tc3 - Engineering, Management, and Escapism

Library: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Florian Engel — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:56:12 +0000

A popular science take on motivational systems.

Blip: New Blip

Florian Engel — Fri, 01 May 2026 12:33:21 +0000

People always look for solutions to problems within their area of expertise. Lawyers look for legal solutions. IT specialists look for IT solutions. Business administrators look for commercial solutions.

That’s why commercial managing directors prefer to take out insurance against cyberattacks rather than invest in cybersecurity.

Library: Ringworld

Florian Engel — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 15:01:08 +0000

A hard-sci-fi tale in a space fantasy wrapper.

Blip: Complexity vs Chance

Florian Engel — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:22:20 +0000

Inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, here’s the everyday business version:

Any sufficiently complex decision is indistinguishable from chance.

Blip: Moving Folders in Finder Considered Dangerous

Florian Engel — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:31:02 +0000

When you move a folder in macOS and a folder with the same name exists in the destination, Finder asks if you want to overwrite the destination. Be warned: “overwrite” means replacing the destination folder without any way to undo it. Make sure you have a Time Machine backup ready.

I find it perplexing that hard deletion of the destination is the default action, and you must press Option while moving the folder to merge.

Library: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Florian Engel — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 12:56:25 +0000

An easy read on what behavioral tendencies prevent teams from working towards a common goal.

Article: Pocketbook Era With Koreader

Florian Engel — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 22:39:47 +0200

I’d been looking for a new e-reader to replace my Kindle Paperwhite for quite a while. The PocketBook Era with KOReader has turned out to be the perfect solution for me.

Because I didn’t have this combo on my radar for a long time, I’m hoping this post helps others who haven’t yet reached the finish line in their search.

In short: In my view, the Era offers the best hardware right now but is let down by the software. KOReader is a fantastic e-reader app that you can install on the Era with just a few steps, and with a handful of targeted tweaks it resolves every issue I ran into.

Blip: Blog Re-Launch

Florian Engel — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 22:34:41 +0000

After experimenting with it for the past couple of weeks, I’ve finally decided to publish my new blog. I’m thrilled to have a platform to write again.

Article: h264, h265, and VC1 in Fedora >= 37

Florian Engel — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 17:12:44 +0100

Mesa 22.2 made the support for hardware acclerated h264, h265, and VC1 optional due to patent claims. Fedora followed suit and is now distributing the version without hw acceleration support for those codecs.

This might affect you, if you’re using the nouveau or amdgpu open source drivers.

The patent claims seem to make it illegal to use the accelerated drivers in some parts of the world, e.g. the US. But if you live in a part of the world where those claims have no effect, you can get the hw acceleration back using rpmfusion.

Article: Extracting Messages from Signal Desktop

Florian Engel — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 00:22:56 +0100

While Signal might be the best crypto messenger out there, it is terrible when it comes to simple convenience functions. Sometimes I want to export a chat to archive it or share it with someone who has lost parts of an important conversation due to a key change. But Signal doesn’t offer any official way to create a CSV or even a PDF export.

On the other hand, Signal is Open Source, and it’s not very hard to find a way to roll your own export.

Article: Reading Time & Word Count in Hugo

Florian Engel — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 21:48:53 +0200

Many Hugo templates include reading time or word count as metadata of blog posts. I think that’s pretty handy, and I always enjoy a little heads up - especially on long blog posts where this info helps me to decide if I read it now or save (read ‘kindle’) it for later.

But what if your favorite template is missing reading time / word count?

It’s pretty simple to add it yourself:

Article: Setting up IPv6 on a Web Server

Florian Engel — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 18:50:24 +0200

This weekend, I finally came around to enabling IPv6 on my web server. In this post, I describe what I did to get everything up and running on a netcup vServer running CentOS 8, but this should be quite the same for other web hoster services.

Motivation

My ISP (like many others) primarily uses IPv6 for client IPs and offers IPv4 access via DS-Lite. On random occasions, the IPv4 gateway (DS-Lite NAT) isn’t available, and I can only access the part of the internet which is correctly configured for IPv6 traffic. I was pretty surprised - and frankly shocked - how much this cripples my internet access. Of everything I’ve tried until now, only a handful of services are accessible through IPv6: Google, YouTube, and a couple of IT expert blogs like mkammerer.de;

Article: Solid Color Background in Gnome 3

Florian Engel — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 13:58:22 +0200

Gnome is notorious for reducing user options in the GUI to a minimum. So if you want to use a solid color background instead of a wallpaper, your only option using the UI is to select an image of whatever color you want your desktop background to be.

As someone who does not like any distracting elements on the desktop, this feels tedious to me.

Fortunately, the functionality is still in the code. It’s just not accessible through the UI.

Article: Installing Fedora 34 with an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT

Florian Engel — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 13:38:03 +0200

I had a little hickup when I installed Fedora 34 on a machine with an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics adapter: the boot process got stuck after mounting /tmp. I assume this was caused by KVM, because booting in basic graphics mode worked flawlessly.

This is nothing to be worried about. The bootstick obviously just didn’t include the necessary microcode for this rather new GPU. Since Fedora is known for including such microcode in the update cycle of their current releases, I assumed a simple # dnf update might fix this after the installation.

Article: Windows 10 Installation: Missing Media Driver

Florian Engel — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:56:47 +0200

I had a strange problem when I tried to install Windows 10 on a new machine yesterday:

I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from the Microsoft website and used dd to create a bootable USB stick. I could actually boot from the stick but got a weird error message when starting the installation:

A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD, USB or Hard disk driver. If you have a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive with the driver on it, please insert it now.

Note: If the installation media for Windows is in the DVD drive or on a USB drive, you can safely remove it for this step.

It did not say which driver other than which class of device a driver is missing, so I tried all chipset drivers on my motherbord CD (to no avail).

Article: Why React Seems to Scroll Just Not Far Enough

Florian Engel — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 14:43:29 +0200

If your React app’s scrolling seems off, it might actually have nothing to do with scrolling.

Article: Signal Updates Considered Harmful

Florian Engel — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 14:35:05 +0100

I usually recommend Signal as a simple-to-use and secure form of communication. Signal is primarily known for its mobile app, but there is also a desktop application based on Electron.

The desktop app has a very annoying, long-standing issue which has already been reported on GitHub in 2018: Whenever a new application update is available, the app shows a message box prompting the user to restart Signal. Unfortunately - at least on macOS - Electron message boxes un-minimize the whole application window and show the message box on-top of the application. This behavior can be seen in the Electron source code, and I cannot see a simple way of preventing this from happening.

Article: Migration to Hugo / Relaunch

Florian Engel — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 20:50:20 +0200

This week, I changed my server OS from Debian to CentOS 7.

Since I don’t appreciate having all those Ruby dependencies on my clients, I changed my static site generator to Hugo.

I intend to bring back most of my old posts in the next few days.

Article: The Tale of the Three Little Monitors and the Evil Lenovo Dock

Florian Engel — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 19:34:32 +0200

TL’DR: I tried to attach three monitors to Lenovo’s Ultra Dock. At least at the moment, that only works if one of the monitors is attached to the analog VGA port because the Intel Graphics Driver does not support nested MST.

For the better half of a decade, my primary laptop has been a Thinkpad Edge 11. The dedicated ATI graphics unit was a major pain: using the open source drivers, the GPU idled around 60°-70° C (even using DPM) and constantly caused the fan to go bananas. The only way to make the battery last for more than 90 minutes was to use a specific (read: very old) version of the proprietary driver. If you ever think about using Linux on a Laptop with AMD graphics: do not.