jan.krutisch.de

Using Ghostscript on Ubuntu

2026-01-26T00:00:00+01:00

When using Ghostscript on Ubuntu, be aware that Ubuntu added an Apparmor config for Ghostscript and it is not particularly sophisticated. Ask me how I found out. Well, I mean, this is the blog post about how I found out, so you don’t even need to ask anymore.

A client of mine was trying to use Ghostscript to create so-called ZUGFeRD invoices. It’s a german/french standard to create PDF invoices that contain an XML attachment that conforms to the EN 16931 standard for electronic invoicing. Exciting stuff, I know, but somehow I know more about this than I ever wanted to know.

The step of actually attaching the XML to the PDF (and making the PDF a valid PDF/A3 file) has always been a bit fiddly. So far, I am having most luck with Mustangproject but that’s Java and not very elegant, is it?

Turns out, Ghostscript officially comes with a script (one could say, a post-script) to do exactly that.

It is documented but it is rather fiddly to use.

Or rather, I could not get it to work at all. The official incantation from the documentation looks like this:

gs
--permit-file-read=/usr/home/me/zugferd/ \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dPDFA=3 \
-sColorConversionStrategy=RGB \
-sZUGFeRDXMLFile=/usr/home/me/zugferd/invoice.xml \
-sZUGFeRDProfile=/usr/home/me/zugferd/default_rgb.icc \
-sZUGFeRDVersion=2p1 \
-sZUGFeRDConformanceLevel=BASIC \
-o /usr/home/me/zugferd/output.pdf \
/usr/home/me/zugferd/zugferd.ps \
/usr/home/me/zugferd/input.pdf

Note the --permit-file-read thing which is “relatively” new in Ghostscript - It, very much appreciatedly, no longer blindly trusts file inputs but wants to make sure you define what files you actually need. This is called SAFER mode, and was an option for a long time and is, for a couple of versions, now the default.

But I would alway, regardless of what I tried, get error messages. Interestingly, and I only later realized what that meant, the error seemed to come from the OS. The issue was that the script (the zugferd.ps file) tries to read the color profile and can’t.

So I started to dabble around. Now, I know absolutely nothing about Ghostscript or postscript, but while postscript looks absolutely alien to me, I could still, at least a little, figure out what the zugferd.ps script was trying to do.

Here’s the most minimalistic reproduction I was able to come up with:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOSAFER -dNODISPLAY -c "(default_rgb.icc) (r) file status = quit"

This would fail. Interestingly, if I replaced default_rbg.icc with, say a small text file called test.txt, it would work.

This didn’t seem right. I double/triple checked file access rights. I tried various combinations of paths and --permit-file-read and -dNOSAFER and nothing would really work.

So, it seemed to be extension specific, but I couldn’t find anything in the Ghostscript documentation about extension whitelists, and after all, given how much Ghostscript deals with color profiles, blocking *.icc would not make any sense.

So, I asked ~~ChatGPT~~ Kagi once more and somehow I found a pointer to Apparmor.

Yes, FUCKING Apparmor.

So, on Ubuntu 25.10, at least, there is an Apparmor config for the Ghostscript binary gs and in /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/gs, it defines the allowed extensions. On my machine, it looked like this:

#------------------------------------------------------------------
#    Copyright (C) 2025 Canonical Ltd.
#
#    Author: Giampaolo Fresi Roglia (gianz)
#
#    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
#    modify it under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public
#    License published by the Free Software Foundation.
#------------------------------------------------------------------
# vim: ft=apparmor

@{gs_file_ext}=[pP][dD][fF] [pP][sS] [eE][pP][sS] [eE][pP][sS][iI] [pP][nN][gG] [jJ][pP][gG] [jJ][pP][eE][gG] [pP][nN][mM] [tT][iI][fF] [tT][iI][fF][fF] [bB][mM][pP] [pP][cC][xX] [pP][sS][dD] [tT][xX][tT] [pP][xX][lL] [dD][oO][cC][xX] [xX][pP][sS]

include if exists <tunables/gs.d>

This is a weird way of defining file extensions, but who am I to argue. Notice any absences? Yip, no [iI][cC][cC] to be found anywhere.

Also, notably, no [xX][mM][lL] which is also needed for ZUGFeRD and if it were me I would probably also throw in some [rR][dD][fF] for good measure.

So, yeah, that’s a couple of hours of my life I won’t get back.

Now, I’m not sure where to report this to, but I will definitely try.

And, yes, after adding these things to the file, and reloading the apparmor service, I can now generate valid ZUGFeRD invoices with Ghostscript.

And now what?!?

2025-11-13T00:00:00+01:00

By now, a lot of words have been said and written about what happened in late September 2025 in Ruby-Land and the fallout of it. If you only read one thing, I’d suggest you take at stab at making it through Filipa’s extremely long but also really good blog post which not only summarises the feelings of a lot of us in the Ruby community, but also tries to connect it with the toxicity of people like DHH and Tobi and how this has fractured the community. The only caveat, rightfully added by women on Mastodon is that DHH probably got his brain worm quite a bit earlier than the blog post makes it seem, but decided to mostly hide it behind a more friendly facade until the circumstances more or less allowed him to show his “real side” freely.

I’ve offered our local Hamburg usergroup to try to summarise what has happened as a basis for a discussion on what this means for the Ruby community and so here’s my very high level, very low-on-details summary that I will use as a basis for my (hopefully) few slides.

A (very) brief summary

On 19th of September, after a bit of a back and forth between people from within Ruby Central (mostly Marty Haught, the director of open source) and the current set of maintainers and operators of Rubygems.org and the rubygems and bunder open source projects, access for those maintainers and operators was ultimately revoked. For the maintainers, this came as a bit of a surprise, it seems. Prior to that, ownership on the GitHub enterprise organisation containing all the code and the “infrastructure as code” for rubygems.org was taken over by a shady manoeuvre (my interpretation!) by HSBT, a ruby core member and rubygems maintainer.

The official line on this after some really irritating and contradicting pieces of communication by Ruby Central board members was that for supply chain security reasons this was a necessary step and that operator agreements needed to put in place for people not directly employed by RubyCentral before access could be re-granted.

As much as I want to understand RubyCentral’s reasoning here, to me, even after several “Source of Truth Updates” on the RubyCentral blog, their communications don’t properly add up. So, there must be more to this story, right?

Here’s where things get murky. RubyCentral still hasn’t properly provided us with sound reasoning for their actions. Which is bad, because it leaves so much room for conspiracy theories or at least for intepretations of malcious intent.

Look at all the things I haven’t talked about!

But there is a piece of missing backstory, that, unfortunately, connects all of this back to DHH and his influence.

