Tech updates

• had to scrape my Pixelfed instance and re-create it
  • DB was somehow broken
  • started from scratch and noticed that Mastodon instances seem to automatically follow my account again. Looks like Mastodon is treating it similar to an account migration in the Fediverse
• Also set up some Jenkins CI/CD pipelines to update Pixelfed and Elk automagically if there are updates on the upstream repos

Health

• finally got my 4th COVID vaccination. Last one was from November 2021 an expired meanwhile. I’m still lucky to not have catched the disease at all so far. But why take a risk?
• swimming on Sunday was good. Sun was shining and no ice on the lake. Water temperature was between 2-3ºC

Black Holes

On Wednesday K2 and me have been at the presentation of Dr. Victoria Grinberg on black holes and her research about them in the Zeiss Grossplanetarium Berlin.

It was very interesting to learn how she’s using black holes as “x-ray “light bulbs” x-ray the solar winds of blue giant stars.

Books

• Had our 3rd family book club session on Sunday
  • Kids are slowly getting into it
  • I’m currently reading “” and found some memorable quotes

Diese und andere ähnliche Heuristiken legen ein übergeordnetes Prinzip in der Entscheidungsfindung nahe, das der Wirtschaftswissenschaftler und Nobelpreisträger Daniel Kahneman als Verfügbarkeitsheuristik oder auch WYSIATI bezeichnet hat. WYSIATI steht für What you see is all there is (auf Deutsch: Was du siehst, ist alles, was es gibt) und meint unsere Tendenz, uns bei Entscheidungen auf die Informationen zu verlassen, die gerade verfügbar sind, statt noch umständlich nach weiteren Informationen zu suchen.

“Die Illusion der Vernunft” – Philipp Sterzer – page 149

In unserem Zusammenhang ist die wichtigste Erkenntnis diese: Allein die Tatsache, dass wir uns für etwas entschieden haben, lässt uns gute Argumente für diese Entscheidung finden.

“Die Illusion der Vernunft” – Philipp Sterzer – page 151

Movies

• watched the whole 1st season of “The Consultant” at Amazon Prime with the brilliant Christoph Waltz – rating 4/5
• StarTrep Picard Season 3 – rating 4/5 so far

Music

• lately on heavy rotation “What’s your pleasure?” from Jessie Ware
  • she’s my latest Discovery from my automated Spotify playlists
  • to me she sounds like a mixture of Kylie Minogue, Roisin Murphy and Sophie Ellis Baxtor – very groovy.
• On our trip to the countryside on the weekend I was listening to “The Blues Brothers – Original Soundtrack”
  • this recalled memories of a show act we did back in school at one of those legendary parties where I played Elwood.

Tech updates

• new version of GoToSocial deployed. It still crashes Ivory and other Fediverse Clients don’t seem to like it either
• set up a continuous update pipeline for Elk – the fediverse web front-end – using Jenkins
• Fixed my Pixelfed Avatar problem – my account should show an avatar picture again
• switched the Docker engine on my home server to send logs to my NAS – to take off disc pressure
• set up my own LinkDing instance to host my bookmarks

Movies

• Finally watched „Avatar 2“ in cinema – 3/5 ⭐️
• Picard Season 3 – Episode 1 – 4/5 ⭐️
• „Three thousand years of longing“ -5/5 ⭐️

Sport

no Sport this week due to reasons. Now swimming on last Sunday due to too thick ice on the lake.

3D Printing

finally got some 3D printing done again. Tried out the new release of the PrusaSlicer which now sports organic support structures. Means, it will generate support structures that look like organically grown trees to support the overhanging parts of the models. This will save time during printing and also a great deal of material.

Fedithoughts

There are quite a bunch of Fediverse services meanwhile. And it’s nice that one can have a Twitter-like experience on Mastodon, an Instagram-like experience on Pixelfed, a GoodReads-like experience on BookWyrm etc.

But what slightly annoys me is the fact that it’s all separate accounts. People would have to follow several accounts of me to consume the various content types. Wouldn’t it be nicer if it would be just one account to follow and maybe just select the type of content that you wanna see? WordPress has different types of posts. What if WordPress would be fully Fediverse capable and could be used as the single account home instance. I would use the Pixelfed client to post pictures there and consume a stream of pictures from other people I follow. I would use one of the many Mastodon clients to consume a Twitter-like feed. Or I’d go to the web page itself (the Blog) to consume all content types at once.

Thoughts?

Sport

This week got a bit messed up as I didn’t made it into the office. So I missed my rowing sessions in the gym. Also missed the running with a friend on Monday as it was rather icy and slippery outside. But towards the end of the week I got my cadaver out two days in a row for running in the park at least. First day I really felt the rust. Second day, although there wasn’t any rest day in between was much better.

On Sunday we were swimming in the lake and had to toss off some ice. The lake was almost covered with a thin layer, but fortunately near the beach it was open.

Betraying Capitalism

Our oven broke the second time now in about 8 years. Every 4 years the lower heater seem to burn out. Last time I had it repaired for about 180 EUR. This time, with some hints from the Fediverse I managed to swap out the heat pipe myself. So the whole repair was only 20 EUR. Hope it lasts the next 4 years at least.

Disclaimer: This is seriously dangerous stuff if you don’t know what you’re doing. The kitchen ovens usually have their own dedicate power circuit and fuses because they draw so much power. This is current that can and will kill you if you make mistakes. So please don’t try this at home unless you’re qualified.

Bleeding Edge

Since the Pinafore Web-Based Mastodon client is discontinued, everyone seems to gravitate towards Elk as a replace. The elk team is building a rather beautiful web client for the fediverse. It can be tried out on their own instance at https://elk.zone/ or one can host it herself.

I tried the latter and built the Docker container to run the service. There are some caveats to that. The documentation is still rather sparse and doesn’t mention that the service must be accessed via HTTPS and also need a proper domain name. But thanks to Boerge I moved past that hurdle and got it somehow working. Of course not after some more struggle with file permissions in the Docker container. I submitted a Pull Request to the Elk team to fix the documentation and docker-compose.yml. Let’s see when this makes it into the main branch.