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This is the home-page of Karl Voit.

On this page you can see the latest blog updates. For further articles, please use the search bar or navigate through the blue tags. My recommendations are pim, privacy, or security.

I recommend any decent RSS/Atom aggregator to get notified on blog updates.

Most recent articles or updates:

2024-03-09: "VLC for Android" as a Potential Replacement For "MX Player"

For many years, I was a happy user of the Android app MX Player. I solely play back local video files which I sync via Syncthing to my phone. Therefore, I disabled the network permission of MX Player for security reasons using NetGuard.

MX Player is a very fine app and I would have never started to switch away from it if not with recent updates, MX Player seems to wait for some time-outs to happen when started. This has the negative effect that I see the startup screen of MX Player for maybe a minute or so until the app actually is started and I may interact with it.

This is simply a no-go to me.

As a workaround, I could open any video file from my file browser app. This invokes MX Player opening the file instantly. However, this has some disadvantages such as not being able to see that file was played back recently.

This makes me look for alternatives which I did via this Mastodon message.

I got several answers and VLC for Android in particular caught my eye. Before I switched to MPlayer and later mpv, VLC was my default desktop video player for a couple of years. It's open source and therefore, I assume the app is not going to introduce bad patterns anytime soon.

I evaluated VLC for Android for a week and summarized my findings below.

Read the whole article ...

2024-03-05: Tipps zur Passwortsicherheit

Ich war beim Podcast Methodisch inkorrekt! in Episode 239 mit einen Audiokommentar on air, wo ich etwas zu den Themen "Wie man eine Authentifizierungs-App auswählt" und Passwortsicherheit im Allgemeinen sagen durfte. Der bezog sich auf die Diskussion zum Thema "Google" der Podcast-Episode 238 "Mö Mö", wo Reini einen etwas saloppen Kommentar zu der Thematik geäußert hat.

In diesem Artikel möchte ich den Teil mit den Tipps zum Umgang mit Passwörtern und Zweifaktorauthentifizierung (2FA) beschreiben.

  1. Ausschließlich sichere Passwörter verwenden
  2. Niemals ein Passwort bei mehr als einem Dienst verwenden
  3. Vertrauenswürdigen Passwort-Manager verwenden
  4. Wenn wo 2FA angeboten wird, immer 2FA nutzen

Natürlich gibt es hier im Detail noch interessante Dinge zu betrachten. Deshalb gehe ich in den folgenden Kapiteln auf die wesentlichen Fallstricke und Hintergründe etwas näher ein. Falls es phasenweise etwas trocken wird empfehle ich trotzdem, da zumindest einmal durchzusteigen, da die Sicherheit all deiner Daten und auch deines Geldes davon abhängt.

Read the whole article ...

2024-03-04: Please Don't Misuse Content Warnings on Mastodon

If you are user of the social network Mastodon (part of the Fediverse), you may have stumbled over the feature called "content warning" (CW):

Mastodon features a Content Warning system. It’s an optional mask that covers the content of a post with an editable warning message.
It’s used to cover content that is admitted by your Instance policy but may still hurt people, like spoilers, nudity, depiction of violence or threads about sensitive topics.
For example, if you want to start a thread about the ending of a fresh new movie, you can do it using a CW like “Spoiler about the ending of...”
Every Instance has its own rules about CWs and therefore it’s common to see them used in different ways, like on selfies or depictions of food. That is because what on an Instance is considered a sensitive topic on another may be something commonly accepted. It’s possible that an Instance is blocked by others because of its misuse of CWs on certain kinds of topics.
This said, if you want you can always go in the Setting page and set to automatically uncover all the CWs.

While there are tons of valid reasons to use a CW, there is a growing number of posts that do seem to dilute this great idea of CWs.

Read the whole article ...

2024-03-03: Other People Using lazyblorg for Blogging

I wrote lazyblorg in order to get the blogging software I wanted to use myself. Therefore, I optimized it for minimal effort for a posting and being embedded into my Org-Mode setup.

Of course, I published lazyblorg on GitHub so that other people could use it as well. The second reason for publishing lazyblorg for others was that I was forced not to deliver an ugly works-on-my-machine hack.

Read the whole article ...

2024-02-26: Searching and Downloading YouTube Videos Via Shellscripts

There are many reasons why someone would not want to use https://YouTube.com in a web browser to search for and watch videos.

My most important reasons are:

Therefore, I created a way to search for YouTube videos, download YouTube videos and watch them locally from my zsh command line interface.

If you don't want to use other solutions like Individous or FreeTube, you might want to check out my workflow.

