There we have June already. About 40% of the year already gone.
Went swimming with my daughter and managed to capture a pike on photo
Resurrected an old iPod touch from the drawers as kiddo needs a dump music player for the upcoming school trip. This isn’t entirely trivial anymore. Today one usually only got streaming. Now to find digital music for offline playing is a bit of an exercise. Fortunately she loves my old music as well and also listens to a lot of podcasts that are available for download.
Next challenge is headphones with wires …
Spend quite and amount of time and filament this week to calibrate the 3D printer properly. Just to find out that the heater on the extruder eventually was broken. Fortunately I still had the old Extruder laying around and could swap out the whole thing.
Got myself a little treat off Kleinanzeigen: an old GDR Marschkompass F73 from Freiberger Präzisionsmechanik manufacturing. Thats a famous GDR compass that we used to have on the scouts club. Unfortunately I didn’t preserve my own and now had to get a used one. But it’s in decent shape after all those years and the packaging looks original as well. Only the instruction manual looks a bit odd over this scanned version here.
On Friday my daughter and me went once more to the local “Paint-your-style” shop. You can paint various items of pottery here and they’ll burn and glaze it for you to pick up. Really looking forward to pickup my new cup 😉
Aaaand another one to finally catch up on my weekly reviews …
Not too much to write about actually. So might just do a photo dump. Weekends are still largely occupied by dealing with the firewood. Still splitting and stacking.
On recommendation of Blumi I gave Espresso/Tonic another try. Had in once at “The Barn” and didn’t like the sparkly coffee at all. But with ice cubes and a decent tonic it’s actually not that bad. At most as weird as my usual Orangespresso 😉
On Wednesday we had a lovely reunion with two old friends and ex-colleagues. Nice gathering on the BRLO BRWHOUSE at Gleisdreieck. Was a bit afraid it might be too crowded as just around the corner the re:publica took place. But it was OK.
passing by Checkpoint Charly on my way back home
And because of the re:publica another good friend of mine was in town and had a bit of time to meet over breakfast the next day. Again near the Gleisdreieck … so another city bike ride.
I did not attend the re:publica this year. Couldn’t be bothered to be honest. Which is also a bit of the essence of the format I guess. When it started we had these central social network that everyone was on. Now it’s all scattered. The ones remaining on the Nazi-Show run by Space Karen and the others scattered across the Fediverse and some attempting commercial social networks again. The common ground seems to be gone.
finally handing out this very late review because … life 🤷♂️
Anker USB hub Ethernet Port
I had bought the Anker 565 11-in1 USB-C hub because it’s got a good review from a German tech magazine. But at some point it stopped working with its Ethernet port. The LEDs lit up briefly but the network interface didn’t show up in the OS. I tried debugging it for a while and initially thought it is a problem with Apple Silicon Macs because the adapter was working on an older Intel Mac at home. I even contacted Anker support but there were only semi-helpful. At least they were asking for some debugging information and had recommendations on cross checking etc. The adapter normally doesn’t need any drivers to be installed as macOS does contain all needed drivers already.
Eventually I narrowed it down to be an issue with my own machine as the adapter was also working on my son’s M1 MacBook Air. So no problem with the Apple Silicons.
Eventually I found a Reddit entry where people were discussing about Broadcom ethernet chipsets and their drivers. Then it came to me that I also had a specific driver package installed for an older USB-C adapter with ethernet chipset. This one was needed for that particular chip. Apparently that driver captured the device when the Anker USB-C hub was connected and crashed, rendering the ethernet port unusable.
After I deinstalled that driver the Anke USB-C Hub was working fine again with its Ethernet port … 🤷♂️
First task was to set the PIN on both. on macOS that’s the only use case where I need Google Chrome. This can configure the PIN for security keys via Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Security -> Manage Security Keys -> Create a PIN
One can also manage the individual entries on the security key via that method.
I’m using these hardware keys for Passkey authentication now. To add that physical layer of security over just storing the passkeys in my macOS/iOS Keychain or 1Password.
I use two keys and create all passkeys on both for redundancy in case I’m loosing one of them or they eventually break.
Debian BookWorm override DNS for DHCP Pihole
I’m running a bit of a convoluted network setup on my MacBook because I hate online advertisement. The best ad-blocker I’ve seen seems to be Pi-Hole. This blocks advertisement on DNS level. Means all the ad-sites just don’t resolve in the browser and rather getting a DNS error message rather quickly. That way pages load quickly without the ad and tracking parts and this solution works on all applications. Even non-browsers.
