Monthly Archives: September 2023

#weeklyreview 38/23

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Sunday

Started my 3D-Printer to produce an Apple Watch stand. Now getting notifications including pictures from OctoPrint on the Apple Watch.

It’s quite amazing that one can produce such things on demand at home now. I remember when I was a kid at school that I was totally amazed when I’ve got my first printer (OKI 390, 24 needles) and was able print stuff at home. That was unheard of in the late 1980s that you can produce your own printed documents. At least for the average normal household.

A little later I bought my first Hand scanner (similar to this Logitech Scanman) from PEARL to digitise photos etc. But it turned out to be quite difficult to get this right. You had to pull the scanner over the picture at a steady pace and angle to produce a picture thats not completely distorted.

Now we have phones in our pockets which produce scans much quicker and of much higher quality in a snap. Printers that can produce color printouts and also 3D Printers that can produce useful things.

Monday

Hit the Gym in the morning for 30min of rowing. Last chance to see my friend for a few weeks as she’s visiting the US.

In the evening there was a crazy beautiful rainbow over berlin. It was already dusk and sky beautifully dramatic anyway.

Thursday

Beer & Burger crew meeting. Felt sick since yesterday. Likely just a cold. COVID test came back negative. Crew changed the venue to an outdoor place nearby so I could join with relative safety. Best crew!

Early today the new Mastodon v4.2.0 update was released. Big changes in search as people can now opt in to cross-instance search from what I understand. Also search filters are available now and a whole bunch of UI improvements to make it easier for new users to find their home on Mastodon.

Updated all 3 of my instances already.

Friday

Still sick day. Cold sitting stuck in my nose. But seems to get slightly better and not getting worse. Thats good I guess.

Saturday

Tried to relax most of the day. Even managed to do a proper after lunch nap 🙂

In the evening we went to the open stage at the Templin “MultiKulturelles Centrum”. Entrance is for free and we got a very good mix of music played by more or less local artists. Ranging from a singer songwriter to a single piano player to a solo singer across a percussion group and choir to a rock band. There was certainly no shortage of variety in style. Everyone gave their best and it was great. Always amazing to see people exposing themselves on a stage to an audience to show their talent and enthusiasm for their art. Not being a professional with many years of training and experience. But just feeling the urge to play and perform.

Also good to see that this scene is thriving in my little home town. Organised and brought to life by people I went to school with. Received by people I know from my youth.

#weeklyreview 37/23

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Sunday

We took our scooter for the once a year drive in the area. The weather was still very warm and the air clean. At the peak of the tour, farthest away from our house we had to slow down at a crossing that village and the motor just died. Couldn’t get it back running as the battery was apparently empty. Even with the kickstarter it wouldn’t start.

A local helped us to start it with external power. But as soon as he removed the cable it died down again.

Eventually we had to leave the scooter there and call my brother to pick us up and drive home. I took the battery with me to charge it during the week and pick up the scooter next weekend.

In the evening back home in Berlin, K3 and me decided for a spontaneous Asian dinner. I got the fancy sushi with a dry ice fountain

Monday

Was jogging for a short round yesterday already. Went to the office gym for a 30min indoor rowing session. Usually Monday I’d go running with a friend from our apartment building. But I thought he’s not in this week. But he was. So we took our usual round in the evening at still almost 27°C outside. That was a lot of exercise for 24hrs.

Tuesday

Met with a friend and former colleague which I haven’t seen in about 10 years. Glad to see he hasn’t changed much.

A bar at the riverside in Berlin Mitte

Wednesday

Fiddled with Mastodon to expand the character limit for posts. Thought this is configurable. But one needs to patch two files at the current 4.1 release.

Set up a Jenkins job to apply the patches automatically and build new docker images.

Thursday

Set up a Mastodon server for a friend. There can’t be enough nodes on the Fediverse 😉

Friday

Of course we joined the Berlin climate strike at the Brandenburger Tor at the global climate justice strike day.

Juli
Crowd at the Brandenburger Tor
Brandenburger Tor right before the begin
Luisa Neubauer giving a speech.

Saturday

Did a 7,5km hike to rescue the stranded scooter. Fully charged battery and helmet in the backpack. After a wonderful 1.3hrs hike I installed the battery and the scooter started in an instant. That narrows down the issue to something around the power generation from the motor. That’s apparently not producing any electricity to sustain the spark plug or charge the battery. Will have to google that or ask the local machine fetishist to fix it.

#weeklyreview 36/23

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Was mostly a work-week, still trying to find the optimal setup with my new work device. Running the corporate VPN inside a VM together with a Dante proxy. First tried this on Linux x86_64 (because the legacy VPN software is not available for ARM Linux). Then realised while talking to Moellus that I could possibly use a macOS VM which uses ARM CPU and got the VPN client and might be able to compile Dante SOCKS. Guest VMs which use ARM CPU are much much faster on the M2 CPUs.

So quickly installed macOS in a VM and compiled Dante. Worked OKish. Unfortunately there is some tcp session issue with Dante and macOS. So back to Linux x86.

Next networking challenge was the Name Resolution. I usually us my personal PiHole as DNS-Resolver to block Ads and Youtube and so on. The PiHole sits outside my home networks so it’s reachable from any location I’m working in. That results in my laptop inability to resolve local network names properly as it would query the PiHole first. But fortunately there is a way to teach the macOS DNS resolver to use different DNS Servers for certain domains.

You’ll have to create a directory /etc/resolver and place file with your special resolver settings in there. Mine is called fritz.box and has the following content:

domain fritz.box
search fritz.box
nameserver 192.168.175.1

This tells the macOS DNS resolver to use this IP address for the domain fritz.box.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I finally met with Daniel again for a run in the Tiergarten. Early morning meeting at the Brandenburger Tor.

3D-Printing

after not using the 3D-Printer for many weeks over the summer I fired up the trusty OctoPi and the printer to print out a case for my new RaspberryPi 4. And everything just worked. I didn’t even had to level the bed or something. It just worked at the first attempt.

Power saving

I have an old PC serving as a Jenkins server to regularly update some docker images for me. The upstream projects don’t change that often and a build about once a day seems sufficient for me. Having the PC running all day long seems like a waste of resources.

I’ve another old PC running continuously to serve S3-compatible object storage for my Mastodon instances. So there is already a machine running 24/7. I used this machine to send a Wake-On-LAN signal at a specific time each day. Waking up that Jenkins PC to let it check its repositories and execute the builds. The PC will shutdown at a fixed time as well and thus run only a fraction of the time for roughly the same result. I’ll have daily new images of my Docker stuff if need be.

Fediverse

I asked the “Volkshochschule” (adult education centre) whether they think a social media course with focus on the Fediverse would be something that their audience would be interested in. They seem to like the idea and now I have to come up with a plan and course material. Fortunately the new semester for them starts only next years. So will be only February 2024 or so.

Barbie

On Saturday we decided to spontaneously go an watch the “Barbie” movie in the local cinema. As it was a super hot summer day, the cinema was rather empty. We had cosy lounge seats and coffee was served at the table.

The movie itself was quite good. Really good acting by the main characters and some funny quirks.

This movie is certainly not for weak masculine egos. Thats why I like it 😀