Category Archives: Uncategorized

#weeklyreview 14/23

Posted on by

Vacation

since it’s school vacation in Berlin I took time off as well and we moved to our house in the .

There was a lot of woodworking waiting for me. Last spring there was a big storm taking down many trees in the surrounding forests. So we’ve got a few cubic meters of wood for a very good price. But it has to be cut down and split to dry properly.

Spend all Monday cutting down the big pile of logs with my trusty chainsaw.

On Tuesday we got a hydraulic splitter from a friend. But somehow we managed to break it and blew one of the hydraulic hoses.

Turns out it’s not entirely trivial to replace such a hose. Apparently the fittings are not really standardised and you can’t just by them in a normal DIY shop. You have to find a specialised shop to custom make the hose with the proper fittings.

The first problem but was to get the hose off the splitter. Of course I first had to buy a proper wrench that size. From a agriculture hardware shop in the nearest town I’ve got the address of the closest hydraulic service company.

Living in the countryside this means a lot of driving and time. Had to go to the nearest city for the proper wrench and then to a smaller village about 50km from our place to have the new hose made. All in all about 4hrs and 150km later the machine was working again.

Wednesday to Saturday we spent parts of the day with splitting and stacking that wood.

This will last for a few years …

Stabat Mater

On Sunday we attended one of two sessions of “Worte, die die Welt bewegen“ – a choir concert in the “Maria Magdalenen Kirche” in Templin. This was a joint venture of the local choir, the “Filmorchester Babelsberg”, “Preußisches Kammerorchester” and several solo artists.

Quite an impressive concert

Sport

Of course we started the new week (counting Sunday as the start of the new week in this context) with swimming in the lake.

#weeklyreview 13/23

Posted on by

Nerdstuff

Decided to move the storage backend of my Object Storage at home from the local HDD to the NAS. That way I avoid the regular backup over the network. The linux machine is connected via wired network to the NAS system and I hope the NFSv4 connection is stable enough. At least the NAS with its RAID and Backup gives me a little more peace of mind that that single aging HDD.

Set up another Mastodon Instance for a friend on my machine.

3D Printing

in time for easter I printed another batch of egg cups:

And just for fun another instance of the Great Wave Off Kanagawa in the form of the Great Wave of Coffee

Sport

Back to almost full schedule this week. Two times running and at least one time indoor rowing in the gym.

Almost attempted to swim across the lake on Sunday as air temperature suggested spring. But water was still bit too low at 5ºC for a full roundtrip. But swam about 7 minutes.

looking forward to a week of vacation next week and working from the countryside the week after \o/

Reading

Still not finished with my current book „Die Illusion der Vernunft“. Was too tired and lazy to read the last two weeks. Need to pick this up again. The books isn‘t that bad that I want to rather quit it. I‘m actually interested in the topic. But apparently its not enticing enough to take the time.

For a reason I will reveal later I‘ve started reading a biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Very interesting so far.

Listening

No, not music. In general. Listening to understand. I noticed that the majority of people donn‘t listen to understand. If at all, they listen to catch the pause in the speakers flow of words to place their own words. Rarely anyone tries to listen to understand. That may include asking questions to clarify things that one doesn‘t understand.

#weeklyreview 12/23

Posted on by

I know this is rather late for the weekly review. The judges are paying attention:

should probably try to get this done on Saturday or even Friday, as Sundays are usually packed with getting back from the countryside to Berlin and getting everything ready for the new work/school week.

Nerd Stuff

Took a look at Logseq as a note taking tool as @moellus was advocating for it. He provided some articles where people described their use of the tool. Main selling point seem to be thats it open source, uses Markdown as text format, synchronises across devices via iCloud or Dropbox and others.

Sport

again a lazy week as I only got the weekly lake swimming done, but no running, rowing etc. 🙁

Fediverse

Was contemplating about Pixelfed. While I like the UI as it resembles mostly the old working Instagram UI I less and less get the point of running my own Pixelfed instance. The level of interaction on the instance is really low compared to the feedback/interaction I’m getting for stuff posted on my Mastodon instance.
Since Pixelfed ist just another Fediverse Service that can be consumed with most Fediverse clients, most people might just consume a main Stream on Mastodon and don’t want to follow a separate stream on Pixelfed. One can perfectly follow people on Pixelfed from a Mastodon account. Thats the whole point of the Fediverse. I can also follow my Mastodon Followings on Pixelfed. But I’m honestly too lazy to re-follow all the people in Pixelfed again.

To me, the Pixelfed mobile app as a special interest Fediverse client would probably be enough. An Instagram-like user interface that would only display ActivityPub posts which contain Images and Videos (maybe even more specific). So one can have the Insta UI but using a Mastodon Account. I don’t need to run or have an account on a Pixelfed instance for this. Of course currently the Pixelfed mobile app isn’t compatible with a Mastodon feed.

