It looks like I got lucky and Midea Support has already reached out to their field service partner, which have already received my support case. All that is left now is an actual appointment date with the technician.

To prepare myself for “Final Destination: Bloodlines”, I decided to rewatch all existing “Final Destination” movies. Let me say this: I knew that I did not need to rewatch them to “better understand the plot”, alright, they are no “silver screen classics”, but I did not remember them to be THAT bad 😂.

Apart from the first one, in which the setups are pretty elaborate and the effects still look good, even though the movie is 25 years old, the rest of the movies are really not worth a rewatch.

The second one was “okayish”, but after that, the CGI work was sloppy and they started the “one-upping”, more spectacle, less elaborate setups.

I remember watching the first one in the cinema and later as DivX on two CDs. Yes, I feel old now… 😞.

Manuel Schmitt hat Manitu verkauft . Schade, wieder ein sympathisches, vom Inhaber geführtes Unternehmen weniger 🥲.

Es wird sicherlich nicht über Nacht passieren, aber 1Blu ist eine anonyme AG, die früher oder später „Kosten einspart“, „Synergieeffekte nutzt“ oder andere Entscheidungen „zum Wohle der Aktionäre“ trifft – Entscheidungen, die dann selbstverständlich über das Wohl der Mitarbeiter oder Kunden gestellt werden.

Das macht Manitu natürlich nicht schlagartig zu einer schlechten Wahl fürs Hosting oder gar zu einem schlechten Unternehmen – aber man sollte sich darüber im Klaren sein, dass Geld bei Entscheidungen nun über kurz oder lang einen höheren Stellenwert einnehmen wird.

Manitu hat sich über Jahre und Jahrzehnte viel Vertrauen erarbeitet. Hoffentlich wird das jetzt nicht in kurzer Zeit vom neuen Eigentümer verspielt. Das fände ich wirklich sehr schade.

Due to recent events, I decided to start limiting the use of US services for my IT needs. I am hosting with Hetzner forever, either using their Cloud offerings or a dedicated Root server. My email is hosted with Fastmail , which is an Australian company. So it is not hosted in the US, but it still feels not optimal as they have a presence in the US as well. Fastmail’s contenders in Germany are not that great though. Mailbox.org ’s webmail interface is horrible compared to Fastmail, and it seems there are some latency issues as well when using IMAP.

My landing page and my blog are based on Hugo, which is a static site generator. So my hosting needs are not that complicated or elaborate. The content for both sites is stored on GitHub and the sites are automatically rebuild and redeployed on Cloudflare Pages if there is a change in the repository.

I liked Cloudflare’s service because it was easy to maintain and fast – and GitHub had a lot of outages at the time. Things at GitHub have stabilized for some time now, and I do not like the fact that I have to use Cloudflare’s nameservers for my domain. Since I have all my code hosted on GitHub anyway, I decided to ditch Cloudflare Pages and go back to GitHub Pages for now. The ultimate goal is to move all my code to a self-hosted Gitlab instance, but I am not ready for that just yet.

To be continued, I guess…

In addition to my 404 Media subscription, I also just subscribed to The Verge . That should cover all my needs when it comes to tech news and tech journalism.

I would have loved to support a German news outlet, for example Heise or Golem . But their reporting pales in comparison. It saddens me a bit, to see how irrelevant they have become. At least to me, but I am sure there are others who feel the same way – I cannot be the only one.

Woohoo! Party Animals is now finally available on the PS5. This is the perfect game for me to play in bed on the big screen TV. Low effort and extremely fun to play: start the PS5, play a couple of rounds and log off.

Another game in the same category is Fall Guys . The hype is gone by now, but it is still really fun to play. Especially with a group!