Monthly Archives: October 2024

#weeklyreview 41/24

Posted on by
Reply

Beer’n’Burger

On Monday we had another instalment of our infamous beer & burger crew meetings. This time we finally met at the Brewdog restaurant at the Frankfurter Tor. The burgers were surprisingly good. The beer was good not surprisingly. But on the costly side with around 7 EUR per 0,5L glas.

Cold

I guess two times swimming on the last weekend and two sick kids at home last week took a toll on me. Woke up with a severely soar throat on Tuesday and it went downhill from there. So bad that I actually called in sick for Wednesday and Thursday.

Originally this Tuesday I was scheduled for the company sponsored flu vaccination. But fortunately that had to be rescheduled due to the doctor herself being sick.

Tried to stay in bed really and rest/sleep. Of course got interrupted several times by phone calls and family emergencies.

But eventually managed to get through and felt much better on Friday already. Almost no symptoms on Saturday.

big mastodon update

On Tuesday version 4.3.0 of Mastodon came out. Almost a major release if you ask me. The update required some manual intervention. They’ve split the container images into one for the web app and one for the streaming app. The docker-compose.yml had to be adjusted accordingly and a second container image built. I also had to rebuild the patch or the source code to allow for longer postings. This is now a little bit easier and can be achieve by just changing one variable value:

From d04253848c2d53cc732e3cb0c6e31be91dd6107c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Falko Zurell <email>
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2024 15:27:02 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] adjust post character limit to 5000 chars for 4.3.x

Signed-off-by: Falko Zurell <email>
---
 app/validators/status_length_validator.rb | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/app/validators/status_length_validator.rb b/app/validators/status_length_validator.rb
index dc841ded3..9cb1ec94b 100644
--- a/app/validators/status_length_validator.rb
+++ b/app/validators/status_length_validator.rb
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 # frozen_string_literal: true
 
 class StatusLengthValidator < ActiveModel::Validator
-  MAX_CHARS = 500
+  MAX_CHARS = 5000
   URL_PLACEHOLDER_CHARS = 23
   URL_PLACEHOLDER = 'x' * 23
 
-- 
2.39.5 (Apple Git-154)

All in all the upgrades of all three of my instances went perfectly smooth and the new web interface looks slightly fresher.

Dinosaurs and Future

The weather on Saturday was so good and we stayed in Berlin for quarantine (not pass on the cold/flue on to my wife in the countryside) reasons. Kiddo and me decided to go to the museum of natural history to see the dinosaurs and other stuff again. We took the bikes and happily pedalled there through marvellous Mitte.

I was surprised to find Knut the famous Berlin Zoo polar bear there on display.

After the museum we felt fancy enough to drive down the road to the FUTURIUM. A new building new the river and Hauptbahnhof where some vision of the future stuff is on display. There was a spectacular view from the skywalk on the roof over sunny Berlin.

We rounded the trip off with lunch at Sanku Maots’ai 三顾冒菜 柏林 a Chinese style restaurant at Friedrichstrasse. It’s quite popular among the natives and you get to choose your ingredients for your hot pot yourself. And yours truly doesn’t shy away from the weird stuff like duck blood or tribe 😀

In the evening we watched the original Tim Burton “Betelgeuse” movie and afterwards James Bond – Goldeneye. Good ol’ stuff.

#weeklyreview 40/24

Posted on by
Reply

Ted Lasso

I’m a big fan of the Ted Lasso TV series. So I had to improve one of our meeting rooms

let’s see how long this lasts

Nerd meet up

On Tuesday I attended gathering of some old hacker dudes. All famous names in the Berlin scene and beyond. Hard fanboy moment to meet Tim Pritlove in person. He’s an icon in the Podcast world and has single handedly established and nurtured podcasts over the decades now with famous formats like Chaos Radio Express, Logbuch Netzpolitik and many more.

Realised we’re getting old and you hardly find people with this depth and breadth of computer knowledge anymore.

flu season

Both kids were off sick for a few days this week. Looks like flu season has started. Fortunately I’m scheduled for my flu shot next week in the company.

At least that gave us some time for a walk in the park and enjoy the autumn.

Swimming

went for a swim in the lake on Saturday. Water is already quite cold. But still comfortably managed to do the large triangle. Of course had the whole lake for myself 🤣

#weeklyreview 39/24

Posted on by
Reply

Obsidian tinkering

I’m using the free version of Obsidian for note keeping across my devices. Using the Community Plugin Self-Hosted Live Sync with a CouchDB to synchronise changes across the devices.

Recently the author of the plugin added support for object storage services (e.q. AWS S3, MinIO etc. ) for synchronisation. I had to give this a try as I’m running my own MinIO instance already for other purposes. The CouchDB was solely for Obsidian syncing. So using the other service would allow to reduce the number of services I have to run.

Created a new bucket and access policy and then configured all the devices with the new sync backend. So far it seems to work pretty well.

Fediverse Talk at the community college

I finally gave a little Fediverse talk at the local community college in Templin. Last time we tried, nobody actually signed up for the course. We tried a slightly different format this time. Kind of a bar camp like approach. Meeting in the little “El Caribe” restaurant in Templin and have it an informal setup with drinks and food.

This time some people did sign up and eventually we were 7 people. One couple even from Luxemburg (which be chance was sitting in the restaurant on their vacation and spontaneously decided to join in).

It was a good evening and the people were actually quite engaged and interested although they hadn’t heard of the Fediverse and its various services before. Let’s see if they eventually show up as followers 😉

70th

On Saturday we went to the 70th birthday of my uncle in Luckenwalde. That included a spontaneous detour to pick up my aunt from her retirement home as her driver had to bail out due to a family emergency. She’s partially paralysed since she had multiple strokes a few years ago. That went surprisingly smooth and she was really happy she was able to attend the birthday party. It was fun to see all the old relatives and friends. My uncle gave us a good tour of the old carpentry workshop our grandfather build and he inherited. He had also collected a whole bunch of historic items from decades ago.

On our way into the city of Luckenwalde we passed by the old house of my grand parents. To our surprise the old neighbour lady was still around and looked just like I remember her from about 40 years ago when I spent time there as a kid. Big surprise and happiness on all sides for this short reunion.