Fatih Arslan

I changed my website’s design. I'm using the previous design since September 30, 2022 (when I moved to Ghost from Cloudflare Pages). The previous design served me well for the past two years, but it was time for a change. Firstly, I wanted to create a

Dieter Rams and his friends (Dietrich Lubs and Ludwig Littman) designed many great looking alarm clocks. I'm looking for one for a long time. Because I have many books about Braun (the company) and Dieter Rams, here are some of their designs:The various vintage desk and alarm

I replaced my existing Homelab setup from the ground up with Unifi's latest Gateways, Switches APs, and Cameras. Here is what I did and how it ended up.

We stayed with the family (two kids and my wife) for several weeks in Munich. I took hundreds of photos. Here is how it went.

How to automate a gate door without remote capabilities using a smart relay and integrate it into HomeKit via Home Assistant.

I have an extensive Vitsoe 606 shelving setup but plan to extend certain places with USM cabinets. What are the main differences?

The Nymphenburg Palace Park ranks among Germany's finest and most important garden design examples. It's also my favorite one in Munich.

A comparison between the M2 and M4 iPad Pro, my initial impressions and close-up photos of the Magic Keyboard

I had to bring my MacBook instead of my iPad during a recent trip. For the whole time, I missed my iPad. Here are the reasons why I prefer the iPad over a MacBook.

Some news about this website you're just reading. I migrated my Blog's infrastructure from a custom Hugo setup and Cloudflare Pages to Ghost.org (Pro). So I'm not in the business of maintaining my Hugo setup anymore. I wanted to switch to a self-hosted platform for a long time but

The Braun+Design Börse is an annual event and fair focusing on Braun products. Braun might not be the design icon it was 40 years ago, but starting in 1955, it profoundly impacted the design world, starting with its cooperation with the Ulm School of Design. With Dieter

Mechanical watches that can show a date correctly are pretty rare, and the ones that do are very expensive (starting at $10k). But why? Let me explain.

It's time for another keyboard review. I've been using Glove80 for several weeks, so let's examine its pros and cons.

Teenage Engineering is one of my favorite brands because it combines two things I love. Design and attention to detail. They make Musical instruments or speakers and many other things. All their products are a joy to use. They also look beautiful, and it's not a mash of various plastics,

The Faculty of Architecture of the METU (one of Turkey's elite universities) was always something that piqued my interest. It was built in 1960's, during the Brutalism era. It's one of the most sophisticated and well-known brutalist buildings in Turkey, especially in Ankara.

This will be short, but I just wanted to rant and vent here because this is my space. I'll use X or Twitter interchangeably throughout the post, but they represent the same entity.Loss of integritySince Elon's takeover of Twitter, a lot has changed. But

My journey from using Fujifilm cameras for a decade to using Leica's latest digital Rangefinder, the M11. Photography is a hobby...

I have the Model Y now for 6 months. Here is what I think about it after six months of daily drive.

I always wanted to wear a mechanical watch not just for engineering purposes but also for its romantic parts, such as giving it down to my kids. For the past seven years, I have always worn an Apple Watch. However, especially in recent years, I wasn't entirely happy

Notiz: /noˈtiːʦ/. Genitive, singular Notiz | nominative, plural Notizen. The German word for “Note”.This post is an experiment, and it might be a long-term project, depending on my overall mood. My Goal:...

Hello! I'm Fatih Arslan, and this is “Die Notizen”: an irregular series of notes about design, photography, technology, etc. An excerpt of things that occupy my mind and inspire me. If you enjoy it, please forward it to a like-minded friend. And if you’re not subscribed, sign up here.

I recently collected all my Quartz watches that were lying around and replaced their batteries to wear them again. Since then, I haven't worn my Apple Watch for the past four weeks, as I wanted to see how it would shape my day-to-day life.

Last year, I had an off day (November 2022). I picked up my Fuji X100V and walked with my wife through the old town of Ankara, Ulus. These are the photos from that...

The AW 50 is one of the only two analog watches designed by Dieter Rams. Released in 1991, it reflects Dieter Ram's vision still...

I got a new Tesla Model Y (2023, made in Gigafactory Berlin) yesterday. Because I live in Turkey, I had to travel from Ankara to Istanbul and pick it up in person. This is my second EV; previously, I owned a Mercedes EQC 400. After picking up the car, I

Using a single init.lua or vimrc configuration file for (Neo)Vim file is better than a multi folder/file layout approach. Let me tell why that is the...

