I recently got the question from my uncle whether I can upscale one of his really old videos. The source was a short 10 seconds video with some low quality audio in 320×240 pixel resolution. Likely taken by one of the first video capable digital cameras or a phone many years ago.
I accepted the challenge as I had seen some AI tools like DiffusionBee being able to upscale images with decent quality.
I haven’t found a good free tool to upscale a video directly yet. There are shade free tools out there, but I don’t trust them.
What I ended up doing is exporting each frame of the original video to an image, scale up the images with an open AI model and then stitch them back together to a video.
1.) export each frame of the video to a JPEG file, export sound into a single file
Last week of school holidays in Berlin/Brandenburg. Kids were enjoying the last days in the countryside before going back to Berlin.
Bread & butter
My uncle pointed me to the webshop of Bäckerei Philipps for really good sourdough bread. It reminded me of the “Sylter” from Jochen Gaues which one could order online a few years ago. So I gave it a try and it eventually arrived on Monday.
A pure delicacy. Soft and crunchy (if refreshed in the oven or slice by slice on the toaster) and so tasty. I think I lived off that big loaf the whole week as my only food supply.
That’s surely a luxury one can’t afford every week (unless the bakery is within walking distance). But if you like to get a really good sourdough bread, I can wholeheartedly recommend this one. It lasted they whole week just sitting on the counter in it’s plastic bag.
I had ordered the 360º LAIB natur and the 360º LAIB Groument Stange. I usually just used butter and salt. Sometimes our family honey, but nothing fancy. The bread is tasty enough to stay on its own.
Final Wood
Eventually finished the stacking of the remaining firewood from earlier this year. That should hopefully be enough wood working for a while. Next step will be restacking the piles into the shed once they have dried for a year or two.
Harvest Season
Our homegrown tomatoes are ripe and provide us with a wide variety. Different colors, shapes and flavors. I’m usually not into raw tomatoes, but I tasted these large red ones with mozarella, oil and vinegar and they are super tasty. Rather sweet and firm flesh.
My wife is getting random seeds from a lady from the internet. As one can’t officially sell seeds in Germany for the bloody agrar lobby, it works on a donation and exchange basis. The seeds are usually of old types and industrially optimized tomatoes. Such a luxury to be able to grow our own. It’s quite a bit of effort and if one runs the numbers probably not “economic”. But that math might be flawed given the environmental impact of industrial style food production etc.
Survival in Brandenburg
On Saturday evening a friend of ours and me attended a movie night in the LeuteHaus in Milow, north-west Uckermark. The german movie “Überleben in Brandenburg” by Zoltan Paul was on show and one of the actors attended and stayed for a little conversation after the movie.
I like the movie very much as is was comedy with some contemporary aspect to the current political battles in the east of germany. Many scenes and situations resonated with the audience. Also had some real good conversations about the movie, the making of it and life in Brandenburg in general with László I. Kish, one of the actors.
Was working from the countryside this week. Kiddo had a friend from school over for camping on our grounds for 3 days. That was fun. The weather was good and they went swimming several times a day.
Friday we picked up the middle kid from his hiking trip to Norway in Hamburg. Took the chance to have a stroll around the Elbphilarmonie. It’s was a beautiful day with strong winds.
Finally finished the wood stacking of the last piles from this spring. That should last for some years now…
Unfortunately I seem to have brought back some sort of summer flu from last weeks vacation. Coughing and stuffy lungs. Fighting it with tea and vitamin-c now.
Nevertheless I had to deliver K2 to Hamburg for his two week hiking trip in Norway …
I hope he’ll enjoys it as much as his last hiking trip in Sweden two years ago.
Embassy
On Tuesday I accompanied the in-laws on their visit to the South African embassy in Berlin as a translator. They want to apply for a pensioners visa which requires a whole lot of paperwork.
