Hi! I am a German 23 y.o. Machine Learning student studying in Darmstadt, Germany. I am an open source and self-hosting proponent (as you might have guessed). For my B.Sc. in Cyber-Security I was at the HSMW, which was great for studying, bad for “being a student” (small city and so on). For fun, I do computer stuff (duh), cook (carbon steel for the win!), do art, watch movies, play games and ride my motorcycle. I take fitness seriously and go to the gym 4+ times a week. Furthermore, I also work at DICOS as a working student.

If I can recommend you anything, if you like Sci-Fi you should definitely watch Alita: Battle Angle (2019)! It’s a real piece of art and was sadly overlooked by many. There is a passionate fan base patiently waiting for a sequel. Give it a try!

People always think that I’m extroverted, because I’m good at small talk, and have no problems talking to strangers, but I need my alone time, or my social battery runs dry quite quickly, which is probably why I am single.

How I came to my nickname

It’s quite a silly story. “Nx2” is short for “noggynoggy” - the “x” being a “times” as in noggy times 2. Basically there is a by now pretty old PC game called “Madagascar” (as in the Dream Works movies) I played with my brother ages ago. I don’t even remember most of the story of the game, but there was a mission where you had to get onions for the lemurs’ party or something. The onions grew in a cave, but the cave was full of spiders. So you as Alex (the Lion) had to run around the cave roaring the spiders away. When you were too slow and a spider snatched away an onion, it said one of two things: “ZWIEBELN” (German for onions) or “NOGGYNOGGY”. I found this to be exceptionally hilarious, so I chose it as a name.

My socials

This static page web server and about 50 other things I selfhost are being run on a mini-pc with an AMD-U processor and 16G of RAM. Like any of my devices, the mini-pc runs NixOS (configuration can be found here). The site is served by an nginx server configured through the NixOS module. I am using Cloudflare as CDN for less IP leakage. I am pretty sure that Cloudflare is just a giant NSA front, but I mean … , whatever man.

Font

The text font used is called Atkinson Hyperlegible from the Braille Institute. It strikes a unique balance between character harmony and uniqueness. The code (ascii-art) font is a modified version of Source Code Pro.

ASCII-Art

On many posts you will find boxes with ASCII-Art. I do all of it by hand. I try to keep them “ASCII”-Art, not “UNICODE”-Art. The letter-style is based on my own Figlet font, which I then often customize for the page.

Read further here: My ASCII Art. There you can also get the figlet font as a download.

Hugo

I custom wrote a Markdown to html pipeline based on pandoc before, but since I reworked the backend I don’t use that anymore. Instead, I use Hugo with a theme written from scratch.

Domain

I got the domain from Namecheap.com. I am not affiliated nor do I explicitly advocate for them. Although I could be! (domain-renewal is expensive lol)

One problem that have with them, is their API, which is something I’d need for auto TLS certificate auto-renewal with the NixOS module. The API falls short in multiple areas and it costs money, wich is crazy since I’m obviously already paying money to them. But they allow DNS offloading to e.g. Cloudflare, so that’s what I did.