Martin's blog

I've picked up a new hobby: fact-checking Instagram stories that careless friends send my way.

The German job market in 2026 is, roughly speaking, hell.

After spending the holidays with my family I am once again reminded of the need for a computer with dedicated hardware for seniors.

More than a decade ago on my first trip to the US I bought a Kindle DX, an almost-A4-sized e-book reader that followed me through multiple countries, homes, and commutes.

I wrote my last post in November 2024, which is a lot.

There is a recurring joke about how the longer you work as a programmer, the stronger the urge to quit the industry and go live in a farm.

If you are a professional software developer you probably heard at some point the cautionary tale of the Therac-25, a radiation therapy machine that gave massive overdoses of radiation to at least six patients in the 80s and killed at least three.

Some weeks ago HN user wonger_ posted this list of words to Hacker News.

I got my 3D printing license last year, courtesy of the Stadtbibliothek Köln offering free printing to any card-carrying member who sits through their two-hours course "please don't burn down your fingers, the printer, or the library".

In my last post I mentioned a small webapp that I had built in an hour.

I recently had to solve a problem that I already faced before: I need an app to keep track of my daily expenses, it has to run on my phone (so I can enter expenses on the run before I forget), and pretty much nothing else.

As a software developer I constantly have to fight the urge to say "this is nonsense" whenever something new comes up.

Today I'll take you on a small trip down the rabbit hole of verifying whether something reported on the media is actually true.

Oh boy, where do I even start with this...?

Looks like I wrote this article and forgot to publish it for a whole month.

I am currently considering whether to run a 10k and decided to take a look at the available training plans.

As someone who's constantly fidgeting, I tend to play some Solitaire during online meetings.

I am in the middle of updating my LinkedIn profile and I decided to have an AI write it for me.

I am constantly having issues with HDMI and I never really know what the actual issue is.

I have just finished playing Return to Monkey Island (RtMI).

I heard about Reddit for the first time around August 2010, when Digg redesigned its website for various reasons (none of them related to improving the user experience) and lost most of its users (many of whom were already annoyed).

As I mentioned before I have a Spotify premium account that I regularly pay for with gift cards.

I have found myself often enough trying to classify a text that I decided to be lazy and write a solution that I could always rely on.

Now that everyone is talking about Large Language Models (LLMs) in general and ChatGPT in particular I thought I would share a couple thoughts I've been having about this technology that I haven't seen anywhere else.

In my previous entry about home automation I mentioned that I was ready to start plugging things into other things and connecting everything to a central computer running OpenHab.

My brother got his iPhone stolen at gunpoint.

About 8 years ago I was searching for a new messenger bag - the one I had was good but too small, its only one big pocket was inconvenient, and the zipper was starting to fail.

Does this situation sound familiar to you?

I always wanted a smart home.

Here's a movie idea no one asked for: A group of teenagers have a dream of competing in the Paralympic Games, but their dream is in danger when their beloved coach gets terribly sick.

In what must be one of the weirdest flexes ever, I can proudly say that I keep my own email server.

Remember this post where I complained that the music industry won't take my money?

As I mentioned a long time ago I am using Pelican for publishing my blog.

I originally envisioned this post as a two-part brain dump, but then I realized that the type of people interested in libraries are also the type of people who aren't bothered by long text.

If you told me I was going to die in the next 24hs, asked me to guess what from, and it was a working day of the week, "MS-Teams-induced aneurysm" would definitely be in my top 5 guesses.

Two years and 44 days after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I caught it.

So you want to use my PC?

An article titled Don't talk to Corp Dev has recently showed up in my feed and the HN discussion around it reminded me of this anecdote.

Last time I talked about Rust I mentioned that I wanted to like the language but I couldn't find a good reason for using it.

Let's say you are a band and you want to keep scalpers from buying all of your tickets and reselling them at ridiculous prices.

I recently found myself in a situation I haven't experienced in a long time: I got an error message that no one on the internet has had before.

Here's a list of short thoughts that are too long for a tweet toot but too short for a post.

Here's a thought that has been rattling around in my head for the last 10 years or so.

I have been too busy to blog the last month and a half, so I thought I'd take a bit of time to talk about my new project, unsignedch.ar.

Last time I talked about GMail I mentioned that my account was blocked for sending about 100 e-mails despite following Google's best practices for doing so.

Here's a "trick" that has saved me a lot of time and that plenty people have never learned.

In my previous post on hierarchical loss for multi-label classification I gave an implementation of a specific algorithm for calculating the loss between two trees.

So, this is a thing that happened: I was invited to give a talk to the Social event organized by LatinX in AI during the NAACL 2021 conference.

Here's one of those problems that sounds complicated but, when you take a deep dive into it, turns out to be just as complicated as it sounds.

I recently confirmed that high quality audio makes you sound smarter, which is exactly what I always wanted: a way to look smart without having to actually work for it.