#weeklyreview 14/24

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more wood work

This week of course had more firewood working. We spent another day in the forest to cut & haul out some more firewood. Got 2 and about one third new stacks now. But still need to split the remaining logs for stacking. That will likely make another 2 stacks … that should last us a couple of years.

Easter weekend

We’ve been out for a delicious brunch on easter Sunday at the famous Hotel Döllnsee. The buffet was rich and delicious as always. They even had Eierlikör on tab!!!

a boat house in a lake, seen from the lake side. One can see that the water level must have been about 1,5m higher when the house was built.
a plate with some braised pork belly and noodles with gravy.
a large pan with sliced meat and vegetables.
interior view of a wooden boat house on a lake. One can see stairs going to to the water

On easter monday we’ve been over at my parents house for coffee. The traditional egg hunt took place in the garden. I hope we’ve found all the rather well hidden eggs.

Cooking lamb and sauce hollandaise

It’s asparagus season again. And as a good German we had to indulge ourselves with a delicious meal of cooked asparagus, lamb steak and self-made sauce hollandaise. Especially the latter is rather easy to make yourself freshly from just a handful of ingredients.

two pieces of lamb steak on a plate. Behind the steak some asparagus covered with a pale yellow sauce hollandaise can be seen.

2 days working

Originally had planned to take the whole week off work. But then decided to cancel two of the vacation days and get some work done. The “joy” of Powerpoint …

Was rather quite as many colleagues were also off for easter holidays or sick. Seems almost like the new flu or cold also spreads over online meetings. Large numbers of sick leaves across the globe with a cold…

Flyer delivery

My wife was helping to organise another “Dorfgespräch” of “DIE GRÜNEN” Uckermark. That’s a series of open topic conversations with the locals. We had attended one sessions already a few month ago and found it rather good. I like that they take the time and courage to listen to the people and take their feedback. This party faces a huge amount of hate among people in the rural areas for no good reason. They are blamed for every bad decision the previous governments made and also solely for all decisions and impact the current government makes.

Windows on the Mac

Installed a Windows 11 VM with UTM on my MacBook. Was surprised that there is an ARM64 version of Windows and that it’s really snappy. It’s still annoying Windows though…

Also tried to emulate a x86 Windows machine. That was significantly slower and not really fit for practical use I’d say. Despite my powerful M2 Max CPU with 64GB of Memory. Will give an older windows version a try next to see if those perform better. All this in support of friends who consider moving the Apple platform again, but still have some legacy Windows software without alternatives. So they need a way to run those old programs somehow.

R.I.P. Mr. Tit

K3 found a dead tit in our garden and gave it proper funeral

Motor scooter drive

Hario Mill Stick mod

Got myself a Hario mobile mill stick. Thats a battery powered motor driver for their hand coffee grinders. It also comes with adapters for some other brands of hand mills. I’ve got two HARIO hand mills. The older model HARIO MSCS-2TB (Skeleton) which is formally not compatible with this mobile mill stick and a smaller HARIOD MSS-1DTB. The latter is compatible.

The mobile mill stick looks a bit like a power tool with a bit adapter on one end. The Skerton got an M6 screw shaft which is flattened on two sides to hold the crank. To make it usable with the mobile mill stick I macgyvered it with some M6 screw extension and an M6 screw from the DIY shop. The screw extension sits on top of the Skerton rod and allows for the M6 screw to go in on the open end. Now the Skerton got a normal screw on the axel that can be driven with a normal power tool and bit of your choice. My Makita Powertools spins a bit too fast for my taste (heats up the beans during grinding too much). Thats why the HARIO mobile stick is the better choice.

For the HARIOD MSS-1DTB the mobile mill stick comes with an adapter to properly hold it in place.

AirTag battery swap

I’ve got an Apple AirTag on my keys and it eventually ran out of battery. I really thought those AirTags were single use and one has to buy a new one after about 1,5 years. Give Apples talent for reaching into your purse that did make total sense to me. But then my brother told me that you can just screw open the AirTags and swap the battery. I was slightly baffled. Fortunately I had the correct type of button cell at home at swapped the battery in a matter of seconds. That was but also some sort of Apple experience that it’s finally that easy to swap.