We had to wait for about 4 hours until it was our turn. Eventually some stamps were missing … but that seems to be solvable. But of course will require another visit. But fortunately no help with translation was needed as the embassy staff speaks German really well and was very kind in general.
Ton, Steine, Scherben Podcast
found this marvelous podcast about germany’s first rock band with german lyrics. They are legendary in Germany although they hadn’t been commercially successful at all. What I think is almost unparalleled in Germany is their integrity to their original principles.
On Saturday there was an event at the grounds of the EST. This is the historic school side in Templin. During GDR times this was the place I finally learned to swim some decades ago. As member of “AG Touristik” we wanted to do a canoe tour. But for that everyone would have been able to swim. I wasn’t at that time, so they send us to the local rowing & canoeing club. There we got life safer vests on and were tossed into the lake to swim 😉 Eventually the life vests were omitted and we could swim 🤣
This week we’ve been at our annual family vacation on Rügen island. This is a family tradition since more than 20 years. Various members of the family (mostly my in-law sisters families) rent appartments in the most eastern peninsula of Rügen and spend week there at the beach with the whole family. The kids play together and we have our standard repertoire of activities. There is the Rügen market in Thiessow. A local crafts and food market. And of course the obligatory visit to the Stoertebeker Festspiele. That is an open air stage play about a german pirate legend from the medieval.
This was again really relaxing since we don’t have to explore new stuff but can just enjoy what we already know. Weather was perfect. Not too warm, but warm enough to spend the days at the beach if we wanted.
My pouch of nail polish was quite popular this year. Eventually almost every body had their nails painted and decorated by my daughter. Even our middle son painted his nails voluntarily. I call that a success 😉
Back in Berlin after one week of vacation. The city is noticeably quieter as many people left for vacation. Summer is seems indeed the most relaxed time in Berlin. The ratio of tourist to inhabitants shifts again towards the tourists.
SIM card issues
Had weird SIM card issues since last week. My iPhone was displaying a message whether I’d want to add this number to my iMessage list of numbers. I didn’t pay attention at first and declined as I was on vacation. But this week had a look and eventually noticed that a different mobile phone number suddenly shows up in my Apple ID settings.
That of course immediately made my alarm bells ring. Had I been hacked?
Upon investigation I noticed that my own phone suddenly shows a different phone number for main SIM card. WTF!?
I did some tests with a friends phone: Calls to this new number immediately get cancelled. Calls to my original number still arrive on my phone. As do messages. Very weird.
Since this is a corporate contract, it wasn’t easy to get support from T-Mobile as I lack the relevant access codes. A bit back and forth via our corporate support eventually solved this mystery …
I have a rather old contract that had two SIM cards for the same mobile number. The second SIM cards sits in a mobile hotspot that I used during my on-call days. Hadn’t used this mobile hotspot in ages. But turned it on last week during vacation. Everything worked. But soon after that weird iOS message about to add the new number showed up. Which I kept declining.
T-Mobile stopped supporting multiple SIM cards for the same number on their side. When my mobile hotspot booked into the mobile network, they assigned a new number from their pool to my main SIM to keep their systems consistent. Two active SIM cards for the same mobile number are no longer supported. They solved this by assigning a new number. Why they assigned it to my main and already active SIM … I don’t know.
That was a relief – I wasn’t hacked but just ran into a technical edge case I guess. Issue is solved meanwhile.
medication foo
Kid is going on a vacation trip to Norway in two weeks. Since he’s got some prescriptive medics we needed to tell the trip organizer which ones he needs. My wife fortunately found out, that we also would need some official papers to accompany the drugs when traveling to Norway. A certified statement from the prescribing doctor in addition to an officially signed and stamped paper from the city of Berlin.
And of course there were only two days left to organize this as we were about to leave for our next week of vacation….
Fortunately everything fell into place and just took a whole lot of traveling the city to collect all the paperwork.
CamSnap camera
a few friends recently got a small digital camera that got some popularity lately. Not for its features, but rather for the lack thereof.