This will be a short topic, but I wanted to get it out of my mind. I have 62K photos and 5k videos, and I want to ensure I can back up my Photos for decades with no issues. I gave a lot of thought to how I could back

These are my initial impressions of using https://mymind.com/, a bookmarking/second brain tool. Let’s start with why I need such a tool. Why? Foremost, I use Apple Notes for note-taking and Ulysses for writing long essays and blog posts. These tools are for my thoughts, for things

It's been four years since I wrote a recap. I wrote an update about my life two years ago when I left the U.S. and moved back to Turkey. It's a Recap of the years 2019-2020. I would suggest reading that blog post if you haven't yet because some

There are numerous blog posts about table-driven tests in Go. In this blog post, I want to show a technique we have recently started using in our unit tests. I saw it the first time when my friend Matt Layher introduced it to me at work, and since then, I

I have used many keyboards over the years. Some of those were standard OEM keyboards you would probably have seen and used all the time. But at some point, I started trying out different designs and wanted to type faster and be more productive. Allow me to share some of

My wife and I recently traveled to South Korea and stayed in Seoul for a week. Seoul is heaven for coffee/café lovers. There is a coffee shop on every single corner. Bad ones, good ones, exceptional ones. Even though I wasn't lucky enough to find a decent breakfast place

Today marks my 30th day of not using any Social Media. I didn't like a single tweet, didn't watch an Instagram story, did not click on the notifications tab, didn't read HN comments, and didn't stroll in various subreddits. Na da. My main goal was not to consume anything. I

The Advantage360 Professional is the successor to the well-known Advantage2. It comes with several new features, such as Adjustable Split, Wireless connection, Tenting, ZMK (highly customizable firmware), and many other minor things. In this blog post, I will explain the significant design changes and my experiences with Advantage360. Before I

(This is a copy of my post at arslan.exposore.co, which I wrote in 2014. I started my blog in 2015, I didn't want to lose those memories, so I moved it here. While at it, I also started using a new grid...

The Moonlander MK1 is an ergonomic, highly customizable split keyboard. I ordered one after I couldn’t stand anymore my hand and wrist pains. In this blog post, I want to share my keyboard journey, my experiences with the Moonlander, how I am using it and what I plan next.

I'm a huge Vim fan and using it since 2002 (the year I've started to learn Linux and how to compile Gentoo kernel). It's a fundamental part of my life. But lately, I'm very sad about the performance on macOS...

I purchased an iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard and Pencil to use as my main computer. Can it replace my local workstation? Is it powerful enough for my day-to-day tasks? Let's find out.

Last week, when I had to increase my screen's brightness, I figured I was using a pitch-black terminal screen. So, I asked myself, 'what if I use a light theme during the day and switch back to a darker theme later in the evening?'

After the introduction of Go modules, people started to advocate using a Go module proxy. After researching the pros and cons, I've concluded that this is one of the most important changes in recent years. But why is that the case?

Here are my own best practices that I’ve gathered from my personal experiences with dealing lots of Go code for the past years. I believe they all scale well. With scaling I mean: 1. Your applications requirements are changing in an agile environment. You don’t want to refactor

A side not, I’m the author and maintainer of the popular Vim plugin for Go programming language: github.com/fatih/vim-go It’s being used a lot in the Go community to develop Go with Vim. Recently I’ve was asked a lot whether I was receiving donations or

I bought a new car. However, due to the chip shortage, several things were missing. One of those features was a wireless charging pad. I'll explain how I designed and 3D printed my charging pad from scratch.

One month ago, I decided I wanted to pursue industrial design as a Hobby. I thought learning CAD and using a 3D printer would give me a solid foundation for prototyping. I had zero idea about the 3D printing world and asked on Twitter for some advice.

The cat is out of the bag. I'm happy to share that I'm joining PlanetScale to work on their mission to build the world's most simple to use, scalable Database for Developers.There are many reasons why I'm...

Last week I announced that I was leaving the U.S and going back to my home country, Turkey. Many people asked why I was leaving. I want to share some of the details of our decision.

This is a followup blog post to my initial blog post about the go/analysis framework. If you haven't read the blog post, I recommend reading that first as this builds on top of it. We're going to keep it...

It happens a lot, you write a bash script and half way it exits due an error. You fix the error in your system and run the script again. But half of the steps in your scripts fail immediately because they...

If you ask people why they're in love with Go, one of the answers is tooling. The reason is that it's very easy to write tooling, especially for the Go language itself. One of the strong areas is linting. If...