Open Stage Templin

On Saturday there was last session of the open stage at the Multikulturelles Centrum Templin. As always it was a fun evening with a good variety of music from folks to rock and even some poetry this time.

#weeklyreview 13/24

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The Zone of Interest

Watched “The Zone of Interest” in the local cinema. The film won 2 Oscars at this years ceremony for best international film and best sound.

In my humble opinion the movie is rather overhyped. It’s ok. The visuals are good and the cast plays really well. The story or maybe rather the script is confusing. The sound was particularly bad at the location we watched it. Not sure that was due to the poor equipment or settings at the venue.

I definitely liked “Treasure” from Julia von Heinz, which I saw at Berlinale a few weeks ago much better on the topic of Auschwitz.

Charite

On Tuesday we took a friend who’s suffering from severe ME/CFS to an appointment at the Virchow Klinikum of the Charité Berlin. The German healthcare system doesn’t allow him to get a transport voucher and he’s really not in a condition to take public transport nor can he pay for a Taxi.

For us it was a nice trip to Berlin with a good lunch at a Thai restaurant.

For him it was at least the most relaxed trip in his series of visits to the Virchow-Klinikum.

Wood working

We’ve got some woodworking done during the week. My dad organised some trees from the town forest that we were allowed to cut into pieces and haul out of the forest. Since the paths in the forest were still not usable with our cars we again had to carry the wood quite a bit through the forest on to the main paths where our cars with trailers were parked.

We’ve also borrowed an hydraulic wood splitter from friends again to cut the logs into smaller pieces and then stack the freshly cut wood into round stacks for drying.

Started the first stack with a too small diameter and didn’t pay enough attention to the angles. Looks rather wobbly and I needed to secure it with a fence around. The second looks more like a cone but seems to be stable enough to stay without fence support.

D. Kahneman R.I.P.

This week we’ve lost another one of the great thinkers of our time. Daniel Kahneman was probably most famous for his “Prospect Theory“. Explaining why we people often seem to make decisions that are not the most rational. That was something that has bothered John von Neumann and his followers to some extent at least when trying to apply the game theory foundations developed by von Neumann to real world scenarios. Men don’t act purely rational an awful lot of time.

#weeklyreview 12/24

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Stumbled upon a toot mentioning the “Enable Mastodon Apps” plugin for WordPress. This basically allows Mastodon clients to login to a WordPress instance and post updates and replies. The plugin is still in early beta but works well with Ivory and IceCubes app on the iPhone. I can now post a brief update from within the Mastodon client that will be persisted as an entry on my blog. I find that idea rather neat. Mastodon itself still feels kinda ephemeral to me.

Sports

I’m a bit behind on sports this week I think. Stayed home Wednesday and Thursday. Tried running on Thursday but stopped after one round in the park. Wasn’t feeling it. Tried again on Friday morning and did a good 10k in the park.

I’m keeping up my push-up streak so far. 45 days in a row of at least 20 push-ups. Since begin of March I’m trying 30 per day. Thats hard most days. Some days too hard, so that I only did 20 or 25. But it’s improving slightly. The increase was certainly too steep and I should do smaller increments. And I’m such a habitual animal that I can’t change pace when I started. So I’m leaving it at 30 for the time being and will increase in smaller steps when I feel for it.

Friend is trying to add one more per week. Maybe thats a good strategy. Will see.

GPS Outage

When we were driving from Berlin to the countryside on Friday late afternoon I noticed that the car navigation system lost track of where we are. At first I thought it’s just a short glitch. But it didn’t recover (as usual) after a few turns. For the rest of the journey it was completely off. I checked my phone and noticed that it also couldn’t find its position. Apparently GPS was not working at that time.

Possible GPS Jams can be found after a day at https://gpsjam.org/?lat=49.64017&lon=28.04866&z=4.6&date=2024-03-22

The Man from the Future

I finished reading the biography of Johnny von Neumann. I liked the book very much. Not only because of this amazing achievements and life of von Neumann, but also because of the rich writing style of the book. The language is colourful and sophisticated. The author: Ananyo Bhattacharya is the chief science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Science. The British English is much more dense that the usual American English of books. I can wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Mudfest

On Saturday we went into the forest to get some firewood from the municipal forest. The trees are already down and we “just” need to cut them and get them out. Plan was to cut them to length of about 30cm already. So that I don’t have to cut them again at my place. We had to get quite deep into the forest. The main paths were OK but we would like to get closer to the allotted trees and go on the side paths. Since it was raining the days before that turned out to be a bad idea. The car got stuck already at the attempt to turn into the path. it was just too muddy and slippery. Fortunately we had a second car and a rope to tow the first car out.

