Timo Zimmermann

I am getting close to the point where I have to do proper styling, proportion adjustments and other finishing touches for my Endirillia model before actually rigging it and getting it loaded into a 3D engine and hooking it up to my personal assistant. What I learned at this point is that a good reference sheet for a character helps a lot, but due to my rather limited artistic skills I decided to commission the work. My wife is an artist. One of our closest friends is making a living as an…

When I started remodeling my office things got a bit out of hand. Since I did not fancy setting up my workstation I simply connected the iPad to one of the Pro Display XDRs, pulled out the travel keyboard and trackpad and used it for a week as primary computing device. So far, so good — I already wrote about my experience using the iPad for software development last year when we got a major revamp of iPadOS. Not much has changed (except that my desk looked like a dumpster during the time of the…

I was fairly certain that I am done with Apple, Xcode and their developer experience. Yet here we are, having a CI job that needs to sign a binary. One thing I noticed using mostly web apps for my personal assistant is that I actually miss native apps. They just look and feel nicer. So, given that I cannot delete my dev account, why not use it and get a little app for my coding assistant going? I did most of my work for macOS and iOS in Objective-C, but I was there when Swift was released and…

It is time to give my personal AI access to more of my data, so it can start answering questions with context and in a more relevant way. As part of this I wanted to address something I have been thinking about for a long time, funneling most of my data into a searchable PostgreSQL database. Obviously this will not be your typical data warehouse, I do t expect more than a few gigabyte of data to accumulate over a year. The stack will be Python and PostgreSQL. I could certainly make…

For a very long time I was a triple screen enjoyer. Nicely symmetrical and it made it easy to split IDE, chat and documentation across multiple screens. When I got a Pro Display XDR I was on the fence if I should just keep one or two of the 5k LG displays around, but the difference in dpi was too noticeable and it threw me off. So I got a second Pro Display XDR. Turned out that was not the best idea (but not for the reasons you might think). First of all the XDR is amazing and I would not trade…

The amount of side quests I go on lately is getting a bit worrisome. One thing I recently started using Endirillia for is controlling Home Assistant. I added support for notifications when the washing machine or dryer are done to not just get Delta notifications. But what actually threw me off while adding stuff to automatons this week was adding two Govee LED bars behind the TV. I do not really care for RGB. But Govee has a good enough, consistent way to have a warm white with different…

One of my primary goals when starting my Sunday post series about working on LazerBunny was to have some references on how I think about some of the problems I am working on. Especially when newer technology I did not spend a few decades with is involved. And judging from some comments I got the series is very much appreciated by younger engineers. However, one common point people made was that I am not diving deeper into application layout and design. Let us fix that. I decided to pull the…

Okay, maybe I am a bit exaggerating in the title. It has been two years since I put Bazzite on my main gaming system. Two years feel like a pretty good time to take stock and see how the journey has been. There have been updates, major releases and new games, which covers most of the relevant things. Back when I put Bazzite on my system I did not expect it to last very long. I was mostly curious to see how well it will work out of the box and if I could recommend it to my non Linux-savvy…

After finding the time to get my Home Assistant to monitor when our washing machine and dryer are done I faced the next challenge. Sending a push notification to me and my wife. Luckily we are already using Delta Chat and there is something that resembles a complete library to send messages to people and a flag to set for bots. So, how hard can it be? I am a happy Pushover customer. Easily the best $5 I spent a few years ago to have a simple way to send a push notification to myself. Sure, I…

Next week Apple will likely introduce a foldable iPhone. For a long time I was pretty sure I will get one. I use my phone mostly for reading, but cannot stand reading books on it. On the other hand the iPad mini, which is roughly the form factor of the foldable, is exactly the size I want for books. Finally a new form factor other smartphone makers have already been supporting for eight years and the first time in five or six years a phone would have a new feature I care about. The last time -…

Sometimes things sound trivial until you have to live with them. I spend most of my day in my office on the first floor. The washing machine and dryer are in the basement. Which is pretty neat as you cannot hear them, but it also means you got no idea when they are done. And I was sick of walking downstairs two or three times or waiting for three minutes that turned into 6, because none of these devices can calculate the correct remaining time. I could technically give the appliances wifi…

In my ultimate yak shaving quest I started working on a shell. So far nothing new. I also added a file manager that is built into the shell or can be run standalone. Here is the thing I learned so far (beside how easy it is to mess up a terminal when putting it into "raw mode"): Having a single binary is pretty neat. I can scp to any server and have not just my shell with a few handy built in commands but also the file manager ready to go! The other app I use most of the time when connected to…

I have been a gamer for about three decades. Obviously I started very casual, as all kids do, and very quickly found interest in many different genres. I actually got pretty good at some of them if I may say so myself. And I have done pretty much everything related to gaming, from conventions, to helping organize LAN parties, to leading a clan and a guild. It has truly been a wild, joyful and fun ride. Over the first few years I played basically anything I could find and that was available on…

I have been using my personal AI assistant for a few weeks and it is working really well, after I figured out which models to deploy, how to exactly words the various tools and forcing at least one tool call for most interactions. There are some smaller annoyances, but overall things are working mostly as expected. To have a bit more of a personal touch and to make sure Endirillia is not just a brain dead chat bot, I added a user profile and facts. This part turned out to be surprisingly…

If this title does not make any sense to you at all that is fine. At the end of this post it will. Mostly. Maybe. Last week I wrote about rebuilding my blog. Looking back at nearly 27 years of blogging I have pretty strict opinions on the software I am using. Not having the first 18 years of archives anymore is one of the reasons I am pretty insistent on having data available, backed up and readable. (Technically I could extract the old posts, but as they are all written in German so it would…

