A Youtube Video Essay Recommendation: Dissecting Discographies

It’s quite regretful when the most annoying people on the planet get to have millions of followers on social media and gems like YouTube channel Dissecting the Disco doesn’t even have more than a thousand subscribers. I want to change that, with the little reach I’ve got because their essay’s are worth every minute spent on them. Their stated mission is to “to document stories and topics that have not been transferred to video form, ultimately creating a library of unique mini-docs that highlight interesting and important artists....

January 15, 2022 · 3 min · Daniel Heitmann

Home office recipe: Ciabatta with veggies

I hate recipes that start with the life story of the author, so feel free to skip to the recipe. Since we’re all stuck at home for more than a year, I’m sure you can relate: Every day with lunch time coming closer, the looming question arises: What should I/we eat? I’ll share a quick recipe with you that doesn’t require much preparation time. Coming from companies where we had chefs to prepare food, it took some getting used to the new situation but over the past year we’ve gotten pretty good at having lunch ready between 12:00/13:00 and the topic hasn’t become much of an issue....

April 27, 2021 · 2 min · Daniel Heitmann

Micropayments and the future of news publishing

Every now and then, I worry about the state of news and reporting on the Internet. Free access to high quality news reporting is often considered to be a birth-defect or the original sin of the Internet, since it forces publishers to live off of advertising, leading to engagement becoming the primary KPI to target. Not to forget that publications might be less critical torwards big advertisers. People’s attention is also easier to catch by creating a reality in which there’s no nuance, where there’s just good and evil, black and white, democrat and republican - you get the gist of it....

December 16, 2020 · 3 min · Daniel Heitmann

Gaslit Nation

A couple of days ago I discovered the podcast Gaslit Nation via Twitter and since I’ve been telling a lot of friends and colleagues about it already, it just seems fitting to also mention it here. Gaslit Nation is a podcast focused on detailing the corrupt criminal enterprise that is the current US government under Trump. It’s hosted by the journalist/author Sarah Kendzior and political researcher/screenwriter Andrea Chalupa who put a lot of the pieces together that explain how we ended up with the current autocratic government in the US and parts of Europe and how Russia is involved in a lot of a that....

July 10, 2020 · 3 min · Daniel Heitmann

New Bruce Lee documentary: Be Water

ESPN has recently launched a new 90-minute documentary titled Be Water about martial arts legend Bruce Lee. It features his family, covers his upbringing as well as his fight against racial injustice and his film career. ESPN requires a subscription but they offer a 7 day trial.

June 10, 2020 · 1 min · Daniel Heitmann

An Ode to Dark Fortress

This text was originally written sometime in 2014 to commemorate the 10 year anniversary since the release of one of my favorite albums of the genre, but was never published. It has been updated throughout the years. It was in early 2004 when I first came into contact with Dark Fortress. I bought a german Metal magazine that came with a sampler, which was a CD filled with a couple of new songs from various bands....

January 3, 2020 · 6 min · Daniel Heitmann

Expose Prometheus Metrics for Kubernetes' Cluster-Autoscaler

If you intend to leverage autoscaling on Kubernetes, you may want the Cluster Autoscaler to expose some metrics for you. It’s pretty simple to a) enable access to the /metrics route and b) instruct your Prometheus to scrape it: a) Expose port 8085 for your Cluster Autoscaler deployment: ports: --name: app containerPort: 8085 See line 50 in this gist of an example deployment manifest. b) Add the following annotation to your Cluster Autoscaler service:...

April 8, 2019 · 1 min · Daniel Heitmann

Depression: I’m not cured and it can always come back

I’ve been free of symptoms of depression since September, at least until last week. I started to feel agitated, nervous, easily annoyed, sad, alone and unwanted. Over the weekend it became a bit worse. I don’t know the cause. It just came back. It also sneaks its way back into my head. At first it’s just a couple of random negative thoughts throughout the day and after a couple of days its self loathing and feeling worthless....

January 28, 2019 · 2 min · Daniel Heitmann

Pixel Slate/Pixelbook features don’t work on G-Suite

The Pixelbook and the Slate share one big caveat: Most of their advertised features aren’t available if you’re using a G-Suite account as your primary Google account. And that’s terrible. Since the Pixelbook was introduced, Chrome OS comes with a feature called Instant Tethering that allows the device to talk to your Pixel phone to establish a hotspot as soon as Chrome OS is offline but wants to connect to the Internet....

December 23, 2018 · 3 min · Daniel Heitmann

The Girl In The Spider’s Web movie is a mess

I’ve been a fan of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy ever since and I’m currently re-reading it, since I had forgotten about several aspects of the intricate story. It’s immensely thrilling and it has aged pretty well. While looking for the trilogy for my Kindle on Amazon, I noticed that two new books had been released, that aren’t based on any existing manuscripts left by Stieg Larsson after his death in 2004....

December 1, 2018 · 3 min · Daniel Heitmann

Düsseldorf, seine Radfahrer und die RP-Online

Ein Freund wies mich heute auf einen Artikel über die Unvernunft der düsseldorfer Radfahrer in der Rheinischen Post hin. Das Solobild zeigt ausgerechnet den neuen Radweg auf der Friedrichstraße — zugeparkt, versteht sich. Arne Lieb beginnt seinen Artikel damit, wie ihm eine Frau auf einem Hollandrad aufgefallen ist, die ihren Blick nach links und rechts richtete und dann ohne zu bremsen über die rote Ampel der Kreuzung am Wehrhahn fuhr. Leider erwähnt er nicht ihre geschätzte Geschwindigkeit, über ihr ungefähres Alter, ihren möglichen Beruf und Preis des Rades hingegen mutmaßt er durchaus....

July 1, 2018 · 3 min · Daniel Heitmann

The Bicycle Curse

I’m not one for supernatural beliefs, but I’ve noticed a certain pattern that I can’t quite shake off: Whenever I get a new bike, I tend to be involved in a bicycle crash. 2014 I ordered a Canyon RoadLite 7.0. The day before the bike arrived at my doorstep, I had a serious accident involving a broken seat screw. I was riding my Koga Miyata touring bike at a rather high speed of around 35km/h at the Rhine when the seat suddenly gave way and I landed on my left foot and abruptly stopped while the bike continued to go on for about 30–50 meters straight without me....

June 6, 2018 · 4 min · Daniel Heitmann

Improve Your Customer's Mail Support Experience

In the past, I have been very vocal against automatic replies from ticket systems. I considered them to add no value while possibly causing the person requesting support some discontent. Let me explain why. Imagine you just sent a support request. Of course you’re hoping for a quick reply. But the first reply to hit your inbox is just an automated mail, which isn’t the support you were hoping for. The more services I’ve been using, the more I’ve come into contact with companies that offer mail support....

May 22, 2018 · 3 min · Daniel Heitmann

Privacy

In 2013, Snowden showed us that we don’t really care about privacy. In 2018, thanks to GPR, me might just learn that we don’t actually want it.

May 21, 2018 · 1 min · Daniel Heitmann

Happiness

This is just a reminder for myself, for the darker days: I can feel happy. I can find joy in life. Hell, I can even smile and then take a picture of that. I didnt have to focus on anything, it just started to become the new normal since I woke up today. It doesn’t take much, but I think these factors are key: Proper bicycling infrastructure If riding a bicycle involves stress because you have to deal with asshole car drivers, that reduces the amount of glee I get from riding a bike....

April 30, 2018 · 4 min · Daniel Heitmann