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It is Deutsche Bahn time again! 🎉 And yet again, I’m traveling from the south of Germany to Ostwestfalen, its most exciting part. And incidentally, also the part of the country where the most competent and ravishly good looking people are born. 😇 At the time of writing, the train is perfectly on time. So I’ve got that going for me. But not all is well in the land of white and red trains. Namely, when I went to ordering myself a nice lunch, the menu only showed drinks. Nothing to eat. The nice waiter assured me that food will be available again starting from Cologne. Which is 1) where I’m going to be switching trains today. And 2), that’s two hours from now. 😭 May the gods have mercy on my undying soul. And my grumbling stomach. ...

In my $dayjob, I’m a build engineer in the CI team of a large company. So I’m reasonably confident that this is going to be only the first post in a long series on the CI setup for my Smoking project. I like CIs and the automated testing they come with. I think it was one of the better ideas the tech industry has come up with. I’m seeing its benefit every day at work. So I also have CIs for most of my private projects. ...

I’m finally ready to start my smoking-web project after finishing the last of the Golang books I wanted to read to prepare. Today, I finished Let’s Go Further. It’s the second book on Go web dev I’ve read, after Let’s Go by the same author, Alex Edwards. Overall, I’ve now spend about five months to learn Go and web development. During that time, I’ve read three books on Go: Learning Go Let’s Go Let’s Go Further All three were well written. Even though I’ve been programming for about 25 years now, I somehow never did web development of any kind. That’s about to change now, and both Let’s Go and Let’s Go Further were great not just for “Webdev in Go”, but also for web development in general. ...

As part of this weekend’s regular service update, I also came across Mosquitto’s new 2.1.2 release. This is my tale… I’m using Mosquitto as the MQTT broker for my IoT thermostats and smart plugs. If you’re interested, you can find more details on my setup in this and this post. The changelog of the new release contained a few interesting points: The acl_file option is deprecated in favour of the acl-file plugin, which is the same code but moved into a plugin. The acl_file option will be removed in 3.0. The password_file option is deprecated in favour of the password-file plugin, which is the same code but moved into a plugin. The password_file option will be removed in 3.0. I’m using both of these options, so because I was doing the update on a lazy Sunday morning instead of Friday evening after work, I decided to be a good sysadmin and replace the acl_file and password_file options now, instead of waiting for the update where they’re ultimately getting removed. ...

So let’s see whether I can write an engaging video game review. This post is about the game Distant Worlds 2. the game is an indie space 4X game, meaning you eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. My preferred kind of game. It is absolutely huge, more in its sheer scale than in the amount of game mechanics. The best description I can give it is from the old Master of Orion days: Your spreadsheet now has 3D graphics. 😁 ...