My blog

In my recent post I mentioned a new (beta) voice assistant device for the use in your Home Assistant system. There are others available on AliExpress based on ESP32 etc. but this one is "the official". More information here. Today it was delivered. Yes, it is not the sexiest device on earth, it attracts dust as crazy and I absolutley want to hide it (and you could because mics and spe [...] 

This post is about on how I managed to transform my Smart Home from using vendor-based solutions to open-source and local-only systems. I am actually cheating. Although my solutions work entirely local, the fact that I want to use it remotely, also requires a cloud account to access it, namely the Nabu Casa account which is 75 bucks per year. Where I came from My first Smart Home steps based [...] 

I recently started to use TickTick, a powerful app to track your personal tasks, reminders etc. I am using the Mac version which introduces a keyboard shortcut to quickly startg a pomodoro timer. The problem is: the same shortcut is used to open the command menu in VS Code: SHIFT+CMD+P VS Code stopped to react on this one and it took me a while to figure out the reason, so here is how to dis [...] 

Today I again encountered some strange things on different Domino machines. It’s Java again. The other specs are: my local dev box is 12.0.2FP2, running in a container using the HCL image the other machines are natively installed 12.0.2FP2, also Linux there are no language packs installed at all The parts that are used: some Java in an NSF, defined as managed bean (but t [...] 

I am done with social media in general. Facebook is only usable with the genius browser plugin FBP. It is just my birthday calendar for my contacts I don’t maintain a “real” record in my phone or anywhere else. Twitter/X always only was my news feed. If you don’t like the political bias here just do not read the comments and block accounts you don’t like - so ea [...] 

Just for my own record because I always forget: If you ever need to pass any object data to a custom control, use this as the property data type: com.ibm.jscript.std.ObjectObject or com.ibm.jscript.std.ArrayObject depending on if you just need one or more objects. This is handy if you use your custom control in a repeat where the looping element is a complex object. Surprisingly [...] 

Yes, I did it again and bought a MacBook Pro with an Apple chip. This time the M4 Pro arrived at my desk. After I got my M1 Pro in 2022 (one year after its launch) for my personal belongings, I thought it might be time to upgrade my work setup and replace the 2019 Intel based 16”. This machine was a mess from the beginning. Thermal issues all the time and fans giving me headache during the d [...] 

I recently noticed another weird behaviour in Designer using the Eclipse-function to rename a Java class. When using this function, you will instantly notice another problem with the menu entries increasing every time you open it - but this is another story. tl;dr Here is a litte demo video How to reproduce To reproduce this, do the following: Create a new blank database, cre [...] 

The nomination phase is over (due Oct 31) and now people at HCL are selecting the future HCL Ambassadors for 2025 in the next month and then finally present them in December. This time I won’t be on this list, because I didn’t nominate myself for it - this is a prerequisite for it in general as it states that you want to be part of this remarkable group of people. This time I though [...] 

I am using NI products for ages and spent a lot of money. When Apple launched their new SoC, Native Instruments' products weren't compatible for quite a while. My latest finding was that I wasn't able to use certain kits from so called expansion packs in Maschine anymore. Those are using a small special version of "Battery" internally and this kept on making problems though i [...]