dit und dat

I worked for a large Ger­man soft­ware com­pa­ny as Chief User Design Expert. My edu­ca­tion­al back­ground is in cog­ni­tive and edu­ca­tion­al psy­chol­o­gy with a lit­tle bit of com­put­er sci­ence. After almost 30 years of con­sult­ing on UI imple­men­ta­tion and visu­al design, on con­cepts and inno­va­tions as UI/UX design­er, man­ag­er, archi­tect, prod­uct expert, I start­ed my ear­ly retire­ment phase in 2020.

In 2023 I reac­ti­vat­ed my old domain ileif.de and since then I write some stuff about my non-pro­fes­sion­al life with this com­put­er stuff. At the same time when I resume writ­ing blog posts again, I dis­cov­ered Obsid­i­an, which I have used since then for col­lect­ing and pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion to pre­pare my arti­cles here. It has also become one of my main top­ics of inter­est.

Anoth­er area will be script­ing lan­guages. Alos work­ing for near­ly 30 years in the soft­ware com­pa­ny I lost my active pro­gram­ming skills, which I had in the 70th and 80th, in Basic, Elan, Pas­cal, Lisp and as well in Hyper­card. So this is the next big top­ic, using script­ing in Python or any shell script­ing lan­guage to reac­tive these skills a lit­tle bit, because script­ing seems a good domain for this. With the advent of AI tools like Chat­G­PT, an inter­ac­tive and edu­ca­tion­al way to rebuild these skills has opened up.

Nev­er­the­less, this blog is pri­mar­i­ly meant to be a place where I can save one thing or anoth­er (dit und dat, as they say in my birth Ger­man home­town) and make it acces­si­ble from any­where. Of course I’m hap­py if I can help oth­ers with this “dit und dat”.

The top­ics I want to cov­er here will main­ly revolve around the use of soft­ware and hard­ware. I may be what is com­mon­ly called an Apple fan­boy, but I also use Win­dows, Lin­ux and Android. So maybe I will cov­er these things as well.

Some disclaimer

No cook­ies will be placed on your brows­er when you browse this site. How­ev­er, my posts may con­tain links to oth­er web­sites or web ser­vices that may cre­ate cook­ies when you click on them or, depend­ing on your brows­er set­tings, when you pre­view them. I am not respon­si­ble for this. Please dis­able the cor­re­spond­ing func­tions in your brows­er if you wish.

The con­tents of my web­site are com­piled to the best of my knowl­edge and belief. How­ev­er, I am not immune to false reports or the like. If you notice any­thing that is not cor­rect, please let me know by e‑mail or in the com­ments to the arti­cles. Thank you very much.

For arti­cles that con­tain pro­gram­ming instruc­tions and/or oth­er instruc­tions such as tips and tricks, I take no respon­si­bil­i­ty for any dam­age to your equip­ment. I will not pub­lish any­thing that I have not tried on my own equip­ment first. How­ev­er, I can­not exclude the pos­si­bil­i­ty that your equip­ment may behave dif­fer­ent­ly in cer­tain con­stel­la­tions.

The texts are sub­ject to the usu­al copy­right. If you want to use them, please con­tact me. This also applies to the most of pic­tures on the web­site. The arti­cle images are done with the help of sev­er­al image AI pro­gramms.

Last­ly, I’d like to men­tion that Eng­lish isn’t my first lan­guage. Indeed, I was not good at Eng­lish in school. Work­ing in an inter­na­tion­al com­pa­ny required me to learn to com­mu­ni­cate inten­sive­ly in Eng­lish, but with­out reg­u­lar prac­tice in speak­ing and writ­ing, I find I’m los­ing these skills a bit. The role of my native-speak­ing col­leagues has evolved towards AI tools, I now rely on trans­la­tion tools and AI like Chat­G­PT to aid in my Eng­lish writ­ing. Although these tools help cor­rect things I’ve got­ten wrong before, they will not catch all my mis­takes. So, I apol­o­gize for any errors in advance.