It’s super simple, no screen, no settings, no different lenses. Just turn on and shoot. Download later.
CamSnap is promoted as a summer camp camera which if super affordable and lets you focus on capture the moment instead of over engineering the images and immediately share them to the world.
I like the idea in principle. But decided for the time being against jumping that bandwagon. I miss some key features in the camera which I would meanwhile consider essential:
accurate meta data in the images: time, orientation
This would allow the images to just be stored without much manual sorting etc. The current model doesn’t keep time. The camera just doesn’t have a clock. There are some workaround, but this would require post processing the images …
Orientation is also quite essential for me now. I don’t want to rotate pictures later …
First full week of school holidays was spent in the “sächsische Schweiz” in Bad Schandau and surroundings. We had booked a small apartment directly at the river Elbe. Plan was to explore the usual sights hiking as I did as a kid with my parents some 40 years ago 😉
First trip was to the Bastei. We parked at a nearby hill and first had to go down to the city of Kurort Rathen to climb up to the Bastei. One could have driven all the way to the Bastei with the car. But where’s the fun in that?
On Sunday we attended the yearly charity concert for the est in Templin. Again the “lautten compagney” played together with the “Singakademie zu Berlin” and the Ukrainian choir “Kammerton”. This time the topic was the music collection of Sara Levy.
What I liked the most again was the narration that was given between the music to set context and provide historic information about the music, the author but also the school the concert took place in.
After the concert we attended a little guided tour across the property and learned about the progress of the renovations and the plans for the school.
last day of school
Kids got their report cards this week as it was the last day of school for the 23/24 school year. Both kids did good at their schools and we couldn’t be happier as parents given the particular circumstances. Schooling has really become challenging these days for various reasons. The decline of german school institution and system is certainly one big factor to it. We’re looking forward to when all kids are finally done with that system and can take more control themselves at their further education…
golden wedding aniversary
On Saturday we celebrated the 50th wedding aniversary of my parents. The weather was just perfect and they had booked a really nice venue at a lake in the countryside for the event. Was fun to see so many of the old relatives and friends. It was also fun to sift through old scanned films and photos to create the mandatory review slide show.
On Monday I handed off K3 for a week long school trip Frauenstein. A medieval castle where they learn something about the time the castle was in full operation. Apparently that was fun as the kids not only enjoyed the activities but also bonded together and grew their relationships. That was desperately needed as the class had some challenges with separation into small groups instead of being one strong community.
Car emergencies
two car emergencies strikes this week. Somehow my wife managed to unhinge the trunk door and hit her head rather hard with it. The cut on her head looked dramatic. But fortunately she got away without an ambulance.
The next day she somehow managed to set the car on the ground with one front wheel in the air. A small field track was apparently steeper on the sides than what was visible. So I had to get to the rescue and try to get the car out. Of course we didn’t had a proper towing rope at first. Snapped two ropes I had collected from my shed earlier. We had to drive to the nearest gas station to buy a proper towing rope. That did the trick and got the car out of the trench.
This was our summer edition and last sitting before the holiday season. And it seems to be kind of a tradition meanwhile that the weather isn’t too great for outside dining. We’ve been meeting at Rembrandt Burger again and chose boldly to sit outside.
The food of course was good again. And we had fun conversing about good ol’ times and new gadgets mimicking good ol’ times 😉
Plumbing
Had to replace the faucet in the kitchen. Always fun to work in very confined space 🙄
HERE Summer Party
On Thursday we had our corporate summer party and our roof terrace and top floor. Was good to see the colleagues again in one place and also talk to some old colleagues which are still around.
We witnessed awesome clouds over Berlin
Beekeeping
My dad in law inherited the beekeeping equipment from my grandfather and is keeping up the tradition of making honey. K3 was very interested to help this week and got to uncover some honeycombs and then extract the honey. Always a spectacle for all the senses.
