René Coignard

I no longer intend to maintain my personal weblog, and therefore I’m shutting it down.

Old steam trains often had whistles that worked much like organ pipes, as both are labial aerophones, instruments where air splits against a sharp edge to create sound.

2025 was tough, but 2026 will be even better than 2027.

As usual, I don’t do year-end summaries, but why not try summing up the first quarter of this century?

Recently I’ve been composing a short organ dedication to a close friend of mine in honour of her birthday.

In addition to my recent notes about the experimental organ ambient album “Wolfen”, I’d also like to share a short video I’ve assembled from parts of the documentary “Original Wolfen.

Recently I shared a couple of useful templates for Dorico, the notation software, on the Steinberg forums, and I’d like to briefly mention this here in my weblog.

In this brief note I’d like to share two things.

Wolfen, and Wohnkomplex II in Wolfen-Nord in particular, is sort of East Germany’s field of experiments.

These words began one of the letters I recently discovered in my (physical) letterbox.

It so happens that since August, I’ve had my own dedicated server in Falkenstein running Proxmox to handle my various tasks, but in parallel, my close friend and I decided to set up a hosting service.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that the Fediverse has been consuming a rather substantial amount of my attention and emotional resources (which are already in rather limited supply at the moment).

I’ve deleted my u/coignard account on Reddit and stopped using Spotify.

If you would like to send me a postcard or correspond with me by regular mail, I hope you will find my current postal address useful.

Today marks four years since I registered the domain for my weblog, renecoignard.com.

Today in Brussels, a closed-door session of an EU working group will discuss Chatkontrolle 2.0.

Back in September I needed a console tool that would take one of my high-entropy master passwords (the ones I keep in my head) plus some context, and deterministically generate a password from that.

A random thought that came to me today: even if it seems like my actions back in Russia didn’t lead to any visible result (the war is still going on), that’s only how it appears.

Merz has a simple solution to every problem: deport migrants.

I mean, seriously.

Today, incidentally, is the fête du prénom René — in other words, my name day.

For those holding copies of my public keys, please take note of the following updates: The PGP key with ID 0802 BDCD 5265 6EE9 has had its validity extended to 1 January 2027.

It so happens that, unfortunately, I’ve found myself in hospital once again.

I suppose I’ll write about how the day went, while I wait for my Magdeburg-Halle train to depart.

Like any other decent German on the nationwide warning systems test day, I’m filling out the survey on the official website about what I thought of the performance and what could be improved.

Alright, Falkenstein.

I’ve already given up on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the past, and now it’s time to say goodbye to Telegram as well.

A couple of weeks ago, before I ended up in hospital, I successfully passed my telc Deutsch A2, and B1 awaits me in September.

I was away for a bit due to some health problems — hope no one worried.

Today brought a completely spontaneous trip to Görlitz (and just across the river, the Polish town of Zgorzelec) with Anton, which we hastily planned yesterday evening and managed to pull off today.

I’ve recently joined the Fediverse — think of it as a decentralised social network where different platforms can talk to each other through an open protocol called ActivityPub.

Today, Anton and I spontaneously decided to go hiking in Sächsische Schweiz, the German part of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.

Exactly one year ago, I moved from my previous neighbourhood in Wolfen, Krondorf, to where I live now, Wolfen-Nord.

I’ve finally got round to sorting and publishing photographs of German towns that I took this year with my Nikon D7000.

Nur als Hinweis: a quick note about a place I visited with Alexander on May 11th.

Yesterday I was in Dresden with Anton, where I went so he could show me around the city.

I always try to escape Wolfen at weekends to meet friends and explore new towns.

Relatively recently, about a couple of weeks ago, I created a new Facebook account.

Last Saturday I visited München to volunteer with the Bavarian Red Cross alongside a friend.

I’m making this note whilst already sitting on the train that will depart for Leipzig at any moment.

Last Saturday, my friends from Stuttgart and other cities and I set off to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a town surrounded by the mountain ranges of the Bavarian Alps.

I’m excited to share some good news: recently, composer Evgeny Petukhov from Berlin and I formed a new musical group called “The Coignard-Petukhov Project”.

It was exactly two years ago today that I publicly announced my name change to the world, and since then I’ve been known as René Jean-Michel Yves Coignard.

The past six months have been particularly generous with all sorts of twists and turns, and I have to admit, most of them haven’t exactly been the easiest trials for me.

I decided to shake things up a bit this weekend and went completely bald.

I can hardly believe that exactly three years ago, at the very moment I’m writing this brief note, I was heading to Moscow to hold a solitary anti-war protest with a placard reading “Putin, Stop the War with Ukraine!”

I developed this real-time bus arrival tracker for Tbilisi public transport in early 2023 while living in the city, and have been continuously improving it since then.

Somehow it’s worked out historically that my worst experiences in Germany always end up being connected to Deutsche Bahn.

I’m continuing to compose music for piano and violin, and I’m happy to present my new piece “Message à Daria”, which I’ve been working on since the beginning of this month.

I’ve just finished the first module of my integration course, where I’m learning German in hopes of becoming a train driver for Deutsche Bahn.