For this to work PiHole has to be your default DNS Resolver. Usually you’d get your DNS resolver via DHCP from your router. And I bet in most cases the router itself is acting as the DNS resolver as it’s the case for most FritzBox routers in Germany.
Now if you roam with your laptop between different networks you’re also switching the DNS resolver frequently. Changing your home DNS resolver to a PiHole in the home network doesn’t help when you’re in the office network or other locations.
So I opted for a Debian linux virtual machine running on my Laptop to do the blocking. I’m using UTM for virtualisation and running the Debian ARM version for performance. However I had to tell the Debian that it should get a DHCP address from hosts network stack but ignore the DNS resolver and instead use its loopback interface for DNS. This is where the PiHole software would run the DNS resolver.
Debian 12 (Bookwyrm) is using the systemd network manager. That’s why just changing the file /etc/resolv.conf doesn’t solve the problem. One has to create a file in /etc/systemd/network/ and name it like <interfacename>.network (e.q. enp0s1.network) with the following contents
As you can guess … these settings apply for all interfaces matching the Name pattern, telling systemd to do DHCP but use 127.0.0.1 as the DNS resolver and ignore the DHCP provided resolvers.
My macOS then got a special network location profile which is also using DHCP in general, but overriding the DNS resolver (I don’t know why it’s always called “DNS Server” in most settings… thats not a DNS Server but a DNS Resolver!!! ) to point to the PiHole virtual machine (which is always getting the same IP address from UTM)
On Monday the daughter of a colleague joined us in the office for a day of “Schülerpraktikum”. She was bright and curious and tried to follow us into the depth and breadth of working in a digital map making company. Hope she took something away for her
On Tuesday my personal trainer examined my exercise posture in the gym … and of course I did it all wrong. All power, no control. She tortured and lectured me for about 1 hour before we got to our weekly run.
I guess I have some homework to do now 😉
a fox casually strolling along in our backyard among the townhouses
On Wednesday I met with an old friend over beers. He was my first mentor in my first commercial job about 24 years ago. On my way back late in the evening I saw a fox casually striding along between the people “Strasse des 17. Juni”. A rather large and busy road crossing one of the many large parks in Berlin.
Thursday morning Leo and me met in Treptower Park to enjoy the good weather and work a bit outside. We both had online meetings that we took from there and I guess the colleagues on the other side of the screen where a little envious about or open office 😉
Mandarin ducks with little ducklings in the Treptower Park
On Saturday we took a trip through the countryside again to visit some plant share market, get new soap from Naturseifenmanufaktur Thoma and ended up having ice cream in Prenzlau and a visit atop the Marienkirche.
Almost time for the #weeklyreview 20/24 already. But I felt lazy this week 🤷♂️
Finally moved to a new department which was in the works for some weeks now. Take on the duty to bring back program management in our organisation to gather with a team to establish more formal business planning and operations again.
We had all this in the past and let go of it at some point. Now apparently it turned out there was value in this kind of work. Now let’s see whether we can make this more sustainable and visible this time.
The week was short due to some public holidays. Nevertheless worked on Friday which most people probably took as bridge day.
Of course there is still woodworking to do. “Convinced” (gave the choice of either one 4h session or 2 x 2hr sessions) the kid to help with the wood splitting. Almost done with the splitting now. I think another 2-3h session and we should be done with the splitting at least. Just the stacking remains. Will try to get this done over the next couple of weekends.
3D Printing
attempted one more model of a charging stand for Apple iPhone and Watch. It looks nice, but turned out to be totally unstable. My phone (iPhone 12 Pro Max) is too heavy for this stand. It always tips over, no matter which angle I mount the phone.
We are approaching to make our “Walpurgisnacht” party a tradition. This year it was a little spontaneous but nevertheless a very lovely evening with our friends from countryside. We had a small buffet, some drinks and two camp fires (and our guests doubled as mosquito buffet 🙈).
Beach Cleaning
Also a tradition already: the yearly cleaning of the local beach by the village community. We meet with rakes and wheel barrows to clean up the beach on the lake from last year’s leaves and possible trash and branches from the winter. This is a really nice tradition which brings the people together for some activity that everyone benefits from. Of course there is self-made cake and beverages after the work. We were around 20 people and work was done in less than an hour. Now everyone can enjoy a clean beach. The weather was perfect. Not too warm yet, but sunny with a fresh breeze.
Good bye Gittea – Hello Forgejo
I was running my own Git Repo site based on GitTea so far. But apparently there are some discrepancies in transparency that caused a decision by the soft fork Forgejo to consider becoming a hard fork and go their own way in the future. Forgejo seems to be more committed to stay a truly independent and community driven project. So I’ve decided to switch to Forgejo as well. Especially as the migration currently is rather seamless as the codebases hardly differ.
Open Studio weekend
On the weekend it was the annual “open studio” weekend in Brandenburg. Local artist opened their studios and galleries for visitors all across the country. We visited the wonderful site of Silke Schmidt and even bought some pictures of her.
Action Sampler
Her place is an old GDR kids holiday camp (Ferienlager) and had wonderful vibes of the past. Had to take a picture of the famous GDR F70 compass that I used to own.
Action Sampler
Another quite magical place was the garden of local artist Siegfried Haase. Beside this being an awesome garden (wonderfully planned and maintained by his wife) there is so much stuff to discover: sculptures he made from scraps and old gear he found around in the area. The whole property is like a large “Wimmelbild“.
And last, not least we attended a session of the Daumenkino of Volker Gerling. We had seen this before two years ago and it’s still magic. One would think ‘how magic can a mere flip book be?’. But what Volker does from it is truly marvellous. Time seems to stop and you listen to his stories and watch the pictures come to life when he presents them. Go check his schedule of exhibits!
Ok, trying to get this one done a bit earlier than usual 🤣
Rowing against myself
The rowing machine in the gym has the feature to re-row a previous session. Then you’ll see a pace boat on the display with the past sessions speed and can compete against that. I used my session from last weeks Monday and beat myself by a few dozen meters. Coming week will be harder to achieve this I guess.
otherwise the gym and fitness week wasn’t spectacular. At least got one running session done with my friend on Tuesday. Slow and shorter than usual, but better than nothing. The evening appointment the same day got skipped.
The weather this week was a little weird. We literally had snow on Monday. I had an appointment to get the summer tires put onto the car for Wednesday. I’m usually late with changing my tires. But this might have been a close call this year.
Food experiments
Saw a recipe on my insta stream to make some tasty paste from chilli flakes, garlic, onions, soja sauce, salt and pepper and sunflower oil. The ingredients meant to be topped with the heated oil and then stirred. The oil supposed to be 180ºC.
On my first try I got the oil much too hot for lack of proper measurement equipment. The chilli flakes almost got up in flames and turn to charcoal pretty quickly.
After getting a proper thermometer the second attempt yielded a glass of tasty hot paste 🙂
Hacktivism
Printed out some shopping cart coins and left them in shopping carts in the countryside supermarket. There is room for improvement on the surface quality. I’ll need to find a better model or make one myself. But the mission is clear: put the locals into conflict between a free cart token and their political views 😀
Obligatory woodworking
Of course there was some woodworking on the weekend. Stacked the firewood that we had split the last weekend. One more round stack finished. Just a few more weekends and we should be done 🙈
Also managed to mow the lawn. Was about time. And we hadn’t mowed the back of the property the whole of last year. It’s meant to be a meagre meadow, which, despite of its name, is actually very rich in plants and insects. As opposed to a nicely manicured lawn. But every other year you should mow it, to encourage the grow.
And while mowing I suddenly catched the smell of fresh peppermint. Apparently I found the spot where we had planted them last year. Found a few plants I didn’t mowed down and made the first fresh peppermint tea this year 🙂
As reported last week, we went to a birthday party and of course stayed to the very end. Quite a bunch of beers and Küstennebel 🤷♂️ was involved. I had a bit of a hangover (for me that means lack of sleep, thirst and still not safe to drive a car).
data archeology
This week was the time that my wife asked me for old data from several years ago. As a good nerd I of course had some old disks and archives that could potentially contain the data (an old address book).
First challenge was to remember on what piece of software I was hosting the address book services and on which of our devices a copy would be present. The data was last seen around 2017. I found old disk images from the MacBooks but wasn’t able to restore the old macOS address book files on nowadays macOS. Then I thought I might just check whether there is a backup of the server side. And indeed I found an old archive of the webserver with the ownCloud installation and a dump of the mySQL database.
I was able to import the ownCloud dump into a local mysql instance and found some tables that looked like they contain the address book entries. Fortunately ownCloud was saving the vCard entry in a single table cell with some meta data in other cells.