In 2022, RubyCentral decided to not invite DHH (as was the tradition) to keynote RailsConf, mainly because of the above mentioned brain worm and a series of really bad blog posts DHH wrote after the 37signals implosion in 2021.

This lead to the founding of the Rails Foundation and the creation of RailsWorld, because DHH couldn’t stand being without a keynote. This may sound facetious, but this is more or less what’s happened, I think.

In 2024, RubyCentral, losing money with RailsConf, because of RailsWorld and because of the harsh realities of post-Covid conferencing, decided to do one last RailsConf in 2025 and then call it quits. And to everyone’s surprise, they decided to invite DHH to that last ride. Not to keynote, but to be on stage.

This lead to a couple of things. First of all, Mike Perham, creator of Sidekiq, decided to withdraw his Sponsorship should RubyCentral follow through with the invitation. We’re talking a quarter of a million dollars! This meant that Shopify, a company with a very toxic person as the CEO and with DHH being a member of the board, was the only remaining big sponsor of RubyCentral.

After the conference (I hope I get these timings right), a bunch of people from the rubygems maintainer team stepped down from their roles at RubyCentral - With the clear understanding that they only wanted to dissociate from RubyCentral but would continue their work on rubygems, bundler and the operation of rubygems.org.

Now: As far as I know, at least one person sitting on RubyCentral’s board, has, immediately after the shit hit the fan on the 19th of September, claimed that the board was pressured by a sponsor (who could that be?) to revoke access. This has since been denied by RubyCentral leadership and they claim, to this day, that this decision was made independently by the board. This is weird, but somewhat understandable if you want to protect your now most important sponsor (Who has, which has to be said, someone on the board, Ufuk Kayserilioglu)

In the end, we will probably never really get to know what happened there. I like the slightly simmered down and still very depressing take from Filipa what they thought happened:

Ruby infrastructure governance was roughly split into two groups that strongly disliked each other and squabbled over petty grievances stretching back more than a decade. The group with more power and more resources saw a chance to push out their rivals – and took it.

But we have to acknowledge what this means. A group of people, who have been maintaining and running rubygems.org for at least a decade are suddenly pushed out. This means that so much institutional knowledge is lost.

In the end, nothing really matters. Or, maybe…

And here we quickly approach the last chapter, leaving out a lot of drama involving lawyers sending letters and people writing really, really stupid blog posts to defend the indefensible, where Ruby core (aka our nice Matz) decides to step in and “save the day” by taking over responsibility (up to a point) for the open source projects involved (I assume this means rubygems, bundler and the server software backing rubygems.org but I don’t think the details are fully fleshed out yet). For many, this seems like a good thing. And I’d agree to a certain point that this is probably not the worst outcome. But.

There is an almost poetic beauty (and with that I actually mean “horrible violence”) in that announcement post that thanks RubyCentral for their “years of dedicated stewardship” but fails to mention even in passing the people who actually did the work. People never said we should be kind. Only that we should be nice, right?

Honestly, I am heartbroken. This was, by all accounts, a power grab from parts of the community (and if you feel so inclined, you can read DHH’s victory laps on that bird site, but I will certainly not link to it).

Now, here’s why. I owe a lot of my professional career (what ever that is) to Ruby and Rails and thus, in some ways, to DHH and I will always be grateful for that. But what I found, is something very different from current day DHH’s racism and hate. I found a community full of love. A community that wanted to improve the status quo. A community that spent a ton of energy on making things better. Improve diversity. Practice kindness. Give room to the weird and wonderful. Events and Conferences like Railsberry or the wonderful Eurucamp I was fortunate enough to speak at 3 times. If I may, I would even include our little Ruby Unconf and ye olde Railscamps in that.

But I now realise that even though this world once very much overlapped with much of what today is the Rails core team, DHH’s hate combined with Tobi’s power and monetary incentives have made these worlds fall apart. A lot of great people that defined the positive aspects of my community have left a long time ago.

There may be other forces in play, and the RubyCentral leadership may just be particularly bad at communicating, but I’m afraid that this, in the end, is at the core of this issue.

Look, I am not stupid. I know that even at the best of times, probably 90% of the ruby community were at best indifferent to diversity, inclusion and to the political aspects of our work and just want to use technology that still feels like a cheat code, even in 2025.

Right now it does feel as if the “other” side has all the power. And I know that this is a skewed picture because they are just extremely loud and of course they are also emboldened by the current political climate, specifically in the US.

But I have to admit, it feels rather lonely over here.

And unfortunately, at least for now, it seems like we should not put too much trust in “the good people on the other side” of which I happen to know a few and I still really don’t understand how this group managed to get caught up in this siege mentality. I know it must be annyoing that every time DHH posts some egregious shit you get bombarded with calls for Rails forks and that you need to distance yourself from that Mofo, but, you know, what can I say, it’s not as if DHH is slowing down with that. And at some point, you are complicit if you keep your mouth shut. That’s how this works.

EDIT: All of that being said, I want to also acknowlege this: I am aware of how much the Shopify engineers have done for Ruby and Ruby’s advancements in the last years. I am aware of how the Rails core team has kept Rails more relevant than most people outside of the Ruby world will ever understand and acknowledge. I am aware that Ruby Central’s Board is made up of people who do this in their spare time, with no extra compensation (Which is, by the way, not true for neither Shan Cureton nor Marty Haught). I am aware of all of that and I am in many ways thankful for their contributions. Regardless, this makes their complicitness in both the power grab and the fracturing of the Ruby community not less relevant, if maybe a bit easier to understand.

I’ll give the last words to the person who arguably wrote the best take on all of this, because, while what I read this morning did not make me cry immediately, it certainly did not make me feel better. And I still don’t know what to do with that.

Some stuff to read

This is not an exhaustive list. It is left here without comment. I think I have made my position clear so you’ll probably figure out which of these I like or not just by reading them yourself.

The post by Ellen Dash aka Duckinator that broke the news
André’s short post from the same day
Joel Drappers Summary after trying to talk to various people
André’s post about the Bundler trademark
Justin Searls not-taking-sides blogpost
Jean Boussier’s post
André’s announcement of gem.coop
Martin Emde’s post
Filipa’s post already mentioned in the beginning

Docker vs. Captive Portal

2025-09-19T00:00:00+02:00

I really like traving by train. You can sit in a comfy seat and if you are so inclined, you can even get a bit of work in. That is, if you are not too dependent on the internet because for some obscure reason, german trains still have rather shitty internet.

Okay, to be fair it has gotten better and it is maybe expected to be somewhat spotty on a route that involves tunnelling through a Mittelgebirge.