A review of Tom Bihn's newest addition: Nik's Minimalist Wallet. Lightweight, simple and clean. How does it perform during day-to-day...

It’s time for a recap of 2018. I wrote one in 2017 and it’s great to read it once in a while to see what I’ve done in the past. This helps me to stay focused on the things I value and let me look back in case...

There are times when you have to take a step back and observe your surroundings. Sometimes you're not aware of the things which put you in an unpleasant situation. After reading 'It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work', I decided to make a significant change in my life.

Let me introduce one of the most iconic one-bagging bags out there: The Tom Bihn Aeronaut 30 carry-on travel bag.Since I started using various kinds of Tom Bihn Bags, I always was interested in up the...

Go 1.11 is out now and it includes preliminary support for Go modules. This is an experimental opt-in feature and the goal is to finalize it as a first class feature for the upcoming Go 1.12 release.There is...

The goal of this blog post is to show you how to write a CSI plugin using examples and explain the concepts differently. As some...

EXIF metadata contains useful information about the photo. What if your photos don't contain a correct EXIF metadata? Let me show how to batch fix and manipulate photos easily on Terminal

From now on, there are no more comments sections below each post. It's a long-term experiment and I want to see how it works out for me. Maybe I'm going to enable it, maybe it'll not happen, we'll all see.I'm...

I've never written a post like this, but I think it's worth writing something about 2017 now that we entered 2018. This is not just for you, also for myself, to take a step back and see what I've done (or...

I have a new bag in town. One of the most famous one-bagging bags out there. The Synapse 25 in limited Guide's Edition theme from Tom Bihn.I always wanted to try this bag out for two reasons. First, it's one...

Arq is a Mac application that sits in your menubar and continuously backs up your data. Let us configure Arq to use DigitalOcean...

I’ve moved my blog to a new blogging platform. This time from Wordpress.com to Hugo. I took some notes about various parts of this migration. I wrote some of my thoughts on why I made the switch, ideas,...

For a while, I knew Blue Bottle was interested to invest into Japan. Their CEO James Freeman was inspired from a small Kissaten (old Japanese Coffee shop) when he opened his first Blue Bottle Coffee shop

Let me introduce my newest bag, the Tom Bihn Tri-Star. A midsize carry-on friendly travel bag for the traveler or weekender. The idea of traveling with a single bag, also called one-bagging is a fascinating topic.

A classic, ultralight, minimalist briefcase for the urban dwellers. I purchased this briefcase because I wanted to have something that is lightweight yet durable - something I could carry with me in the city

A while ago I've started to build a tool to make my life easier. It's called: gomodifytags. It automatically fills the struct tag fields based on the field names. Let me show you an example:An example usage...

When I’ve started writing my stories on Medium it felt realy good. Medium was the perfect medium to share your thoughts with all your followers. However in couple of years it changed a lot and I didn’t liked those changes. What were these?

It’s time for another backpack review! This time I want to share my experiences and thoughts about using the Minaal Daily Bag. As some of you know, I use a bag extensively before writing down my thoughts on it.

I had to start carry something more comfortable and something that could hold more in a better way. I’m also working remotely from home, so I was not going to use the bag every single day.

Text-objects are great to modify and change the function. But we also might want to move around functions. Suppose there are several function declarations in the current file, and you want to jump to them directly?

Vim users know that they can edit text in a very different way, with what we call as “text objects” or “text motions”. For example words are defined with the character “w” or paragraphs with “p”. Instead of...

One of my new side projects was about a scanner/parser family written in pure Go for the Hashicorp Configuration Language. I had two reasons for it, the first one was to have fun and learn the internals of Go’s own parser family (go/{ast,token,scanner,parser}) and

I’ve decided to create a lexer (a.k.a scanner) for an upcoming hobby project. Before creating the lexer, I wanted to see how a lexer can be implemented in Go. Also important for me was how to implement it with an idiomatic Go usage. During my research I’

Two issues of Drift, NYC and Tokyo. I love Coffee. I love reading even more. Combine these you’ll end up with Drift. Drift is a magazine about coffee, the people that gives coffee a meaning and the cities they are shaping. Each issue is about a specific city. It

I’m a coffee geek. I really love coffee. Every single morning I have the same routine at home. The smell of good coffee is everywhere in our home. I frequently get a lot of questions about how to drink fresh and quality coffee. Because the number of questions is increasing I’ve decided to provide some guidelines.