps a bit. Bring some color into them, upgrade to the latest versions, fix a few bugs and so on. Now I’ve got a set of interesting applications, all managed in the same flask-container, delivering some features that you might find useful. ...

2023-08-28 · 4 min · 679 words · Jan Kapellen

File Permissions/Ownership Bug in Docker 20.10.25-0ubuntu1

UPDATE 2023-08-28 The bug is now fixed, you only need to update to the newest version of docker on affected systems! ORIGINAL TEXT Yesterday night I have tried to build a container running a python-application as non-root user and I stumbled onto a bug currently tracked as #2029523. Example Dockerfile: FROM alpine:latest ENV BUSTCACHE=2 RUN adduser -S -D -h /home/test test && ls -al /home/test WORKDIR /home/test COPY --chown=test:nogroup foo.txt foo.txt USER test RUN whoami && ls -al . && touch bar.txt The file foo.txt is a plain text file containing only the single word ‘bar’. ...

2023-08-20 · 3 min · 491 words · Jan Kapellen

Hello World From Hugo

Hi, This is my first post on my new Hugo website. I’ve relaunched this old PicoCMS page in favor of probably the most used static generator at least in my corner of the internet. I included a few old posts from my old blogger.com blog called ‘iamnodev’, since I am planning on retiring that one. I fiddled a bit with this theme in particular to get things going and I am quite pleased with the results. ...

2023-08-18 · 1 min · 211 words · Jan Kapellen

Testing certificates with openssl

Nowadays I have to check ssl-configurations quite often and have to accomodate a blur of different CA’s intermediates and wildcard certs. So for the most basic stuff I reccomend taping Julia Evan’s openssl cheat sheet somewhere in plain view until you can type the commands from it blindly. But in some cases I needed to… verify a certificate from your disk against your systems CA You download or receive a certificate from somewhere, but before installing it, you want to see if it really works: ...

2019-01-29 · 2 min · 270 words · Jan