Notes on Nico Einsidler.

Digital Independence Day: What I Use

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:25:34 +0100

Today marks the first Digital Independence Day, which will be held every first Sunday in 2026. The idea is to move at least start using one more privacy respecting non-big tech alternative each month. I have been slowly but steadily moving all my digital life away from big-tech over the past year already, but still a few steps to go.

Inspired by a great talk about volunatry privatly organized censorship in Germany by the CUII by Lina and Elias Zeidler (Northernside), I switched to DNS4EU:

The 512KB Club

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:39:07 +0100

This site is now part of The 512KB Club. 🎉

Just yesterday, my pull request was accepted and got merged. I am very excited to be featured on the clubs site. With 50KB, I am sitting right in the middle of the Green Team:

My homepage featured in the Green Team in The 512KB Club along with some others.

ISPF Editor Cheatsheet

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:48:35 +0200

Today I stumbled upon an old GitHub repo and GitHub page that I created for a very niche text editor: the ISPF Editor¹. I am very much into modal text editors. I love using vim, vi, Emacs etc.

As I am fascinated by mainframes and worked in this field for a few years (this was such an interesting and great time), of course, I looked into different editors on z/OS. Apparently, I didn’t find any well written cheatsheet for the ISPF Editor, so I made my own.

Why NE555?

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 15:59:05 +0200

Why is this site called NE555.io? NE555 has been my goto username. As you are probably not aware, NE555 is a popular integrated circuit. The 555 timer IC can be used to time things, create pulses, delays and oscillations. It is the most sold IC in the world:

To this day the 555 has been the best-selling IC every year, copied by numerous companies.

page 143, chapter 11 "Timers and Oscillators" in "Designing Analog Chips" from Hans Camenzind

Migrating Hugo Static Site Deployment from GitHub Actions to Forgejo Workflows

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 23:02:54 +0200

I moved from GitHub to the private.coffee Forgejo instance. You can now find my latest projects and repos at git.private.coffee/NE555. Porting my GitHub action to automatically build and deploy my static homepage using Hugo was a bit work.

Here’s the old GitHub action to build and then deploy my homepage using GitHub pages:

name: github pages

on:
 push:
 branches:
 - master # Set a branch to deploy
 pull_request:

jobs:
 deploy:
 runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
 steps:
 - uses: actions/checkout@v2
 with:
 submodules: true # Fetch Hugo themes (true OR recursive)
 fetch-depth: 0 # Fetch all history for .GitInfo and .Lastmod

 - name: Setup Hugo
 uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
 with:
 hugo-version: "latest"
 # extended: true

 - name: Clean public directory
 run: rm -rf public

 - name: Build
 run: hugo --minify

 - name: Create cname file
 run: echo 'ne555.io' > public/CNAME

 - name: Deploy
 uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v4
 if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/master'
 with:
 github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
 publish_dir: ./public

And this is the new Forgejo workflow to build the site and then deploy it to Codeberg pages (coffeegit.page):

Poolsuite FM

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 23:04:09 +0200

Such a cool sweet small macOS application: Poolsuite FM. A little Soundcloud “radio” player. It fetches songs from Soundcloud and organizes them into well-curated playlists such as:

Poolsuite FM
Friday Nite Heat
Balearic Sundown
Indie Summer
Hangover Club
Tokyo Disco (← my favourite)

The small Poolsuite FM macOS app.

According to Wikipedia, the project originally started just as a website, but soon apps for Mac OS and iOS were added. This classic Mac OS styled web desktop environment plays 80s and 90s video loops and features a music player as well.

ZFS Disk Replacement & Pool Augmentation

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 13:26:34 +0200

My home server where I mainly store all my pictures and some Vienna Sessions backups uses the Zettabyte File System (ZFS). A few weeks back one of my weekly scrubs revealed a failing hard drive in one of the three mirror pools I have created.

As I recently upgraded from my beloved Canon 60D to a Fujifilm X-E3, file sizes will dramatically increase. So why not upgrade the disks while replacing them anyways. The steps to do this for a ZFS mirror pool are failry simple, first you replace the faulty disk, resilver the pool and then repeating this procedure with the second disk, here is a condensed protocol (TL;DR):

qRAM

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 13:52:46 +0100

A concept of a quantum random access memory was first proposed in 2007. It offers a way to randomly address $N=2^n$ data cells with $n$ bits.

Basic Idea

The basic idea of qRAM is to use address qubits to point to some data in a data qubit register. Encoding of the information in the data register can be done by using controlled gates on the data register (if the information is consisting of only 0’s and 1’s CNOT gates are used). The address qubit register acts now as the controlling qubits.

WezTerm

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 15:14:57 +0100

I found a new terminal: WezTerm. Not as fast as Alacritty it’s still GPU accelerated and has some great features.

WezTerm combines two important aspects: Alacritties speed and iTerms/GNOME Terminals tabs. It sure isn’t as fast as Alacritty, but in my daily usage, I hardly notice any differences.

Noteworthy features:

GPU accelerated
tabs
good font support (it supports ligatures as well)
easy theming
simple configuration (via a wezterm.lua file in $HOME/.config/wezterm or just in $HOME.)

Podman All the Things

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 01:33:10 +0100

A few days ago while browsing lobste.rs I stumbled upon the article “Dock Life: Using Docker for All The Things!” written by Andrew Welch. It had then gotten onto the upper half of the first page on lobste.rs and a few days ago even Chris Coyer from CSS-Tricks.com wrote about it.

Just coming from NixOS and Fedora Silverblue, I was immediately hooked. This is actually an amazing idea!

Basic Idea

The basic idea behind Andrew Welch’s article is simple: If you ever need to run a certain program, grab a container that already includes the desired program and remap the program name on your system to a docker run command.

Selling Products

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 20:07:38 +0100

Selling stuff is just a byproduct of creating cool products.

DNF Config

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 19:07:18 +0100

The DNF package manager posses a config file under /etc/dnf/dnf.config. A few interesting options are available and not set per default.

# force the usage of fastest mirror available
fastestmirror=True

# enable parallel downloads to speed up downloads
max_parallel_downloads=10

# enable colored output
color="always"