A long-standing tradition by Bram Moolenaar, the
creator of the Vim editor, was to provide
the community with a printable, year-long desktop calendar. The calendar fits
on A4 paper and only needs to be folded and glued to sit neatly on your desk,
serving as both a practical date reference and a small tribute to Vim and
the ICCF charity founded by Bram.
I’ve used these calendars for more than 20 years, and every year, I looked
forward to set up a fresh desk calendar. Simple, practical and always within
reach. For many Vim users, Bram’s printable calendar became a small yearly
tradition that blended usefulness with a touch of community spirit.
After Bram passed away in 2023, I wanted to continue using these handy
calendars, so I decided to create them myself. This led to an almost
pixel-perfect recreation of the original Vim calendars for the years 2024 and
2025. I originally made them just for personal use, but a few months ago I
decided to share them publicly on GitHub.
With the new year approaching, I’ve now created the 2026 edition as well. It’s
available for download in my GitHub
repository.
If you’re a longtime Vim user like me, or simply appreciate small, useful desk
tools, I hope this calendar brings you the same bit of joy and practicality it
has brought me over the years. Keeping this tradition alive feels like a small
way to honor Bram’s legacy and the community he built. Feel free to download
it, print it, and share it with anyone who might enjoy it too.
Wow, just wow! Another year has flown by, and my website has seen… almost no
activity. An entire year without updates — apart from dusting off and uploading
one of my old music tracks. I don’t think that’s ever happened before, and it’s
definitely making its way onto my New Year’s resolutions list.
Of course, the usual excuse applies: it’s been a busy year (and believe me, it
really has been). Between juggling life, work, and everything in between, I’ll
admit I’ve been a bit too lazy to channel energy into keeping the site fresh.
But here’s the thing: I’m still here, and so is this little corner of the
internet.
As we step into 2025, I want to take a moment to wish each and every one of you
a prosperous, joyful, and healthy new year, no matter where you are. Let’s make
it a year to reconnect, create, and keep things a little less dusty — myself
included.
Here’s to new beginnings, fresh intentions, and perhaps a little more website
activity. Cheers to 2025! 🥂
A happy, healthy and prosperous new year to all of you! I know, I am a little
late to the party, but nevertheless I hope all of you have had a good start
into the new year and are doing well.
Last year felt like it passed quite quickly. I had been constantly busy with
one thing or another and most of my time, especially in the first half of the
year, had been taken by my day job. A company restructuring with many layoffs
and extensive organisational changes gave me a truckload of work.
What followed was an extraordinary warm summer, during which I was mostly
slacking and fooling around with some personal projects.
Starting in late summer, I began a complete overhaul of our company’s IT
documentation, mainly to adjust it to the changes that happend in the first
half of the year. But as it turned out, it also needed a lot of general
updating and in the end it became a project that kept me busy for almost the
rest of the year (rewritten from scratch, the resulting book currently has over
300 pages).
Apart from that, my main interests (and what I have spent most time on) had
been brushing up my knowledge of ARM assembly,
bare metal programming of the Raspberry Pi and
other low-level programming stuff, like operating system design in general.
Now, for 2024 I (maybe just like anybody else) have made myself some
resolutions and set some personal goals. But, as always, let’s wait and see
what becomes of it… 😀
That’s the title of this article on
Computerworld,
giving some interesting insight on Microsoft’s plans to bring desktop computing
to the cloud and strip businesses of the classical PC desktop.
While I wouldn’t go so far to predict an early death of Windows as a desktop
operating system, the article makes clear what we are heading for. At least in
the business world.
In my job as system administrator I can witness first hand how Microsoft is
aggressively moving services to the cloud. They are targeting every aspect of
business computing (because, that’s where the money is) and providing a Windows
desktop as a cloud service is just another piece in their grand picture.
Whether that’s good or bad? You decide for yourself… I could tell some stories.
