Change in Professional Life

This November was very exciting for me so far, as I was starting a new job at a company called Heidolph. I left SUSE after working there for another two years. My role there that was pretty far away from interesting technical work, which I missed more and more, so I decided to grab the opportunity to join in a new adventure. Heidolph is a mature German engineering company building premium laboratory equipment....

November 23, 2018 · 2 min · 337 words · Me

Kraft Version 0.82

A new release of Kraft, the Qt- and KDE based software to help to organize business docs in small companies, has arrived. A couple of days ago version 0.82 was released. It mainly is a bugfix release, but it also comes with a few new features. Users were asking for some new functions that they needed to switch to Kraft with their business communication, and I am always trying to make that a priority....

October 19, 2018 · 2 min · 231 words · Me

Kraft Version 0.81 Released

I am happy to announce the release of Kraft version 0.81. Kraft is a Qt based desktop application that helps you to handle documents like quotes and invoices in your small business. Version 0.81 is a bugfix release for the previous version 0.80, which was the first stable release based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks5. Even though it came with way more new features than just the port, it’s first release has proven it’s stability in day-to-day business now for a few month....

June 17, 2018 · 1 min · 142 words · Me

Kraft Version 0.80 Released

I am happy to announce the release of the stable Kraft version 0.80 (Changelog). Kraft is desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well choosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. After more than a dozen years of life time, Kraft is now reaching a new level: It is now completely ported to Qt5 / KDE Frameworks 5 and with that, it is compatible with all modern Linux distributions again....

April 3, 2018 · 3 min · 516 words · Me

Kraft out of KDE

Following my last blog about Krafts upcoming release 0.80 I got a lot of positive reactions. There was one reaction however, that puzzles me a bit and I want to share my thoughts here. It is about a comment about my announcement that I prefer to continue to develop Kraft on Github. The commenter reminded my friendly that there is still Kraft code on KDE infrastructure, and that switching to a different repository might waste peoples time when they work with the KDE repo....

March 22, 2018 · 4 min · 640 words · Me

Kraft Moving to KDE Frameworks: Beta Release!

Kraft is KDE/Qt based desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well chosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. Kraft is around for more than twelve years, but it has been a little quiet recently. However, Kraft is alive and kicking! I am very happy to announce the first public beta version of Kraft V....

February 3, 2018 · 2 min · 422 words · Me

Another DIY Net Player

Following up on my first DIY Net Player Post on this blog, I like to present another player that I recently built. [caption id=“teakear1” align=“alignnone” width=“800”] TeakEar media player[/caption] This is a Raspberry Pi based audiophile net player that decodes my mp3 collection and net radio to my Linn amplifier. It is called TeakEar, because it’s main corpus is made from teak wood. Obviously I do not want to waste rain forest trees just because of my funny ideas, the teak wood used here has been a table from the 1970ies, back when nobody cared about rainforests....

August 5, 2017 · 2 min · 421 words · Me

SMB on openSUSE Conference

The annual openSUSE Conference 2017 is upcoming! Next weekend it will be again in the Z-Bau in Nuremberg, Germany. The conference program is impressive and if you can make it, you should consider stopping by. Stefan Schäfer from the Invis server project and me will organize a workshop about openSUSE for Small and Medium Business (SMB). SMB is a long running concern of the heart of the two of us: Both Stefan, who even does it for living, and me have both used openSUSE in the area of SMB for long and we know how well it serves there....

May 21, 2017 · 2 min · 295 words · Me

Raspberry based Private Cloud?

Here is something that might be a little outdated already, but I hope it still adds some interesting thoughts. The rainy Sunday afternoon today finally gives the opportunity to write this little blog. Recently an ownCloud fork was coming up with a little shiny box with one harddisk, that can be complemented with a Rapsberry Pi and their software, promoting that as your private cloud. While I like the idea of building a private cloud for everybody (I started to work on ownCloud because of that idea back in the days), I do not think that this example of gear is a good solution for private cloud....

December 11, 2016 · 4 min · 699 words · Me

Recent ownCloud Releases

Even though we just had the nice and successful ownCloud Contributor Conference there have quite some ownCloud releases happened recently. I like to draw your attention to this for a moment, because some people seem to fail to see how active the ownCloud community actually is at the moment. There has been the big enterprise release 9.1 on September 20th, but that of course came along with community releases which are in the focus here....

October 4, 2016 · 2 min · 389 words · Me