#weeklyreview 11/23

Posted on by

Obviously didn’t manage to get the weekly review done before Sunday. Weekend was rather busy as the weather finally felt spring-like and we got a lot stuff done on the property and in the garden.

We put in a tree to hopefully give us some shade in the summer (not this year, but maybe next year already)

replanted the tomatoes seedlings and also cleaned up the property. Since we had borrowed a large trailer over the weekend I was able to bring a lot of old stuff and trash to the local recycling yard. It’s amazing that you can just got there and get easily rid of most of your stuff that doesn’t belong or fit into the normal trash bins. Its free as its included in our yearly waste treatment fee. I’m always tempted to rummage trough the large scrap containers and get out useful stuff (like old electronics).

Hosting

This week I’ve installed my own instance of Overleaf – a web based LaTeX editor for collaboration. Not that I’m in need of LaTeX document system at the moment… but it’s always nice to play around with such stuff.

Mastodon updated to v4.1.1

Installed a Jenkins-Cron-Job to repopulate replies to my mastodon instance as suggested by Matt.

3D Printing

Got quite a bit of 3D printing done. Leveled my printbed properly and I’m still amazed how smooth prints come out with the right filament and settings on this rather cheap printer. Uploading the timelapse videos to my PeerTube Instance in their own channel.

I switched to a newer version of OctoPi and it was just really smooth. Simply download a backup bundle on the old instance and feed that to the setup wizard on the new instance. Thats it. Everything was just there again. No need to change our touch a single thing. I could just go on-printing.

Gina Häußge (aka @foosel@chaos.social ) is really doing a fantastic job with this piece of software.

Sport

Oh boy was I lazy this week. Almost no sport at all. Running partner still sick, office gym showers closed and me too lazy.

I hope at least the physical activity on the weekend and hauling that bulky package count a little bit.

And of course we went swimming despite some rain.

beast of burden

Posted on by

Today I was tasked with shipping a rather large and bulky package. How hard can this be? Short answer: very hard (if you don’t want to spent hundreds of EUR on it)

The object to be shipped is a rather stiff case. I thought I was well prepared with bubble wrap and some wrapping film. Oh boy was I wrong.

Took me about one hours to carefully pack the thing, wrap it first in bubble wrap and then in a couple of layers of wrapping film (like the one you might use in the kitchen to keep bowls of food fresh).

Went to the website of DHL (the shipping company of choice for this project) to check on the price and figured that the packaging material will have to be paper or cardboard to avoid the bulky load surplus charges.

Fortunately I still had some packaging paper large enough. Another round of wrapping and taping. Finally I put the monster into a large IKEA bag and trotted off to the nearest post office. Thats about 800m from here. Hauling this bulky thing which comes in at 15 kg is not as easy as one might imagine. The bag straps cut into my fingers and my arms are about 10cm longer now.

In the post office I learned another requirement for stuff you want to ship at lowest possible cost: it has to be box shaped so it can be stacked.

My package had one side with a hump and thus would again count as bulk load with a hefty surplus charge. As I’m frugal … I hauled the whole thing back home to organize a cardboard box large enough to contain the package and small enough to not exceed the shipping boundaries again.

In addition I 3D printed myself a bag strap holder to ease the cutting of the straps a bit. That came out rather nice and make a huge difference when carrying such heavy loads.

To be continued …

#weeklyreview 09/22

Posted on by

Climate Demo 03.03.2023

On Friday my daughter an me joined the #FridaysForFuture gang for a nationwide climate justice demonstration in the Berlin.

In Berlin there were reportedly about 18.000 people on the streets. First there were a couple of speeches at the Invalidenpark and some musician were playing. The ones that stood out for me were Santiago Rodriguez and “Provinz”

One important topic was the upcoming public vote (Volksentscheid) on Berlin Climate Neutral by 2023. I hope you all got your vote notification and do you cross at the right spot. We need to push the government to do the right stuff.

3D Printing

Finally fired up the 3D printer last week to print another one of the moon globe lamp. That print took almost 2 days to finish. Now need to print the remaining parts for the stand and assemble it.

Sport

Started running again after 2 weeks ob absence. Felt good, but also rusty… I’m gettting old I guess.

Also started to do the indoor rowing again in the office gym. Feels good to get back into it and feel the old muscles getting stretched again.

And we were lucky on Sunday that there was no ice on the lake. It was still frozen on Thursday. So the water was pretty chilly but I managed to swim for about 4:30 min. Temperature outside and inside the water was ~ 2ºC.

Even my wife joined us this time and went into the water 3 times and took a few strokes of swimming. Wearing a neoprene suite, but nevertheless. Knowing that she’s suffering from severe ME/CFS for the last 4 years, this is a big deal for her.

