#weeklyreview 04/2025

Another busy week behind. Started with some Kimchi making that almost ruined the kitchen. The kimchi usually ferments over a few days. My batch didn’t do much fermentation for the first few days. So I had closed the lids. But then my daughter noticed that they were starting to bulk and leak. Upon opening the lid almost exploded

Apart from that it came out pretty delicious. The Recipe can be found here:

A night at the Opera

Tuesday was a big day. Birthday of my wife and to celebrate the event we had tickets for the “Dreigroschenoper” at the Berliner Ensemble.

I have to admit I hadn’t been in an Opera before, so I have nothing to compare it with. Had heard about the Dreigroschenoper and of course know the iconic song about Mack the knife.

It was spectacular. The building, the cast, the stage setup, the show. Will probably do this more often 😉 The kids had mixed feelings about it. It was a bit too long and too late in the evening for our youngest one to enjoy. But the two older ones did appreciate.

More Meshtastic

I got really excited about Meshtastic stuff and kept tinkering with the devices I’ve got. Of course that involved 3D printing various cases. So a hobby that addresses all the nerdy senses 😀

At good weather Berlin can see nodes from far away. I’m trying to get a feel for coverage and range. Means how reliable messages are delivered within the city through the mesh.

Got quite a bunch of ideas in my head how this could be used and possibly be applied/expanded in rural areas.

However… when driving to the countryside on the Weekend the mesh pretty much ended on the edge of Berlin. In Templin and around I couldn’t see a single node. There were at least two to be seen in Zehdenick. There is clearly room for improvement.

Gardening Season

The gardening season starts with seeding tomatoes and chilli and grow them seedlings indoors at first. My wife set up the first batches on the weekend.

Seed trays with transparent lids and labels for different plants sit on a floor near a window. A bag of fireplace briquettes is visible outside the window, and there is a red curtain to the right.

#weeklyreview 03/2025

Ice swimming

A few weeks too late for a white christmas it was snowing on the weekend and actually cold enough for the snow to stay. Nevertheless went running with a friend on Sunday and of course swimming. This time there was about 3-5m of ice on the shore before the open water started.

Thats always a bit tricky as the ice shards are quite sharp. And it’s really frickin’ cold to break them and push them away with bare hands. But we managed and it was a beautiful swim in the cold water and the sun was shining. Water temperature was about 2Âș C.

Still got some cuts and bruises from the ice, but not as bad as last year.

Ice shower

The shower in the gym still doesn’t have warm water. So the week continued with cold showers after the exercise 😉

18 at last

Our 2nd child turned 18 this week. Time flies …

Kiddo doesn’t like presents nor a party. So a family coffee was all that was tolerated. đŸ€·

At least my wife payed us a visit in Berlin for this occasion đŸ€—

Dunkin' donut box on a table, encircled by lit tea candles. On the box, there is an easel holding a small canvas painted with a blue and yellow design.

Pixelfed – another attempt

Since the enshittification of the commercial networks goes on many of their users seems to be migrating currently to Pixelfed.

I had an instance in the past, but were not happy with the buggy setup and flaky support. So eventually deleted my instance.

But with this new influx of users and the native iOS being available now I thought I give it another chance and did a new installation. Not without hiccups of course. But I think I’ve got it running reasonably well.

I’ve also downloaded my data archive from Instagram. Then I saw a friend posting batches of photos from his Insta Backup and thought that’s a nice idea, to post them month wise. But a tool to do that posting from the backup folder would be nice.

So I asked ChatGPT for help and came up with https://repos.mxhdr.net/maxheadroom/insta-import-pixelfed

This does the job ob posting all images in a certain folder in batches of configurable size.

This looks like this:

Meshtastic

Finally had ordered a Meshtastic device and got it delivered. That was inspired by the tinkering of Jan Wildeboer and is stories about the mesh networking capabilities oft the OLPC. I went with a LILYGO T-Echo

↬social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113137588284826911

↬social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113191557900339340

This is a protocol on top of the free 868MHz packet radio frequency that can be used for message exchange and routing. The good thing about the mesh network is, that there is no central infrastructure. The messages are just passed from node to node in a store/forward fashion. It resembles a little bit the robustness of the early Internet with multiple paths and redundancy and resilience in mind.

I can see dozens of nodes in Berlin and if the weather conditions are right, then even nodes from Poland, Hamburg, Halle (Saale), Zeitz etc. This is pretty amazing.

This can be seen on https://meshmap.de/

confused

overall I was little thrown off this week as there were so many unusual events and meet-ups that I got confused with the weekdays. We also didn’t went to the countryside on the weekend, which added to the confusion đŸ€Ș

#weeklyreview 02/2025

First full work week of the new year. Of course I started with proper gym sessions. The gym but had some surprises in store. The hot water wasn’t going on Monday so I could combine gym and ice bathing 😁

Had some good rowing sessions this week and also did some high-intensity interval sessions on the rowing machine.

Meta -> MAGA

Zuckerberg caved in proactively and declared Meta is no longer doing content moderation for their services (Instagram, Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp etc.). So the shitshow that is their social media platforms will turn even worse. That’s surely gonna work out. It worked great for Twitter under first lady Musk turning it into a right-wing cesspool.

I saw first Mastodon instance admins already announcing that they’ve now finally blogged the threads.net domain from federation with the Fediverse. Threads was meant to properly federate with Mastodon and the likes via ActivityPub. But looks like that’s not going to expand much further with their current trajectory.

I’m not yet blocking Threads on my instance but rather leave it up to the individual users to set up a block for their own account.