Funnily, “Desktop as a service”, or DaaS for short, has been around for a very
long time. I remember using Triton Technologies “CoSession” back in the days of
the venerable DOS and Citrix
Metaframe later on in
the good old days of Windows NT.
Yet again it’s Microsoft that tries to sell you old wine in new bottles 😀
One of the most hated “features” that Microsoft has recently forced upon
Outlook M365 users is the new “Apps” sidebar on the left side of Outlook’s main
window.
The much hated Outlook sidebar
This nonsense takes up valuable screen estate on smaller laptop screens and
many users, including myself, prefer the “old” layout where the folder icons
are placed below the list of folder.
Well, luckily, at least for now, there is a way to get the old layout back by
turning the option “Show Apps in Outlook” off.
Open the “File” menu and select “Options”, then goto the “Advanced” section. There
uncheck the option “Show Apps in Outlook” and press “OK”
At the company I work for, we use Microsoft
Teams for video calls,
conferencing and collaborative work. Leaving its doubious technical aspects
aside, the tool mostly works for our colleagues and its usage is pretty
straightforward.
Nevertheless, not all of our employees are tech-savvy and used to this kind of
communication, especially some of the older workers. And so I get frequently
asked for some kind of introductory material which helps them getting started
with Microsoft Teams.
Luckily, Microsoft itself has some helpful resources and training materials for
Microsoft Teams available on their website, which, as it seems, are sometimes
overlooked.
Here’s a list of the most interesting parts for new users (links to German
versions), which I forward to new colleagues and those asking for help:
Happy New Year to everyone! I wish you all a prosperous and healthy new year
2022 and hope you have had a great start 😊.
2021 is gone, the second year of the global Corona virus pandemic which, again,
has imposed a lot of retrenchments on all of us. I sincerely hope that the year
ahead will be better, especially in this regard.
Nevertheless, last year has been a busy one with no time to mope. In my spare
time I was mainly busy doing renovation work in our home (which is still
ongoing) while my day job has become increasingly demanding lately (mostly
because of major structural changes in IT and a “mobile workforce” that needs a
lot of support). All in all I had almost no time to spend on my hobbies or
personal projects. Naturally, one of my new years resolutions is to find back to
a more normal schedule.
That being said, I would also like to pick up some of the projects I had
abandoned last year and also start some new ones. With my current unstable
schedule we will see how far I get… but, resolutions, you know…
Again, I wish you all the best for the new year and as always: MUNTER BLEIBEN!
I recently finished reading the book “UNIX - A History and a Memoir” by Brian
Kernighan which was a great
read, especially for someone who is into the UNIX operating system as much as I
am.
On about 180 pages the book tells the story how UNIX came about and how its
groundbreaking concepts changed the path of computer technology and led to a
whole lot of new and innovative software, which still is in use over 50 years
later.
What I particularly liked about the book is not only the intelligible and
entertaining style it is written in, but especially that the events are
portrayed first-hand by Brian, who had been closely working with the Unix
creators Ken Thompson and Dennis
Ritchie at the time when Unix was
created at Computing Science Research Center at Bell
Labs.
It was especially interesting to learn, how the particulars, the exactly fitting
mix of people and work environment, time and events led to something far beyond
what the creators could have imagined.
If you are interested in computing or computing history, or in Unix
specifically, this book is for you.
The Book
At the end of the book Brian had referenced a couple of web links I almost was
too lazy to type in. But I did it anyway and it led to some interesting
resources on the topic. Mainly for my own reference, I’ve listed some of them
below. Be aware that this is by no means the complete list of references Brian
had mentioned. There are a whole lot more, especially to papers and books.
Recently, the battery of my trusty old Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (GT-P5100)
has become weaker and charging cycles took longer. Buy a new tablet? Of
course not! If you check your favorite video platform, you will find
plenty of videos, showing you how easy it is to replace the internal
battery. So let's go ahead...