Lazy me asked ChatGPT to write a Python script which would extract the vCard cell from the database and write it into a text file one per each entry of the database table. To my surprise this worked on the first attempt. All I had to do now, was import these vCard files into my new nextCloud instance.
Doodle / Rally
Every once in a while we have to find a common slot for some activity among friends and family. A service like Doodle became famous to create a poll and find a common slot. This week I became aware of “Rally” an opensource tool to do exactly that. Of course I quickly installed my own instance 😉
Kitchen tricks
One of my favourite dishes at the moment is a block of feta cheese surrounded by a whole bunch of cherry tomatoe, garlic and olive oil. Put in the oven for about 50min and enjoy.
I cut the cherry tomatoes in have so the loose a bit of water are not popping/splashing when trying to stir the whole dish after cooking.
Finally remembered an old trick to cut a lot of these small tomatoes in short time. Just use a second cutting board and a long knife. Put as many tomatoes on the board as fit and the knife can cut, place the second board on top to hold the tomatoes in place with a gentle pushdown and then cut with the long knife between them board through the tomatoes. One cut and have a pound of tomatoes cut…
Lamb watching
On Saturday we payed a visited to the local Shepard to watch the newly born lambs. Always cute.
admittedly this blog post is coming a little late … but hey… better late than never 😉
Snake swimming
During our weekly swim in the lokal lake we encountered a grass snake this Sunday. That snake is living near the water for quite some years now. It can be seen swimming in the summer occasionally. Even when there are people bathing sometimes it is crossing the beach.
The only thing I was surprised about is that it could be seen swimming at this still rather low water temperature of about 11ºC.
BookWyrm update hassle
I tried to update my BookWyrm instance to the latest version (0.7.3 pre-release) this week. This turned out to be a bit more laborious than I thought … Of course there were issues with the pre-release and I had to do a roll-back. The release came with some database migrations (changes to the database schema) that were not backwards compatible. So for the roll-back I had to find the migration information and undo these changes in the database. But then again the migration files of Python Django made this relatively straightforward.
LinkDing now supports Screenshots
Another tool that got an update this week was LinkDing – my bookmark archiving service. The new release now contains an optional container image with the chromium browser engine to take snapshots of the websites you’re adding to your Bookmark archive. This is really neat as the plan of course is to keep this archive around for a long time … likely longer than some of the websites that the links point to.
One can also add more snapshots at a later point in time to the same entry to keep some kind of evolution of the site.
Paperless WorkFlow
Even more software fiddling this week. I’m slightly obsessed with my PaperlessNGX installation now. All my documents go into Paperless meanwhile. Some of them I want to share with other users on my instance. So I created a workflow that adds certain permissions to documents if some conditions are met. In my case the trigger is the correspondent of the new document. If that matches a certain entity, the document is shared with a specific group on my instance.
Wood
Of course we did some more woodworking on the weekend. There were still trees left in the forest for us to fetch. This time it was a little easier as Dad payed a guy with a Forwarder to get us the trees close to the main path. No more hauling the logs with wheelbarrows.
Party Nazis
On Saturday evening we went to a birthday party of one of the locals here. That’s alway fun as one meets whole bunch of people from different backgrounds. Especially different from how we used to live in the big city etc.
I talked to one guy I didn’t know before and he was quite nice. We got along well and talked about where we’re coming from, what we were doing etc. Abruptly the guy asked whether I’d vote for the “DIE GR¨ÜNEN” party. One of the three coalition partners in the current government and the most hated party among the people from the rural area. Hated of course for other reason than the right-wing guys spreading fake narratives about them…
I admitted that most of the times I’d vote for that party. He acknowledged and told me the mandatory story of why he hates the party. Then we switched topics and continued to have a good conversation about all sorts of stuff.
A while later he again asked me – with a little disbelief – whether I’m voting for the “DIE GRÜNEN”. Again I said “yes”. He responded that I surely have noticed by now that he’s on the rather opposite political spectrum. He obviously didn’t like that party, that was obvious. He added that he’d consider himself a Nazi. Blunt straight out. I was a little surprise that he made it that clear. But we still continued to have rather nice and relatable conversations that were by no means Nazi coloured or propaganda. Nobody tried to convince the other of their world view. In fact he emphasised that he enjoyed the conversation and that we got along so well despite our opposite political stance.
Of course some people might now shout: how could you talk to this guy!?
But I believe these kind of conversations and maybe even relationships are very important in keeping the bridge to those people. Showing them that they matter as human and listen to their worries and fears. Building trust and find common ground. So that conversations about the hard topics can take place on a better foundation than mistrust and mutual hate and despise.