Except, for me, it wasn’t working at all. I couldn’t even get to the captive portal after connecting to the Wifi.

Trying my usual debugging for network connections, I tried to ping the gateway which worked. Okay, so how about name resolution, after all, it is, as we all know, always DNS, right?

Okay, weird, the DNS server rejects my connections on port 53.

Aha!

I must admit, at this point, I did a bit of web searching on my phone (I’m trying to get into the habit of not calling it googling anymore, which it actually isn’t, so there) and someone in an obscure forum suggested that there could be issues when using Docker.

Which lead to a couple of challenges. For basically all of my life, either ipconfig or ifconfig, depending on using a Windows or a Linux system, would give you a list of network interfaces.

This is no longer true for Linux, at least not generally.

On my machine, on Ubuntu, the correct incantation to see both the IPv6 and the IPv4 addresses is ip address. Now I know and now you know.

Private IP ranges, a primer

Now to explain what’s happening we need to understand the concept of private IP blocks. You have encountered these before. If you look at your local IP address at your home network, chances are, it looks a bit like 192.168.0.200 or so. Or maybe, depending on your provider, even something like 10.10.1.200.

Just to be absolutely sure, let’s quickly make sure we are all on the same page regarding IP addresses. They are distinct addresses of nodes in a network. For example, if you ask the DNS to tell you the address of the webserver of this page, it will tell you, after a bit of indirection, that it is 138.201.249.230. This is a public IP address that is “owned” by my provider, Hetzner.

These IP addresses are somewhat rare, given that they are only 32 bit numbers (The dot notation we usually use for IP addresses is just a representation of a 32 bit number that is a bit easier to understand and reason about, because it allows us to segment the numbers into blocks) and so for example your internet provider (usually) doesn’t actually give you a public IP address for each of the devices you connect to your home network, instead they use a thing called NAT (If you are a network professional, please ignore my inaccuracies, I’m trying to keep this brief) which allows you to use the before mentioned private IPs inside the network.

There are three distinct blocks of private IP ranges. The first one is the 10.x block. It allows you to run one single network that can have up to 16,777,216 distinct addresses. In most organisations, you will probably split this up into multiple sub networks, but technically, you could use it as one block.

The second one we all know is the 192.168.x block. Usually, when used in a home network, you will only use a single sub block of this network, allowing you to use 256 distinct addresses. This is probably enough for a while for home networks, even with the internet of shit.

But if you’re trying to provide Wifi for a whole ICE train, 256 is definitely not enough. And while you technically could use the full block of 65536 distict addresses, that’s not usually how this network is used.

So the engineers designing the network for Deutsche Bahn decided to use the third network block, the slightly weirdly shaped 172.x block. Which is inaccurate, because the actual range is from 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255.

This is slightly inconvenient to read in the usual dot notation because the available address space is 20 bits. But it isn’t so bad, because this is usually split up into 16 segments (= four bits) of 16 bits, so that we end up with the last two segments as the usable address space for a network.

This is where Docker comes back in

Now for some reason, the 172.x IP block is rarely used for NAT. I don’t really know why, but I must admit that before I encountered this particular issue I didn’t even know about this block.

Which is probably why Docker engineers decided to treat it as their private address space.

And io and behold, when looking at the output of ip address, one of the docker networks had an IP of 172.18.0.1 which is also the standard address of the ICE Wifi gateway, at least for my train.

So instead of asking the gateway for DNS responses, I actually asked a non running docker container’s IP address.

Okay, let’s fix this

The fix to this is twofold. You can probably, if it is a development thing on your machine, delete the particular docker network that’s clogging that particular address using docker network rm.

But also, it is a good idea to instruct docker to never use that particular network range ever again by creating (or modifying) /etc/docker/daemon.json.

Mine looks like this now:

{
  "bip": "172.29.0.1/24",
  "default-address-pools": [
    {
      "base": "172.30.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    },
    {
      "base": "172.31.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    }
  ]
}

The first one defines the base IP of the docker daemon, and the pools are just network segments the docker daemon is free to use. Your mileage may vary.

After restarting the docker daemon (And probably rebooting for good measure because that always seems to help), my Computer happily connected to the network and I was able to push out some code one of my clients was waiting for.

But then there was this tunnel and … well, nevermind.

Original Image by Wee Sen Goh.

One Year

2025-07-26T00:00:00+02:00

On thursday, I finally took the train back home from rehab.

I spent 3 weeks exercising, relaxing, exercising, relaxing and exercising. With, honestly, terrible food (which is a bit embarassing for a clinic specializing in gastroentero, but what do I know) and too little (and too late) psychological help, but I don’t want to make this sound too harsh - It was absolutelly worth it. I do understand the limitations of my body in it’s current state much better, I did really exercise a lot and I gained very useful insight in how my body and specifically my glucose levels react to said exercise.

I got to know some awesome people, some who I would now, tentatively, like to call friends. I heard many a story of illnesses that are, in the long run, much worse than what I have to deal with, and am, as always impressed how people whose whole life has turned upside down, still manage to keep their humour and their positivity.

I played a ton of table tennis, something I didn’t even know would be possible, and rekindled my love for it.

I swam a lot, for the first time in what feels like ages. Damn, that felt good.

And then thursday also marked the one year anniversary of that fateful botched procedure that sent me on this journey that hopefully, at least for some aspects, ends here.

There’s a ton of stuff that I need to do now, from starting with some post-rehab exercises, re-starting my dormant gym membership to get back into a regular training schedule, doing lots of cardio to get my endurance back, figuring out the whole psychotherapy situation (Which is a mess, but you all probably know that) and also finding back into a groove in terms of my work.

Right now, I’m just happy to be back home, near my loved ones, with good food, my own kitchen, my own bed and my own gordam schedule. I’m not made for alarm clocks going off at 6:30 on a weekend.

So, let’s go. There’s stuff to do, stuff to figure out. And for the first time in what feels like ages, I feel energised and ready for the challenges to come. (If I am allowed to ignore, for now, you know, *gesturing around* this whole mess)

The pond in the photo in the header is called “Bottomless Kolk” (Grundloser Kolk) and is a great place to just sit or stand there and stare at it. It was a 5 minute walk from the rehab facility.

Well that happened, I guess

2025-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

So, I’ve been hinting on mastodon that I would write a blog post on what exactly happened last year to me health wise, to turn these small hints into a complete picture. Turns out that it is actually still somewhat hard to talk and write about a deeply traumatic experience. But I’ve been dancing around this now for so long that I think it makes sense to at least briefly write down what happened, and maybe the extended version talking about all the grimy details can come later.

Content Warning

This post contains a personal account of a traumatic medical experience and discusses issues of personal health, death, and medical details. Please keep that in mind before continuing to read.

Something is wrong

Last summer in July, right before we wanted to go on a holiday to Dalsland, Sweden, my health wasn’t particularly great. I had a very weird, wandering back pain that no doctor I talked to could really make sense of. But both my GP and my Orthopedic were sure to assure me that going on holidays was fine and that reducing stress would probably help.

Well, it didn’t. As soon as we got to Sweden, I got a high fever, the pain got worse and at some point my face started to turn yellow. This was a pretty clear hint that something was going wrong and so I ended up in an emergency room in a local hospital (Where local in rural sweden means something like 150km away, of course). I was immediately admitted and a procedure to remove my infected gall bladder (and with it the gall stones I knew I had) was scheduled for the next day. Technically, this is a standard procedure and you shouldn’t be super worried to have this carried out in a smaller hospital. I was told that if everything went alright, I could be home in two days.

Trollhättan / NÄL

Well, it didn’t. From now on I will just quickly summarize what happened, because it is a lot and because of the reasons I laid out above.

During surgery, an artery in my liver was accidentally cut. This was probably not recognized until they tried to wake me up and I started to bleed heavily. In the ensuing emergency procedure, by trying to compress the liver to stop the bleeding, a thrombosis in a liver vein was caused. The team was unable to find the source of the bleeding, unfortunately, and knew no better than to further compress the liver, pack my abdomen with gauze and then transfer me to the Gothenburg university hospital, Sahlgrenska. Not that I particularly cared in my articifial coma. But I can say that I have finally flown in a helicopter.

Gothenburg / Sahlgrenska

After a bit of preparation, another emergency procedure was carried out, this time identifying the issue with the liver artery, reconstructing the connection between the bile ducts and the small intestine.

A few days and one intervention (for laying a bile drainage and checking the bile ducts) and another procedure (to fix the reconstruction) later, I was finally stable enough to be transported to the university hospital in Hamburg, this time by plane and ambulances.

Hamburg / UKE

In Hamburg, I arrived on a monitoring station and made a bit of progress until, one night, I started bleeding again. Four procedures (two of them being emergency procedures) and about two weeks later, I was finally cleared to move from the intensive care unit to a normal ward, at the time with about five drainages and a so-called vacuum dressing (with an actual pump attached to remove wound secretion and bile). Unfortunately, I developed a fistula that was directly moving bile from a leakage at the so-called anastomosis, the connection between the bile duct and the small intestine to the last part of my operation wound, making this very slow to heal. I was told that this could take time, as the leak needed to heal and the conditions for that are not particularly great with bile being a somewhat aggressive liquid.

About five weeks later, I was discharged, still with two drainages, but finally at home. It was now October 2024.

At that point, I had lost about 15kg of body weight, mostly muscle. I was a shadow of myself and had to use a rollator (a walker with wheels) when walking. I needed daily care by a professional and I had frequent infections that had us sitting through various nights in the emergency room and three slightly longer stays in the hospital with IV antibiotics and additional examinations.

The aftermath

In February 2025, I finally got rid of my last drainage. Shortly before that, I felt strong enough to finally put my ass on a bicycle again, something I had longing for for a while.

At some point, the remaining wound became small enough that we were able to seal it with a waterproof bandage, which allowed me, after more than 7 months, to take my first shower.

In the middle of March, the bandages on that wound finally stopped having the minimal amounts of bile in them we were seeing until then. On the 18th of March, I first noticed that the wound had completely closed. Almost 8 months after the initial procedure, my body finally had healed on the surface.

The now

I am nowhere near 100%. I still can’t sit on my ass for longer periods of time before it starts to hurt. I am still regaining my core strength and that unfortunately means I am constantly plagued by back pain but now I know exactly where it is coming from. There will hopefully be a full rehab at some point in the near future.

But I can work. I can enjoy a good walk in the sunshine. I can eat yummy things. I can give and receive hugs. I can love. I can live. And I can write this blog post. There were a couple of brief moments in the last year where it wasn’t super clear if all of that would be possible. Put differently: There was a good chance of me coming home from Sweden in a wooden box. Like my father did in 2005. Fuck.

The stuff I left out

There’s so much I left out in this brief post. The pain medication that gave me hallucinations and anxiety attacks. The PTSD that definitely needs professional treatment in the near future. What all of this has done with my SO and my family and friends. All the small stories that made this both the worst year of my life and also a strangely positive experience in many ways, as I got to know so many awesome humans that cared deeply about me and everyone else in the three hospitals. Not that I can recommend this to anyone.

This is probably a horrible text, and not a particularly good read but I wanted to get it at least partially out of my system and I wanted to have something I can point to. And now I can hopefully start writing normal posts again. Which are less traumatic to write. That would be grand, thanks.

In the end, I have no idea how I would have fared without the help of my SO, Klaudia. Her love and her care carried me through this and I know that this took a lot of effort, a lot of willpower and a lot of hidden or not so hidden tears. I will forever be in her debt for this and I hope we can find the time and space this year (and how ever long it takes) to heal together.

Weekly Beats 2024 - A logbook (Q2)

2024-04-22T00:00:00+02:00

Every two years, on even years, on weeklybeats.com, there’s a sorta kind music contest (without the actual contest part) where the idea is to submit a piece of music, at least one minute long, every week, for the whole year.

I have attempted this twice so far, in 2014 (Where I managed to create 15 beats) and 2018 (14 beats). I always had a phase of joy in the beginning, then it became work and then I quit. This year, at least so far, feels different, as I am giving myself a lot more slack and let stuff be unfinished, if I can’t make it. Let’s see how many beats I can make this year. I thought it would be kinda fun to write up some notes on all of these beats I managed to release so far.

These are more or less the notes I wrote as descriptions on weeklybeats.com plus extra information or thoughts whenever I see fit (Marked as “Editor’s notes”. I’m going to update this article over the year.

This is a continuation from this post containing all beats from Q1.

Week 14

halfbyte · WB2414 Flachsdreschen

I’ve been watching a ton of historical documentations on old crafts on this youtube channel by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland and one of them was about preparing flax for spinning, including the threshing to free the flaxseed from the pods. Threshing by hand in a group inevitably produces some sort of rhythm and that’s how I ended up sampling that video under the CC license.

I didn’t spend a ton of time on the track except for arranging the voice samples and making sure the threshing was somewhat in rhythm. Lots of warp markers in these.

Editor’s note

I’m a bit torn on this. On one hand I like it, but also I do realise that the music part of this is a bit underdeveloped and primitive while the combination with the old film commentary can feel a bit gimmicky. Also, I guess this is much more enjoyable (and you’ll be able get the small gags I managed to squeeze in by specifically sequencing the spoken words with particular parts of the music) when you are able to understand the german words.

Week 15

half/byte · WB2415 No Compromise

This started out with a sound exploration in Serum for the stabby sample (now played through AMIGO) that flies in at the beginning. The timing of that sound was a bit odd which prompted me to try to make this a triplet based Drum’n’Bass thing.

I had a bit more time that anticipated on friday and tried to make this a bit more interesting with a couple of nice transitions and breaks but this is still not my biggest forte.

My plan is to reuse that sample next week in a more dub-techno kinda affair, let’s see if that idea holds up.

Editor’s note

I think this track is a bit weak in the sense that I don’t particularly like the lead that comes in later, it feels a bit flat to me. I am still happy with the outcome, but it could be better. I definitely am not the king of catchy ravey hooks.

Week 16

half/byte · WB2416 Zweitverwertung

The title means “secondary utilization” and is part of the bigger compound word Zweitverwertungsrechte which translates to secondary publication rights and I found this fitting because this reuses the main sample from last week’s song. This was a bit of a close shave as I was only able to start on friday and I was lucky in that my SO was unlucky and caught a cold so I basically have an unplanned free weekend.

Nevertheless tonight feels like I need to submit this, as working on this was a bit annoying. Dub tech stabs are usually a bitch to mix, with the filter sweeps and all, but this one didn’t want to gel at all and I still don’t think it is particularly well mixed but I tried.

Last week I was pondering how this year feels different in that I don’t feel particularly burned out (In both 2014 and 2018 I stopped submitting somewhere around this time of the year with a couple of unsuccessful reboots over the rest of the year) but this week felt a little bit more like, you know, work. Maybe I’ll need to pause next week or do a little quick sketch or something so that I can relax a bit.

In any case, 15 Songs per Year is my current record and I just beat that with just one missing (in week two where I was seriously sick), so I should feel pretty good about this.

Let’s see.

Editor’s note

I wrote that longish blob of text on Saturday evening and it does feel accurate still, even though I managed to make some more (different) music on Sunday that may or may not turn into the next beat.

I hope this is just a momentary issue or that I maybe painted myself into a corner with that idea to reuse the sample. Listening to the track a couple more times I start to like it a bit more, so maybe it’s a similar case to the Drum&Bass track “Regulators” where I also had similar issues.

For some reason I managed to export the track from Ableton (twice!) with a cut off tail, not sure how that happened. Usually I listen to the export a couple of times on different devices to check the mix but since I was so annoyed, I seem to have always skipped the end and so I noticed this just before going to bed and had to re-export (twice!) and re-upload. It would help if my ISP would not currently limit my uplink to below 2Mbit, which makes uploading full wav exports to Soundcloud quite the hassle. But that ISP thing is another story. I recently vented about it on LinkedIn in the vain hopes someone from the ISP would see it, but I think it’s worth writing it up in a blog post as well.

Week 17

half/byte · WB2417 Interlude 030

I started with this track last Sunday by creating the chords and was initially quite happy with the track. Then I ran into a brick wall over the course of the week. This morning I had an idea and then had to wait the whole day to finally be able to try to get a go at it. This isn’t super original or exceptionally funny but I am quite happy with how this turned out in the end.

This uses a sample from freesound: [Amnbiente café México (lluvia, voces, tazas)_02_LR.WAV by vicocintle](https://freesound.org/s/672829/ License: Attribution 4.0

Editor’s note

I really like the beat drop at 1:09, as a friend of mine remarked, you kinda expect someone to come in with some dope rhymes.

Week 18

half/byte · WB2418 Waiting for departure

The base of this is the weird percussion/drum loop that I constructed from some samples I recorded when sitting on deck of a ferry that would bring us back home from a short vacation. For a long time I had no idea where this is going but somehow this slightly jazzy downtempo jungle thing emerged.

Uses a sound from freesound: Catterline Harbour.WAV by inchadney License: Attribution 4.0

Editor’s note

There’s something about the way home from either a really nice vacation or a good workation (See week 26) that makes me do really nice upbeat music.

Week 19

half/byte · WB2419 Vibin

This was a fun one, as this almost 100% turned out the way I wanted it to. The only compromise is the lead melody that was supposed to be an improvisation on top of the rest of the beat but I suck too much at keyboard playing for that to be viable and the result being usable.

I really like the way the chords are repeating at a very odd period - I tried to reign them in a bit, but it made things sound worse, so I kept them at a length of 2.2.2, never really matching the beat which is why the beginning of the song sounds so weird.

Editor’s note

Still vibin’ to this. The only regret that I have is that I had a version of the chords that sounded much more round and mellow but somehow managed to mess it up and somehow being unable to recreate it.

Week 20

half/byte · WB2420 It's Something I Guess

So, just to make it clear, the voiceoover is a bit. I am somewhat content with this, I didn’t have much time, so this is more an exploration of different sounds than anything else.

It’s something!

Editor’s note

This was basically a sound design session crammed into a track. I had a couple of sounds in my head I wanted to recreate and then built a slim chassis of drums and melodic elements around it. I does remind me a bit of the beginnings of dub step when people were basically throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, so you could see it as a kind of hommage to that, I guess.

Week 21

half/byte · WB2421 It's a Mood

As I have other endeavours that take up most of my time right now, the WeeklyBeats sessions become more and more speedrun sessions. Not the “fruityloops a new beat in 20 seconds” type of thing but this one more or less took an hour. Which is about double of what I had to spare. Again, “It’s something”.

I’d like to have a more normal week next week, please.

Editor’s note

This (or rather, probably last week already) marks the beginning of a rough patch where I was struggling with my health a bit while simultaneously having to finish a conference talk. These are very low effort and it makes me even prouder that I managed to come through with tracks that are actually quite nice.

Week 22

half/byte · WB2422 Noisy Beach Bop

Another quick one, roughly 1:30h in total, I think. It’s always fun to try to load up on various sources for noise when building these atmospheric dub techno/dub house tunes. This one is a bit overcompressed I think but I liked the aesthetics of it so I left it as is.

Hopefully, after next week, I will be back to having a bit more time for the WB stuff.

Editor’s note

Yeah. I mean.

Week 23

Completely impossible to deliver something. In the end I did not even try. I MC’d RubyUnconf on the weekend and as usual was just super knackered after the long days and during the week I was still busy getting my conference talk done.

Week 24

half/byte · WB2424 Shutdown Imminent

These were two absolutely mad weeks preparing a conference talk with some new jobs starting and, not one but two conferences, so I am happy to at least have one of two weeks checked.

This is again a quick sketch following a similar pattern as the last one with loads of noises, loads of delay etc.

I am absolutely done for and looking forward to a quiet week with nothing but, you know, normal work.

Editor’s note

During Baltic Ruby week I was again struggling quite a bit with my health but managed to get my talk done and enjoy Malmö. What a lovely city it is. I created the foundation for this track on saturday afternoon in my Friend’s apartment before moving out to a last night in a hotel in the old town and finished the track there after a long day in the sun exploring Malmö’s inner city, the palace gardens and the beach. THE BEACH!

Week 25

half/byte · WB2425 Midsummer Speedrun Challenge

This is a hot, overcompressed, drowned in reverb and delay, quickly thrown together mess.

It’s a speedrun and I swear one of these weeks I will be able to spend more time on my weekly beats again, but this week wasn’t one of them. Nevertheless, a submission is a submission.

Editor’s note

The first week back after Malmö was challenging, so much to do still and also still a bit brittle, health wise. I kinda like the sound aesthetics of this, despite the overcompressed mess.

Week 26

half/byte · WB2426 Sand In My Backpack

Still made with relatively little time, but at least I took the time to properly record and edit a more complex lead improv. I did not play this in via a keyboard, though. Instead, when I recorded the adlibs, I just scatted along with the chords and then used “slice to MIDI” in Ableton to turn it into MIDI, it then took quite a bit of editing (I am not a good singer as can be heard in the end of the song, where I offer you a glimpse into the process).

I started this with a completely different set of chords and then had to go back to some preset chords of the latin variant to turn it around because it wasn’t working at all. Then I processed the beats a bit more and was reminded of the Underdog Remix of Risingson by Massive Attack. The switchup in that remix is obviously much more refined, but I liked the idea of going double tempo in the middle of the song.

Editor’s note

I’ve tried the approach of “singing in” the lead melody once before (for week 19) but there it did not work at all. I’m not sure if maybe my voiceover ruins a perfectly fine track, but I felt like doing it and the mic was open anyway for the melody so whatevers.

This marks 50% of the weeks done. I am incredibly happy and proud to have only missed two weeks out of 26 and in contrast to the last years I don’t feel particularly burnt out. I think reducing the effort down to a minimum in weeks where I had no time was crucial, but I also think that I got a lot faster at arranging and I have a lot less anxiety going into arrangement. Sometimes the results are a bit stereotypical but the way I see it, I learn a lot by doing stuff other people have done before and only when being good at that, I feel more comfortable to step outside and find my own aesthetics.

I wish my health would be a bit more stable, I wish I would find more time for making music, but I’m working on both, so let’s see what the second half of the year will bring!

Weekly Beats 2024 - A logbook (Q1)

2024-03-30T00:00:00+01:00

Week 1

halfbyte · WB2401 It Makes A Sound

I had a lot of fun last week building a beat with Klevgrand’s “Speldosa” (The plugin done in collab with Wintergatan) and I wanted to see if I can do it again. The result is a laid back, slightly boring ambient-ish kinda track.

I wanted to start this week with something quick as I knew I didn’t have much time and I wanted to see how much time I need to invest to get something done.

One thing I noticed with this beat and the one from last week is that I need to figure out how to do proper chord progressions with this arpeggio-style music box thing (Which I believe is why this song is kinda boring)

Oh well, next time.

Week 2

Between xmas and nye last year I had some issues with my digestive system, most probably caused by a new medication for my diabetes. I thought I had it under control but this week it became clear the medication and my body did not agree. I have since started with a different (more conventional) medication and I am much better off for it, but boy was this not fun times. Between xmas and this week I lost about 10kg which is never a good thing to happen. Again, I am much better now and regained my weight, but to cut a long story short, I spent most of this week between my bed and my bathroom and couldn’t even think straight most of the time. So yeah, no weeklybeat this week. Great start, eh?

Week 3

halfbyte · WB2403 Mango Sykkel

This week was a bit busy so again, this is more a sketch that shows the potential.

The name is a nod to the all time classic Mango Drive from Rhythm&Sound, which in term is a remix of Mango Walk.

I don’t see this as a sort of reproduction or even remix but more of a study of the spirit and the techniques of the original.

Produced using the Ableton 12 Beta, but hardly using any of the new functionality (I used “strum” for the second guitar-ish synth chord)

It would by quite easy to stretch this to 5-8 minutes with some melodic variations and some proper dub style echo automations but I ran out of time as I won’t have much time during the weekend.

Editor’s note

Rhythm&Sound of course being one of the alter egos of Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, also know as Basic Channel and Maurizio. I love almost all of their work and they are the founders of what became known as Dub Techno or Dubhouse. I often come back to this genre, not only as a musician but also as a listener, especially in work settings.

Week 4

halfbyte · WB2404 Drilling Through

This week I stood in my own way, started way too late on Thursday and then ended up with something completely unusable. I thew away everything melodic, just kept the beat and started from scratch.

The sounds are a bit stereotypical, but I like the anthem-ish sound of the super saw synth.

Again, sloppy arrangement, but at least this one has a couple of transitions if a bit random.

Editor’s note

Over the course of last year, I fell in love a bit with UK Drill, especially with female artists like Cristale and Teezandos, if you haven’t watched their Plugged in with Fumez, you’re missing out. (Or, if you also like Football (The Soccer kind), make sure you watch Cristale’s daily duppy

I don’t think I have nailed this genre fully yet, but it’s definitely fun to play around with.

Week 5

halfbyte · WB2405 Clamshell

No idea what this is. The groundwork, including parts of the pads in the background, the bleepy melody and the two drum loops were done on the OP-1, but then I pivoted to Ableton Live as I was getting nowhere on device.

I tried to add more to this but the song actively resisted adding more elements.

Editor’s note

The interesting thing when you’re forcing yourself to make music every week after a long time of not doing it (at least on a regular basis) is that every week is different. This week was a crawl and I ran into several walls. Sometimes a track simply doesn’t want to cooperate and finishing it becomes a drag. This one was especially frustrating because it felt unfinished and at the same time, as I wrote, it almost actively resisted additional elements.

Week 6

halfbyte · WB2406 Drain The Groove

I went into the week thinking that trying to do some minimal techno could be fun. I then unexpectedly had time over the weekend, as I was trying to get rid of some cold viruses.

This became a fun excersise in time and space with various different time signatures running against each other and constantly changing amounts of reverb on the main pieces. I also had a bit more time for arrangement so not only is this the longest beat this year so far, it probably also has the best breaks and transitions.

