#weeklyreview 16/24

Hangover

As reported last week, we went to a birthday party and of course stayed to the very end. Quite a bunch of beers and Küstennebel 🤷‍♂️ was involved. I had a bit of a hangover (for me that means lack of sleep, thirst and still not safe to drive a car).

data archeology

This week was the time that my wife asked me for old data from several years ago. As a good nerd I of course had some old disks and archives that could potentially contain the data (an old address book).

First challenge was to remember on what piece of software I was hosting the address book services and on which of our devices a copy would be present. The data was last seen around 2017. I found old disk images from the MacBooks but wasn’t able to restore the old macOS address book files on nowadays macOS. Then I thought I might just check whether there is a backup of the server side. And indeed I found an old archive of the webserver with the ownCloud installation and a dump of the mySQL database.

I was able to import the ownCloud dump into a local mysql instance and found some tables that looked like they contain the address book entries. Fortunately ownCloud was saving the vCard entry in a single table cell with some meta data in other cells.

Lazy me asked ChatGPT to write a Python script which would extract the vCard cell from the database and write it into a text file one per each entry of the database table. To my surprise this worked on the first attempt. All I had to do now, was import these vCard files into my new nextCloud instance.

Doodle / Rally

Every once in a while we have to find a common slot for some activity among friends and family. A service like Doodle became famous to create a poll and find a common slot. This week I became aware of “Rally” an opensource tool to do exactly that. Of course I quickly installed my own instance 😉

Kitchen tricks

One of my favourite dishes at the moment is a block of feta cheese surrounded by a whole bunch of cherry tomatoe, garlic and olive oil. Put in the oven for about 50min and enjoy.

I cut the cherry tomatoes in have so the loose a bit of water are not popping/splashing when trying to stir the whole dish after cooking.

Finally remembered an old trick to cut a lot of these small tomatoes in short time. Just use a second cutting board and a long knife. Put as many tomatoes on the board as fit and the knife can cut, place the second board on top to hold the tomatoes in place with a gentle pushdown and then cut with the long knife between them board through the tomatoes. One cut and have a pound of tomatoes cut…