I no longer carry my laptop home most days, just an Android tablet. To be able to blog with that setup, I installed Termux which provides a nice self-contained Linux environment with Apt to install more software goodies. The "Hacker Keyboard" makes vim and the command line more usable on a tablet and now I can quite comfortably edit blog entries in Markdown, commit and push to the server where Pelican re-builds the HTML site automatically.

For blogging pictures and URLs, they can be shared to Termux from other Adroid apps, I just had to drop a small script that writes the URL from the clipboard to a text file.

Germany is about to get a new president. He — yes, the position has been male-exclusive so far — does have mostly representative duties and not much power, and gets elected by an extended parliarment. Since the majority parties already have agreed upon a common candidate, current foreign minister Steinmeier, he is most likely to succeed president Gauck.

The reason I write this is the question asked by SpiegelOnline in their pay-walled section (not worth a link): Can Steinmeier's wife keep her job as a judge when she becomes "first lady"?

What the hell, SpOn? Well done propagating the antiquated norm that women should give up their careers whenever it fits the husband. What about asking whether Steinmeier can take the job, if his wife's profession really poses a conflict of interest?

Uppsala university recently published this Festschrift that lists all newly installed professors. As cover they chose an image that made me stop short: a single male surrounded by a flock of females. Not exactly what one would expect in usually quite gender-aware Swedish academia. It gets worse once you read the description that enlightens us that there is indeed only one professor in the picture, the man. And that the others are a "group of women from the Orient". Oh, dear!

However, I think there is a way to read all this sympathetically. The caption tells us further that the chaired professorship held by the man in the image is about semitic languages, which explains the connection to "oriental women" shortly after the second world war. Also, this chair is one of the positions newly filled by a women included in the booklet. So, benevolently, the message of the cover image can be read as "Look at how things were a few decades ago, and look inside for how much more equal they are today."

I remember it blew my mind a little in high-school, that loudspeakers and microphones are the same thing, in principle. A membrane with a magnet and a coil that you either use to drive or to measure.

It should therefore maybe not come as a surprise that the headphones that you plug into your computer can be used to spy on you.

I disabled some of my social media accounts and want to use this blog some more instead. To that end it was about time to stream-line my pusblishing process here, lowering the mental threshold. After writing a new entry, I would up to now build the site locally and then sync the output to the server. The commit to the git-repository was optional.

Now, I commit and push with git, directly to the server which updates the repo, rebuilds and syncs locally to the place where the webserver expects its files. There are many ways people do this, the following is what I found the simplest for now.

Have a git repository on the server that you push into. Let this be a standard repo, not a bare one. Set the option git config --local receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead inside of it. This will update the current branch working files instead of refusing to receive the push. Since we never edit files here, the tree will always be clean, so it can be updated.

Then add a script at .git/hooks/post-receive which is a hook that gets executed after the repository received the push. Mine looks like this:

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#!/bin/sh
cd ..
pelican -q -s publishconf.py && rsync -a output/* ../tmy.se

This builds the static html files with Pelican and then syncs them to the place where the webserver expects them.One could point the webserver directly to output/, in principle. But the built process takes half a minute for me during which the main index file is missing and the website would be offline.

Also note the cd .. in the script above, which is there because the working directory that the scripts gets run in seems to be the .git/ subdirectory. This is contrary to the git docs which claim that hooks get started in the root directory for non-bare repos.

I was in Munich the other week.

You certainly have heard of the term mansplaining, meaning to condescendingly explain something while falsely assuming the explainee is ignorant of the subject matter; typically executed by a male on a female.

While this certainly exists and is often pointed out rightfully (and hilariously), there is a related aspect that I think should not be confused with mansplaining. Remember this old XKDC:

Combined it with the attitude that we all know very little, that it is fun to learn new things and that there is no prestige involved in knowing more or less, we can easily find ourselves "involuntarily mansplaining". This situation, even if it lacks the misjudgment of expertise and the condescension, can be perceived as mansplaining.

Should it? Maybe. After all, in this case, the explainer has misconceved not the knowledge of the explainee, but the mind set and presence of the aforementioned attitude, resulting in a failure of human interaction. On the other hand, we might not want to stifle open exchange of ideas too much by being afraid of appearing mansplaining.