Andrej's notes

Last year I purchased an e-bike upgrade kit for my mother in law. We decided to install it on a bicycle she originally bought back in the 80s, which I fixed and refurbished a couple of years ago and used until September 2022 when I bought myself a Dutch Cortina U4.

When I used this bicycle, I installed a lightweight Shutter Precision dynamo hub and compatible lights, XLC at the front, Büchel at the back. Unfortunately, since Swytch is a front wheel with a built-in electric motor, these lights don’t have a dynamo to connect to anymore, and Swytch doesn’t have a dedicated connector for lights. I tried asking the manufacturer for more documentation or schematics, but they refused to do so.

My attempt to travel to the UK by train last year didn’t go quite as well as I expected. As I mentioned in that blog post, the NightJet to Brussels was cancelled, forcing me to fly instead. This disappointed me so much that I actually unpublished the blog post minutes after it was originally put online. The timing was nearly perfect: I type make publish and I get an email from ÖBB saying they don’t know if my train is going to run. Of course it didn’t, as Deutsche Bahn workers went ahead with their strike. The blog post sat in the drafts for more than half a year until yesterday, when I finally updated and published it.

Two weeks ago I decided to make myself a combined birthday and Christmas present and upgrade my coffee gear.

I’ve got my first espresso machine back in 2013, it was a cheap Saeco Philips Poemia, which made reasonably drinkable coffee, but not being able to make good coffee made me increasingly unhappy about it. However, since it worked, I wasn’t motivated enough to change anything — until it stopped working. One day the nut holding the ‘shower screen’ broke, and I couldn’t replace it.

This post was written in August 2021. Just as I was going to publish it, I received an email from ÖBB stating that due to a railway strike in Germany my night train would be cancelled. Since the rest of the trip has already been booked well in advance, I had to take a plane to Charleroi and a bus to Brussels to catch my Eurostar. Ultimately, I ended up publishing it in April 2022, just as I’m about to leave for a fully train-powered trip to the UK once again.

Following dkg ’s example, I decided to finally transition to my new ed25519/cv25519 key.

Unlike Daniel, I’m not yet trying to split identities, but I’m using this chance to drop old identities I no longer use. My new key only has my main email address and the Debian one, and only those versions of my name I still want around.

My old PGP key (at the moment in the Debian keyring) is:

I’ve just made my blog available on the Fediverse, at least partially.

Yesterday while browsing Hacker News, I saw Carl Schwan’s post Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon^(m) about him replacing Disqus with replies posted at Mastodon. Just on Monday I was thinking, why can’t blogs participate in Fediverse? I tried to use WriteFreely as a replacement for Pelican, only to find it very limited, so I thought I might write a gateway to expose the Atom feed using ActivityPub. Turns out, someone already did that: Bridgy, a service connecting websites to Twitter, Mastodon and other social media, also has a Fediverse counterpart, Fed.brid.gy — just what I was looking for!

Recently, I needed to package a Rust crate libslirp for a Apertis, a Debian derivative. libslirp is used by the newly release UML backend of debos, our Debian image build tool. Unfortunately, this crate hasn’t yet been properly packaged for Debian proper, so I could not simply pull the packaging from Debian. Even worse, its build dependencies haven’t all been packaged yet. Most importantly, I have only uploaded zbus to Debian today, and at that time none of its dependencies were in Debian either.

I have a Thinkpad and I also have two external keyboards I occasionally use with it: one at home when I decide to work at my desk with a bigger monitor, another one at a shared office I rent. They have quite different physical layouts: the one I use at home is a Thinkpad keyboard which roughly mirrors the layout of Thinkpad X230, the other one is Sun Type 6. I want to be able to use any of them while having my own custom keyboard layout too.

As a response to Antonio Terceiro’s blog post, I’m publishing some FFmpeg commands I’ve been using recently.

Embedding subtitles

Sometimes you have a video with subtitles in multiple languages and you don’t want to clutter the directory with a lot of similarly-named files — or maybe you want to be able to easily transfer the video and subtitles at once. In this case, it may be useful to embed to subtitles directly into the video container file.

Here’s a recap of my train journey based on the Twitter thread I kept posting as I travelled.

To FOSDEM…

The departure from Bratislava was as planned:

Half an hour in Vienna was just enough for me to grab some coffee and breakfast and board the train to Frankfurt without a hurry: