This week got a bit messed up as I didn’t made it into the office. So I missed my rowing sessions in the gym. Also missed the running with a friend on Monday as it was rather icy and slippery outside. But towards the end of the week I got my cadaver out two days in a row for running in the park at least. First day I really felt the rust. Second day, although there wasn’t any rest day in between was much better.
On Sunday we were swimming in the lake and had to toss off some ice. The lake was almost covered with a thin layer, but fortunately near the beach it was open.
Betraying Capitalism
Our oven broke the second time now in about 8 years. Every 4 years the lower heater seem to burn out. Last time I had it repaired for about 180 EUR. This time, with some hints from the Fediverse I managed to swap out the heat pipe myself. So the whole repair was only 20 EUR. Hope it lasts the next 4 years at least.
Disclaimer: This is seriously dangerous stuff if you don’t know what you’re doing. The kitchen ovens usually have their own dedicate power circuit and fuses because they draw so much power. This is current that can and will kill you if you make mistakes. So please don’t try this at home unless you’re qualified.
Bleeding Edge
Since the Pinafore Web-Based Mastodon client is discontinued, everyone seems to gravitate towards Elk as a replace. The elk team is building a rather beautiful web client for the fediverse. It can be tried out on their own instance at https://elk.zone/ or one can host it herself.
I tried the latter and built the Docker container to run the service. There are some caveats to that. The documentation is still rather sparse and doesn’t mention that the service must be accessed via HTTPS and also need a proper domain name. But thanks to Boerge I moved past that hurdle and got it somehow working. Of course not after some more struggle with file permissions in the Docker container. I submitted a Pull Request to the Elk team to fix the documentation and docker-compose.yml. Let’s see when this makes it into the main branch.
phew, this week was … slightly turbulent at the beginning.
f**ed up the hotel booking for the baltic sea and basically booked two hotels. Fortunately at different times. So we changed plans quickly and went earlier to Binz to not let those booked rooms expire while we had already payed them.
renovated the kids room and gave one wall a nice green color. Kid is happy
Baltic Sea at Binz was good. I like all wheather and we almost had all sorts of weather. Mostly stormy and cold. Sometimes rainy and icy. But also patches of Sun and an awesome sunrise on the last day
Spend a lot of time reading in and out the sauna (my kindle is sauna proven)
Finished the last book of the Trisolaris series: Death’s End
Against my habits I was not swimming in the baltic sea. While I don’t mind the temperature I would need to be able to swim before I get cold. Since the beach is very shallow, I’d have to walk about 50 m into the sea before I could swim. Thats too much for me.
I did however went swimming on Sunday again back in our little village lake. We had to break the ice to get into the patch of free water. Water had about 1ºC.
Trying to be a little more consistent with the language this time.
Why English anyway? Multiple reasons.
most of my friends understand english. quite many are not german speaking at all.
I’m using an english keyboard for almost all my devices due to to work reasons. Writing german on an english keyboard is a little cumbersome
Fediverse
After Twitter has cut off several 3rd party apps the folks over at Tapbots have finally released their Mastodon Client app named “Ivory“. It has been excitedly awaited since their “Tweetbot” app was one of the best apps for Twitter when Twitter was still a thing. So I’ve installed Ivory as well and do like it. It has the potential to take the crown from “toot!” for me. I actually don’t like the candy design. But the rest feels promising.
Meeting people
On tuesday I met my previous boss for the last time as a colleague. She’s moving on, leaving the company after several years. She was the one dragging me from System Engineering to the Product Management side. But more importantly she was a voice of reason the in the crazy circus that we used to call “leadership team”. I will miss her as my boss and as a colleague. Fortunately her new position isn’t too far away from our office.
On thursday I managed to visit @moellus in his natural habitat – his kitchen. That was long overdue. Thanks for the coffee!
Sport
Unfortunately I didn’t reach my goal of 2x running and 2x rowing this week. Schedule was a bit messed up due to a doctors appointment and us leaving Berlin early for the weekend.
No Swimming this week as there was ice on the lake. It’s only about 0,5cm thick. But too much hassle for me to get it off for swimming. I’m not an ice dipper (you only dip your body for a few seconds into the cold water. Maybe repeatedly) but a swimmer. I have to go in a swim away for as long as the body seems to work. Concentrating on the swimming and monitoring the muscles whether there are signs of them getting stiff or weak distracts me from the cold and allows me to stay in the water for several minutes. This is not possible when there is ice.
I tried to break very thin ice while swimming. While it seems possible physically, the ice shards are very sharp. Since I’m swimming just with my swim trunks I had cut my arms, legs and back on these sharp ice shards. One doesn’t feel the cuts in the ice cold water actually. But when you get out it looks like you’ve been tortured …
Bookmarks
Here are a few booksmarks I saved throughout the week:
I’m at about 1/4 done with the “Death’ End“. Still manage to read every night and sometimes even a few minutes during the day.
To encourage more reading in the family, we established our own private book club. We want to meet every two weeks and talk about the books/material we’ve read. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a book, but can also be a poem or some longer paper etc. The emphasis is on active and conscious reading and reflection on the material and reading itself. This sunday we had the first session and I think it was a good kick-off. The kids shared the books they were reading and what they liked about the books. Of course it was unusual at first to have a “formal meeting” about that. But I think we’re on to something here and look forward to the next session in two weeks.
ToDo
Boerge was asking in his weekly review about To-Do-List apps. I have to admit those didn’t really work for me so far. I like the concept and read quite a lot about various systems and apps. Of course it all started with “Getting Things Done” from David Allen. I’ve got OmniFocus on my devices and be using this occasionally.
In addition I’m using a view shared lists in Apples reminders app for things like groceries and remembering what to take/bring out to our house.
3D-Printing
Again a week without 3D-Printing. Just didn’t had the time nor a concrete model that I wanted to print. Still very much in love with “The great wave off kanagawa“
when adding new entries to .env for a docker-compose.yml .. make sure you put them also into the environment: section of your service to actually make use of them. Was searching for quite some time why my Minio didn’t properly made use of Prometheus …
Mattermost has finally release their Mobile app in Version 2.x. Most notable feature is the support for multiple Mattermost servers. This is very important as the self-hosted Slack-alternative grew rather popular the last years and the likelihood that you have to use multiple is increasing.
tried out the new 7.51 firmware from the FritzLab for my ancient Fritz!Box 7490. Seems to have wifi issues with my setup. So I switched back after about 1 day
Sport
on track with running 2x per week
trying to get more rowing done if time permits
swimming in the lake at 1.5ºC water temp on Sunday
Sightseeing
visited the Museum Barberini in Postdam. Nice collection of famous impressionist pictures
stunning that most of the pictures didn’t even had protective glas. You could really see all the great details of the pictures. There were watch guards in every room though.
we used the VIP treatment and were able to get right into museum with the car.
on thursday I had to pick up my daughter somewhere in Neukölln. The usual route was blocked due to some blockage on the Ringbahn so I had to travel the U1 and U8 route in Neukölln. Quite a different world from Friedrichshain. There are so many small shops of different purposes. I wonder how they thrive at this size in this economy.
Product Management
one very important question for product managers to decide the priority of a certain feature is: “Whats the business value of this feature?”
It can be further specified with questions like “How exactly does this make our product better?”, “Which problem does it solve?”
If you don’t have a very clear answer to these questions, then you’ll have a problem with the delivery of that feature.
Books
finished reading “The Dark forest” and started the third volume of the trilogy “Death’s end”
On monday my Mastodon server acted up. I noticed that images were not properly loading but only displaying a blurry preview. But not all of them, just some. I suspected issues with the Object Storage Provider IONOS that I had recently configured.
After some digging I found out that my host couldn’t resolve DNS names anymore. Somehow the resolver died. So I rebooted the whole machine … not remembering that I had unfinished business in /etc/fstab which shadow mounted my home directory causing new weird issues …
In the wake of blaming the external object storage provider I had started looking into open-source alternatives. Like open-source software to set up a self-hosted S3-compatible object store. Stumbled over minio.io and quickly did a test installation on one of my machines at home.
After fixing all the issue on my server and finishing the setup of minio, I was ready to test it on some real live services: my personal Pixelfed instance. Since I’m the only user on that one, I considered it a safe playground. After a few rounds of trail and error (Pixelfed documentation still gives me the shivers) I’ve got the configuration right and test postings worked as expected.
Ready for prime time
I had configured my Mastodon instance at https://hub.uckermark.social/ to use external object storage provider for media content. The reason is, that Mastodon caches all the media in posts it federates. This can grow to several gigabytes very quickly. The more users on remote instances you local users follow, the more content the Mastodon instance will cache.
I followed the article of Thomas Leister, admin of the Mastodon instance https://metalhead.club/ to configure the S3 compatible storage from IONOS. While that technically worked out, I wasn’t really happy with the IONOS administration interface. They currently do not show any metrics for the object storage nor the data transfer. That means, flying blind for using their service until the invoice arrives. They claimed to have a billing API where the data is supposedly available. I had a brief look at it and decided that I’m too lazy to go that route.
So when IONOS issued the warning, that my trial period will run out in a few days I have decided to switch also my Mastodon instance to my self-hosted object storage backed by Minio. I copied over the existing data from IONOS object storage using the Minio Command Client. That is really comfortable.
I’ve also hooked up my minio server to Prometheus and Grafana for insights into the usage
Sports
To fight some of the kilos and the rust in general I’ll try to move more. Started that pledge with a run on Sunday. Wanted to start light with maybe 5 km to get back into it. Of course I overdid it with 10.99 km. Payed the price with sore muscles for 2 days.
While our weekly swim in the lake doesn’t count as much moving maybe, we still did it and I spent 3:12 min in the water. I’m heavily cursing at myself and the world when getting into the water. That part doesn’t get easier. But after 3 strokes of swimming thats forgotten and all that remains is the good feeling of beating oneself.
On Wednesday I finally sorted out my access to our office Gym and hit the rowing machine for 30 min and 7 km.
For the coming week I found a partner to run hopefully more regular again here in Berlin at home. Lets see how that pans out.
Reading
Almost done with “The Dark Forest” by Cixin Liu. Memorable quote
The historical facts of the Middle Ages and the Great Ravine prove that a totalitarian system is the greatest barrier to human progress. Starship Earth requires vibrant new ideas and innovation, and this can only be accomplished through the establishment of a society that fully respects freedom and individuality.
The Dark Forest – Cixin Liu
Warp
In den vergangenen Wochen hatte ich mal Warp als Terminal getestet. Dafür gabs Einladungen und man musste sich da irgendwie für die Beta Anmelden. Anfangs sah das auch alles ganz schick aus, aber mir kam es schon gleich etwas komisch vor, dass da so ein Hype mit Einladung und künstlicher Verknappung gemacht wurde. Dann vielen mir einige Settings auf, die ich auch nicht mag. Z.B. das Warp als SSH-client eine eigene Implementierung nutzt, damit es im Output seine Blocks verwenden kann. Heißt für mich, das mein ganzer SSH-Traffic durch einen SSH-Client geht von einer Firma bei der noch nicht wirklich klar ist, welche Absichten sie hat.
Jedenfalls bin ich erst einmal wieder zurück zu iTerm2. Da weiß ich was ich hab 😉 Warp werde ich dennoch weiter aus dem Augenwinkel beobachten.
