Monthly Archives: March 2025

#weeklyreview 11/2025

Posted on by
3

walking to the office

Managed at least once to walk to the office this week. It’s a 5km walk in one direction. So doing about 10-11km total on such days. That’s good exercise. And indeed it’s been to toll at all now compared to the first time I did this. The weather was cold and air quality this week was really bad. The large deconstruction side on the way certainly contributed quite a bit of dust.

A large green demolition excavator is tearing down a graffiti-covered, partially demolished building. Rubble and debris are scattered on the ground. In the background, there are two cranes and a modern building under construction. A person wearing a white hard hat is standing near a temporary structure, observing the site.

making pasta

Felt for pasta this week. First batch was the simple aglio, olio e peperoncini. Lot’s of garlic of course.

A close-up of a plate of spaghetti aglio e olio, featuring sautéed garlic slices, red chili peppers, and chopped parsley, glistening with olive oil in a dark bowl.

Second thing I tried was a Amatriciana sauce. I remembered that from one of our nearby lunch restaurants. Looked up a recipe and it’s surprisingly simple and fast to make. I could not find the correct meat in the nearby stores – guancale – and had to make do with normal bacon instead. Also seasoned with balsamic vinegar and it came out quite delicious. I like that it’s simple and fast and doesn’t take hours of cooking to extract the umami from the tomato sauce.

Diced pieces of meat sizzling in a pan, coated in a rich, dark sauce.
A close-up of a pan filled with simmering red tomato sauce, with visible chunks of tomatoes and onions. A wooden spatula is placed in the sauce, indicating stirring. Steam is rising from the sauce, suggesting it's being cooked on a stovetop.

Apple Updates

Security updates for macOS and iOS. Some people complained that such updates would re-enable Apple Intelligence for them when they had previously turned it off. Didn’t happen to me. I remained turned off.

A laptop and a smartphone, both displaying the Apple logo with progress bars, are on a desk. The smartphone is connected to the laptop with a cable. A white keyboard and a decorative cat figurine are also visible, along with several wires and monitors in the background.

Considering it pretty useless anyway. And Gruber even called it vaporware.

AI/LLM investigation

My local AI/LLM investigations continue. Still hindered by our corporate security policy which prohibits the use of any USB storage. So I can’t offload stuff to my company payed external USB drives to make room for new LLM models and virtual machines.

I’m trying to evaluation and develop with the LLM stuff in a secure way. Means… I don’t want to use any public APIs or services to not leak any company material to the outside. I don’t trust any of the LLM API providers despite us having a legal framework in place to “securely” use the likes of CoPilot and ChatGPT.

UX hell & Car roof

Realised after about 4 days that I left the car sunroof tilt open. Fortunately it didn’t rain in these 4 days. I don’t understand why VW didn’t implement a notification feature for such cases and the ability to remote close the sun roof. The car does have all the capabilities for sure. It’s connected to the internet – the companion app on my phone clearly tells me that the roof is open and the car is locked. The companion app can send me notifications as it does every once in a while that charging is complete.

The roof can be closed with a long press on the key fob – so remote triggered. So why the heck is it not a feature of the app to get notified that I forgot to close the roof and to close it remotely?

Close-up of a car sunroof slightly ajar, reflecting cloudy sky and surrounding buildings. The roof surface is dusty. Other parked vehicles are visible in the background.

torch

Eventually got myself a little kitchen torch to sear and caramelise stuff 🙂 (Ab)used it to pimp my coffee

A torch is caramelizing sugar on top of a cup of coffee, likely creating a crème brûlée latte, on a wooden table.

Nails and Bacon

On Friday I was invited to a Serrano bacon and wine at a friend’s place. Finally time and reason to get my nails somewhat done again.

A thumb nail painted with vertical rainbow stripes is prominently displayed against a light tiled floor background.

#weeklyreview 10/2025

Posted on by
Reply

Last week was a week of crazily beautiful sundowns. Clear skies and city scenery made for some spectacular photos.

A cityscape at sunset with vibrant hues of purple, pink, and orange filling the sky. Silhouettes of trees and a building are in the foreground, and a prominent tower is visible on the horizon. The building has multiple balconies, some with lights on.
A city street at sunset with vibrant orange and pink hues in the sky. Contrails cross the sky above tall buildings, and the Berlin TV Tower is visible in the distance. Cars and a tram are moving along the wet street, and a bare tree is silhouetted against the colorful sky.
City street at sunset with colorful sky featuring intersecting contrails. The skyline includes tall buildings and a distinctive tower. Traffic lights are visible, and some cars are on the road.

Hacker Stammtisch

Tuesday was this month session of the old nerds. There were animated discussion about a IT cooperative. One friends bugs us since years with that idea. It sounds nice and some of us kinda do have this with our self-hosting efforts at a small and family scale. But I doubt this can take off commercially. If you offer IT services to companies and need to respect SLAs and all the regulatory requirements it quickly becomes involved and expensive. Or someone is being exploited …

Plate of breaded schnitzel topped with a lemon wedge, served with potatoes. A glass of beer and a mug with utensils are in the background, alongside a bowl of salad.

Crocusses

On Friday I used to good whether to have a walk over the nearby cemetery. We can see it from our balcony and I could tell it’s full or crocuses.

A vibrant field of purple crocus flowers with orange centers, growing densely in a lush green meadow. The foreground is in sharp focus, while the background is softly blurred, creating a depth effect.
Close-up of a small patch of flowers featuring a blue blossom in the foreground and light purple crocuses with orange centers in the background, surrounded by green grass and brown undergrowth.
A cluster of blooming purple and white crocus flowers with bright orange stamens, emerging from the sunlit ground amidst dry grass.