You don't have to use a shell if you want to use my method. You can also wrap the shell scripts into easy to start temporary Terminal windows to interact with them. I didn't bother so far. I'm very fine with using the shell.

So here is my method which you can use and adapt to your personal taste in case you're familiar with basic shell scripting and how to invoke them.

Read the whole article ...

2024-02-18: Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit

If you're, for example, contributing to a reddit thread about something which is irrelevant or anything with only a short-term relevance, this article does not apply to you right now.

However, as soon as you're helping somebody solving an interesting issue, summarize your experiences with something or write anything that might be cool to be around in a couple of years as well, you do provide potential high-value content. My message to all those authors is: don't use web-based forums.

In 2022, I talked about this topic at the Grazer Linuxtage and there is a video on the pages of the CCC as well as on YT:

The initial slide of the slide deck for the talk.
My talk about this topic (45min).

In late 2023, I got the opportunity to give a talk at the 37C3 by the CCC in Hamburg. This talk was not recorded but overlaps in most parts with the recorded talk above.

TL;DR: all of the content of closed, centralized services will be lost in the long run. Choose the platform you contribute to wisely now instead of learning through more large data loss events later-on.

The longer version is worth your time:

Read the whole article ...

2024-02-18: My Restaurant Recommendations In and Around Graz

From time to time, I do love to eat in more or less fancy restaurants.

If I'm in the right mood, I blog about my experience.

Here is my list of my personal restaurant recommendations for Graz mostly in no particular order:

Read the whole article ...

2024-02-16: Clippings

On this page, I collect my public/media appearances of any kind.

I do have a separate press information page with my bio in German and English, summary of my academic work and photographs to download. Drop me a line via email in order to get the URL.

Most recent updates:

Some of them are available in German language only.

Read the whole article ...

2024-02-07: Switching Windows and Desktops According to Window Names and Text Search

Update 2024-02-07: remark on Wayland below.

Here is a neat little PIM improvement which has a great impact on my personal way on how to deal with Virtual Desktops and windows on my GNU/Linux systems. After using it for a few months, I do find this method brilliant and therefore, I need to blog about it.

Working with many application windows on different Virtual Desktops comes with a burden. In most setups, you have to manually switch desktop before you can see the corresponding windows and switch to them. However, in my usual work I know exactly to what window I'm going to jump to, independent of my current Virtual Desktop.

Same as with using a (local) search engine to "teleport" to a specific web site, computer file or start an application, I introduced myself to a method to teleport to any open window on my computer.

In combination with the Firefox add-on "window-titler", I may switch to arbitrary windows by simply invoking a custom keyboard combination, enter a search term (if it's unique with few letters, it's really quick), press Enter and my focus is switched to the Virtual Desktop and the window of choice.

Read the whole article ...

2024-01-31: Logseq from an Org-mode Point of View

As my wife is not happy to start using GNU Emacs with Org-mode as I recommended to her, I was looking for an alternative. The general requirements are those of a typical student, collecting all kinds of university- and domain-related knowledge and - I presume it will take the usual direction - contact management, information on things, household stuff, appointments, and so forth.

This article is a brief report on my personal experience from that journey. It's not a tutorial. It's not describing the full set of features of mentioned tools. This is just my remarks from an Org-mode point of view, mentioning things that caught my eye.

Read the whole article ...

2024-01-22: How to Use Tags

I do have some academic background with tagging, the process of assigning labels or tags to entities such as headings in my knowledge system or file names. I designed tagstore as a research platform to study tagging behavior in different configurations and I developed the concept of TagTrees which I also used in my filetags method and tool-collection which is the basis of my personal file management.

However, this article here is something I came up with personal experience while using tags and tagging methods over many years in my own setup. From this experience, I derived some general rules I do think that may be applied to any personal tagging workflows.

Disclaimers: The things mentioned here can not be applied to social or collaborative tagging in general. I refer to file tagging many times but it is just as an example use-case. The rules mentioned here should apply to personal tagging with other types of entities as well.

Read the whole article ...

2024-01-14: ChatGPT Considered Harmful: Our Whole Society Is In Danger

ChatGPT is all over the media these days. It's a true miracle to most people. In this article, I want to express my personal opinion on ChatGPT as a non-expert on AI.

Please do note that ChatGPT is only one single example from a class of AI services that do provide similar services. Because of the current hype of ChatGPT, I'm using that product but you need to be aware that this article is not about ChatGPT only. This article is valid for all software services that are able to produce valid looking all-purpose texts from a simple command.

Read the whole article ...

