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Goodbye Snapchat

Marius Timmer — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:14:42 +0100

Even though the Digital Independence Day (German only) was over two weeks ago and the next one is still almost two weeks away, I decided to break the pattern and deleted Snapchat from my phone. The account still exists, but the app is no longer on my device. Unlike other messaging apps (e.g., Instagram), the chance of me reinstalling it in a moment of weakness is extremely low—I never really understood Snapchat anyway.

What’s the Point of Snapchat?

I’ve asked myself this question many times. You could exchange messages, photos, and videos with friends, but so can every other messenger. In the early days, it was revolutionary that recipients could only view images and videos once, or that screenshots weren’t possible. But all of that has been caught up by time (and other apps).

All Your Friends on a Map

At some point, the so-called Snap Map was introduced, showing the locations of all your friends around the world. From my perspective, this isn’t a selling point for Snapchat. While you can appear as a “ghost” to hide your location, I simply revoked the app’s permission to access my location. However, this just leads to a constant prompt asking for location access every time you open the app—almost like an endurance sport.

Tabloid-Level Content

Around the same time, a new section was added where posts from other users are suggested. To me, this part was absolute trash. The content presented there is so shallow that even tabloid headlines seem profound in comparison. Often, the principle seemed to be “sex sells.” On top of that, there were almost daily friend requests from people (or rather bots) you don’t know. If you took the trouble to accept them and ask where you knew each other from, you’d often get shady responses from salespeople.

Not for Kids

What I find worst about the app is that it’s primarily targeted at children and teenagers. If I had kids, I wouldn’t want them using it. So, you might wonder why I even had Snapchat in the first place.

My Experience

When I downloaded Snapchat back in 2014, none of this nonsense existed yet. My impression of the app was mixed—I suspected most users only used the “view once” feature for questionable content. Over time, I noticed people in my circle sending each other “snaps.” Most of these were selfies with funny filters applied. One of the most popular filters added dog ears. Looking back, it was all rather cringe, but that was just how things were back then. Nowadays, these selfies are rarely sent. Often, the phone just clamors for attention; you tap the icon and see blurry, meaningless images of the floor with even more meaningless text overlaid. My brother told me that nowadays, people just send the text “RS,” which apparently stands for “resnap” or something. This is the peak of mindlessness. It’s no longer about communicating with others, but just about staying active in the app so the flames don’t go out. These flames appear when people send each other pictures or videos daily. If you forget one day, the flames disappear. If that bothers you, you can pay real money to reignite the flames and pretend nothing happened. It’s empty, meaningless, and the pinnacle of exploitation.

So, that’s my take on Snapchat. Saying goodbye isn’t hard for me. The few people I kept in touch with through the app now message me on WhatsApp, Telegram, or Mastodon. I can only advise you: Delete Snapchat from your phone. If your kids have it installed, try to delete it there too—though I suspect that will take a bit more convincing.

Ich find's cool, dass du RSS benutzt ;-)

Polarlights in January

Marius Timmer — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:35:24 +0100

Last night, a friend sent me a few snapshots he had taken with his cell phone, letting me know that the northern lights were visible. I had noticed them several times in recent months, but had never managed to photograph them properly.

Faster than you think

In no time at all, I grabbed my Canon M50 and tripod, put in the battery and a fresh SD card, and tried my luck. The first pictures were indeed underwhelming. Mainly, I could see a sky that wasn’t completely black, with two tree tops in front of it. Even before I had set the exposure time to 8 seconds, I noticed that the green glow had already moved and was barely visible. I always find it fascinating how quickly the northern lights move.

Fortunately, I had seen more shimmering directly to the northeast—even better: green and red colors stretched across the horizon. There, I managed to take a few nice pictures showing several streaks. I’ll share my two favorites with you here, even though the internet is already full of photos of the aurora borealis.

View from my kitchen window

Several bands of color from the aurora borealis

Ich find's cool, dass du RSS benutzt ;-)

Snowfall in winter

Marius Timmer — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:25:24 +0100

View of Laer

The Weather Service warned us

The new year started with temperatures below freezing. So, the first snow of winter arrived - not a lot, but just a little. During the week, the German Weather Service (DWD) announced that heavy snow was expected over the weekend, with repeated thawing and freezing, making everything extremely slippery. As a result, schools in Lower Saxony (the federal state which lays northern of us) were closed on Friday. To be safe, I worked from home that day.

