Images of my 4-week-trip to iceland in summer 2017.

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tags: #iceland #life #photography

This post was written during my trip through Iceland and published much latern than it was written.

Right now I'm sitting in front of our mobile home in Iceland, at the most western point of europe. We've had a great day here and the camping side (nothing more than a few square meters of grass, but enough to host 20-30 parties with tents or mobile homes) is nice.

But what I do not understand is the stupidity of people. There are marked ways around here, everything else is nature and therefore protected area. Still, people are running through the grass and around in places where they are not supposed to. A few days ago we even saw a group of people multiple times pass a bird-protecting area without even considering taking the official (and nearby) roads.

I mean, are these people not thinking?

Also, just moments ago, a fellow camper entered the area and placed his car right next to ours... leaving out more than 50 square meters where enough space is available, but no, he placed his car less than two meters next to ours.

Next, a car with three Americans arrived. The little girl, maybe of 14 years, ran around in short pants and without shoes. In Iceland. We just had two pants and three Shirts to keep warm. Now they're sitting in the (still running) car to warm their selves. What the fuck?

So we moved to another position within the camping place. Hope that gets these idiots thinking, but I doubt it.

To end this rant: Pleace think before running around in protected areas and nature, especially if you're on vacation in another country. And also leave fellow hikers alone. In some places in Iceland there is little space for hikers with tents and such, but most times there is enough space to have 10 or more meters between you and your neighbors. And if you are too stupid to prepare yourselves for vacation with proper clothing, please stay at home.

tags: #traveling #iceland #life

Dear Iceland,

this is not only a love letter, but also a letter which should give you moments of thought.

I love you. Your nature is most beautiful, most astonishing, most cruel and also soft nature I have ever seen and I will likely ever see in my life. Your rivers, mountains, waterfalls and highlands are incredible. Your harsh winds keep one cold and shivering even if the sun burns. The sky looks more blue than anywhere in the world and the waters look more clean than air itself.

I'm by no means a poet, so I really hope anyone who reads this understands what I want to say: I'm in love with Iceland.

Although the land can be harsh and cruel, the winds can freeze you and I bet the snow in the winter can kill you easily, I have to say that Iceland is now my favourite country.

Sadly, there are bad things about Iceland, too. But these are human made and therefore they could be fixed.

First of all, please Iceland, fix your Roads! It is unbelievable how bad they are. We always laughed when the road signs said “80” or “60” (Km/H) because one could hardly drive 40 on those roads because of all the bumps and holes in it. We had holes that where about 10cm deep into the road.

Secondly, please fix your camping sides. With two toilets for two hundred people, that's not gonna work for any longer. Especially not for 30€ (3000 IK) for two people per night. For this price, one can have a nice camping side in France, Spain, Italy or Germany (and other countries in central Europe) with tens of toilets, ehashing places, a common room and incl. electricity. So if you want the hikers to stay at camping sides, you either have to lower the prices or provide more luxery – and I'd suggest lowering the prices because not-so-wealthy people will still camp in the wild if the prices are too high. The mini-campers will continue to shit into your landscape if camping prices are too high.

And then, of course, the many people. We talked to a ranger during our trip which said the same: There are too many tourists coming to the country. I guess the problem is not that there are too many people, that's just annoying for everyone. The real problem is that there are too many people who do notbcare about nature, but about their pictures and how they can brag about their great vacation and about the big car they drove and rivers they crossed. They don't care about your nature, running through protected area, not caring about the breeding birds they disturb and such. You, Iceland, should put fines on that. And by fines I do not mean “fines” but FINES. Let them pay. Let them help with their money fix your roads. Let each of them play 1000 € or $ if they run trough protected area. And don't tell me it is hard to do so if nobody watches: We saw a ranger who clearly saw what was happening and who did not care about it.

Despite these issues, which clearly can be solved. It just needs someone to step in in your politics and do it.

So, dear Iceland, please think about your issues. It will help to keep you as beautiful as you are. And you're clearly the most beautiful county on this planet. I really want to come back some time and see more of your nature.

Sincerely yours.

tags: #life #traveling #iceland

This was written on 9th August, during my trip through Iceland.

On this day we witnessed an accident of three young guys from Spain. They wanted to cross a river with their car, but got stuck and the car broke down. The complete car was in the river and drowned up to the steering wheel. After we pulled them out with our car (which thankfully has the right tools to pull 9 tons of weight) we noticed that the engine was broken. The three guys, luckily, got out soon enough and were not hurt (but in shock, especially the driver).

I can assure you, their vacation was over at that point. And you know what: This was the first day after they have rented the car.

What drives me to write this article is not their miserable situation or how lucky they were coming out of this alive (five meters further down the river they would be all dead now, probably). Also not because I want to shed some light on us because we are the saviours in this situation (we were just at the right place at the time, lucky for them).

What I really want to talk about is the number of strangers that cared more for the good pictures they got out of this as for helping. Overall it took us about 2.5 hours to get the car out of the river, the guys to calm down, drink some tea and call the car rental company. There were about 50 people passing by in this time, only three groups asked whether help was needed. All others stopped, took a few pictures and continued their journey.

Of course we also documented every step we made with my camera, but we did it while we helped, not while we stood there laughing our asses off (I don't actually think anyone laughed their asses of because it was clearly visible that these guys were in a really dangerous situation down there).

After we got them calmed a bit (one was literally shaking, not only because of the cold water he fell into, but also of fear of having to pay for the whole mess), we brought them to the next camping side from where they could call they police and car rental company.

tags: #life #traveling #iceland

I will fly to iceland tomorrow. I'm really excited about this and I really hope I will have the opportunity to take great pictures while there.