Village conversation DIE GRÜNEN
To finish the weekend on a different note this time I stay longer to participate on the village conversation organised by the DIE GRÜNEN Uckermark. Thats a series of talks with the local members of the party but also some higher up staff from the country or even national government on the panel. They briefly introduce themselves to then answer questions asked by the participants. Topics those find relevant and want to ask a party thats member of the government.
It was a small round of about 30 people, but not less interesting and lively.
This week of course had more firewood working. We spent another day in the forest to cut & haul out some more firewood. Got 2 and about one third new stacks now. But still need to split the remaining logs for stacking. That will likely make another 2 stacks … that should last us a couple of years.
Easter weekend
We’ve been out for a delicious brunch on easter Sunday at the famous Hotel Döllnsee. The buffet was rich and delicious as always. They even had Eierlikör on tab!!!
On easter monday we’ve been over at my parents house for coffee. The traditional egg hunt took place in the garden. I hope we’ve found all the rather well hidden eggs.
Cooking lamb and sauce hollandaise
It’s asparagus season again. And as a good German we had to indulge ourselves with a delicious meal of cooked asparagus, lamb steak and self-made sauce hollandaise. Especially the latter is rather easy to make yourself freshly from just a handful of ingredients.
2 days working
Originally had planned to take the whole week off work. But then decided to cancel two of the vacation days and get some work done. The “joy” of Powerpoint …
Was rather quite as many colleagues were also off for easter holidays or sick. Seems almost like the new flu or cold also spreads over online meetings. Large numbers of sick leaves across the globe with a cold…
Flyer delivery
My wife was helping to organise another “Dorfgespräch” of “DIE GRÜNEN” Uckermark. That’s a series of open topic conversations with the locals. We had attended one sessions already a few month ago and found it rather good. I like that they take the time and courage to listen to the people and take their feedback. This party faces a huge amount of hate among people in the rural areas for no good reason. They are blamed for every bad decision the previous governments made and also solely for all decisions and impact the current government makes.
Windows on the Mac
Installed a Windows 11 VM with UTM on my MacBook. Was surprised that there is an ARM64 version of Windows and that it’s really snappy. It’s still annoying Windows though…
Also tried to emulate a x86 Windows machine. That was significantly slower and not really fit for practical use I’d say. Despite my powerful M2 Max CPU with 64GB of Memory. Will give an older windows version a try next to see if those perform better. All this in support of friends who consider moving the Apple platform again, but still have some legacy Windows software without alternatives. So they need a way to run those old programs somehow.
R.I.P. Mr. Tit
K3 found a dead tit in our garden and gave it proper funeral
Motor scooter drive
Hario Mill Stick mod
Got myself a Hario mobile mill stick. Thats a battery powered motor driver for their hand coffee grinders. It also comes with adapters for some other brands of hand mills. I’ve got two HARIO hand mills. The older model HARIO MSCS-2TB (Skeleton) which is formally not compatible with this mobile mill stick and a smaller HARIOD MSS-1DTB. The latter is compatible.
The mobile mill stick looks a bit like a power tool with a bit adapter on one end. The Skerton got an M6 screw shaft which is flattened on two sides to hold the crank. To make it usable with the mobile mill stick I macgyvered it with some M6 screw extension and an M6 screw from the DIY shop. The screw extension sits on top of the Skerton rod and allows for the M6 screw to go in on the open end. Now the Skerton got a normal screw on the axel that can be driven with a normal power tool and bit of your choice. My Makita Powertools spins a bit too fast for my taste (heats up the beans during grinding too much). Thats why the HARIO mobile stick is the better choice.
For the HARIOD MSS-1DTB the mobile mill stick comes with an adapter to properly hold it in place.
AirTag battery swap
I’ve got an Apple AirTag on my keys and it eventually ran out of battery. I really thought those AirTags were single use and one has to buy a new one after about 1,5 years. Give Apples talent for reaching into your purse that did make total sense to me. But then my brother told me that you can just screw open the AirTags and swap the battery. I was slightly baffled. Fortunately I had the correct type of button cell at home at swapped the battery in a matter of seconds. That was but also some sort of Apple experience that it’s finally that easy to swap.
Open Stage Templin
On Saturday there was last session of the open stage at the Multikulturelles Centrum Templin. As always it was a fun evening with a good variety of music from folks to rock and even some poetry this time.