Surprising reality

As it turned out, the storm was far less severe than initially feared. Even though train services were suspended in some parts of the country (which happens every winter anyway), people managed just fine. Of course, I can only speak for Laer (my village), but once the snowplows had cleared the roads, it was actually quite nice: a white landscape, sunshine, and roads that weren’t even very slippery. Our driveway stayed icy for a while longer, but even that wasn’t too bad.

Personally, I’m enjoying the weather. The white landscape looks amazing, and in recent years, there’s been far too little snow. I just took a photo so you can see how “much” snow we got. This way, winter is actually quite bearable.

If it’s snowed where you are, enjoy the weather! If you’ve had problematic amounts of snow, I wish you good luck getting through it. Now, I’m off to scrape the ice off my car.

Ich find's cool, dass du RSS benutzt ;-)

RSS is cool

Marius Timmer — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 22:14:27 +0100

I’ve Watched a Video

I’ve just watched the latest Technology Connections video on YouTube. I watch most of his videos and really like them since they are always a great start to a new rabbit hole.

What the Video Was About (very short)

This time, he spoke about how we are increasingly letting the algorithms choose what we see on the internet, which is obviously a bad thing. I think one of the biggest issues might be the danger of doom scrolling and wasting a lot of time doing nothing. He explains that there is a personal feed on YouTube which only shows videos from channels you are subscribed to. I have to admit that I didn’t know that. I used this to check which channels I was subscribed to and made a few modifications. After realizing that I had indeed lost a lot of time watching videos I didn’t even want to see in the first place, I hope to use that personalized feed more often now.

My Thoughts

Some of my friends might have heard before that I really like RSS feeds. They allow me to only read news I really want to read. No clickbait titles or even ads. It is the feeling of freedom that amazes me so much. I am in control of the feeds I am “subscribing” to by putting the feeds’ URLs into my RSS reader—that’s it. No suggested articles about things I am not interested in.

I love podcasts. One more cool thing about RSS is that it is the default format for publishing podcasts, which means I can not only subscribe to my favorite news or blogs but also to podcast series! If social media platforms supported RSS (which wouldn’t be a hard thing to do), it would be pretty easy to add the posts of my favorite people there too. I’ve heard that some platforms already support it, but I guess most providers like Twitter or Meta just have no reason to support RSS since it would only move people away from those doom-scrolling platforms.

Last night, I added a few of my favorite news, blogs, and podcasts to my RSS reader (Akregator on PC and Feeder on my phone). I am super curious to see how this will affect my screen time and even the amount of traffic on my devices. I will report back as soon as I have more information about that.

My Blog as RSS feed

Just in case you already use a RSS reader yourself, this is where you can find my posts: feed

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Leave Twitter!

Marius Timmer — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0100

Preface

I started writing this post three weeks ago, but it still hasn’t made it to the blog. However, the topic hasn’t lost any of its relevance, so it’s not too late to publish it.

Twitter is Broken

At first, I wanted to list a long series of reasons why Twitter is no longer what it once was and why there are reasons not to be present there anymore. But all these reasons have been obvious for a long time and don’t really need to be explained in detail. After the takeover by Elon Musk more than two years ago, the platform has gone downhill. Engineers critical to the infrastructure were laid off, the blue verification was introduced for money, and in the name of “free expression,” the entire platform became even more repulsive than it ever was. A similar fate has befallen alternatives like Facebook and even Instagram.

The Man Behind It

The once-existing culture of discussion has given way to a repulsive blob of hate and fake news. Since I started running my own Mastodon instance, I have said goodbye to this platform and only toot on Mastodon. The fact that this content change was not accidental but explicitly desired and brought about is also becoming increasingly obvious. The best reason to renounce this platform is that every call to a Twitter page (which, by the way, runs into a paywall for outsiders) gives money and attention to the company and, above all, the person behind it, which is misplaced. The person Musk should not be supported. It’s no coincidence that more and more Tesla drivers are ashamed of this personnel issue—rightly so.

