Hi! I'm Erik.

Building a Study App with Mistral LLM using Claude AI

AI helped me use AI

Has AI killed writing? Maybe not, but it has certainly made some forms of content creation feel less important. Why bother putting work into writing a text, creating an illustration, or writing a program, when an AI can do it better and faster? This hardly helps inspiration and I find coming up with ideas - like things to write on this blog! - much harder. On the other hand, maybe AI is indeed the "bicycle of the mind" and we can use it to our advantage. If I have no ideas at the moment, maybe AI can help us? Perhaps it can even implement that idea, at least to some degree. Let's see what our LLM friend Claude can come up with and what we can learn along the way.

Telldus Tellstick: Simple Scheduler with Lua

Because scheduling is...fun

Home automation is nothing I personally go overboard with, but sometimes it's convenient to have lights turn on and off by a schedule. Several years ago, I bought a Telldus Tellstick ZNet Lite V2 for this exact purpose. While the device could do more, I have simply used it to control smart plugs that turn on or off depending on the current time as well as the times for sunrise and sunset. However, I recently discovered that scheduling has been remotely disabled by the manufacturer. While you used to be able to use an app to set up a schedule, the app now tells you that using a schedule requires a premium subscription. Turning the lights on or off manually using the app is still possible but since I purchased the device to use its scheduler, this change pretty much defeats the purpose of owning the device in the first place. Luckily, the Tellstick does offer the possibility to run custom Lua scripts, which you can write and upload yourself. Let's write us a scheduler!

Android: Using a USB sound card as wired headphones adapter

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid

It's hardly any news that several big phone manufacturers are trying to kill off the standard 3.5mm audio jack in favor of their own Bluetooth headphones. And if you want to keep using your favorite wired headphones, they are happy to sell you an adapter so that you can connect them to the charging port of the phone. So a win for them, but if you don't want to play that game, it could be useful to know that - at least with many (most?) Android devices - you can use a standard USB sound card as a 3.5mm audio adapter. I happened to have a couple of them collecting dust, so all I had to do was to plug one in, and it worked! Granted, since it's a USB-A sound card, I also needed a USB-C adapter so it's a rather bulky solution. Not always great when you are out and about, but for connecting to hifi equipment at home, it gets the job done.

Windows Remote Desktop: Use Subset of Monitors

The missing checkbox

If you use Remote Desktop (RDP) in Windows and have three or more monitors, you probably have noticed that there is no option to select only some of the monitors. So if you have three monitors and only want to use two of them, you are out of luck - the application only seems to support either exactly one monitor, or all three. But fear not - there is a hidden option for using a subset of monitors. And as an added bonus: I wrote a little PowerShell script to automate setting it up. Read on for more.

Retro PC Emulation with 86Box

Your Voodoo card is now ready for download

When was the golden age of PC gaming? Some might say it's now, some that it hasn't happened yet, but I know what I think - it started in around 1997 and it's still going strong. In 1997, the 3Dfx Voodoo graphics accelerator had gained widespread adoption, bringing fast 3D graphics to the masses, we had CPUs such as the Pentium MMX with 233 MHz, and some really good games were released. While we may not be able to relive our childhood, we can at least relive the games. Older games may not run on a modern operating system, however, but with an emulator such as 86Box, we can not only get old games to work, we can get pretty much the whole experience. Read on for how - and why! - you can set up your very own retro gaming machine.

Mounting Old Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo on AM4 CPU the DIY Way

Full jank

I recently upgraded from an Intel CPU to an AMD Ryzen and while it came with a cooler, I wanted to stick with the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo that I was already using. However, I had an older revision and the mounting bracket did not fit the AM4 motherboard. But since the solution to the problem was basically just a matter of fitting a round peg into a square hole, I figured it could be a fun challenge.

Rolling Your Own Frontend JS Framework

For fun and (no) profit

(TL;DR I built a framework just for fun, please do not use, check it out here!) There is no shortage of frontend JS frameworks, and they seemlingly never keep coming. Trying to keep up with every new framework on the block for the last decade or so has proven to be an exercise in futility, resulting in what can be best described as framework fatigue. But instead of trying to fight about which of the frameworks released this week is the best (and why everyone should make the switch), it could be a fun experience to approach the subject from a different angle by building your own framework. Let's dive in.

Self-hosting your website on a Raspberry Pi Zero

Because you can

If you pay a visit now and then to Hacker News, you might have noticed that two topics that keep coming up are the old web, and self hosting. The old web, because the web used to be better than today, and self hosting, because individuals have too little control, and the big corporations too much, and we can change that balance by hosting our content ourselves. Whether true or not, self hosting your own website is usually pretty easy can be a fun exercise to setup and run. Let's dive in.

Icon Maker Rewrite... again

Third time's a charm

Web front-end technologies have been moving fast the last few years and trying to keep up has been exhausting. As an alternative to libraries and frameworks such as React and Angular, I recently started looking into web components. While the developer experience of modern tools can be great, they also bring in things you may not want. A React app may have thousands of dependencies, and any problems with those dependencies may break the app - or at least give you annoying deprecation warnings. Web components along with ES6 modules can provide a nice alternative as they are based on web standards and as such, should not break easily. Also: No dependencies, and no build! I find them a bit cumbersome to work with compared to React and friends, but I hope they will make up for it over time. So I re-implemented the icon maker using web components, go check it out!

Removing jQuery

Because everyone likes vanilla

In 2006, jQuery was released. It was quite a game changer, providing a terse syntax that allowed for quick front-end development, resulting in scripts that behaved consistently across browsers - in a time when Internet Explorer 6 was still king.

Fast forward 15 years, and jQuery is used by millions of web sites - paradoxally, in a time when web developers since long have considered jQuery a legacy library of the past. The browsers have definitely come a long way since 2006, and many of the problems that jQuery set out to solve may not actually be problems anymore. Modern JavaScript natively provides much of the functionality jQuery offers, and IE6 and the likes are long gone. So as an exercise, why not try to replace jQuery with plain JavaScript (AKA Vanilla JS) and see if that promise has come true? I did so on this very website and had some interesting findings. Read on for more.