Niels K.

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:41:27 +0200

I have for a couple of days now an E-Ink-tablet with a 13.3”-display. It is huge but reading PDFs on it feels a lot better than on an iPad for some reason. And I think it is not just the display that is bigger (which fits nearly an A4-page in original size)

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 06:33:02 +0200

Leo liefert jetzt als Werbung bei nicht zahlenden Kunden ein Video aus (in der App), bevor man das übersetzte Wort bekommt. Textwerbung u.ä. ok, aber Full screen-Video ist unschön. Und warum wusste ich nicht, dass das Jahresabo nur 7,49€ kostet? Selbst mit seltener Nutzung ist das dann noch ok.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 06:08:58 +0200

Oh no, MUD jeans the sustainable jeans seller from the Netherlands declared bankruptcy. I bought all my jeans in the last couple of years from them. The service was always superb. 😞

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 07:47:14 +0200

Back in Germany. 😕

Next vacation in #japan is already in planning. We want to go during the Christmas holidays in a couple of years to Niigata. That’s somewhere we want to go because we heard lots of it during our classes in Japanese studies.

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:03:53 +0200

The Mikado game centers were pretty cool. I played Bubble Bobble with my son on the actual arcade machine. And there was a Fatal Fury Special-tournament going on. #retrogaming #japan

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:58:05 +0200

“S-Bahn-“-Wagenstandsinformation in Yoyogi (Tokyo) #japan

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:32:52 +0200

Wenn ich aus Japan zurückkomme, ist auf meinem eigentlichen Heimweg Schienenersatzverkehr. Da begrüßen einen die Berliner Öffis gleich richtig, damit man gleich sieht, wie es nicht funktioniert >_< #berlin #japan #sev

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:45:09 +0200

When you vacation in #Japan, you should have a look who owns your hotel chain. We stayed at APA hotels for a couple of days and didn’t know that you get far right books included in your room…that part we didn’t research… 😞

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:41:58 +0200

This vacation I used the Shinkansen three times (Nozomi and Hikari). I really liked it. It is on time, fast and you got lots of leg space (compared to the ICE in Germany or economy class in an airplane). #japan

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 02:08:05 +0200

Another thing done from the bucket list: stay a night in a capsule hotel.

I can’t recommend it at all. It was hot in the capsule, you hear people snoring, until late in the night people got in and out of the room with the capsules. It is like a dorm with a bit more privacy. #japan

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:16:41 +0200

It is satisfying to know that my Japanese is still good enough to manage my daily life as a tourist here. And people seem generally happy that we are speaking Japanese with them 😃

By the way - best vacation of my life so far. #japan #travel

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:38:01 +0200

We bought fast passes for the Universal Studios in Japan and thought that admission tickets are included because it cost so much money. And then we discovered that you need this in addition… wow.🤯

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:03:15 +0200

I feel him… #catsofmastodon

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:43:38 +0200

Charging up some classics… #retrogaming #handheld

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:13:43 +0200

Because of the trip to Japan that is coming up we need to do stuff on lots of Japanese web pages. I am surprised how good I can still read. I am not necessarily understand it, but my kanji reading ability is far better than I expected. #japanese

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 12:17:35 +0200

That was kinda warm today…but it was fun to run again in a group. We were more than usual :) #running

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 03:45:26 +0200

Ghibli Museum in Tokyo has the worst ticket buying experience ever. We used 4 devices to get into queue. The numbers are random. One got a number below 1000 and with that we could acquire tickets. We needed like 20 tries to get to the payment page, then multiple tries to pay. But we did it!

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:24:13 +0200

Season 2 of Silo is a bit sluggish…

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:37:37 +0200

That vacation in Japan that is coming up will cross off a lot of things from my bucket list 🤩

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:46:16 +0200

Ich habe jetzt die Domain rpg-nielsk.de (die ML meiner Rollenspielgruppe, die jetzt seit fast 30 Jahre besteht, wurde irgendwann mal rp-nielsk getauft…aber das “g” fand ich in der Domain besser).

Was mach ich jetzt damit? #ttrpg

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:41:16 +0200

I am reading “Apple: The first 50 years”. I knew that they innovated a lot, but not that much. I hope they move a bit in another direction though with their new CEO.

Even though Steve Jobs was against open systems.

NFS-problems I didn’t expect at all

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:19:36 +0200

Stories from the engine room: I have a big configuration file which is part of a mail-setup and it is read on each mail delivery (MTA is exim and it is the file that contains all the domains the servers are responsible for). It lives in NFS and several servers use it.

Two days ago I migrated that part of the NFS to a new NFS-setup that works differently than the old one. And because it is already in production I cannot change a lot in terms of NFS-server configuration. The rest works now fine for months.

When I mounted the two small exports via the new storage I had problems with certain scripts because they use flock. Those scripts just hang. The big storage that runs for months now is using nolockd, so that part never came up. Since I couldn’t really configure the stuff for locks correctly because it would need a restart of the nfs-server, I switched to NFSv4.2 (the old one uses v3; the big storage part as well) because file locking works there differently. The scripts worked and everything was great.

Yesterday suddenly the problem came up that the mail platform misbehaved. Huge numbers of newsletters and spam came in and everything went down to a crawl. I tried around and after implementing greylisting especially for mails from googleusercontent, things recovered.

Today the problem came back and even harder. When I hit ctrl+t (FreeBSD - sends SIGINFO) on a hanging mail delivery I saw that it hang with [nfs]. But the NFS-servers were fine, no saturation, no massive IOPs, they were basically bored. So I attached truss to a hanging process and it hang when it ran the big configuration file from the beginning. I changed it now that configuration file is locally on each server and gets copied over via a cronjob if it changes. And suddenly all the problems went away.

I have been rarely so happy to solve a problem. That thing was a beast and it had such a massive production impact. I have no idea how I should have figured that out before.

Especially since I was focused only on the big storage parts and not the small ones which are barely noticeable. That was probably the last hurdle to bring the project to the finish line.

I already had to migrate an LDAP as part of that project which didn’t perform in the new setup and the problem were too restrictive file limits in the new Linux-setup in contrast to the old FreeBSD-setup.

Now I just have to migrate a couple of Terabyte of mailboxes (around three quarters are already migrated) and then I can clear servers which take up roughly 24 rack units (spread over several racks) and some ancient cabling. This project took ages…

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:35:54 +0200

Ich kann mit dem Großteil deutscher Comdey irgendwie nichts anfangen. Mir wurde am Wochenende die Show von Carolin Kebekus (Shesus) wärmstens empfohlen. Und ich muss Augen, dass ich die zu sehr großen Teilen einfach unlustig finde. 😕

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:00:36 +0200

Ich hab hier ein Zimmer in dem ist es schön kühl - laut Thermometer sind es trotzdem 27 Grad…

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:17:53 +0200

Ich habe es geschafft. Normalerweise brauche ich für die Strecke 30 Minuten. Heute waren es 2 Stunden 12 Minuten. Danke Deutsche Bahn und S-Bahn Berlin. I❤️U

Die letzte S-Bahn hatte keine Klimaanlage und man wurde ein wenig gekocht.