Adventure

A friend of mine asked whether I’d join them to find a sophisticated geocache inside one of the old soviet bunkers in the area. Since we really didn’t had anything else important to do on sunday morning, my daughter and me joined. The entrance was a venting pipe that wasn’t designed for chubby unicorns like me. But with a bit of wiggling it fitted through 😉

#WEEKLYREVIEW 08/23

Posted on by

Tech updates

  • had to scrape my Pixelfed instance and re-create it
    • DB was somehow broken
    • started from scratch and noticed that Mastodon instances seem to automatically follow my account again. Looks like Mastodon is treating it similar to an account migration in the Fediverse
  • Also set up some Jenkins CI/CD pipelines to update Pixelfed and Elk automagically if there are updates on the upstream repos

Health

  • finally got my 4th COVID vaccination. Last one was from November 2021 an expired meanwhile. I’m still lucky to not have catched the disease at all so far. But why take a risk?
  • swimming on Sunday was good. Sun was shining and no ice on the lake. Water temperature was between 2-3ºC

Black Holes

On Wednesday K2 and me have been at the presentation of Dr. Victoria Grinberg on black holes and her research about them in the Zeiss Grossplanetarium Berlin.

It was very interesting to learn how she’s using black holes as “x-ray “light bulbs” x-ray the solar winds of blue giant stars.

Illustration by Dr. Victoria Grinberg https://www.sternwarte.uni-erlangen.de/~grinberg/#doodles

Books

  • Had our 3rd family book club session on Sunday
    • Kids are slowly getting into it
    • I’m currently reading “” and found some memorable quotes

Diese und andere ähnliche Heuristiken legen ein übergeordnetes Prinzip in der Entscheidungsfindung nahe, das der Wirtschaftswissenschaftler und Nobelpreisträger Daniel Kahneman als Verfügbarkeitsheuristik oder auch WYSIATI bezeichnet hat. WYSIATI steht für What you see is all there is (auf Deutsch: Was du siehst, ist alles, was es gibt) und meint unsere Tendenz, uns bei Entscheidungen auf die Informationen zu verlassen, die gerade verfügbar sind, statt noch umständlich nach weiteren Informationen zu suchen.

“Die Illusion der Vernunft” – Philipp Sterzer – page 149

In unserem Zusammenhang ist die wichtigste Erkenntnis diese: Allein die Tatsache, dass wir uns für etwas entschieden haben, lässt uns gute Argumente für diese Entscheidung finden.

“Die Illusion der Vernunft” – Philipp Sterzer – page 151

Movies

  • watched the whole 1st season of “The Consultant” at Amazon Prime with the brilliant Christoph Waltz – rating 4/5
  • StarTrep Picard Season 3 – rating 4/5 so far

Music

  • lately on heavy rotation “What’s your pleasure?” from Jessie Ware
    • she’s my latest Discovery from my automated Spotify playlists
    • to me she sounds like a mixture of Kylie Minogue, Roisin Murphy and Sophie Ellis Baxtor – very groovy.
  • On our trip to the countryside on the weekend I was listening to “The Blues Brothers – Original Soundtrack”
    • this recalled memories of a show act we did back in school at one of those legendary parties where I played Elwood.

Embedding content from Pixelfed

Posted on by

Testing some Pixelfed settings here

I think in order to have posts from Pixelfed embedded into other sites the Pixelfed posts have to be public (accessible to anyone in the Fediverse) and also the Pixelfed instance needs to be accessible without authentication (INSTANCE_PUBLIC_LOCAL_TIMELINE=true).

#weeklyreview 07/23

Posted on by

Tech updates

  • new version of GoToSocial deployed. It still crashes Ivory and other Fediverse Clients don’t seem to like it either
  • set up a continuous update pipeline for Elk – the fediverse web front-end – using Jenkins
  • Fixed my Pixelfed Avatar problem – my account should show an avatar picture again
  • switched the Docker engine on my home server to send logs to my NAS – to take off disc pressure
  • set up my own LinkDing instance to host my bookmarks

Movies

Sport

no Sport this week due to reasons. Now swimming on last Sunday due to too thick ice on the lake.

3D Printing

finally got some 3D printing done again. Tried out the new release of the PrusaSlicer which now sports organic support structures. Means, it will generate support structures that look like organically grown trees to support the overhanging parts of the models. This will save time during printing and also a great deal of material.

Fedithoughts

There are quite a bunch of Fediverse services meanwhile. And it’s nice that one can have a Twitter-like experience on Mastodon, an Instagram-like experience on Pixelfed, a GoodReads-like experience on BookWyrm etc.

But what slightly annoys me is the fact that it’s all separate accounts. People would have to follow several accounts of me to consume the various content types. Wouldn’t it be nicer if it would be just one account to follow and maybe just select the type of content that you wanna see? WordPress has different types of posts. What if WordPress would be fully Fediverse capable and could be used as the single account home instance. I would use the Pixelfed client to post pictures there and consume a stream of pictures from other people I follow. I would use one of the many Mastodon clients to consume a Twitter-like feed. Or I’d go to the web page itself (the Blog) to consume all content types at once.

Thoughts?