Happy new year everybody! I hope everyone has had a good start into
the new year. Now that we have once again crossed the magical border
between years, it is time for a short personal recap of 2018...
From my experience, using the traditional way of bookmarking in multiple
browsers ends in a complete mess. I've spent countless hours in getting
my bookmarks in sync between my computers at home, at work and elsewhere
and all the different browsers I use. The more my list of bookmarks
grew, the more tedious the process of synchronization got.
But, as for most issues, there are several ways to solve it.
First, you may use one of the countless online services or social
bookmarking sites such as delicious.com or
diigo to get your bookmarks organized. While
some of them have great features and functions to share bookmarks (if
this is your intention), I never trusted them. It's far to easy to
create a nice profile of you and your interests, just by analyzing your
bookmarks and how often you click them. Now, call me paranoid, but I bet
that's what most of these free services are doing in order to sell data
to market research companies and the like. Anyways, if you don't care
about this, I'd recommend having a look at
delicious.com or Google
Bookmarks.
Another way to get your bookmark stuff organized and synchronized
between browsers is the use of tools, made for this specific task. In an
quite old article 25+ Ways To Synchronize Your
Bookmarks over at
mashable.com you'll find many of them listed
and explained.
And lately the maker of browser have begun to integrate synchronization
support directly into their browsers, for example Firefox
Sync or Google Sync
Services functionality in
Google Chrome, which is great if you're
using the same browser everywhere.
Personally I have chosen another tool to organize my bookmarks. Since I
am running my own website with database support, I am in the fortunate
position to host my own online bookmarking services. In my case I'm
using the not so well known tool
Online-Bookmarks, which is
quite excellent for this task.
Unfortunately development of "Online-Bookmarks" has been put on ice a
while ago. Nevertheless, all the functionality you expect from such a
tool (except for tagging) is available and works flawlessly. And if you,
like me, are used to work with an hierarchical organization of your
bookmarks (i.e. keeping them in folders and subfolders) rather than
tagging them, there's nothing you'll be missing.
So, if you have the necessary prerequisites and want to keep your
bookmarks private, yet not giving up the advantages of an online
bookmark service, you should check it out. And if you like it, drop the
author an email to let him know. Maybe it encourages him to continue
development on this nice project.
And just in case you wonder: I've currently 2228 bookmarks in my
database :-)
Lately I prepared a bunch of spreadsheets in Open Office that contained
lists of calendar data and values. I had a template file that already
contained the basic layout which I just needed to fill in. So I typed,
copied, typed, and so on until I was finished after almost three hours
of work.
After saving the document and re-open it on my notebook (another
installation of Open Office), I found my whole list of dates displayed
with different years – they had gone four years into the past. At first
I thought I made a mistake, corrected the dates, saved the document and
re-opened it on my desktop computer. Yet again I found the dates
shifted. I corrected the dates again, saved and re-opened it and
annoyingly they were shifted again.
After a while I figured out that the reason for this behavior was due to
different settings of the base date in Open Office.
Open Office base date settings
where one installation was set to to the default of "30/12/1899", the
other one to "01/01/1904". Normally I would have expected that the
base date settings are stored in the spreadsheet document, but for some
reason this is not the case.
After settings both installations to the same base date, the problem was
solved. Simple, if you know where to look. In the end it had cost me
quite some time to figure this out.
I'm available to help on your open source project. If you think my
skillset below matches your requirements, feel free to contact
me. I don't have any special preferences regarding the size or
kind of your project, but preferably it should be of interest to a
broader audience or address real world problems. Also, your time
schedule should be somewhat flexible.
I can provide:
Programming: C/C++, Python, Perl, SQL & database design, et al.
I've to admit that I've shamelessly neglected my blog lately. Here's
a short roll-up on what happened lately...
