Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

💬 Micro

This section is for short notes, thoughts or IndieWeb interactions.


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Due to OpenAI’s move to prepaid billing, I (finally) had to pay for using the OpenAI API. But this also allows me to finally use the gpt-4-turbo-preview model as I have reached tier 1. Now the AI-generated summaries on this blog will be created using this new model. 😄

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Four years ago on this day, the government decided to close all schools and universities because of Covid-19. It was hard to get toilet paper or pasta because people started hoarding. Crazy what happened in those four years.

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I received my blood results last week and have since been taking high dose vitamin D pills (also B12 and folic acid once a week) to improve my extremely low levels (~9 ng/ml).

I feel as if it’s already having an effect: I have more energy throughout the day and feel much better mentally. But it could also be a placebo effect. 🤔

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Today I learned that there is furniture made of cardboard! What a crazy idea…

Sure, some IKEA furniture these days is also made of cardboard, but they try to hide it. ROOM IN A BOX or KarTent, on the other hand, don’t try to hide it and use it to market themselves as sustainable.

Since we needed a guest bed, I ordered a cardboard folding bed from KarTent and am very interested to see how good it will be.

I will keep you updated…

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I was just looking at SSD prices and wow, have they gone up! Last year in May I ordered a Crucial P5 Plus with 1 TB for 79,99 €. In the late summer of last year, the price was as low as 59,90 €. But now the lowest price I can find is 92,81 €, the second lowest is 134,28 €. 😱 Seems like I should wait a bit before buying a new drive to back up all the tape videos

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Using non-Apple hardware usually has one big advantage: Much better upgradeability.

Even though my laptop isn’t as modifiable as the Framework Laptop (it was a lot cheaper, though), I just upgraded its battery from the 36 watt-hour version to double that, 73 watt-hours. Pretty good for a 14" laptop, I think. Based on past battery performance, this new battery should easily last 10 hours of my typical usage.

Past upgrades: 16 GB to 40 GB memory, 512 GB to 1 TB storage.

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I can’t really explain why this is happening, but I noticed that my home server is now idling at 7 watts instead of 13 watts as before. I checked powertop, and it seems that the CPU is staying at C7 (pc7) for about 85% of the time, which seems to be the most power efficient state.

Maybe it’s a result of moving my Baïkal instance to my VPS or some other updates? Maybe Home Assistant or Tailscale? The operating system is still Ubuntu 22.04. What else could explain almost 50 percent power reduction without any hardware or major software changes?

Update: I found a likely source: When the powered-off TV is connected with an HDMI cable to the DisplayPort adapter plugged-in into the home server, it idles at about 13 watts. When I remove the HDMI cable from the DP adapter, it goes back to 7 watts. So it might have to do something with the integrated GPU. I guess, I will leave the TV disconnected unless I really need it.

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Reviving Memories: A nostalgic bike ride past my University

It was a bit cold and quite windy today, but otherwise the weather was beautiful with a clear and sunny sky.

I took advantage of this opportunity and used my pedelec again after a long time to do what I originally bought it for.

I bought it in 2018 (German blog post from back then) so that I didn’t always have to drive to university by car. I sometimes took the bus or train, but the public transport to the neighboring town 15 km away (Wolfenbüttel) wasn’t that great and the journey took a long time, especially at off-peak times (for example in the evening after the last lecture). A normal bike wasn’t a good alternative for me either, as I didn’t want to sit in the lecture hall sweating.

Anyway, today, after a very long time, I cycled past the university where I studied from 2017 to 2021 and completed my bachelor’s degree in computer science. From 2020, mostly just from home, pandemic and all…

It was kind of cool to stop by there again, I got a bit nostalgic. But I’m also kind of glad to have the degree behind me, as I mostly saw it more as a necessary prerequisite for my favorite job.

The main building of the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences

The computer sciences building

Some beautiful landscape on the way

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Everything in the park is covered under the white magic! ❄️

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I’ve made the sad observation that numerous people started to blog during the pandemic, but stopped in 2021 or 2022. Today, I cleaned up my feed subscriptions in Miniflux and removed many feeds that saw no activity for a long time. At least, I can’t remember of a site I subscribed to that completely disappeared.

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Jan-Lukas Else