If you can’t tell, I am quite happy with this one :)

Editor’s note

Sometimes I need to nerd out on a track and this is one of them tracks. It reminds me a bit of my old beat “Backyard Bench” from Weekly Beats 2014 where I also tried to play around with time signatures and create some interesting switch ups.

halfbyte · Backyard Bench (WeeklyBeats12)

Week 7

halfbyte · WB2407 Varifocal

This is another quick one, all in all something like 3 hours maybe. Still I think I came up with some fun ideas and somewhat executed on them. Arrangement could be better, I would love to have more time to get the mix right (I know that the master compressor somewhat messes up the drum levels), but I’m willing to live with these sacrifices :)

The voice is Klevgrand’s Pipa, Synths are almost exclusively Live’s Wavetable. I’m quite fond of the pads that are quite simple in design but have enough movement and are quite lush and so give a nice back end to the track.

Editor’s note

I still like this track very much and would love to find the time to turn it into a full track. Again, a little bit of rhythm nerdery when the beat switches to a triplet pattern without warning.

And yeah, I ordered some Varifocal glasses that week. I am getting old.

Week 8

halfbyte · WB2408 Oat Milk

Ran a bit out of time here, so it’s a bit on the short side. I love the fact that this does not actually contain any form of kick drum.

The noise in the background, if you listen very carefully, turns out to be the 3D printer I had running in the background today (not super easy to master with that) that I sampled with a handheld recorder and then did a bit of filtering for it to be not super obnoxious.

Editor’s note

Not much to say about this one, another dub techno-ish track.

Week 9

halfbyte · WB2409 Regulators

Bit of a weird one this week: I am not really happy with the end result and the process was kinda painful with lots of dead ends. In the end the result is somewhat coherent, I think, but also very, very stereotypical. I was going for that particular sound aesthetic, but was hoping for something more interesting.

In the end I am just glad I pulled through and had something to upload. Maybe it’s just one of those weeks.

Editor’s note

This is an odd one: I was really frustrated with it and the process was almost as painful as week 5, but it has since grown on me and I am actually quite happy with the end result. Not only that but it’s also one of my more successful tracks on Soundcloud which surprised me.

It is of course, heavily influenced by the sound of tracks like Baddadan with that super flat clap sound that seems to be the hype right now in D&B.

Week 10

halfbyte · WB2410 A Very Long Preset

For a while I wanted to do some actual ambient work. When playing around with the release version of Ableton 12 and the new Granulator III, I stumbled across this preset called Piano Quartz that on its own already started like half of a Nils Frahm song. (Don’t worry, I don’t want to belittle Nils Frahm, the other 50% are 99% of the work, and also, I love his music). It feels a bit like a cheat, but the result is quite soothing I think. I added some well hidden drums, some rainy ambience and a bit of noodling.

I know this is probably a bit of a downer after last weeks track, but I darn well do what I want here :)

Funny side note: My once beefy desktop machine can’t handle the 3-4 voice Granulator, I had to freeze the track which is fun on an 8 minute track.

Another funny side note: Standard encoding out of Ableton was resulting in a file too big for Weeklybeats.

Editor’s note

It still feels a little bit like Robert Henke actually wrote this song, but I am still quite happy with how this ended up. I wish I could have done something a bit more useful on top of the Granular Piano than my mindless noodling but again that’s both a question of time and also of how well stuff fits into the song in the end. I am quite happy with the drums, though.

Week 11

halfbyte · WB2411 This Is Not a Cake

Ooof, forgot to hit the submit button and only realised that late on monday. Now thankfully got a link to upload.

Another surprisingly long one. Heavily inspired by listening to too much Von D, but hopefully able to give it my own spin and atmosphere. Lots of different delays and reverbs, definitely not skimping out on the post processing.

It is developing slowly but I wouldn’t have it any other way in this case.

Editor’s note

On one hand I was relieved I was able to upload towards the end of the week thanks to the organisers of Weeklybeats, on the other hand I was so proud of this one that I was gutted that it wouldn’t get the attention a beat would normally get. On the other hand, it’s one of the more popular songs on Soundcloud, so I can’t really complain.

Week 12

halfbyte · WB2412 Stereo Type

I wanted to do this for a while, sort of to prove myself that I’m able to do it. I am somewhat ambiguous towards the lofi genre and do enjoy listening to the Girl’s stream from time to time, but I didn’t have to create this to figure out that most of those tracks are relatively low effort.

Still, it was fun to play around with some nice chord progressions and the lead melody.

Editor’s note

It’s one thing to try to crack a genre as a producer. As you can see from the variance in my music, it’s a common theme with me. I do have genres I feel more at home at (mainly because I made them for years or decades), but I am quite curious and use the weekly beats tracks often as a way to familiarize myself with this genre.

With Lofi, the rabbit hole gets a bit deeper. There’s a couple of things that make this challenging for me and a couple of things that make this “success” all the way more rewarding. The first thing is that I am really bad with music theory, with chord progressions and such and Lofi is all about that one nice chord progression you can then milk to death. This was probably the hardest part for me.

The other thing is that I am super aware of the fact that Lofi is now a very, very crowded genre and one, where “standing out” isn’t really what you’re aiming for and so a lot of it is really, really simple. Still it would probably help to know how to play some jazz guitar chords.

And lastly, I have this weird love/hate relationship with producing hip hop ish beats - When my brother got into beat making, I showed him all the tricks I knew and I taught him how to make music using Buzz, the tracker I used at the time.

And very quickly after that, he was making beats that were clearly better than what I had ever done. And as his bigger brother, this pissed me off and still does. I am getting much better at sampling (It’s just not something that lends itself well for weekly beats with having to clear samples etc.) and my hip hop chops do improve over time, but getting this beat to sound as good as it does while completely matching the stereotype of a Lofi beat made me really happy.

(Love you, bro, hope you’re finding your way back into beat making soon, too.)

Week 13

halfbyte · WB2413 Remember Me

Everyone was talking about the Amigo VST for the last few weeks and since I spent most of the 90’s in Protracker, and the price honestly made it a no-brainer, I picked it up. This track is supposed to be a slightly modernised throwback into the 90’s - gritty samples of questionable sources, distorted 808 basses, etc. etc.

I resampled a couple of synths into Amigo as well, notably the pad and the arp, to give it that grit. In the end I didn’t spend as much time with the drum editing as I expected as the sound of that more mellow melodic jungle didn’t need it.

This was fun and I think Amigo will part of my toolkit from now on. Definitely recommended.

Editor’s note

Not only due to the way AMIGO adds some nostalgic grit to the samples, but also due to the simplistic arrangement this very much has “Jan sitting in his bedroom hacking numbers into Protracker” vibes. I maybe should have used Renoise to build this, and maybe I will try to do that again later in the year but every time I try to actually use Renoise, I get bored really really quickly for some reason.