So I ended up carrying the logs about 10 – 30 m from the forest to the main path. Since the logs were also wet and slippery I could only grab one or two at a time. That day I clocked apparently 11km of walking according to my watch. Will definitely need to optimise this for the next round. We only managed to get out 2,5 trees that day. About 2 cubic meters and there is 12 m^3 to fetch …

#weeklyreview 11/24

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Over the weekend I was fighting with the NextCloud All-in-One Container setup. It’s supposed to make the setup easier and convenient, but in my case it didn’t really. I tried also the normal mere PHP Installer on a web server. But that setup requires me to maintain the Database and additional components like Redis cache and so on myself. I wanted to have all the needed stuff in Docker containers and behind my default Reverse Proxy Traefik. Usually one gets a docker-compose.yml file with all the services and thats it. NextCloud chose a different route and is using a setup container to pull and bring up all the application components. They don’t provide a docker-compose.yml with all these components unfortunately.

But eventually I’ve got the thing running and snug behind by Reverse Proxy which takes care of the SSL certificates.

Cold?

I think a brought back a slight cold from the weekend. Went to bed with a stuffy nose and slight headache on Monday evening. Decided to stay home on Tuesday and figure oute whether thats a cold (or even COVID) or maybe just allergies. Took a COVID test which fortunately turned out negative. Went for a short run in the park to see whether my endurance is impacted. Doesn’t seem to be. So just added a few freshly made ginger shots. Felt much better on Wednesday already. Guess that was a short cold or something then.

Stammtisching

On Wednesday I went out Stammtisching with two friends and learned a lot about Berlin night club scene. Maybe a bit too much …

Unfortunately the waiter at the venue showed his misogynist side and treated by female friend rather badly. She had him reported to the manager and filed a formal complaint against him. The guy was treating all women rather badly. Commanding them around and didn’t pay attention to them.

He even had the balls to approach us outside after the complaint and ask what he was doing wrong. Say that he didn’t do any misconduct. But in that only addressing me and my other male friend. Not even looking at the woman among us.

He’s got a passionate and enduring enemy now …

Nails

Thursday was about time to get our nails done again. So I brought my wonderful pouch to the office and we practiced our nail game.

That same night our notorious Beer & Burger crew finally met for another session and my dear friend Klappstulli gifted me a stunning new color of nail polish

Ray Cokes

This week I saw a post on Insta that the Berlin based radio station “radio eins” will host a new live show by Ray Cokes. Yes! The Ray Cokes who hosted MTV Most wanted in the early 1990s.

Why is that so remarkable for me? Because I learned English by watching MTV most of the time in the early 1990s. And especially Ray Cokes and Steve Blame shows on MTV. I opted out of English lessons in school (yes, that was possible at some point) as I felt I don’t learn much new from the teacher at that time.

We actually had a legendary good teacher at my later school (Gymnasium). But unfortunately he wasn’t my teacher and I had already opted out then.

To my regards these lessons actually worked out good enough to admit me to the higher level English course during my apprenticeship at SIEMENS NIXDORF. During the screening test for the courses I thought I’d make it only to the entrance level course as an Ossi. But turned out my English was already pretty good. I was just lacking speaking experience.

I thanked Ray Cokes for teaching me English back in the days and I’ll definitely going to listen to that radio show.

Alice & Bob

On Friday I attended a workshop and get-together of the Alice & Bob Company. That was founded by a friend and ex-colleague of mine a few years ago. They showed how they’re helping their clients to build a digital foundation for their businesses and help them keeping the complexity of that foundation in check. I’m always happy and proud seeing friends founding and running their own companies successfully.

Felling trees

On Saturday we feel a dead tree in our forest. The pine died from a strangling fungus infection a few years ago and was at risk of falling in the next storm. So we took it down. The fungus it was suffering from caused the trunk to saturate with natural resin at a certain height. This resin saturated wood can be used to kindle a fire. It was even used instead of candles before the 20th century.