2024-01-12: UOMF: Linking Headings With org-super-links (Poor-Man's Zettelkasten)

This is an article from a series of blog postings. Please do read my "Using Org Mode Features" (UOMF) series page for explanations on articles of this series.

Reading this article you will learn why the Zettelkasten method is not for everybody. Furthermore, I show you a nice Org mode extension to link headings with back-links.

This article was also part of the basis of my EmacsConf 22 9 minutes demo which can be also be found on various locations:

Read the whole article ...

2024-01-07: Our Photovoltaics (PV): Numbers of 2023

In the previous article on our PV, I've summarized many things related to the planning and construction phase and ended with the figures from the first six months. I assume, you went through this article before you continue below.

Here, I want to deliver the figures of the year 2023 which is more or less equal to the total run-time of our PV so far.

Read the whole article ...

2023-12-25: I Started With Nix, NixOS, Home Manager and Flakes

Update 2023-12-25: Backlink to linuxuser magazine

After over two decades of using Debian-based GNU/Linux distributions (in short: "distros"), I did my first steps with a distro that is also considered as hyped one these days: NixOS.

Although NixOS is already around for twenty years, it only gained more attraction probably in the recent five to ten years or so.

If you're a frequent reader of my articles, you know that I don't follow the latest hype and I certainly would not practice distro hopping just because of the high switching cost.

This article is about my motivation to leave my comfort zone and try something very different, accepting this high switching cost for a higher goal.

Disclaimer: I'm still a Nix beginner and if I may have understood something wrongly, please feel free to leave a comment so that I'm able to fix errors I might have made here.

A bit of a warning upfront: it's complex. Furthermore, NixOS is doing many things very differently compared to other GNU/Linux distributions. It's a deep rabbit hole you may fall into - or not. My article should give you my personal point of view that might motivate or demotivate to use Nix for yourself.

Read the whole article ...

2023-12-22: Nobody's Perfect: My Personal PIM Debt

I do write a lot about PIM topics, I did some PIM research about local file management, I love to give lectures on PIM topics. Therefore, it's quite natural that people start to believe that my personal PIM situation is near perfect.

As I once wrote on Mastodon, this is not the case at all:

A screenshot of a Mastodon message that reads
My Mastodon post about spring-cleaning my Org-mode inbox file.

I got great feedback from people writing that they are relieved that even "somebody like me" is really struggling with processing all the information as properly as desired.

Therefore, I want to update this persistent article from time to time, showing my current status of some digital debt in terms of unprocessed items in various inboxes of mine.

Read the whole article ...

2023-12-11: Ein aufregendes Weihnachtsgeschenk

Mal eine ganz andere Geschichte für mein Blog.

Ich hatte vor vielen Jahren eine Freundin. Oder besser gesagt, ich war ein Werber, denn sie war noch nicht ganz von unserer Beziehung überzeugt und wir noch nicht offiziell zusammen.

Leider war ich recht rasch ziemlich heftig in sie verschossen und so entstand eine sehr emotionale und eventuell auch ein bisschen toxische Beziehung mit vielen schönen Hochs und auch vielen schlimmen Tiefs.

In dieser Situation war ich ständig auf positive Signale hellhörig. Diese Frau musste einfach mein werden.

Nun ging es damals auf Weihnachten zu. Wir feierten getrennt mit unseren Familien und so tauschten wir bereits im Vorfeld verpackte Geschenke aus.

Read the whole article ...

2023-12-10: What App am I Using for What and How?

Here is a list of tasks I do on my computers and the software I am using for accomplishing these tasks. The first column also links corresponding workflow descriptions with further information on how I am doing things which should be our focus, not the tool. At the very bottom, there are links to more workflow descriptions.

For all the Emacs people visiting this page: here, I just list a few Emacs packages. For more details on which packages I'm using for my workflows, please do visit my online Emacs config and check out the first chapters explaining my setup.

It is important to emphasize that you can not derive anything for your situation without knowing my requirements and how they lead to my choice for a tool. For some workflows, I've added a link to further information which might also contain a description of my requirements (first column).

Read the whole article ...

2023-12-02: Adobe Digital Editions: Error #2038

For a year, I had a nice setup to obtain ebooks in EPUB format from my local library. I set up Adobe Digital Editions 1.7 (ADE) on my wine from Xubuntu 16.04.

You have to use ADE since the ebooks are using Digital Rights Management (DRM) which prevents you from using the data as you would like to. DRM is for protecting the property of companies. So you never own any DRM protected data. You only rent it as long as the DRM owner allows you to.

The only way to make it run was for me using winetricks with "install software" and choosing ADE version 1.7.2. Don't even try to install a downloaded ADE exe setup file within wine.

