Monthly Archives: March 2023

#weeklyreview 12/23

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I know this is rather late for the weekly review. The judges are paying attention:

should probably try to get this done on Saturday or even Friday, as Sundays are usually packed with getting back from the countryside to Berlin and getting everything ready for the new work/school week.

Nerd Stuff

Took a look at Logseq as a note taking tool as @moellus was advocating for it. He provided some articles where people described their use of the tool. Main selling point seem to be thats it open source, uses Markdown as text format, synchronises across devices via iCloud or Dropbox and others.

Sport

again a lazy week as I only got the weekly lake swimming done, but no running, rowing etc. 🙁

Fediverse

Was contemplating about Pixelfed. While I like the UI as it resembles mostly the old working Instagram UI I less and less get the point of running my own Pixelfed instance. The level of interaction on the instance is really low compared to the feedback/interaction I’m getting for stuff posted on my Mastodon instance.
Since Pixelfed ist just another Fediverse Service that can be consumed with most Fediverse clients, most people might just consume a main Stream on Mastodon and don’t want to follow a separate stream on Pixelfed. One can perfectly follow people on Pixelfed from a Mastodon account. Thats the whole point of the Fediverse. I can also follow my Mastodon Followings on Pixelfed. But I’m honestly too lazy to re-follow all the people in Pixelfed again.

To me, the Pixelfed mobile app as a special interest Fediverse client would probably be enough. An Instagram-like user interface that would only display ActivityPub posts which contain Images and Videos (maybe even more specific). So one can have the Insta UI but using a Mastodon Account. I don’t need to run or have an account on a Pixelfed instance for this. Of course currently the Pixelfed mobile app isn’t compatible with a Mastodon feed.

#weeklyreview 11/23

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Obviously didn’t manage to get the weekly review done before Sunday. Weekend was rather busy as the weather finally felt spring-like and we got a lot stuff done on the property and in the garden.

We put in a tree to hopefully give us some shade in the summer (not this year, but maybe next year already)

replanted the tomatoes seedlings and also cleaned up the property. Since we had borrowed a large trailer over the weekend I was able to bring a lot of old stuff and trash to the local recycling yard. It’s amazing that you can just got there and get easily rid of most of your stuff that doesn’t belong or fit into the normal trash bins. Its free as its included in our yearly waste treatment fee. I’m always tempted to rummage trough the large scrap containers and get out useful stuff (like old electronics).

Hosting

This week I’ve installed my own instance of Overleaf – a web based LaTeX editor for collaboration. Not that I’m in need of LaTeX document system at the moment… but it’s always nice to play around with such stuff.

Mastodon updated to v4.1.1

Installed a Jenkins-Cron-Job to repopulate replies to my mastodon instance as suggested by Matt.

3D Printing

Got quite a bit of 3D printing done. Leveled my printbed properly and I’m still amazed how smooth prints come out with the right filament and settings on this rather cheap printer. Uploading the timelapse videos to my PeerTube Instance in their own channel.

I switched to a newer version of OctoPi and it was just really smooth. Simply download a backup bundle on the old instance and feed that to the setup wizard on the new instance. Thats it. Everything was just there again. No need to change our touch a single thing. I could just go on-printing.

Gina Häußge (aka @foosel@chaos.social ) is really doing a fantastic job with this piece of software.

Sport

Oh boy was I lazy this week. Almost no sport at all. Running partner still sick, office gym showers closed and me too lazy.

I hope at least the physical activity on the weekend and hauling that bulky package count a little bit.

And of course we went swimming despite some rain.

beast of burden

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Today I was tasked with shipping a rather large and bulky package. How hard can this be? Short answer: very hard (if you don’t want to spent hundreds of EUR on it)

The object to be shipped is a rather stiff case. I thought I was well prepared with bubble wrap and some wrapping film. Oh boy was I wrong.

Took me about one hours to carefully pack the thing, wrap it first in bubble wrap and then in a couple of layers of wrapping film (like the one you might use in the kitchen to keep bowls of food fresh).

Went to the website of DHL (the shipping company of choice for this project) to check on the price and figured that the packaging material will have to be paper or cardboard to avoid the bulky load surplus charges.

Fortunately I still had some packaging paper large enough. Another round of wrapping and taping. Finally I put the monster into a large IKEA bag and trotted off to the nearest post office. Thats about 800m from here. Hauling this bulky thing which comes in at 15 kg is not as easy as one might imagine. The bag straps cut into my fingers and my arms are about 10cm longer now.

In the post office I learned another requirement for stuff you want to ship at lowest possible cost: it has to be box shaped so it can be stacked.

My package had one side with a hump and thus would again count as bulk load with a hefty surplus charge. As I’m frugal … I hauled the whole thing back home to organize a cardboard box large enough to contain the package and small enough to not exceed the shipping boundaries again.

In addition I 3D printed myself a bag strap holder to ease the cutting of the straps a bit. That came out rather nice and make a huge difference when carrying such heavy loads.

To be continued …

#weeklyreview 09/22

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Climate Demo 03.03.2023

On Friday my daughter an me joined the #FridaysForFuture gang for a nationwide climate justice demonstration in the Berlin.

In Berlin there were reportedly about 18.000 people on the streets. First there were a couple of speeches at the Invalidenpark and some musician were playing. The ones that stood out for me were Santiago Rodriguez and “Provinz”

One important topic was the upcoming public vote (Volksentscheid) on Berlin Climate Neutral by 2023. I hope you all got your vote notification and do you cross at the right spot. We need to push the government to do the right stuff.

3D Printing

Finally fired up the 3D printer last week to print another one of the moon globe lamp. That print took almost 2 days to finish. Now need to print the remaining parts for the stand and assemble it.

Sport

Started running again after 2 weeks ob absence. Felt good, but also rusty… I’m gettting old I guess.

Also started to do the indoor rowing again in the office gym. Feels good to get back into it and feel the old muscles getting stretched again.

And we were lucky on Sunday that there was no ice on the lake. It was still frozen on Thursday. So the water was pretty chilly but I managed to swim for about 4:30 min. Temperature outside and inside the water was ~ 2ºC.

Even my wife joined us this time and went into the water 3 times and took a few strokes of swimming. Wearing a neoprene suite, but nevertheless. Knowing that she’s suffering from severe ME/CFS for the last 4 years, this is a big deal for her.

Adventure

A friend of mine asked whether I’d join them to find a sophisticated geocache inside one of the old soviet bunkers in the area. Since we really didn’t had anything else important to do on sunday morning, my daughter and me joined. The entrance was a venting pipe that wasn’t designed for chubby unicorns like me. But with a bit of wiggling it fitted through 😉