This song is a good reminder of the endless capabilities we have at our hand nowadays in terms of music production and that we were able to produce cool music with much, much less.

I’ve decided to split this up in a post for every quarter, so Q2 starts here.

Archiving a Web Application

2024-03-11T00:00:00+01:00

Last year in June, we sunset Artdoxa, an online arts platform I more or less worked on from its humble beginnings and have been the sole developer of for the last 11 years or so. The reason we took it offline is that while there were a couple of active users still using it, we never managed to get it to pay for itself and its owner (and quite frankly me as well) didn’t want to maintain and operate it at a loss.

When we finally took it offline, we had agreed on me spending a bit of time to try to create an archived version, fully functional in read only mode. This is what I am currently working on.

Your first instinct might be to just create a static version and still have a bit of time reserved this week for trying that, but it is “Web 2.0”-ish enough to get complicated with a ton of views that load subviews via jQuery-backed Ajax-requests.

So, the question is, how do you archive a Rails application in a way that you can hopefully start it up in 20, 50, maybe 100 years from now? (Not that I personally believe that computers in their current form make it into the 2100s)

While something like Docker would be an obvious choice, it is kind of problematic - It is still a bit of a moving target so regardless of if I use Docker under the hood to make the app run, I still probably need to seal Docker into a VM that pins the version of Docker.

Virtal Machines, but how?

My second idea would be something like VirtualBox, which would be good, because there are virtual machine image formats that can be exchanged between different VM hosts. But VirtualBox on its own has a very specific isssue: It is CPU dependent. Does that mean that I simply create two images, one for Intel, one for Arm? What happens if both of these CPUs are obsolete in 20 years from now? Given how bullish some people are on Open Source CPUs like RiscV, I don’t think it’s completely unwarranted to worry about that.

It seems to me that right now, targeting qemu is the best bet. We can use qemu-kvm on intel machines that quite frankly will probably be around for a long time and actual emulation on other CPU architectures where the emulation tax will probably be less and less of an issue.

Today, I, because I am more familiar with it, started to work on a VirtualBox VM and made the web application run on that, but I did choose vmdk as the virtual hard drive file format as it is the most compatible and should be usable in qemu.

Browsers

Now, the other thing that’s kind of an issue is the actual web browsers, because while most browsers are reasonably backwards compatible, given the current state of the web browser landscape, I don’t think it’s reasonable to bet on that for the next 100 years. So the idea is to make the image actually boot a graphical user interface and start up Firefox. There is the slight issue of expiring and self signed certificates but I guess that can be part of the documentation.

The challenges ahead

An interesting problem is that we’ve hosted the images of the artworks shared on Artdoxa on Amazon S3, as one does, but since we did try to cut down costs, we have migrated the bucket to Glacier deep archival - Instead I am working with a local copy of the files. A copy that is roughly worth half a terabyte. Which makes for a somewhat unwieldy VM disk image. Especially if I want to store it on a disk that is supposed to be read on as many future and past operating systems as possible. If you’re currently thinking “oh no, he isn’t…” - Yeah, I am running this off of a FAT disk. Luckily, vmdk has a dedicated FAT mode where its splitting up the disk file into chunks that are 2GB in size at most. I am currently copying the files into the VM using SCP and it is fun to see the image files growing and growing, but let me tell you one thing: A FAT backed vmdk is not exactly the fastest hard drive emulation you can imagine. So I’ll let this run over night I guess.

The Artdoxa homepage had a fun little gizmo: The artwork of the day, calculated on a simple algorhythm that would include views and likes, I think. As a hommage to our sunset, I decided it would display the artwork of the day of the 21st of June for ever but I need to clean up the database a bit to remove the few days the background job ran on after I switched off the website. I don’t want to know how many forgotten servers run cron jobs for applications that are long gone and happily send out emails to irritated users :)

I am still debating if I should try to make this archive available publicly. This would mean that I would need to scrub personal details out of the database, though, so I will most definitely only do this if I can find some extra time. I guess a static version would lend itself much more easily to that.

Tomorrow I will try to turn this VirtualBox image into something I can run in qemu or, failing that, take the lessons I learned today and do everything again.

It is a fun challenge and I am quite happy that am able to spend some time on this to do it right.

Sublime Text on Ubuntu the right way

2024-03-04T00:00:00+01:00

Recently, I went back from using Visual Studio Code almost exclusively to using Sublime Text for most of my editing work. I’m a paying customer (And have been using the most excellent Sublime Merge as my git GUI of choice all the way through, as I found the VS Code git integration a bit lacking). Also I have to set up this new machine (More on that in another blog post) and so I am going through all of the tools I need and figuring out how to best install them on this machine.

For years now the official instructions on how to install Sublime Text and Sublime Merge are somewhat wrong. The reason is that Ubuntu (And, I believe, Debian as well) have changed the way the GPG keys are supposed to be stored and referenced for third party repositories. I am still not 100% sure why this change, that actually makes installing software from third party repositories so much harder, was neccessary, but there are probably good security reasons for it.

In any case, by taking inspiration from the official Docker instructions I was able to cobble together the instructions to do this in the “official” way on modern Ubuntu.

I thought it would be useful to have a version available that explains this line by line and thus make it applicable to other cases.

Let’s start with setting up the necessary tools (it’s very likely you have these packages installed, but better be safe than sorry):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl

Next, we’re using the install command as a slightly nicer version of mkdir -p to create a keyrings directory that will hold our gpg key

sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings

Next, let’s actually download the key and make it generally available

sudo curl -fsSL https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-pub.gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/sublime.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/sublime.asc

Quick note: SublimeHQ does not provide instructions on how to validate the GPG key. But if you’re well versed with gpg, you should be able to figure that out.

Next comes the interesting part: The actual apt source configuration, which will contain the path to the keyring file, so that apt knows how to validate the sources.

echo \                                     
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/sublime.asc] https://download.sublimetext.com/ apt/stable/" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sublime-hq.list > /dev/null

After that, we can just update apt and install the packages:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install sublime-text sublime-merge

I’ll try to make SublimeHQ update their instructions but I am not very helpful that this will happen quickly.

Redesign, Schmedesign

2023-05-26T00:00:00+02:00

If you have read my blog before, you may have noticed I have completely overhauled and stripped down the design of this page. I am not 100% happy with it but the branch was lying around for so long that I finally pulled myself together, fixed the worst stuff and just hit the button.

There are a few things still missing but this should be good enough for now.

And yes, this is the third post with this headline. The first one is from 2011 and the second one is from 2014.