Cold Brew

When it’s cold outside (It was snowing in Berlin this week) one can use the balcony to make cold brew coffee 😉

It wasn’t too cold though. No risk of the water freezing and cracking the jar.

A glass jar filled with amber liquid sits on a slatted wooden table on a balcony, with an out-of-focus cityscape and a blurred plant pot in the background.

fiddling with CSV files

I recently found a great tool for playing around with CSV files. Often I have to export some data from a tool to CSV format to process it further. Sometimes I just want to answer a relatively simple question. Like how many lines match a certain value in column C?

Probe is helping with that exact problem by providing an SQL like interface for CSV files (and even Parquet files). Simple binary that use open the CSV file with and start writing your queries.

↬mastodon.xyz/@johl/113775818903147100

Monitoring NextCloud All-In-On Containers

I’m running my NextCloud instance with the AOI Mastercontainer setup. To monitor such an instance, you can call a special monitoring URL that is displayed for the administrator under System Info.

However, you need to authenticate your request to the monitoring URL. For this you’re supposed to generate an access token. I was searching in the user interface for that option and couldn’t find it. Turns out that the access token is just a random string that you then have to configure as access token via the occ command line tool.

Now how to get to that occ tool on the AIO installation?

First you generate that random string using openssl:

openssl rand -hex 32

The result should be a 32 character string of hexadecimal numbers.

On the machine where your AIO containers run, you then call the main next cloud container like this:

docker exec --user www-data -it nextcloud-aio-nextcloud php occ config:app:set serverinfo token --value <your random hext string goes here>

That should set the Token for the server info URL and you can now call your monitoring endpoint with curl if you like to verify it:

curl -H "NC-Token: <your random hext string goes here>" https://nextcloud.example.com/ocs/v2.php/apps/serverinfo/api/v1/info

It should give you an XML document (unless configured to produce JSON output) with a whole bunch of NextCloud status information.

Winter finally

it had snowed already several times this week. But at least at the beginning of the week the snow didn’t last long as it was too warm still.

Tuesday evening on our way to the „Hacker Stammtisch“ there was proper rain/snow mix. Fortunately I got my rain coat „Friesen-Nerz“ and rain trousers and arrived dry. Moellus wasn’t dressed for the weather but still used the bike. R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

On Thursday the snow snow started to stay and it looked like Berlin was wildly unprepared. There roads were not cleared of the snow from what I could tell.

It did start to look rather nice on the weekend in the countryside. 3 weeks too late for a white Christmas though.

Herbstgold

On Saturday there was a documentary film evening organized in our village. Two films were on display. A short animation film by Adrienne Zeitler called “Die Frau und Landschaft” and a documentary by Jan Tenhaven called “Herbstgold“.

The latter was about really old people still competing in Sports. Very lovely movie with unique characters and touching stories. Really funny at times.

Studio Ghibli Mucke

and last, not least some tunes from Joe Hisaishi that K2 was practising

#weeklyreview 01/2025

Silvester

early afternoon we’ve got the admittedly slightly crazy idea to watch the official fireworks at Binz on RĂŒgen island. So we hit the road to be there by 6 pm and watched it with hundreds of other people at the beach of the Baltic Sea.

Been back for our own little Sylvester dinner with cheese fondue by 10:30 pm. Fortunately it was relatively quite in our village and we were in bed right after the mandatory cheers at 12 o’clock:D

Back to (school) business

Heading back to Berlin on 1st as the rest of the week was officially no holiday for the school kids. Slightly stupid if you ask me to get back to school for just 2 days. I bet many kids and even teachers were probably not showing up because of holiday induced “illness”.

Bots talking to bots

Looks like Meta is going to allow A.I. bots on their platforms to appear as “normal” user accounts. What could possibly go wrong?

On 27 December, Meta’s vice-president of product for generative AI, Connor Hayes, told the Financial Times that a new set of AI products would allow users to create AI bots that “exist on our platforms
 in the same way that accounts do”. The bots, he explained, would “have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content”. Before long, it is probable that much of what is posted on Facebook and Instagram (and perhaps to a certain extent WhatsApp) will not have been written by a human being. Bots talking to bots, sharing AI glurge, and upvoting is “where we see all of this going”, Hayes told the FT.

Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2025/01/mark-zuckerbergs-fake-internet-empire

3D Printing resumed

I was neglecting my 3D printer for several month now. But today I needed a frame for a pop filter for a microphone. Found a model on printables, sliced it and spend about 1 hour debugging the networking of the RaspberryPi running Mainsail & Klipper.

But finally the printer just delivered without any issues. No calibration or other maintenance needed.

Subskription tracking

My friend Boerge pointed me to a software to track ones subscriptions. Of course is installed it as a self-hosting service. Recently introduced another friend to it and she seems to like it. In the wake of that I created a little introductory video.

Service overview

Also related to that friend starting to use one of my self-hosted services, I thought it’s about time to create an overview of all the services I do self-host. Mostly for myself, because I sometimes forget that I have a certain services and then I can’t always remember the URLs …

I wanted this to be a static site as it’s really just a simple overview. So I decided to look into HUGO CMS again. Which is a static site generator CMS.

The result can be found here: https://www.explain-it.org/

It’s still work in progress, but I’m happy with the start.

A webpage titled "Explain IT" displays six project cards, each featuring an image, title, brief description, and a date. The projects include tools and services like Solidtime, Matrix/Element, Tandoor, KitchenOwl, PlantUML, and Teammapper. Navigation links for “Deutsch” and “English” are visible on the left, and "About" and "Contact" links are on the right.