Blog on Janik von Rotz

RSS forever

Tue, 05 May 2026 08:15:17 +0200

Every blogger and reader of blogs knows about RSS. It enables subscribing to a website and receive updates to an inbox (RSS reader) since 1999. In terms of internet standards that makes it very old.

RSS has been proclaimed to be dead many times. Popular RSS readers have come and gone. But it seems RSS will surpass us.

Mastodon creator tag for your blog posts

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:26:20 +0200

This blog post was created using Hugo and the new.css theme that I am developing. When sharing posts on Mastodon, you get a nice preview for links. This is possible by adding OpenGraph meta tags to the html document. In Mastodon you also have the creator tag.

100 Days to Offload

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:19:16 +0200

I stumbled upon https://100daystooffload.com/ and I am thinking of taking this challenge.

Blogging always helped me to shape my ideas and filter out unnecessary things. But before starting the challenge I want to collect some ideas.

2025 Book List

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

In 2025 I read 9 books and 4 Mangas. As we move towards a more federated and decentralized internet, I now track my reading habits with Bookwyrm. Please join the fediverse and follow me via Bookwyrm.

My favorite book was Unsong by Scott Alexander.

Here is the full 2025 book list:

2024 Book List

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 15:30:27 +0100

In 2024 I read 4 books and 10 mangas. Even though I read more mangas than books, the list will still be called “book list”. And there is another update. The rating is now on a scale of 5 point instead of 10.

My favorite book was Landkkrank by Nikolaj Schultz. And my favorite manga was Ion Mud by Amaury Bündgen.

Here is the full 2024 book list:

SSH vs VPN

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 11:45:58 +0100

When I deploy an application to a server that is owned by the customer or the customers IT provider, they very often require me to setup a virtual private network (VPN) connection. I tell them about Secure Shell (SSH) protocol and how is better fit for this use case. As they are used to Windows server environment, where SSH is mostly absent, they insist on using VPNs.

In this post I will compare the two technologies and explain why SSH is the better option in this use case.

2023 Book List

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 17:12:26 +0100

In 2023 I read 17 books. Most of them were great, it was difficult to choose my favorites. As most of them were science fiction books, I chose a non-fiction and a fiction book. My favorite fiction book was The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem and the non-fiction book is Corruptible by Brian Klaas.

And here is the full 2023 book list:

2022 Book List

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 11:37:11 +0100

In 2022 I read 18 books. Some of them were good and some bad. Out of these books only two stuck with me: There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm and Undinge by Byung-Chul Han.

There Is No Antimemetics Division deals with the idea of antimemes, which is the opposite of a meme or to put it plainly is non-information. qntm is a prolific writer for the scp wiki. Scp is a database of fictional anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. The idea of antimemes is very strange and difficult to grasp, however, qntm built a very engaing story with this subject.

Undinge is an exploration of paradigm shifts of things becoming “smart” things. Han is a contemporary philosopher and in this book he skilfully describes the problem of objects that suddenly produce data and dictate to us as humans.

And here is the full 2022 book list:

Abrupt Decay

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 10:07:49 +0100

I am an (addicted) Magic: The Gathering player. I love the game, its complexity, the story and of course its art. The card in the header image is Abrupt Decay. Inspired by its caption and artwork I wrote a short poem about decay and regress:

The bird is dead

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 18:43:42 +0200

The bird is dead and so is social media.

As of 27th of October 2022 Elon Musk owns Twitter. With the $44 billion acquisition Twitter went private. As I am not a big fan of Musk (he is a megalomaniac) I think the time has come to quit Twitter. For me quitting Twitter is one more step to quit social media entirely.

I want to report a crime

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 11:38:17 +0100

Waking up in the morning and getting going is always hard for me. It’s much easier with a good coffee and a simple breakfast. But today was different, very different. When I opened the butter churn, my eyes almost fell out of my head and I immediately called the police.

2021 Book List

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 17:59:44 +0100

In 2021 I read 20 books. Some of them were good and some bad. Out of these books only two stuck with me: Ilium by Dan Simmons and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Ilium is a must read for every fantasy and/or science fiction fan. It does not attract by a catchy story or using smart concept. The sheer unlimited creativeness gets one hooked on the book. Currently I am finishing the second book and it has been on of the largest I read in a while.

Flowers for Algernon is my definition of literature. Daniel writes about intelligence in a way that makes it much more understanding and compelling.

