Tools I Use

I use chezmoi for my dotfiles. To find out why and how to get started, check out my talk from Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2025 .

Within chezmoi, you can use the file .chezmoiexternal.toml to download archives or git repositories during updates. This is particularly useful for managing external dependencies. Let me walk you through some common use cases.

This week, I investigated an issue with the advanced profiles search in HCL Connections. I had a system which did not show any results in the advanced search for the department number of Connections profiles.

HCL support tried for three months to reproduce the issue, and the users missed the option to search for their teammates with the advanced profiles search.

In the last blogpost I showed how I use an instance of changedetection.io on a Raspberry Pi to monitor and track changes in a ServiceNow portal.

Meanwhile, I tweaked this a bit more and found a way how I can monitor the RSS Feed of my blog to post a toot on mastodon when I created a new blog post.

The HCL Software knowledge base is built with ServiceNow . You can register and subscribe for channels and documents. You receive mails for new documents and changed documents you have subscribed for.

Since end of last year, I use Fedora Silverblue or, better Universal Blue on my notebooks for daily work and my personal projects.

I spend the entire day working on a very sizable 4k UHD display, and I frequently ran into the problem of wanting to share my screen with participants in various collaboration tools. Then, viewers claim that my screen is too small on the remote displays due to the display resolution of 3840x2160 pixels.

The last months I played around with Matrix , a secure and open collaboration system. The protocol looks very promising, it allows hosting your own server and federate it to other systems. So like SMTP, all these matrix users can communicate to each other.

I use Shaarli since ages to collect links, notes and bookmarks. I worked a little bit on that collection and started to share some as public lists .

On my mobile device I bought a license for Stakali , it fits perfectly into my workflows. I often search on my mobile and share the link through Stakali to my desktop. Stakali just needs the URL and the API Key of Shaarli, but I got errors. So I analyzed the source and app with:

Watson Workspace Clients are only available for Windows and Mac OS. I’m a 100% Linux user on my devices and I use a Windows virtual machine only if I can’t avoid it. To communicate with colleagues, IBM and DNUG I need to use Watson Workplace, opening the web view is possible, but then I need to search the right tab or forget to open it. Since some weeks there is Zoom (Web / Video meetings) integrated with Watson Workspace too.:

Watson Workspace clients are based on Electron . I’m not a big fan of Electron clients, most of them are big and need tons of system resources. There is enough written about advantages and disadvantages, so I just leave it that way.

Last week I wrote a post about Using Docker and ELK to Analyze WebSphere Application Server SystemOut.log , but i wasn’t happy with my date filter and how the websphere response code is analyzed. The main problem was, that the WAS response code is not always on the beginning of a log message, or do not end with “:” all the time.

I often get SystemOut.log files from customers or friends to help them analyzing a problem. Often it is complicated to find the right server and application which generates the real error, because most WebSphere Applications (like IBM Connections or Sametime) are installed on different Application Servers and Nodes. So you need to open multiple large files in your editor, scroll each to the needed timestamps and check the lines before for possible error messages.

Many of you know that i like VI/http://vim.org[VIM] and when i say editor it must be VIM. Often i hear at customer sites or from my colleagues, that they can’t work with vi, that shortcuts are hard to remember or even they can’t save their changes.

When you remember some short commands, you can work very fast and you can edit files through all connections (ssh, x-forward) to a server.

I created a mindmap as preparation for a speedgeeking session, the session wasn’t accepted, but the file is already done. So you can download a cheat-mindmap with a collection of shortcuts.