Alternatives

Of course, I advise everyone to become a Mastodon user. However, I can understand that the entire ecosystem seems overwhelming and initially discourages new users. But even if you delete your Twitter account and switch to BlueSky or Pleroma instead, you’ve already gained a lot. The fact that unregistered people can no longer see tweets will hopefully lead to an even faster demise of the platform.

Ich find's cool, dass du RSS benutzt ;-)

OTRS does not sign Admin notifications

Marius Timmer — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 23:00:00 +0100

What Exactly Is My Problem?

From time to time, I need to apply spontaneous updates to our OTRS system or make other unforeseen fixes. Regular system updates are done via crontab once a week during the night, so that the subsequent reboot causes as little disruption as possible to agents. However, if it is necessary to shut down the service for a few minutes, I always inform all agents beforehand. I first enable System Maintenance to inform agents who are actively working. Most importantly, I also send an admin notification to all agents in the system. In our instance, this currently involves over 800 users, so I need to allow some time for the emails to be delivered on time. So far, I’ve always done well with an hour’s notice, but I know that some agents are not pleased with this.

As the data center of the University of Münster, we take security and integrity very seriously. Therefore, we’ve been encouraging our users to use S/MIME for email communication for years. This includes sending emails with signatures by default, but especially ensuring that incoming emails have a valid signature.

That’s why it’s so embarrassing that, after sending each admin notification, some colleagues ask if the email was legitimate because it wasn’t signed.

Why Sign Admin Notifications?

There are several reasons why securing email communication is important. On one hand, it’s crucial when dealing with targeted attacks – such as social engineering. But it can also be important for mass emails. There’s a reason spam emails, which are sent in bulk, are never signed. My specific use case is, of course, much smaller, with fewer than a thousand users. However, it’s easy to imagine that an attacker could exploit a compromised email account in this way. Instead of informing all users that the system will be unavailable for a few minutes, the attacker could instead ask users to send an email with their login credentials to “verify” them – admittedly a crude attempt, but in doubt, it only takes one person to fall for it.

A signature legitimizes an email and assures the recipient that the message was sent both from the admin account and the owner of the certificate.

Furthermore, what kind of message does it send about us as a data center, which always recommends users to use SSL certificates, yet doesn’t implement it themselves? That’s quite awkward and needs to be corrected as soon as possible.

My Possible Solution

The situation becomes even more absurd when you consider that OTRS is fully capable of managing and using S/MIME certificates (and the associated keys). Incoming emails show the SSL signature status in the ticket overview, and encrypted emails can also be decrypted by OTRS. Conversely, OTRS can sign and encrypt outgoing emails if the recipient’s certificate is known.

In general, OTRS does support SSL. So, it makes no sense to me that admin notifications are not only unsigned, but I’m also not given the option to sign them as an admin. The email address, SSL certificate, and the associated key are already set up in OTRS. There’s really no reason why this isn’t being done.

Therefore, I’ll soon write a small OTRS extension that automatically signs admin notifications if a certificate is available. This should be a minor change. Even though I’m still using the old LTS version 6.0.x, I’ll target the current OTRS LTS version 6.5, as I plan to migrate to that as soon as possible. Additionally, it wouldn’t be helpful to write the extension for an outdated system, especially since I still have three other plugins to migrate to the current 6.5 LTS version.

Once I’ve completed the extension, I’ll share it here (and possibly on gitLab). But if I’m completely off base and you’re not sure what I’m talking about because your OTRS system already signs admin notifications, please let me know.

Ich find's cool, dass du RSS benutzt ;-)

I love John Candy

Marius Timmer — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 19:14:53 +0200

This might be a bit random for you but I love John Candy. He has passed away before I was born. But when my dad raised me we have spend a lot of time watching comedy or family friendly action movies from the 80s. Sometimes we watched three or even four movies a day when my sister and I visited my dad during the weekend. This did something to us and I guess the taste of music and even more movies I like today is based on this time together.