And here is the full 2021 book list:

Am Gericht: Waschplan

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 10:32:45 +0100

Ein 30-jähriger Softwareentwickler ignoriert den Waschplan im Wohnhaus und wird in eine Diskussion über Moral und Anstand verwickelt.

ZSH scripts with dynamic command completion

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 09:43:28 +0200

ZSH/Bash completion guides sure are confusing. I personally had difficulties wrapping my head around those arbitrary compdef, _describe, _arguments, compadd commands. Moreover, in my case I wanted to complete a script that is placed in multiple folders and should load completion arguments dynamically. Luckily I found a simple solution.

Some thoughts on stress

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 17:31:15 +0100

How are you? Are you stressed?
Stupid question! Of course I am. I am f!*$&ng stressed all the time!

Not a nice way to start a blog post. But for me it also not a nice topic. This post is a ongoing series about the challenges of being self-employed.

Missing out to be bored

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 15:40:07 +0100

It occurred to me that I cannot recall the last time I have been bored. As I child I remember being bored on many (rainy) days. After playing Lego for hours I became too tired to find the right pieces, so I ended up being bored.

2020 Book List

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 09:55:24 +0100

In 2020 I read 20 books. Out of these books I can remember only a few. I will present you these and their lasting effect.

Denken mit George Orwell: This book inspired me to read more about philosophy. George Orwells critic on totalitarianism goes beyond his time.
Factfulness: To see the world for what it really is. Hans Rosling taught me how to be aware of my own biases and learn about the world through statistic.
Guilt: I have become a huge fan of Ferdinand Schirach. His short stories tell how difficult it is to judge a human being. Schirach can describe life and its tragedy on one page.

Render PDF from Markdown that is using mermaid

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 18:38:44 +0100

Mermaid and Markdown is widely supported match. With mermaid you can describe diagrams and get them rendered next to your Markdown text. It is kind of a markdown flavor, but not supported by all Markdown processors. Use this guide to get result as described in the title.

Success is collaboration

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:08:41 +0200

The public perception of success seems very wrong to me. if media and the public discuss the success it is often referred to an individual that single-handedly built a fortune. “He/She is a successful person, because he/she funded a successful company”. Wealth and power are the keys to success and being an outstanding person. Seeking power and wealth is part of the human nature.

Professionalism versus Friendship

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 16:41:29 +0100

Personal intro:

There are these moments when you face a sheer unsolvable conflict in life. This conflict can be of a personal nature or be a dispute at the workplace. A lack of sleep might be a side effect. A lack of orientation and perspective become an enduring feeling.

An unfinished story

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 08:34:05 +0100

I found this funny text editor, started writing a story and this was the result:

Making hierarchies more efficient

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 23:42:56 +0200

I tend to come up with the important questions always a bit late. “Why do I not like working in hierarchical organizations?” is the question I should have asked a year ago. I gave it some thought and here are my notes.

Dark mode support

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 16:23:26 +0200

Every website has to support dark mode now. Probably because of the new iPhone launch or so. Nonetheless, I added a bunch of CSS to this theme as well.

My favorite podcasts

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 16:38:34 +0200

I love podcast and now spend more time than ever listening. It is a growing business and therefore there are tons of good and bad podcasts. Let’s talk about the good ones. Here are my favourites:

Changing Habits - Meat Consumption

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 11:56:54 +0100

I would like to start a series about changing habits. In this series I want to ask a simple question about an habit I have and try to answer it from an economic point of view.

In this first post (and hopefully not the last) I would like to know if I should stop eating meat?

Demystifying Data Science Hypes

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 19:39:14 +0200

Yesterday Prof. Dr. Diego Kuonen paid a visit at my company and held a lecture about data science and analytics. I enjoyed his presentation very much.

Struggle with arbitrary knowledge

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 15:27:00 +0000

This post is about a thought I wanted to process and thus wrote it down.

At work I often find myself to be exhausted from dealing with intensive thinking patterns. In my definition intensive thinking patterns are caused by issues which occur often, cannot be solved easily and require a sustainable solution. This sounds very broad, let me give you an example.