In my last post from June I already wrote about the many fill-ins I had
to make at work lately. Unfortunately this hasn't changed. After a
substitution for another colleague right before my vacation in
September, I was recently informed that I have to step in again for a
total of 9 weeks! In fact I'm already starting week two of this
substitution.
The problem is that all tasks in the jobs I'm currently stepping in are
crucial for the company's operation and require full attention. At the
same time I have to keep the IT running and to provide a basic level of
support to our users. All in all it is totaling up to an enormous
workload, not leaving much room for other activities. And my blog is one
of the things that suffer from this situation.
I'll try to re-arrange my schedule during the next days and maybe I can
spare some time to write a more comprehensive update on my other
activities.
Yet again I got into the situation to fill in for a colleague who had to
undergo a surgery. Yet again it means that I've to handle double the
workload and yet again I feel I'm totally out of time. Although I try
not to spend too much time at the office and to get out of there as
close to the stroke as I can, the situation is so demanding that I'm
pretty tired after work and I hardly can motivate myself to do something
else than just to goof off. I don't know for how long I'll have to
fill in this time, but I guess it will be a couple of weeks (depending
on how fast my colleague recovers).
After looking on my recording of time worked since the beginning of
2010, I have the feeling that all these substitutions become rampant.
But wailing won't help, I guess. So let's get through and hope that it
won't last too long. At least my upcoming vacation in July is a ray of
hope :-)
Today is Corpus Christi, a religious feast, so we didn’t work here in
South Germany. But since the weather was pretty bad (cold and rainy), I
spent my day at the computer, upgrading my Cygwin environment and
reworking content of my personal wiki knowledge base (which is badly in
need to be uncluttered).
It’s Valentine’s Day, but since I’m not into this kind of stuff, I spent
my time today on updating my site to the latest
Habari release. The update process went
smoothly and there weren’t adaptations to make. However, while I had a
closer look after the upgrade, I found a few issues in my site’s theme
and fixed a bunch of glitches in the comment system, the template class
functions and few minor things in the main CSS set. Everything should
run fine now.
Yesterday I made as small excursion to the
Drupal CMS, just out of curiosity. I haven’t
looked at it for a few years now, although I constantly run into it, as
many high traffic sites such as java.net use it
as their publishing platform. To get a grip on it, I ported my current
site template to Drupal. Basically it isn’t very hard to create a
template, although I had to apply a few tricks to make my template work
the way I wanted it. Once Drupal's concept is understood, it’s pretty
straightforward to use it. In order to avoid fiddling with its
internals, you might also make use of the vast amount of plugins and
themes for Drupal. After all, I'm considering to use it for my next
major web project. And before you ask: I have no intention to move away
from Habari for my personal site.
Apart from fiddling with web related stuff this weekend, I also finished
setting up a new home network at my parent’s house. Everything works
fine, Mom and Dad are happy :-)
Finally, after almost 10 months of continuing work with no holiday, I’m
going on vacation for a little more than a week. I will return on Friday
next week. Until then, happy trails!
I have a bunch of PC systems around here but for the past two years or
so I worked almost exclusively on my Dell notebook. I haven’t upgraded
any of my desktop systems since. In fact, the last time I upgraded any
of them must have been four years or even longer ago. But now, with the
dawn of new, power-demanding video games like
COD5 and others, I had to make a
decision: Buy a new, powerful notebook or upgrade a desktop PC. I
decided to do the latter…
I wish you all a very Happy New Year! Immer munter bleiben!
EDIT: A Youtube video that is no longer available had been placed here. It was removed.
Yes, I love those funny cat videos :-)
NB: Just in case anybody wonders: The song played in this video is “Auld Lang
Syne”, a Scottish poem that dates back to 1788. The song is well known in many
English-speaking countries and traditionally sung to celebrate the start of a
new year.
Update 2009-01-04
While routinely checking my site for web standards compliance I learned that
inserting Youtube videos with the standard code they provide breaks the
validation. Stylehack as written an interesting
article
on this issue and how to get around it.