Glorious mug

A friend gifted me this glorious golden mug for always bringing tea for our winter swimming group. Isn’t it gorgeous?

A reflective, gold-colored mug held in a hand, filled with frothy beverage, against a blurred outdoor background of grass and trees.

Rust programming

I also continued working on my little Rust program to batch upload images to Pixelfed. Adding support for various options to generate the image descriptions.

I gave up on trying to write the whole thing with help of tools like ChatGTP, Claude or Copilot. It just doesn’t work in my eyes. As soon as stuff gets more complex, one spends more time explaining context and functionality to the tools than writing code. I’m only using some help for short functions and lines that needs fixing or alternatives. But just doing the good old RTFM and reading blog posts with examples and explanations seems still a more effective way to get this moving forward.

It’s not fully done yet, but the code is available in the branch “Ollama” on my repo.

Your employer is not your friend

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday I was talking with a young colleague from India. She felt that her work is not seen and her role seems undervalued in the organisation. She’s putting a lot of effort into her role and tries to deliver at every task thrown at her. But she started to question the benefit for her and her career.

I shared my personal experience and perspective with her. Mainly that one should consider the employee/employer relationship as that what it is: a commercial contract.

Your employer is not your friend. They will at best fulfil your contract, but not go beyond that. So everything you put in beyond what’s in the contract if a free gift to the company.

That might sounds harsh, but thats the reality in my experience. All the hard work and over hours you might put in are not guaranteed to pay out. They depend on individuals like your direct line manager to be recognised and respected. That person however can change at any time at the will of the company. And the next line manager will have no knowledge about your efforts.

Think of your employment contract like of any other commercial contract you enter. When you buy a TV set, the seller will usually not give you something else for free in addition. And you would not consider to pay 10 or 20% more just because you enjoy the deal. So why would you give free labor to your employer? In hope of a promotion?

That might be a reason. But ask yourself what’s the risk here. Does your employer have a document career progression framework? Have you talked to your line manager what is that you need to do to get promoted? Or are you just hoping that your effort will eventually be recognised for a promotion? That means you’re banking on the memory of your line manager and her goodwill to promote you. It’s not a surefire thing to get.

So whenever you commit effort beyond what’s in your contract, make sure you understand what’s in it for you.

I did a lot of over hours throughout my career. And I did so voluntarily, knowing that often times I’m not compensated by the company with money or free time in return. But most of the time it was a conscious decision of mine because I knew that I would learn and gain experience. That was, what I took out for me of those over hours. One might argue whether that was worth it, sure. But I think it was.

#weeklyreview 09/2025

Posted on by
Reply

I guess previous week Sunday was the last ice swim of this season. During the week before the temperatures were really cold but on the weekend they were already above freezing and the ice was brittle. We reopened the path we cut the weekend before to take a dip.

A digital thermometer partially submerged in water, displaying a temperature of 3.9 degrees Celsius and a timer at 1 minute and 18 seconds. The surrounding water is clear, showing a sandy bottom with some small pebbles.
A frozen lake with patches of ice and open water near the shore, surrounded by dry reeds. In the background, a dense forest of leafless trees is visible under a cloudy sky.

In the afternoon it but turned above 14ºC and we could witness that one of our two beehives seem to have survived the winter. The bees were coming out and cleaning their hive.

A green beehive is set on a wooden platform outdoors. Several bees are visible near the entrance, with some flying in and out. The surrounding area includes dirt and foliage.

Local LLM setup

Made progress with my local LLM setup. Finally got the RAG properly working with my documents. I’m using Open WebUI as interface for the Ollama installation on my machine. For the RAG setup I use the Ollama model bge-m3:latest to generate the embeddings of the documents. Also tweaked the values of Top K to 10.

The biggest difference seems to make the System prompt and the query prompt. I’ve created custom models by combining an existing model plus my knowledge objects (the documents I’ve uploaded with the embeddings generated as described above) and a custom system prompt.

The system prompt explains to the model what it is and also especially the structure of the knowledge objects. This way the model has a better “idea” of what data it’s dealing with and can respond more accurately to the queries later on.

Dinner

Wednesday I was at a friends place for dinner. Was meant to be a bigger round at first, but eventually most others had to bail out for being sick. So just my friend with her husband an me. Was still a great evening with delicious food and lots of conversations. Learned a lot about onions 😄

I’m walking

Trying to walk to the office more often now. Roughly takes me one hour to get there and is a nice exercise. According to my fitness tracking that’s spending almost as much calories as going to the gym. So figured I can just do that and have a nice brisk walk twice a day and also take pictures around the city.

Black and white image of an urban scene featuring the Berlin TV Tower (Fernsehturm) in the background, and a street with tall buildings, a tram, and a street lamp in the foreground. A Moleskine store sign is visible among the buildings. The scene captures elements of city life and architecture.
Black and white urban scene showing a street with cars, a tram, and pedestrians. On the left, a building with a clock is visible. In the background, the prominent TV tower and a high-rise building can be seen through a light fog. Overhead, tram wires crisscross the scene.
Black and white image of an urban scene with tall buildings and a tower partially obscured by fog. A tram is visible at street level, and a large tree is in the foreground. Hotel signs are on the buildings.

On the weekend I took a longer bike ride in the countryside to the forest with our little pond. Also started a rewrite of my Pixelfed Bulk Uploader in Rust. Figured that trying to write the whole thing with tools like ChatGPT or Claude doesn’t give me the clean code I like. I spent too much time explaining to the LLM what I want to achieve and an equal amount debugging the output from the LLMs.