Searchtodon
Jan Lehnardt apparently had too much spare time over the holidays. So he did what Janl does and created a search engine for ones own Mastodon timeline: Searchtodon
This is based on the free Elk browser interface for Mastodon
Ok, let’s do this. If @assbach can do it (again) and @b30 anyway, then I should be able too, right?
Swimming
Of course we started the new year with swimming. Exactly as we closed the old year. Since it’s gotten really warm over new years even the 10cm thick ice that we were skating on shortly before christmas was completely gone.
Office
First day in the office was a slight fail. Went there early to hit the gym just to learn our access has been temporarily removed. That threw a spinner in my sports plan (haha, plan… who am I kidding?). So I went to the kitchen to get me a coffee from the office coffee machine. Fortunately I sense the cheesy smell before taking the first sip. The milk apparently got stale over the holidays. And since I was in early, the housekeeping hadn’t renewed that yet. And because those coffee machines are precious, they are secured with a lock. So I couldn’t fix it myself.
3D Printing
This weeks prints:
Reading
Still reading “The Dark Forest” – the second part of the Trisolaris Trilogy from Cixin Liu. This is the third time I’m reading this trilogy and it’s still very captivating for me.
Also fixed some mail configuration issues in the BookWyrm instance. Now Google Mail users should be able to receive mails again.
Unfortunately he’ll not be able choose computer science as major topic in school. Since not enough pupil choose that topic and they wont open a major course with just 5 kids.
In the previous round of the contest only 430 kids participated. I find this pretty concerning. Every freakin’ job in this country depends more or less on devices or services provided by computer science. But apparently nobody seems interested to understand it or its foundations. One of course can’t blame the kids as the schools don’t really encourage them…
As a hobby I’m providing a whole bunch of services on my machine. I’m not interested in user data or usage data. To protect the privacy of my users where possible, I’ve deactivated the logging of source IP addresses in my Traefik Proxy.
I’m using the following CLI parameters in my Traefik docker-compose.yml file to avoid that ClientAddr, ClientHost, ClientUsername and also the X-Real-IP HTTP header is logged:
The fantastic Studio Ghibli is providing stills of their famous movies for personal use. If you wanna download them to your local machine, try using this loop:
for movie in baron chihiro ged ghiblies howl kaguyahime karigurashi kazetachinu kokurikozaka laputa marnie mimi mononoke nausicaa ponyo totoro porco;
do
for number in $( seq -w 1 1 50 );
do
wget https://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/${movie}0${number}.jpg;
done
done
Just open a shell (Bash) on your OS and paste the code above. Assuming you have “wget” installed locally, this will download those movie stills (850 pictures at the moment).
Zuerst eine Warnung! Versuche nicht normalen Milchreis im Reiskocher zu machen. Das gibt eine Sauerei. Die Milch kocht über und versaut Dir Küche und Kocher.
Aber es gibt einen Weg für Faulpelze und gleichzeitige Besitzer eines Reiskocher dennoch soetwas ähnliches wie Milchreis zu machen. Und das geht so:
1 Tasse Reis (Sushi-Reis, Milchreis)
1 Tasse Kokosmilch
2 Tassen Wasser
1/2 Apfel
1 Stange Zimt
1 Prise Salz
Die Größe der Tasse spielt keine Rolle, wichtig ist das Mischverhältnis.
Zuerst schälen wir den Apfel und schneiden ihn feine Spalten. Auch das Kerngehäuse entfernen. Dann alle Zutaten in den Reiskocher tuen und das Program für normalen weißen Reis durchlaufen lassen.
Nach ca. 1h hat man sehr leckeren, duftenden Reis mit der Konsistenz und fast dem Geschmack von Milchreis. Den Apfel kann man auch durch andere Früchte wie z.B. Trockenpflaumen oder ähnliches ersetzen.
Nach diesem zweiten trockenen Sommer in Folge freut man sich so sehr über die feuchten, kühlen Tage die der Herbst bringt.
Ein weiteres Highlight ist der Nebel am Abend
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.WhateverRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
