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For a bit more than two years now I’ve been closely monitoring my network uplink. In the past I had a ton of issues with up- or download speeds not being what I paid for, packet loss issues and outright full blown outages. In order to put myself into a better position when reaching out to the ISP’s support hotline I figured it would be good to be able to proof not only the existence of these issues but to also be able to determine the exact times they happened at and also to verify and show that in fact it was only external connections that were suffering and it was not an issue with my own internal network. Given that I don’t trust the cable modem/router they force on me to be my edge router and instead have my own Unifi gear set up behind it (considering anything not exclusively under my control to be part of the hostile public internet) this otherwise will usually lead to endless attempts to blame my LAN when in fact the issue lies outside of my reach. ...

The original version of this post was published as a Twitter thread on March 23rd 2020. I figured I should give it a more permanent home here since IMHO it was a quite fun story. Since everyone can use some entertainment right now, how about a battle story on how a year ago I spent almost two weeks trying to wrap my head around a really weird issue of a lagging GCODE viewer and overall print progress reporting in OctoPrint and finally figuring it out? ...

I’ve been working full time from my home office since mid-2014 now. At the time of writing this post this is nearing 7 years. Naturally, considering how much time I spend there, I’ve also spent a lot of thought and money on making sure my workplace helps to keep the usual side effects of the mostly sedentary lifestyle of a developer at bay. Over the years I’ve had some run ins with RSI and backpain. My first wrist issues developed more than 10 years ago. Pain in my lower back beyond “all fine again after a good night’s sleep” started in February of 2014. Both have been repeating visitors since then. You can probably imagine that that has led to a lot of research and experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t for me. So, here’s a summary of my findings as of March 2021. Quick disclaimer though, this is what has proven to work for me, that doesn’t mean it will work for you, if in doubt please consult a professional. Also, I do link to some products here – consider those references to give you more details on my setup, not official endorsement or anything like that. ...

It’s been a couple years since I last tried to maintain a blog. Back then I was still living life as a corporate drone, employed as a Software Architect to consult other people on their IT problems. I rarely had anything I could blog about – either things were under NDA, or they were simply uninteresting. Since then my life has been turned completely on its head. In late 2012 I got myself a 3d printer, spent my Christmas break to develop a small web interface for it, that grew into a full sized Open Source project called OctoPrint and these days I work full time on it. ...