After setting up my Adobe account, I was able to download an EPUB into ADE. ADE then (sometimes) recognized my Kobo ebook reader and transferred the books onto its storage.

This worked somehow until recently:

ADE error #2038 when trying to download an EPUB

Read the whole article ...

2023-11-19: Herzlich Willkommen an alle PIM-Interessierten

Du hast deinen Weg auf meine Homepage gefunden und interessierst dich für Personal Information Management (PIM)? Wunderbar. Hier ein kleiner Überblick zum Einstieg, da ich schon recht umfangreiches Material gesammelt habe.

Da das Thema PIM sehr viele Menschen interessiert, sind die meisten Artikel zu dem Thema in englischer Sprache. Ich hoffe, das ist kein Problem. Ansonsten gibt es ja noch entsprechende Übersetzungsdienste.

Auf How to Use This Blog Efficiently erkläre ich, wie man über neue Artikel benachrichtigt werden kann, wie die Navigation über Schlagworte (tags) funktioniert und was die verschiedenen Seitentypen (temporal, persistent, tag pages) unterscheidet. So findest du dich mit der hier verwendeten Blogging-Software zurecht.

Du wirst am besten mit meiner Tag-Seite zu PIM beginnen, wo du alle Artikel findest, die mit "PIM" verschlagwortet sind. Hier habe ich auch vor der Artikel-Liste einführende Worte zu dem Thema formuliert.

Ich denke, du wirst auch andere Schlagworte interessant finden. Beispielsweise sind auch meine Seiten zum Thema Privatsphäre spannend zu lesen. Unter anderem diskutiere ich hier die meiner Meinung nach dringend zu klärenden Voraussetzungen, bevor du deine persönlichen Daten in die Cloud kopierst. Die negativen Auswirkungen von einer zu laschen Handhabung von persönlichen Daten sind leider viel zu unbekannt.

Gibt es Interesse an PIM-Kursen oder Vorträgen, so findest du meine Kontaktmöglichkeiten auf der About-Seite. Meine bisherigen Vorträge und Medienauftritte sind auf dieser Seite zusammengefasst. Ich komme auch gerne zu einschlägigen Veranstaltungen.

Viel Spaß beim Lesen und Lernen!

2023-11-18: Alfred Dorfer: "und…" im Orpheum Graz

Wir waren mal wieder im Kabarett. Alfred Dorfer ist jedem Österreicher aus Kabarett, TV und Film wohlbekannt. Seit 2017 spielt er sein Programm "und…". Ich ging vollkommen ahnungslos in das Programm - ich wusste nicht, was mich erwarten wird: politisches Kabarett oder ein typisch österreichisches Kabaretttheater à la Haders "Privat" oder auch frühere Dorfer-Programme, die in diese Richtung gingen oder Musikeinlagen oder etwas anderes.

Es war - bis auf die fehlenden Musikeinlagen - ein bunter Mix aus vielen Elementen, würde ich sagen. Hier ist mein Bericht.

Read the whole article ...

2023-11-10: Google and Its Messaging Solutions

Google has quite of a story when it comes to services and apps for messaging:

Somebody could say that this is what you get when people get promoted when they "ship something to the customer" totally neglecting whether or not this "something" has meaning, value or other positive aspects. This is a general cultural issue of the Silicon Valley.

Google was on the right track in my opinion when they worked on Google Wave. It was planned as a federated open protocol with open source code published. This way, each company, organization or community was able to set up their own instance that talked to all other instances. Just like the email infrastructure.

For the first time, I thought that this had the potential to replace business email services in the long run. The technology involved was awesome and highly collaborative work was extremely well supported. In this direction, I've never seen anything better ever since.

Then Google discontinued the development out of the blue and moved the code to the Apache Foundation. It entered a slow but steady death road until it was finally declared dead in 2018.

There are no specific descriptions on the new stuff Google is going to release. My prediction is that this is going to be either dead on arrival or a bit later or it is going to be a niche product for some time.

Considering the market power of Google, the whole story is a declaration of failure.

2022-06-08: The German heise news features a nice article on the latest sundowns of Google message services which is fun to read. The list can now be extended by:

If anybody is telling me about a brand new chat service by Google, I'll just laugh hysterically while going away.

2023-11-10: Yet another bunch of message services from this Mastodon message based on arstechnica:

2023-11-05: Worklab 2023: "The Art of Organizing Yourself and Your Data"

In June 2023, I got invited to give a short talk about local file management at the Worklab 2023 which was organized by mur.at. This time, I used a different idea and talked about a few general concepts and ideas related to this topic. A few things I took from my PIM lecture.