#weeklyreview 10/24

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Wow… 10 weeks into the new year already. Time is flying fast.

Of course we started the new week with swimming again. This time we also brought a thermometer and can tell that the water was 6º C. Water level in the lake is back at where it was last year this time. That is good.

Vabali

I had gotten a voucher for the Vabali Spa in Berlin for my birthday. This week it was about time to use that. The weather was set to be perfect – cold and sunny. So I booked a slot for the early morning and enjoyed 5 or 6 sauna sessions while continue reading “The man from the future” – The visionary life of John von Neumann.

Still blown away by the life of von Neumann and also the book. Very well written with lots of background information. I can highly recommend. There was even a chapter about 3D printers

The Spa itself was very good. Lots of space, many large saunas and some pools and hot tubs, several bars and a restaurant. But even on a normal workday it gets rather crowded. Not so much that you don’t find a spot in the sauna, restaurant or the many many relaxation areas. But still quite a bunch of people to ignore. Cause apparently there is a high percentage of people which use this for a show off.

Missed my running sessions this week as both my running partners bailed out. Only 3 gym session this week. But managed to increase my daily push-up score from 20 to 30 💪

International Women’s Day

Lucky enough this day is a public holiday in Berlin. So we could leave for the countryside on Thursday evening and enjoy the sunny Friday in the Uckermark. Of course most places were crowded with Berliners …

Saturday kiddo and me visited my old biology teacher for a coffee. One could consider this kind of preparation for the presentation about the local flora & fauna by one of the village residents in the evening 😉 . Very interesting what rare species we still have around here. He presented a whole lot of pictures and plants, birds, insects and amphibians etc. And of course a lot of knowledge and stories around the same.

#weeklyreview 09/24

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3D Printer calibration

I was generally happy with my 3D printing setup of Klipper and the Creality Ender 3 V2. Especially the KAMPS plugin seems to make for a much better 1st layer.

But lately it problems with the 1st layer sticking to the bed and the bed mesh picture showed that my bed seems to be severely tilted and needs calibration.

One disadvantage of my Klipper setup is, that the printers Display doesn’t work anymore and I can’t trigger a manual bed levelling at the printer itself. But I found the slightly hidden settings in Klippers Web Interface to trigger the leveling.

It’s called “Bed Screw Adjust” and hidden behind the 3 dots menu of the toolhead widget.

After that adjustment I saw that my bed seems still below what the software considered as Z-Axes 0. So I also calibrated the Z-Probe again.

Finally that made a difference and the 1st layers are perfect again.

The next thing I was curious about was the extrusion. My prints were generally good I’d say. But I was wondering whether the extrusion factor was correct. Klipper calculates the extrusion itself using a pressure advance factor. That factor must be determined per filament type.

So I followed their calibration instructions and printed the square calibration box. This time I actually saw the difference in the changing pressure advance values of the individual layers.

You can clearly see that the corners below the red arrow bulge to the outside and the layers above shrink to the inside.

And finally we found the time to meeting @rudelbildung and @saumselig at home and also help him get his 3D-Printer set up. Turns out 3D printing is still a rather geeky sport as it has way too many things in between the model you wanna print and the actual printer. In this particular case a wrong (power only) USB cable and a changed USB device path on the RaspberryPi was a hinderance. But after fixing this, we’ve got the printer working easily.

OmniFocus 4 Update

OmniGroup released a new major version of OmniFocus this week. The upgrade was a little more involved than I originally thought. Had to write down my little sync encryption odyssey.

Open Stage

On Saturday evening there was another session of the Open stage in the MKC Templin. Artists can apply to perform and the entrance is free for spectators. This was my second visit to this event series and it was really good again. I’m still amazed to see amazing talents from the local area and also the crowd really appreciative of the event. Wouldn’t have thought this possible in my slightly dusty and provincial home town.

As often in the last years, there is always some last minute drop-outs due to sickness or other events. That is the chance for people in the audience to take the stage. To my honest surprise there were multiple people volunteering to perform and two acts were chosen by the organisers.

Jackson from Templin played guitar and performed a song about Templin that he wrote himself. It was really cool.