John Candy in "Home alone" (which I never have seen because my dad didn't liked it)

What I saw in him

One of the reasons why Candy was special to me was that he had visual similarities with my father, who also never was a slim person. As a kid I always saw a version of my father acting in those movies. They both were very lovely in the roles they had and always were like “a rock in the waves” - as we say in Germany. Both of them had this calming side. Of course both were able to be angry but never without any reason.

The movies I grew up with

Since my dad never liked “Home alone”, I have never watched that movie. The first movies I recognized Candy in were Cannonball Fever, Blues Brothers (one of my favorite movies), Little Shop of Horrors (awesome movie!), Spaceballs (one of my favorites as well) and Uncle Buck - just to list a few of them. In my eyes every movie gets better if I see Candy - even in the smallest side roles.

There is no special event which made me think about John Candy today, but since my dad passed away in January I spend a lot of time thinking about him and sometimes I see John Candy which might be a bit weird - but that’s okay I guess. I miss both of them.

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More English please!

Marius Timmer — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 18:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

I will post more English content and maybe even more posts exclusive in English like this one.

A bilangual blog doesn’t mean to just translate

Since I started this blog over ten years ago I wanted to support the English language. Not because I have interesting things to tell the whole world but more because I have a hand full of friends from all around the world. That is why all iterations of my Blog (including the WordPress and VitePress phase) supported both languages German and English. But just providing the language switch button isn’t really bilingual. When I randomly switched to the English version of my blog I realized that there were only five posts available. It remoinded me that I have to write English posts as well.

It is not just about different languages

My trick to avoid that situation back in the day was just to put my texts into DeepL and take the output into my blog. But that was anoying and didn’t helped any further since everyone nowerdays owns a browser which offers to automatic translate whole websites. I started to translate some posts by hand and sometimes wrote whole new phrases. The best thing I guess was to add special information. That kind of information which I believe are obvious to a German but might not be known to everyone around the world.

As an example we can take a look at the German post about my analoge film Camera. It tells you how long Rossman and DM needed to develop my films. But the English Version even tells you what a Rossman or a DM is. Of course that will make it harder to provide English posts as well but it is important to me to be accessible for everyone on the planet. Or lets say the biggest part of it.

I doubt that there will be visitors who are not capable of German but English but at least I know that wont be a problem.

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My analoge Nikon film camera

Marius Timmer — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 19:00:00 +0200

The camera model

A few days ago I was invited to a wedding. The bride and groom had asked me to take some photos. Beforehand, I went into my basement and got out my father’s analog film camera. I went straight to the nearest Rossmann store (a German drugstore) to get a new black and white film so that I could take an incredible amount of 36 photos.

Photo of my Nikon F-60

The film development

The entire process, from taking the photos to receiving the finished image on paper, has become much more complex compared to using a digital camera. Now, I repeatedly spend seven or eight euros (depending on whether it’s a color or black-and-white film) to buy a new roll of film with 36 photos. And only when the entire roll is fully shot can I take it to a DM store (a German drugstore) so it can be developed in their photo labs, which takes about three weeks and costs nearly 10€. If there are particularly good pictures that someone else might want as well, I can put the negatives back in an envelope, mark the desired images, and have more prints made. So far, I’ve only had negatives and prints made. For the future, I’m considering having the photos delivered digitally (via cloud), so I don’t have to digitize them myself, though the quality of the results tends to vary. But that may be because I suck at digitalizing film.

Developing film means waiting

I’ve also learned not to have my film developed at Rossmann (another wide spread drugstore in Germany). Perhaps it was just two unfortunate incidents, but I dropped off two rolls of film at different times at the Rossmann in Gescher, and in both cases, I had to wait more than six weeks before I could pick up the finished prints and negatives. While the waiting time at DM was also three weeks, that’s at least only half as long.

At a wedding, I shot two rolls of film. Interestingly, I wasn’t the only one with an analog camera, as my cousin also had one that she brought along. She has her films developed at a photo lab in Berlin. So, that’s another option I have, and I’ll definitely try it out next time when I have two or three rolls to develop. At the end of August, something is sure to happen that’s worth capturing on film. What exactly that will be, you’ll find out here.

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