But vacation also means no activity on my open source projects. This post is mainly for your notice that there won't be any updates on imag or other projects in the next weeks, until I'm back.

I guess I have to set a photo gallery up when I'm back, so I can share the pictures I take in iceland.

Have a nice summer, you all!

tags: #blog #life

I switched to xfce. Yes, I really did, after more than 6 years on i3.

Here's why.

Right now, I'm writing this very blog post in gvim in a xterm on xfce4-12. Why did I leave i3? Well... I love i3, I really do. It is the perfect tool for beeing productive with a lot of terminals.

Although, I have noticed that I use tmux more and more lately. Having a terminal multiplexer at hand means you don't have many terminals anymore.

So I thought: Switch away from i3?

I thought about switching to a framebuffer terminal, moving away from X11 entirely. I could have used elinks, tmux, mutt, newsbeuter, rtv, rangern, of course vim and so on... but only on a framebuffer terminal.

But that wouldn't work well with multi-monitor setups. I thought about KDE5, a lot actually. But KDE is too heavy for me.

So what is a good alternative to KDE, leightweight, has nice performance but also looks nice? Yes, XFCE!

And so far, I really love it!

The only problem I have is, of course, syncing of configurations via git. It seems that XFCE writes state information to the configuration files as well, which is unfortunate. What I will do: Not track the configurations except maybe the keyboard bindings. I hope that'll do.

So I have a nice-looking desktop environment now, which has nice keybindings for doing all the things I did with i3 as well – speaking of tiling. I configured the XFCE desktop to do basic tiling like i3, yes. That gives me the same productivity I had with i3 before. One thing I couldn't figure out by now is how to switch the focused monitor with a keybinding. That might not be possible at all, which would be unfortunate, though I guess I can live with that.

A nice side effect of my new setup: People I work with don't think “What a hell of a nerd” anymore. Not that I care about what other people think, but this way they might get the impression that Linux on the Desktop rocks – and I guess this is a nice thing to have, isn't it?

tags: #software #linux #desktop #life

After a full night of work (honestly I haven't slept in 26 hours now, working for my masters thesis), the next version of Cursive was published. I immediately had to drop a mail to the author and thank him for his wonderful work.

And this got me thinking...

Sometimes, being awesome to each other is not being friendly, acknowledging others work or enthusiasm about a thing or being tolerant about decisions others have made which might not fit ones own ideas of how life should be.

Sometimes, being awesome to each other can be a simple thing like just saying “Thank you” when it isn't expected.

I do that for quite a while now – dropping other open source authors a “Thank you” mail. But you can be sure – it happens rarely – it is still something special. I write maybe two or three “Thank You” mails per year.

So if you receive one, you can be sure: I deeply value your project!

tags: #life #social

I just found the website githubreportcard.reflect.io which generates github user statistics for 2016.

I went ahead and tried it out. And hell yeah, 2016 was a productive year!

Of course, I worked a lot on imag, which resulted in a lot of changes. But I also did other things in 2016... and guess what? Rust is not the language I wrote the most code in – at least not by repo count!

So let me show some of my numbers:

“This year I made 3,438 commits across 40 GitHub repos in 12 languages.”

12 Languages? Well... yes! I don't know what these languages are, but here are some of them listed (ordered by number of repositories I contributed to): TeX, Rust, Shell, Ruby, C, Racket, Nix, Unknown, PHP. Yes,... “Unknown” is also there, I'm not sure what this is, actually.

Let me show some more numbers:

My Additions – 151,411 My Deletions – 92,512 My Open Source Changes – 95,290

Hell yeah! 151.411 lines of code? Holy sh!t! That's huge, isn't it? I'm not sure where this all comes from ... a huge portion must be from imag. Thinking of some repositories I also deleted in 2016 because they where old... this number might be even higher!

While I guess that 2017 won't be as productive as 2016 (because masters degree, blabla ... you know it – and because a long journey which is planned in summer), I really hope I can have a decent statistic at the end of this year as well.

Enough of me – what about you? What's your github graph of 2016 like?

tags: #github #life #open-source #software #programming

It is over. 33c3 has happened. Post depression already started.

Thank you all for beeing there and making congress great again! It really was a pleasure to meet you all and have awesome discussions, seeing awesome people and listening to awesome talks!

tags: #ccc #social #network #life

Merry Christmas and a happy 33c3!

Last year on christmas I posted a blog post as well, so I figured I'll do it again this year.

This year, though, I have a little present for you all and myself. This blog got a new design and is also built with another tool. Why is that? Well, because I wanted to change something. So I ditched frog and opted for hugo.

Don't get me wrong, frog is an awesome tool and I really love it! Racket is a great language and I hoped to get my feet wet with it a bit while using frog. I didn't. Sadly.

But hugo is faster. And it got to the point where speed matters. I didn't want to use nanoc, though I know it and I've built some sites with it already (starting with my wiki.template which was initially built with nanoc and the imag-pim.org website which is build with nanoc). I wanted to use something new. And a quick query to staticgen.com told me that jekyll, hugo and gitbook were my options. Yes, there are more engines – I considered middleman as well. But no, I wanted something new. So hugo it is.

By now I'm amazed. It is really fast, all the things just work and the template I chose was almost perfect for my needs.

I did some work to make the URLs backward compatible, so all your links should work as expected. If not, tell me, I will fix it. What changed, though, is the location of the RSS file. So you have to use the new URL: RSS.

So here we go.

Have a nice Christmas eve. See you at 33c3!

tags: #life #social