The digital bookshelf

Mon, 14 May 2018 09:45:00 +0000

Two years ago I’ve started to read books on my mobile device. I have skipped the whole e-reader thing and went straight from hard covers to e-books. Many doubt that you can read a book comfortably on the smart phone, but I can tell with certainty that it works well. It is only a matter of changing your habits. However, there is one thing I miss. A hard cover in a bookshelf also represents an association with your memories of the book. Whenever I see a book cover I remember the story. This does not work with virtual book covers. Memories of books I’ve read on my e-book reader fade as they move beyond the display on my phone. To solve this issue I’ve come up with a simple solution. I want to create a bookshelf poster and pin it to my bedroom wall. With this idea in mind I’ve started creating a list of books I’ve read. Now I would like to present you the tool I’ve built to create beautiful post from this book list.

How I manage knowledge

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 16:40:48 +0000

So far I mostly posted about technical aspects of IT. Mainly solutions for particular problems. In future I would like to change that a bit. Not only because I am currently working on confidential projects, but also because I believe I have developed some ideas worth to be shared. One of those ideas is about knowledge management. While I never dealt with the topic on a research level, I made some experience while applying knowledge base solutions in different companies. Interest in this topic is probably cause because I often faced a frustrating situation. IT employees at company X were not incentivized to write documentations at all. Company X had not institutionalized a proper knowledge management. In result with employees leaving the company, knowledge got lost. Mistakes were repeated. Frustration increased. A vicious cycle.

Study finished!

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 19:23:12 +0000

Yesterday I received my diploma for my Bachelor of Science in Business Information Technology. We celebrated the three years of hard work with a very pleasent ceremony. At the ceremony I was honored to have the finishing speech. It went very well and I received great feedback. Thanks to everybody who encouraged and supported me on this journey.

Results of my very important internet survey

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 12:29:11 +0000

First some backgroud informations about why I’ve published this kind of survey:

There are many pulbic survey tools, but none of them offers the as much features as LimeSurvey. To run surveys on my own, I’ve installed the LimeSurvey application on this server. For more insight of how the user interacts with the surveys I’ve added Piwik tracking for my LimeSurvey installation. To test the setup I’ve added a simple survey and posted the link to the SampleSize subreddit.

Animes I love

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 10:55:17 +0000

As I don’t want to forget about the beautiful animes I’ve seen so far I’ve created a list of my favorite ones. Even if you don’t know anything about the anime genre or don’t bother about it, you’ll should at least see one in my list. The art of anime is very underestimated in the western hemisphere, it’s far more work to produce an anime than a ordinary hollywood movie.

I’m back

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 13:30:00 +0000

My site has been down for one week. So what happened? Well, I still don’t know :)

This website is hosted by Amazon Web Services. One week ago I updated and rebooted my EC2 server. Then it simply didn’t boot anymore. I was very furious, that’s a typical worst case scenario. Luckily the volume wasn’t affected at all, so I was able to get my backups and configuration files without effort.

Our daily struggles according to info commercials

Thu, 17 Apr 2014 14:24:15 +0000

According to info commercials we life in a dangerous place and it’s almost a wonder that most people know how to get up in the morning.

I’ll present you a collection of the worst first world problems:

I'm on fire so let's jump out of the window

Print all over me

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 10:39:25 +0000

printallover.me is a collaborative community and a space for collecting your own fashion designs.

You can print almost any design on different clothes such as t-shirts, sweat pants, pullovers or even backpacks.

Improve your next presentation with Less is More

Thu, 03 Apr 2014 07:40:16 +0000

The less is more approach is a simple improvement strategy for your next presentation. By simplifying the design and removing unnecessary formatting of tables of diagrams, they will be more easy to read and understand.

David F. Sandberg master of horror movies

Fri, 21 Mar 2014 08:31:56 +0000

David Sandberg recently won several short movie awards for his film Who’s There.

I’m not a fan of horror movies, but this is truly amazing.

Let’s get weird: Website of the day

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 11:19:08 +0000

This is definitely the best website on the internet right now: https://www.lingscars.com

Happy new year

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 23:55:18 +0000

Wish you all the best, 2014 is going to be great :)

Hope you’ve enjoyed my blogging in 2013 ;)

Merry Christmas 2013

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 15:32:46 +0000

Happy Birthday to me

Fri, 12 Jul 2013 07:22:13 +0000

I love this picture :D Anyway today is my birthday and that’s why you get a cool vector collection of my favorite quotes:

![Quotes](/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Quotes.png)

Download zipped Quotes.svg

Use software like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator and create some big posters for your bedroom or office wall.