Thoughts of an IT expert
Getting ready for Scotland involved buying some gear – next to the required things also a headlamp, a powerbank and Merino clothes. On the surface, maybe a bit much. Did I need a new powerbank? Technically no, but the right size makes a difference for tracking, navigating, and tent-charging on a trip like this. Merino? It means less sweat, less odor, more comfort over days of exploring.
Today, I did my longest bike tour this year so far. I went north to a lake in a neighboring district, mostly following the Weser-Harz-Heide route, which I already partly followed on my journey from Kassel to Braunschweig last year. There I sat down on a bench for half an hour and then returned. I had plenty of headwinds on the way there and a bit of tailwind on the way back, although the wind was mostly from the side. This time, I luckily did not mess up the OsmAnd tracking. Despite the wind, it was a lot of fun!
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April has also been over for two days now. So it’s time to take a look back. What was going on (for me)?
Today, after three years and one month, I handed over the keys to my first apartment away from my childhood home. It marks the end of an era worth reflecting on.
If you’re reading this, it seems that my GoBlog Telegram Bot (just another embedded plugin) is working!
This new bot probably has no real use, but it was a good experimental project to try and get a bit more familiar with the current state of GitHub Copilot, especially as we can now use it at work.
Probably the biggest use is for uploading photos from my phone. I can just send them as files and get a link back. But I can also send text and it publishes it. Even with frontmatter to configure parameters for the post.
Regarding Copilot: For whatever reason (maybe my adblocking DNS?) the VSCode extension keeps asking me to log in again, but still works for the non-chat features.
However, I am still a little worried that AI will make my work obsolete.
Yesterday, before our second (and last) move today, I took the opportunity to take a relaxing ride on my bike along my running route from some years ago and enjoy the nature.
It’s a bit sad that I can’t run anymore without getting pain in my knee, but riding the bike is also fun and gentler on the joints.
On Wednesday, I will hand over the flat and then the time with two flats to manage is finally over! More time to bike! 😄
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Until recently, my fiancée and I used Bring! to manage a list of groceries, we need to buy. Recipes we saved in a Telegram channel, pinning those we want to do in the following days.
I tried GitHub Copilot (Free) in Visual Studio Code again for some small GoBlog changes. Copilot can now generate tests (although it doesn’t feel intelligent, as you need to correct quite a few things), it can do code reviews before committing and it can generate commit messages. Of course, it can also do code completions and write complete code, if you want it to do so.
My fiancée and I were in Scotland in 2023 on an Interrail trip. But with some bad luck, we got COVID-19 after half of the trip and had to go home and recover. We always said we wanted to finish our trip in one of the next years.
To reduce my dependence on USA-based products, I switched from using the OpenAI API to Scaleway’s Generative API for my blog. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s based on open-source models, hosted in Europe. 🇪🇺
It was straightforward to just add an option to change the REST endpoint in my GoBlog plugins, and then use Scaleway’s API for creating the post summaries and the image descriptions. For the post summaries, I am now using llama-3.3-70b-instruct, for the image descriptions pixtral-12b-2409.
Let’s hope that there will also be a model that supports audio transcriptions until April 2026, so I don’t have to renew the credits on the OpenAI API for my Telegram Voice-To-Text bot. 🤞