“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

This week (2021-05-15 – 2021-05-21) I started thinking about hiking. Besides from that, not much happened, to be honest.

Hiking

I started (german) thinking about #hiking a lot more recently because I don't think the pandemic will end soon and even if it does (it won't, srsly!), I cannot go on vacation anyways because my prefered way would be with a camper and I do not (yet) own one, plus, prices are high up in the sky, so I cannot afford one either. So the idea of hiking a lot more came up and I started planning hikes around my hometown and nearby (southern Germany).

I also started thinking about multi-day hikes (3 to 10 days) and am currently thinking whether this would be a plan for the next (approx.) two years, to be able to do the NST (german) in 2023 over the course of 6 months.

I'm not particularly fit at the moment, but a 15-20km hike with a light backpack is nothing I am scared of, so I guess that's a good start for training. Still, having approximately 1.5 years for training shouldn't be a bad idea. Starting slow with lower two-figure-km hikes and going up to 25 or even 30km, adding more and more baggage along the way, including (of course) a tent and sleeping bag, to be able to do multi-day hikes. Also, some of the gear has to be bought, of course.

Maybe this develops into a real plan.

Logging with rsyslog

Another thing I thought a lot about is how to log from several services (distributed over a network) to one central place, in one file per process. A friend suggested #rsyslog and I was investigating the possibilities with that. It certainly can do what I want.

For my particular problem, rsyslog would suffice. Still, I was able to solve it even less complicated, without the need for an additional service.

Per-Process Resource restriction

I also messed around with the idea of restricting resources per process on my notebook. The idea came up because of high RAM usage of #firefox and dolphin, slowing down other things. Putting these two into a resource-restricted environment, only giving them access to 16 GB RAM maximum for example, could solve that minor inconvenience (I have 32GB installed in the device).

IRC

After freenode vanishing from the face of the earth, I think the time of IRC is finally over.

The time of #irc is over. Join #matrix now!

(toot)

I'm not saying that there won't be #IRC channels anymore, but #freenode was the one big network in IRC-land. The takeover was no surprise but a question of “when” instead of “if”.

Still, alternatives exist today and I promote Matrix because I think it is a good thing. Don't tell me it is bloated, don't tell me it is slow, don't tell me the clients suck (go write one that fits your needs, instead of bragging about these things), don't tell me what I know (or what I have experience with that differs from your claims)!

Matrix is here today, has advantages over other communication protocols and works.