Most notable thing this week was probably the weather. Temperature went significantly above 10ºC during the day. On Friday it actually felt a lot like summer. Sun was shining, streets were buzzing with people and animals and a lot of trees finally decided to put out leaves.

Thursday morning was still very grey and rainy. I was driving through the area east of Berlin towards the border of Poland and the very low hanging cloud formed a homogeneous wall of grey. Was thinking that people suffering from depressions must probably have a really bad day this morning.

On Tuesday morning I met with an old friend in Westberlin. Always a bit of a trip and visit to the many different worlds of Berlin.

When I was still in school (and after the Berlin Wall came down obviously) we used to take the train to Berlin on the weekends to go to Kurfürstendamm. That was the posh and trendy shopping mile back in the days. You’d find the trending fashion stores and and “WOM – World of Music” at the famous Ku’damm.

It surprisingly survived and revived as a shopping distination. Of course shops have partially changed. But over all it’s still rather lively and trendy.

Sport

Got at least some running done on Tuesday. Was scheduled to have another run with a friend on Wednesday morning. That was cancelled last minute. So planned to go to the office gym with a colleague. But that didn’t happen either due to forgotten towel. Peer pressure didn’t really work out this week then.

But at least on sunday I managed to cross the local lake in our village for the first time this year. Water had 7ºC and it took about 18 Minutes back and forth. Unfortunately the GPS recording isn’t very accurate as I had to swim a lot of breast stroke. At this temperature I can’t keep up the freestyle all the way. Its much too exhausting. The actual distance is ~560m

Links

some bookmarks I put during the last week:

Fedimeister – a Fediverse client aimed at writers and journalists. Makes it easier to write longer posts (automatically split into multiple posts)

Coffee rabbit hole links:

• https://strivefortone.com/2020/09/19/low-pressure-turbo-shots-and-the-perfect-espresso/
• https://espressoaf.com/guides/profiling.html

Unterrichtsmaterialien zum Thema Informatik

I know I’m late again for my weekly review 🙄 but hey at least I’m not breaking my streak 😉

last week I still spent in the countryside due to kids holidays. But had to work from there. Which was certainly bearable. In general life in the countryside feels so much slower that the two weeks felt almost double as long as the same time in busy Berlin.

We managed to really get most of the work we had planned for the two weeks done. There is a tiny bit of wood stacking left, but thats OK for the next weekend.

The weather is really cold and wet this year. Its mid April and the temperatures during the day are still in the single digits. At least the nights don’t seem to be freezing anymore and we can consider leaving the tomatoes and chilly seedlings outside in the greenhouse.

Working

was working remotely this week from my trusty container. Spend way too much time debugging the network again. The container got a LAN cable thats plugged into a FritzBox Wifi Hotspot to provide WiFi in the container. While a windows laptop, my phone and iPad just happily use the WiFi, my laptop complaints a lot about. Wouldn’t want to connect, connection very flaky, stopped connecting at all. I ended up pulling out a LAN network adapter for my Laptop using the LAN cable directly. So annoying….

Sport

I considered the woodwork as sport as well 😉 Apart from that I only did the regular swimming. This week we took two turns – on Sunday and on Monday as this were holidays and most of the people in our swimming group were still around in the area.

There seems to be a little gear competition going on. I might have started it by having a hand paddles and a buoy for swimming. Now another guys got a buoy and hand paddles and a second guys said her ordered an buoy belt …

Hipstamatic

Boerge recently rediscovered his love for Hipstamatic. This was probably one of the first apps I had on my first iPhone and I’m using it ever since. I love the design of the app and the concept of combining films and lenses etc.

They recently did a bit of an overhaul of their app and introduced a new incarnation of their social network around Hipstamatic shots. Apparently the profiles can be seen from the web now and you can follow people on their social network. I’m not entirely (or actually at all) convinced this will get enough momentum to sustain … but hey, lets give it a try: https://hipstamatic.app/@maxheadroom

BeReal

I’ve also started to participate into the daily BeReal rounds again. Had the account for a while already, but didn’t got around using it as I didn’t (don’t ) like this forced time period of posting thingy. I get the idea, but find it bit of impractical for me.

But apparently people in friend sphere still sticking with it. So giving it another try.

Random pictures from the week

Vacation

since it’s school vacation in Berlin I took time off as well and we moved to our house in the #uckermark.

There was a lot of woodworking waiting for me. Last spring there was a big storm taking down many trees in the surrounding forests. So we’ve got a few cubic meters of wood for a very good price. But it has to be cut down and split to dry properly.

Spend all Monday cutting down the big pile of logs with my trusty chainsaw.

On Tuesday we got a hydraulic splitter from a friend. But somehow we managed to break it and blew one of the hydraulic hoses.

Turns out it’s not entirely trivial to replace such a hose. Apparently the fittings are not really standardised and you can’t just by them in a normal DIY shop. You have to find a specialised shop to custom make the hose with the proper fittings.

The first problem but was to get the hose off the splitter. Of course I first had to buy a proper wrench that size. From a agriculture hardware shop in the nearest town I’ve got the address of the closest hydraulic service company.

Living in the countryside this means a lot of driving and time. Had to go to the nearest city for the proper wrench and then to a smaller village about 50km from our place to have the new hose made. All in all about 4hrs and 150km later the machine was working again.

Wednesday to Saturday we spent parts of the day with splitting and stacking that wood.

This will last for a few years …

Stabat Mater

On Sunday we attended one of two sessions of “Worte, die die Welt bewegen“ – a choir concert in the “Maria Magdalenen Kirche” in Templin. This was a joint venture of the local choir, the “Filmorchester Babelsberg”, “Preußisches Kammerorchester” and several solo artists.

Quite an impressive concert

Sport

Of course we started the new week (counting Sunday as the start of the new week in this context) with swimming in the lake.