Sheeessh, the year is almost over… time flies.

This week I looked into possible alternatives for Evernote. I pump all my documents into Evernote since decades. It’s a trusty store for all my admin stuff and some notes and has saved my bacon several times when traveling. Whenever I needed some official documents (birth certificates, marriage certificates etc.), I was able to pull them out of Evernote and unlock the things like immigration into South Africa or getting temporary passports at the embassy.

But it’s always good to have alternatives in case the enshittification of services spreads to further tools I use. I also like (and dislike) being in complete control of my own data. So looking at services that would keep notes in a durable format, sync across devices via my own facilities and can possibly import Evernote data.

This time I took a deeper look at Obsidian. A free for personal use note editor that stores in MarkDown files. Sync can be done via file sync services like iCloud Drive, DropBox etc.

Obsidian also offers their own paid sync service.

Using iCloud Sync isn’t optimal as iCloud now has this on-demand sync. If files are not needed for a while, they’ll be deleted from the device and downloaded on demand once needed again. This however will mess with Obsidian as it expects files to be there.

I found a community plugin for Obsidian which offers a live sync capability via a CouchDB. That I can host myself and thus have all the data location and syncing under my control.

But it turned out that plugin is still under heavy development and changes features rapidly. At least the E2E encryption was replaced while I was testing. That requires a re-sync of the whole database.

I had exported all my Evernote notebooks into the ENEX format. Obsidian is able to read this and import the notes including their attachments and some metadata. So far so good. But turns out that almost 6GB of data seems a bit too chunky for my CouchDB setup. Syncing one device took several days. Given that the plugin changed and I had to re-do the syncing several times … too much hassle for the moment.

I eventually decided to not put the heavy Evernote archive into Obsidian. The app is more for note taking, not so much for storing Documents (as in PDFs and other attachments). Notes are much smaller and sync almost instantly via the CouchDB backend.

Spotify Wrapped

This week the famous Spotify year review came out. Not much surprise in there. I also believe that the stats are wrong. I do like Queens of the Stone Age. But now way I was listening to “Feed don’t fail me now” more often than songs from one of the other top artists in the list. Anyway..

And I know that people keep complaining how Spotify is not paying the artists fairly. For me Spotify is almost the exclusive way to consume music nowadays. They run the infrastructure and pay for the network bandwidth to deliver the music as well as providing clients and integration into a lot of appliances. A hear nobody complain about the major records labels anymore. What value do they provide these days in getting the music to the fans?

Winter

Winter finally arrived and brought a whole bunch of snow. In Berlin especially black ice. Monday I still managed to bike into work. But it was dangerously slippery. Of course the pedestrian and bike paths were mostly not cleared or gritted.

Keto diet

I’ve finally started to seriously try and loose some weight. My approach is a mix of special diet and more exercise.

On the diet side I’m trying a no-carb diet. Simply means avoid any carbohydrates in my diet. No other restrictions. No carbs is almost impossible as almost any food contains some of them. But I’m trying to stay well below 50g/day. Idea is that the body metabolism is adapting from burning carbohydrates for energy to burning fat for energy.

The effect is already visible on the scale 😉

Admittedly last weeks review was a little late. Too late… To make up for that, I’m publishing this one on Sunday 😉

Last Sunday our weekly swimming was really just a small group as most of the people were busy otherwise. Water was at around 6ºC. Didn’t try to cross the lake as there wasn’t enough time.

Started Monday with one hour of rowing in the office gym. Tuesday I made due with just half an hour of indoor cycling. That was the last day of the week I could properly exercise as on Tuesday morning I received my yearly flu vaccination from the company doctor and was advised to keep it low for the next few days to let the body build the antibodies against the flu.

Nevertheless couldn’t resist to have a long walk Wednesday evening to get at least some exercise and fresh air.

On this day the colleague brought his coffee equipment to the office. So we got to enjoy proper coffee and a show 😉

On Thursday I was tinkering around with the Flipper Zero and its new App Store. Found an App than can read and display the values of the most popular temperature sensors.

Unfortunately the App broke a little later when Flipper pushed out an updated firmware. I checked the repository of the app and tried to build the app myself fixing the things the build process was complaining about.

And after half a night of trial and error I got it running eventually and was able to build me the smallest weather station. I still had a DHT22 sensor which I consider quite bulky for my other projects. But it’s pin-out fits directly into the Flipper Zeros GPIO ports:

The thingy even had a cameo in one of my BeReals 😉

Friday it finally got more seriously cold. During the week we already had a low of -6ºC on the countryside and even Berlin had around -2ºC.

Friday Evening it even started to snow. Enough to cover the lawn with a thin blanket of snow.

Saturday evening we had our annual party of the “Leben in Groß Dölln e.V.”. It was a lovely get-together again in a great venue. Everyone brought their favourite food to share and good wine. Lot’s of fun and inspiring conversations. Really good to see the village community still thriving and growing.

