Monthly Archives: October 2024

#weeklyreview 43/24

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Swimming

It’s still way too warm for late October I’d say. The lake still has about 12ΒΊC water temperature. We had a good swim on Sunday, although we were only two people of our group. Still both made it across the lake and back, which took us about 20 minutes.

Running

Sunday morning I finally took another run with a friend in the village. I had signed up for the Berlin Half Marathon 2025 via the WWF charity program. One tries to collect donations for the WWF forest restoration project and once you reach at least the target of 300 EUR, you can get the ticket for the half-marathon.

So the shit gets real now πŸ˜‰ I’d try to not only finish the half marathon, but also with a target time of under 2hrs. Finishing is not the problem. Did this several times before. But running fast is my issue πŸ˜€

Regardless whether I’ll get a ticket for the Berlin half marathon or not … I’ll run at least one half-marathon in April 2025. Thats my pledge.

Subscription tracking

Moellus found a nifty little open source tool to track your subscriptions and provide sing statistical insights. It’s called Wallos and can be easily self-hosted. Of course I set one up for myself. It provides stats about your regular spent, the top categories etc. It can also send you reminders when renewal or cancellation is due.

Container monitoring

Found a toot with an interesting graph on container workloads. The author pointed me to “Beszel” – an open source lightweight monitoring tool for container environments. Of course I needed to test this out and it was really easy to install.

↬chaos.social/@vanilla_chief/113350730869041478

WordPress + ActivityPub

Had to dig a little deeper into the ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress as my last posting triggered a discussion about ContentWarning for post.

It took me a while to figure out where exactly the CW would be set for a post. It’s actually on the “Post” Settings under “Fediverse”

I was also wondering why my replies from WordPress to comments that came in via the Fediverse did not show the user handle of the person I’m replying to. They are pinged via ActivityPub, it’s just not visible in the Web UI of Mastodon as a visible mention. It’s rather a meta data field that Mastodon UI just doesn’t display. The is an ongoing discussion on the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress to possibly handle this differently.

Cinema

while cleaning her room, kiddo found a voucher for the cinema that was going to expire soon. So we picked a movie to watch. We settled on the latest “Beetlejuice” movie from Tim Burton. Just a week ago we had seen to original one on TV and the new one features actors kiddo likes from other Netflix shows (Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega).

The movie wasn’t that bad actually. At least mildly entertaining.

We went to the UCI Luxe Cinema at the Eastside gallery. That building is just a few years old. But it’s really kinda disgusting already. It’s trimmed for masses with self-serve automatons for beverages and tickets etc. The floor is quite dirty. Popcorn all over the place. The bathrooms, while visibly clean already start to break apart. Tiles fall off the walls and have cracks. Seals around the sinks do not fit anymore. Looks the building was done without quality control and no attention to detail. That’s a shame for a building that is just a few years old.

Preparing for Winter

On Saturday I cleaned up our tomatoes and harvested the last batch of fruits from the plants. Cleaned up all the pots, saved the soil on the raised beet for next years and stowed away the pots. Finally burned some old twigs and branches to have a clean slate for winter (there is more than enough foliage and heaps of branches in the forest behind our property. So no need to store that on our property for the wildlife.)

Our bees also enjoyed the warm and sunny day.

#weeklyreview 42/24

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Blood donation

finally went to the CharitΓ© to donate blood. There have been several calls to action posted across the year as either the demand for blood went up or people are just not donating enough anymore. Especially my blood type is in high demand as it can be used for many patients.

What’s a bit annoying is, that you can’t refuse the money they’ll give you for the donation. You get a barcode that you need to scan on your way out. You have to do this, otherwise they’ll throw away your blood. You have to accept that it’s actually going to be used. And once you do that, you automatically get the money. There is no option to donate the money are refuse it.

I’ll write to the CharitΓ© and ask them to make this optional

bugs

Tuesday evening friends and me tried a new restaurant which is serving insects as part of their meals: Mikrokosmos in Berlin Kreuzberg. It was actually near my old roaming grounds in Kreuzberg near the former I-D Media Headquarters.

We chose the menu with 4 courses and of course I made it all insects dishes. They had crickets, grasshoppers, and two types of larvae/worms. All as ingredients or topping to their fantastic vegetarian dishes. It was very delicious.

3D tinkering

I found an old Neopixel ring in my drawers that I finally wanted to put to use as a little remote controlled lamp. I also had an ESP8266 flying around and quickly installed WLED on it. This is an open source software for the ESP microcontroller family that offers a web interface to control WS2812B based LED Strips. These are the famous multicolour LEDs that can be controlled by microcontrollers. You’ll find them in almost all cheap color LED strips that can change colours.

Now I needed some sort of Lamp shade to put the Neopixel ring into. I searched the interwebs for a readymade 3D Model of the Neopixel ring so I can model around it in Autodesk Fusion 360. And of course I found one on GrabCAD for free. Cobbled together a quick and simple cylindrical lamp shade with a compartment for the ring in the bottom.

Exported as STL file to OrcaSlicer for printing with my modded Creality Ender 3 V2

And watching the progress on Mainsail with the Klipper firmware while printing.

The result looks promising for a quick mock up of the final model. I love how the layers of filament build sort of a funnel with the light.

Mushroom season

On Saturday we finally went foraging in the forest. There are tons of mushrooms this year. And as every year, the streets in the countryside are lined with “Berliners” going for mushrooms as if there is no tomorrow. AFAIK there is a German law (of course) that says you must not pick more mushrooms than for personal use. The forest is surely owned by someone. So you’re practically stealing food off the land of someone else.

I like picking mushrooms as an exercise or rather recreational activity. Not so much a fan of the mushroom dishes. We usually clean, cut and dry them for later use in dishes as seasoning.

Cleaning the cemetery

Saturday morning we had a cleaning session on the local cemetery in the village. Cutting back all the bushes that try to overgrow the site and removing all the dead branches from the surrounding trees. Always a good community exercise with lots of fun and chatter, man with their dangerous tools and hot beverages πŸ™‚

#weeklyreview 41/24

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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 δΈ‰ι‘Ύε†’θœ ζŸζž— 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 πŸ˜€

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

#weeklyreview 40/24

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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

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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 πŸ˜‰

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.