The talk was part of the session "Desire to collect - Tools & Roadmap".

Fortunately, the talk was recorded and got published in October 2023 (44min):

Here are the main topics of my talk with some links:

2023-10-15: Leserbrief an den Falter: Mastodon vs. Bluesky

To: Falter Verlagsgesellschaft <Leserbriefe@falter.at>
Subject: Leserbrief: Falter 41/23 Medien/Lexikon
(Time 2023-10-15T14.09)	  

Im Falter 41/23 S.21 (eine Seite vor einem großartigen Artikel über Kompetenz in Sozialen Median) schreiben Sie:

Gäbe es doch etwas wie Twitter, nur ohne Elon Musk! Seitdem der erratische US-Investor den Nachrichtendienst übernommen hat, driftet Twitter/X hart nach rechts. Jeder hadert damit, aber wohin migrieren? Jetzt ist Bluesky als Alternative aufgetaucht, die Codes, mit denen man sich dort anmelden muss, sind begehrt – und werden sogar um Geld gehandelt. Wird Bluesky, das wie Twitter/X aussieht und sich auch so anfühlt, das nächste große Ding, oder bleibt es nur ein Nischenphänomen wie das umständliche Mastodon? Das lässt sich wohl erst dann sagen, wenn Meta seinen Twitter-Klon Threads in der EU anbietet.

Ich finde es schade, dass ein Medienunternehmen wie Sie das meiner Meinung nach ungerechtfertigte Vorurteil der Umständlichkeit von Mastodon so breit wiederholt. Der einzige fundamentale Unterschied in der Bedienung zwischen Twitter und Mastodon ist, dass man sich bei dem offenen Mastodon ist die verteilte Struktur, die man auch schon von E-Mails kennt. Niemand hat ein vielbeachtetes Verständisproblem, weil man sich für einen E-Mail-Provider entscheiden muss.

Meine Hoffnung wäre, dass die Redaktion keine Vorurteile wiederholt, sondern im besten Fall ihren LeserInnen erklärt, wie etwaige Startschwierigkeiten überwunden werden können.

Große Verlagshäuser starten ihre eigenen Mastodon-Server und stellen ihren RedakteurInnen somit verifizierte Accounts zur Verfügung. Dadurch kommt es auch vermehrt zu direktem Austausch zwischen LeserInnen und dem Printmedium. Sie finden beispielsweise auch unter https://verifiedjournalist.org/ verifizierte KollegInnen im Fediverse.

Falls es doch noch offene Fragen und Unsicherheiten gibt, so komme ich sehr gerne auch von Graz in die Redation vorbei, um den großen Unterschied zwischen kommertiell betriebenen Plattformen wie X oder Bluesky und offenen Plattformen wie die Services im Fediverse näherzubringen.

Disclaimer: ich bin im Vorstand von https://graz.social "Verein zur Förderung ethischer Digitalkultur" und betreibe viel Aufklärungsarbeit bei techniklastigen Themen auf https://Karl-Voit.at

Meine Adresse wie bei Leserbriefen gewünscht:

x x x

DI Dr.techn. Karl Voit

2023-09-25: Tagging Files With Windows 10

This quite lengthy article explains and discusses the built-in file tagging implementation of Microsoft Windows 10. I do have a strong background with PIM and tagging and this article is written from the human perspective when manually tagging user-generated files. Please do read my general recommendations on using tags in an efficient way.

To my knowledge, Microsoft is currently not actively promoting this feature. Therefore, complaining on bad design decisions does not apply here as long as Microsoft does not understand this kind of tagging as something which was designed to be used by the general user. Because from my perspective, it obviously can't be meant to be used in practice. Unfortunately. Let's take a closer look why I came to this conclusion.

TL;DR: Microsoft Windows does provide NTFS features to tag arbitrary files. Some applications do also merge format-specific tags with these NTFS tags. Although there are quite nice retrieval functions for tags, it is very complicated to use this for general file management. Applied tags are easily lost so that in practice, users will refrain from using native Windows file tagging like this.

Table of contents:

  1. What Does Tagging Mean Here?
  2. A Well-Hidden Feature
  3. How to See and Assign Tags
  4. How to Make Use of Tags
  5. Playing Around With Tags
  6. Enabled File Types for Tagging
  7. How to Enable Tags for More File Types
  8. Relations Between Applications and Meta-Data
  9. History, Implementation Details, and Similar Implementations
  10. Windows 10 Tags Considered as Fragile
  11. Summary and Remarks

Read the whole article ...