When I am traveling I really enjoy traveling as light as possible. This means either bringing a laptop when I know I got some work to do or my iPad when I want to relax and disconnect. I prefer reading on an iPad over a laptop or a phone and I still have enough screen real estate to write a few emails if needed or SSH into my workstation or a server in case of an emergency. Now we all know I enjoy a good keyboard. And good keycaps. (Read: I despise typing on a glass surface.) I was shopping…

...is them working on their blogging software, static site generator and deployment pipelines. And once that is done, it is time to write about all of that and then never publishing another post again. Granted, that joke has been made too many times, but let us be honest… it is not really wrong. I am guilty of that as well, but at least I try to write somewhat regularly. This does not mean I don’t occasionally enjoy over-engineering my little corner of the Internet. It has been some time since…

There is currently a number from Statcounter making the rounds that Linux has surpassed 10% market share in North America. I would not necessarily believe that number – and yet I think there are some really good signs for Linux on the desktop becoming more and more relevant. Now, I am not saying to not trust Statcounter... well, that is actually exactly what I am saying. They are known for having abysmal reporting (such as the macOS and OSX market share shown in one of the graphs). But even…

My file manager is coming along nicely. I am getting more comfortable with bubbletea and lipgloss. This means (aside from fixing one or two smaller bugs) I can start adding useful features and start refactoring the code a bit. I am not a big fan of putting everything into one 500 line Update method, so pulling apart ever growing functions was number one on the todo list. I was going back and forth if I should add two different structures, one for a regular directory list and one for previews or…

I spent so many hours in IRC in the late 90s and early 2000s. I have seen the netsplits, the drama, the communities that formed. And it was such a fun time. I have seen the IRC client wars, people flaming mIRC users, irssi becoming popular and in a screen session making bouncers feel less relevant to be able to stay up to date with channel activities. One of my most fun memories has to be on a New Years Eve when someone I talked to for years (but had never met in person) randomly pinged me if I…

I was going back and forth for some time how lightweight my shell will be. I ended on the decision to bake everything into the binary I need to be productive, except for some tools too large to reproduce. So Neovim is safe, I will not try to rewrite it on a weekend - what a disappointment for the orange site I visit sometimes. But what certainly made it into the codebase is a file manager. I often find myself moving a good amount of files around. Sure, I can remember how to use find or install…

We live near a pre school and an elementary school. Each morning when walking Triss we see kids and their parents on their way to drop off the little ones. And the majority of parents simply walk straight across the street. The Main Street of the town, not the most traffic, but still some traffic. And you'd think: Timo, why would that matter, you have to get across the street somehow. True, but 20 meters down the road is a crosswalk. It is right on the way, and you do not gain anything by not…

It has been round about six months since I started working on [LazerBunny][lb]. Which means I am getting close to the point where I want to evaluate my progress and do a little mini retrospective to see if any of the effort and time that went into it was actually worth it. Not in the classical project management sense of identifying sunken cost fallacies and self-flagellation, but more a curious look at which parts were the most fun and where I might want to invest more time in. I started with…

I mentioned in a previous post that I am working on a CalDav server (creative as always I named it LazerBunny cal), to take control of my appointments and calendaring needs. The first iteration was working decently well with Apple Calendar. During this week I fixed a few issues making it also work nicely with any calendar app that uses Evolution as its backend. There were actually not many changes needed to make this work. Authentication, hitting the endpoints, all of this worked well. But…

I am closing in on 30 years in the industry. One thing I did not imagine when I just started out was that the list of “things I have seen” would constantly grow over the decades. How naive I was, believing people know what they are doing, management making decisions based on data and the market not being a dice roll for who can lie the best. On the bright side this makes for some really good stories. Usually these are stories to share over a scotch or two. To help people save face. To not…

As I was working on new tools for my personal assistant this week, I ended up adding web search and thereby getting the content of a website to the toolbox. Automating anything web related in 2026 is a pretty annoying experience, and with good reason. It is understandable that website owners add scraping safeguards, considering the state of the web. Luckily, when you build tools to behave well, things are manageable. There are two parts to adding "the web" as a data source to an LLM, no matter…

Valve announced the Steam Machine and its price(s), causing much unrest online. Some saw it coming, some are disappointed, some have a more realistic view that this is the price of non-subsidized hardware in 2026. I think the price is fine for what you get, but you should not be paying it if you are comfortable building a computer yourself. Let’s put the Steam Machine into perspective. When you buy one you get a console-like experience with the ever growing catalog of Steam. But you also get a…

There are good ideas, bad ideas and the ideas I get when sitting on a couch holding the paw of my dog for two weeks (while she is recovering from surgery). One thing I am really not a fan of is the current landscape of CalDav servers. So what better to do than read some RFCs while a coding agent bootstraps a “kind of not working but close enough” skeleton that I can make actually work in between treats, all the pets required for recovery and "who is the best girl?! YOU ARE THE BEST GIRL!".…

Sometimes I wonder why things are more complicated than they have to be. I have donated to Gamers Outreach in the past, multiple times, so I obviously receive their newsletter. I also follow some VTubers, some are great musicians, some voice actors, some are just entertaining and happen to play the niche of games I enjoy watching on the side. Some are, according to my wife, "absolutely unhinged and need to be kept away from children" (one of them she said that about is a mother of four). (Note…

It has been nearly 6 years since I last made any significant changes to my video call and conference setup. Back then I ditched the Logitech Brio (which sometimes showed odd behavior on macOS) and got an HDMI-USB adapter and a Canon DLSR camera. While this setup might be a bit overkill, it worked really well and the video quality was great. In the beginning, getting the Canon to work was a bit of a challenge. While the camera provides a clean HDMI output (without all the additional data people…