Tag Archives: Rust

#weeklyreview 10/2025

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Last week was a week of crazily beautiful sundowns. Clear skies and city scenery made for some spectacular photos.

A cityscape at sunset with vibrant hues of purple, pink, and orange filling the sky. Silhouettes of trees and a building are in the foreground, and a prominent tower is visible on the horizon. The building has multiple balconies, some with lights on.
A city street at sunset with vibrant orange and pink hues in the sky. Contrails cross the sky above tall buildings, and the Berlin TV Tower is visible in the distance. Cars and a tram are moving along the wet street, and a bare tree is silhouetted against the colorful sky.
City street at sunset with colorful sky featuring intersecting contrails. The skyline includes tall buildings and a distinctive tower. Traffic lights are visible, and some cars are on the road.

Hacker Stammtisch

Tuesday was this month session of the old nerds. There were animated discussion about a IT cooperative. One friends bugs us since years with that idea. It sounds nice and some of us kinda do have this with our self-hosting efforts at a small and family scale. But I doubt this can take off commercially. If you offer IT services to companies and need to respect SLAs and all the regulatory requirements it quickly becomes involved and expensive. Or someone is being exploited …

Plate of breaded schnitzel topped with a lemon wedge, served with potatoes. A glass of beer and a mug with utensils are in the background, alongside a bowl of salad.

Crocusses

On Friday I used to good whether to have a walk over the nearby cemetery. We can see it from our balcony and I could tell it’s full or crocuses.

A vibrant field of purple crocus flowers with orange centers, growing densely in a lush green meadow. The foreground is in sharp focus, while the background is softly blurred, creating a depth effect.
Close-up of a small patch of flowers featuring a blue blossom in the foreground and light purple crocuses with orange centers in the background, surrounded by green grass and brown undergrowth.
A cluster of blooming purple and white crocus flowers with bright orange stamens, emerging from the sunlit ground amidst dry grass.

Glorious mug

A friend gifted me this glorious golden mug for always bringing tea for our winter swimming group. Isn’t it gorgeous?

A reflective, gold-colored mug held in a hand, filled with frothy beverage, against a blurred outdoor background of grass and trees.

Rust programming

I also continued working on my little Rust program to batch upload images to Pixelfed. Adding support for various options to generate the image descriptions.

I gave up on trying to write the whole thing with help of tools like ChatGTP, Claude or Copilot. It just doesn’t work in my eyes. As soon as stuff gets more complex, one spends more time explaining context and functionality to the tools than writing code. I’m only using some help for short functions and lines that needs fixing or alternatives. But just doing the good old RTFM and reading blog posts with examples and explanations seems still a more effective way to get this moving forward.

It’s not fully done yet, but the code is available in the branch “Ollama” on my repo.

#weeklyreview 47/2024

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Of course the week started with swimming (for this series of weekly reviews I’ll take the Sunday as start of the new week). Not all the way across the lake as it’s getting a little chilly in the water now and we didn’t had that much time.

Coding

while writing on last weeks review it nagged me that the WordPress blog posts don’t have image descriptions. I know it’s just me being lazy to put them in in the first place. But I’m meanwhile spoiled by IceCubes app which can autogenerate image descriptions.

So I started chatting with ChatGPT about writing a little helper program in Rust which would get an image description from the OpenAPI API and then upload the picture to my WordPress and put the description as well. It slowly took shape but didn’t quite get there apart from it getting late in my day …

A cartoon polar bear sits at a desk using a laptop, with a chalkboard in the background featuring a mix of symbols, drawings, and indecipherable text.
generated illustration with DiffusionBee

I was about to give up and sent a toot before closing my laptop. But then someone replied that they had more success with Claude.ai instead of ChatGPT for Rust programs.

↬mas.to/@ingenieur/113506074188779262

And indeed. The code seemed much better and I got a first working version that night. You can find the code and some pre-compiled binaries on my Forgejo instance.

To process multiple files I used a simple shell loop:

No thinking where to take this next. I’d like to update the image descriptions of the existing images in WordPress. Could do this from remote as well. But an actual WordPress plugin probably makes more sense here.

Other idea is to use a local LLM to generate the image description so you don’t need to upload the images to OpenAI.

This is really a rabbit hole. But programming is much more satisfying the herding cats as a project/program manager ….

And because self-hosting is fun … I also set up an instance of Asciinema. The “shell cast” above is an example of this.

Walking

Since the office gym is still closed I’m missing out on a lot of exercise 🙁

Started walking to the office more often. It’s a 4.5km walk in one direction. So adding up close to 10km of walking per day. Not too shabby. Now that the weather is turning colder and more rainy it’s even more fun 😉

A person wearing a coat and headphones stands outside looking up, with a gray sky overhead. Tree branches with leaves are visible on the left side of the image. It appears to be raining lightly, as droplets are visible on the coat.
A person walking on a sidewalk with one foot visible. The surface consists of large stone slabs on the left and a cobblestone pattern on the right. A few small leaves are scattered on the ground.
A man wearing a yellow raincoat, dark pants, and a black cap is taking a selfie in a mirrored elevator. The elevator doors and panels are metallic, and the man is holding a smartphone in his right hand.

Updated my nails again as the color faded and crackled.

A hand with bright red and rainbow-painted nails rests on a wooden table near a full beer bottle and a glass of beer, both placed on branded coasters. Another person's hand is visible in the background.

First snow

This week we finally had some snow. It didn’t stick in Berlin, but the on the countryside one actually had a thing white blanket over everything. Even when we arrived there on Friday evening there was still some snow on the sides and roofs. The low sun made for some incredible sundowns in the late afternoon.

A vibrant sunset illuminates the sky with shades of orange and pink above a dense cluster of trees with varying foliage colors, including dark greens and yellows. Some bare branches are visible, indicating a transition into autumn. The overall scene evokes a calm, serene atmosphere.

On Saturday we had our annual “Vereinsfeier” at the house of some friends. Always lovely to see the people from the village and have them bring all sorts of food and chat away into the night.

A pink deer head sculpture with lit candles on its antlers is placed on a wooden table beside a bowl filled with cables and papers.