After the successful mushroom foraging session on Saturday it was now my duty to risk my life and eat them.

If you’re reading this … I survived 😉 Turned into one delicious meal 😉

Was playing around with ownTracks as a self-hosted location tracking app. The idea is to have the ability to track various mobile devices but keep the data under my control. While the built-in iOS (“Find my”) and Android (Google Maps) are convenient, the also leave the data on Apples/Google server to fuck around with.

ownTracks is a simple app that can send the position data to an arbitrary MQTT backend. I’m hosting my own Mosquitto instance and use the ownTracks Recorder app to visualise the data on OpenStreetMaps.

The connection to the MQTT broker is of course using TLS encryption. To add security and hide the data from the MQTT broker one can define an encryption passphrase. Now the MQTT broker sees only encrypted data. Via this secret you can also share your position with friends. All devices with the same encryption key can see the location of the other members.

It gets interesting when you add POIs and geofences. The clients can send a special message when leaving or entering a certain location. This way one can automate geo location based events (e.q. the classical “turn the lights on when I’m coming home” example etc.). The ownTracks Recorder app also records “tracks” means it doesn’t only collect the individual points but draws line/routes where one moved. So you can display your own moving profile over time.

Wednesday

I felt fancy and took my coffee gear to the office. Thats the Wacaco Picopresso and the HARIO Travel Grinder. I pre-weighed the coffee beans at home and stored them in the little metal containers I’ve kept from my coffee bean advent calendar last year.

Saturday – mushrooms again

On Saturday we’ve been invited over to our friends place in the next village for a little walk in the forest and maybe some mushroom picking again.

And it was crazy. On just a 30m strip right outside the village we filled 3 baskets of mushrooms and had to stop as our storage capacity was exceeded. Those will be cut into small pieces and dried up for later use. Mostly in sauces to stews and the like.

Sheeesh, already late again with my weekly review.

Tried to up my gym game again this week. Starting with rowing machine on Monday. Resting a bit on Tuesday and then doing some long walks on Wednesday. Our bunch of weirdoes considers a hiking trip in Greenland next year. In preparation I need to stark doing longer hikes with weight in the backpack. So I took my large rucksack to carry my work backpack and my gym backpack and walked all the way to the office. Also had session on the “Elliptical Strider” and Sam forced me into a core workout 😀

This week the sun came out the time I was traveling to the office and gave a nice glow to some building tops. Although the days were mostly cloudy and rainy, that was still a nice sight.

In the evening our little travel group met for beers and I might have slightly had too much of the Lemke’s IPA.

Thursday another meeting of our infamous Beer & Burger group took place at Hirsch & Eber. Delicious burger with game meet. Can definitely recommend.

Another jogging session in the morning on Friday since my running partner from our house was out sick again this week I had go alone.

Saturday @sirki & @moellus finally came over to reinstantiate our yearly mushroom foraging session. That was paused for some years due to my wife’s health conditions.

That was a lovely reunion although almost all our kids opted out. Back in the days our two families were a force of nature as we tend to show up with 10 people from just two families 😀

We made Pizza and even found some mushrooms on our stroll through the forest.

I’ve got a super lovely new coffee cup from @moellus. This is my new favourite cup in the house now 🙂

Tried to stay away from carbohydrates in my diet this week. Of course had a few cheat meals, but slowly getting there.

Some bookmarks from this week:

• visualising Apple Health data with Grafana – source: toot from Schenkl
• Hookmark – source: toot from @pixelgraphix

Sunday we had lunch at my parents side and enjoyed the kids favourite German dumplings menu 🙂

Swam the lake and figured that the Apple Watch can record the heart rate while swimming. In contrast to my Garmin Fenix which refused to do so. The GPS tracking during swimming seems to be a tad bit better with the Fenix though. But I was out of training and had to do a couple of breast strokes. The water finally has temperature around 10ºC. Unfortunately the Apple Watch that I have doesn’t have a temperature sensor.

On Monday I had to get back to work. Working remotely though as the kids were still on vacation. So we spent the time in the countryside.

Tuesday

This was our 16th wedding anniversary. But we live together for much longer already. And hopefully for many more years to come <3

Formally I had to work, but in the afternoon the stormy weather caused a power outage in our village and also took away mobile data reception. Good excuse to have a trip to the Werbellinsee and Szczecin, Poland

Wednesday

Saw a large pike at the lake

Thursday

Spontaneous trip to a “nearby” cinema to watch “Killers Of The Flower Moon” by Martin Scorsese. Very good (and rather long) movie. Awesome performance by Lily Gladstone.

Saturday

Finally cleaning up the property of all the half-dead plants and fallen off leaves. It’s finally getting a bit of autumn vibes. Apparently we had a whole lot of pots in use for this years tomato growing.