Plastic Bomb - Was ist das Fediverse? #131 2/2025"

The Plastic bomb is a German punk magazine, which is published every three months, with a circulation of 8000 copies.
Those who know me for a long time, know I’m coming not only from a nerd world - but also from the music world. Punk especially!
And, if you followed me along Social Media, you know I’m a big fan of the Fediverse and I’m trying to promote it, as much as possible.
As the Punk music is always into DIY (do it yourself) and anti-corporate, I thought it would be a good idea to write an article about the Fediverse for the Plastic Bomb magazine.

this is a test

test for rss feed

Java aktuell - Article “Automatische Dependency-Updates mit GitHub Actions und Dependabot”

My first ever published article was published in the Java aktuell 3/24 (topic: Tools).
It’s about “Automatische Dependency-Updates mit GitHub Actions und Dependabot” (automatic dependency updates with Github Actions and Dependabot).
It’s all in German, if you don’t mind:

The complete magazine can be downloaded for free on the website

Pre-Requirements

To add a new Tasmota device to the Home Assistant (HA), I assume that:

• HA is installed
• An MQTT Broker is running and an user in HA is already registered/in use
• Already one other Tasmota device is connected to the HA (so you know it’s working)
• The new Tasmota device is already connected to the local HA WiFi
• Already has upgraded to the newest firmware

Todos:

Give device a better name

Click Configuration -> Configure Other -> and enter at Device Name a name which makes sense

Please let me know, if you have some good alternatives

• Productivity

  • Cryptpad - instead of google docs / google sheets etc… selfhosting is possible
  • Jitsi - instead of Google Meet / Zoom and so on. selfhosting is possible
  • etherpad - as online collaboration pad selfhosting is possible

• Social Networks

  • Friendica instead of Facebook selfhosting is possible
  • Mastodon instead of Twitter/X selfhosting is possible
  • Peertube instead of YouTube selfhosting is possible
  • Pixelfed instead of Instagram selfhosting is possible

• Others:

When I was researching some stuff for a blog post about Github Actions, I stumbled over the blog from Github user @nicolasiensen.
When I read the post, I saw that people were able to add comments with being logged into Github.
Something like this I have seen a long time ago, but this was so complicated, I just ignored it.

But now as I saw in his blog , it’s super ways, thanks to Giscus
The setup was super easy, the repo must be public, you need to add the all to your repo and enable discussions.
And the best is:

• Stop all containers - docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)
• Debug into running container - docker exec -it container_name /bin/bash
• Debug into docker image - docker run --rm -it image_name /bin/bash
• Remove all docker dontainers - docker rm -f $(docker ps -a -q)
• remove all images you need to download everything again) - docker rmi -f $(docker images -q)
• delete all docker network bridges - docker network prune

New Thinkpad Trackpoint Keyboard II

(i maybe should have cleaned it, before the picture…)

I got my first Thinkpad Trackpoint keyboard as a farwell gift from a company I worked for (thanks <3 ).
I don’t use any mouse, I just use the red “joystick” (called trackpoint) to navigate. For users which aren’t used to it, it’s a horror if they have to use my keyboard. But if you are used to it, you don’t wanna work without it anymore.
As you can see, the old one is not in a good shape anymore. And as working-from-home is the new normal, the company I work for, offers us the equipment we need, so I ordered a new one.
This is a newer version, which is running without a cable but wirelesse with an USB dongle. So far so good.

the setup

This is how my setup looks like:

as webcam I use a Waveshare 10300 RPi Camera (E)
(bought it here, unpaid advertisement)

Install raspberry pi image

Download the images from the raspberry pi website
copy it to your sd card.
on the webpage they recommend to install the rpi-manager via sudo apt install rpi-imager, but for me it wasn’t working because of dependency problems.
So I installed it the classic way:

First build an docker container and run it afterwards so you see it with docker ps -a As an example, I use the container for the MagpiDownloader

docker build -f Dockerfile . -t mag-pi-downloader
docker run -v $(pwd)/issues:/app/issues/ mag-pi-downloader -f 131

After that is done, have a look, for all the docker container:

$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED              STATUS                          PORTS     NAMES
ea901f38e328   mag-pi-downloader   "/bin/sh /app/entryp…"   About a minute ago   Exited (0) About a minute ago             exciting_feistel

As you can see the newest has the container id ea901f38e328