Was working from the countryside this week. Kiddo had a friend from school over for camping on our grounds for 3 days. That was fun. The weather was good and they went swimming several times a day.
Friday we picked up the middle kid from his hiking trip to Norway in Hamburg. Took the chance to have a stroll around the Elbphilarmonie. It’s was a beautiful day with strong winds.
Finally finished the wood stacking of the last piles from this spring. That should last for some years now…
Unfortunately I seem to have brought back some sort of summer flu from last weeks vacation. Coughing and stuffy lungs. Fighting it with tea and vitamin-c now.
Nevertheless I had to deliver K2 to Hamburg for his two week hiking trip in Norway …
I hope he’ll enjoys it as much as his last hiking trip in Sweden two years ago.
Embassy
On Tuesday I accompanied the in-laws on their visit to the South African embassy in Berlin as a translator. They want to apply for a pensioners visa which requires a whole lot of paperwork.
We had to wait for about 4 hours until it was our turn. Eventually some stamps were missing … but that seems to be solvable. But of course will require another visit. But fortunately no help with translation was needed as the embassy staff speaks German really well and was very kind in general.
Ton, Steine, Scherben Podcast
found this marvelous podcast about germany’s first rock band with german lyrics. They are legendary in Germany although they hadn’t been commercially successful at all. What I think is almost unparalleled in Germany is their integrity to their original principles.
On Saturday there was an event at the grounds of the EST. This is the historic school side in Templin. During GDR times this was the place I finally learned to swim some decades ago. As member of “AG Touristik” we wanted to do a canoe tour. But for that everyone would have been able to swim. I wasn’t at that time, so they send us to the local rowing & canoeing club. There we got life safer vests on and were tossed into the lake to swim 😉 Eventually the life vests were omitted and we could swim 🤣
This week we’ve been at our annual family vacation on Rügen island. This is a family tradition since more than 20 years. Various members of the family (mostly my in-law sisters families) rent appartments in the most eastern peninsula of Rügen and spend week there at the beach with the whole family. The kids play together and we have our standard repertoire of activities. There is the Rügen market in Thiessow. A local crafts and food market. And of course the obligatory visit to the Stoertebeker Festspiele. That is an open air stage play about a german pirate legend from the medieval.
This was again really relaxing since we don’t have to explore new stuff but can just enjoy what we already know. Weather was perfect. Not too warm, but warm enough to spend the days at the beach if we wanted.
My pouch of nail polish was quite popular this year. Eventually almost every body had their nails painted and decorated by my daughter. Even our middle son painted his nails voluntarily. I call that a success 😉
Back in Berlin after one week of vacation. The city is noticeably quieter as many people left for vacation. Summer is seems indeed the most relaxed time in Berlin. The ratio of tourist to inhabitants shifts again towards the tourists.
SIM card issues
Had weird SIM card issues since last week. My iPhone was displaying a message whether I’d want to add this number to my iMessage list of numbers. I didn’t pay attention at first and declined as I was on vacation. But this week had a look and eventually noticed that a different mobile phone number suddenly shows up in my Apple ID settings.
That of course immediately made my alarm bells ring. Had I been hacked?
Upon investigation I noticed that my own phone suddenly shows a different phone number for main SIM card. WTF!?
I did some tests with a friends phone: Calls to this new number immediately get cancelled. Calls to my original number still arrive on my phone. As do messages. Very weird.
Since this is a corporate contract, it wasn’t easy to get support from T-Mobile as I lack the relevant access codes. A bit back and forth via our corporate support eventually solved this mystery …
I have a rather old contract that had two SIM cards for the same mobile number. The second SIM cards sits in a mobile hotspot that I used during my on-call days. Hadn’t used this mobile hotspot in ages. But turned it on last week during vacation. Everything worked. But soon after that weird iOS message about to add the new number showed up. Which I kept declining.
T-Mobile stopped supporting multiple SIM cards for the same number on their side. When my mobile hotspot booked into the mobile network, they assigned a new number from their pool to my main SIM to keep their systems consistent. Two active SIM cards for the same mobile number are no longer supported. They solved this by assigning a new number. Why they assigned it to my main and already active SIM … I don’t know.
That was a relief – I wasn’t hacked but just ran into a technical edge case I guess. Issue is solved meanwhile.
medication foo
Kid is going on a vacation trip to Norway in two weeks. Since he’s got some prescriptive medics we needed to tell the trip organizer which ones he needs. My wife fortunately found out, that we also would need some official papers to accompany the drugs when traveling to Norway. A certified statement from the prescribing doctor in addition to an officially signed and stamped paper from the city of Berlin.
And of course there were only two days left to organize this as we were about to leave for our next week of vacation….
Fortunately everything fell into place and just took a whole lot of traveling the city to collect all the paperwork.
CamSnap camera
a few friends recently got a small digital camera that got some popularity lately. Not for its features, but rather for the lack thereof.
It’s super simple, no screen, no settings, no different lenses. Just turn on and shoot. Download later.
CamSnap is promoted as a summer camp camera which if super affordable and lets you focus on capture the moment instead of over engineering the images and immediately share them to the world.
I like the idea in principle. But decided for the time being against jumping that bandwagon. I miss some key features in the camera which I would meanwhile consider essential:
accurate meta data in the images: time, orientation
This would allow the images to just be stored without much manual sorting etc. The current model doesn’t keep time. The camera just doesn’t have a clock. There are some workaround, but this would require post processing the images …
Orientation is also quite essential for me now. I don’t want to rotate pictures later …
First full week of school holidays was spent in the “sächsische Schweiz” in Bad Schandau and surroundings. We had booked a small apartment directly at the river Elbe. Plan was to explore the usual sights hiking as I did as a kid with my parents some 40 years ago 😉
First trip was to the Bastei. We parked at a nearby hill and first had to go down to the city of Kurort Rathen to climb up to the Bastei. One could have driven all the way to the Bastei with the car. But where’s the fun in that?
