#weeklyreview 31/24

Posted on 2024-08-17 by Falko

back to work

Back in Berlin after one week of vacation. The city is noticeably quieter as many people left for vacation. Summer is seems indeed the most relaxed time in Berlin. The ratio of tourist to inhabitants shifts again towards the tourists.

SIM card issues

Had weird SIM card issues since last week. My iPhone was displaying a message whether I’d want to add this number to my iMessage list of numbers. I didn’t pay attention at first and declined as I was on vacation. But this week had a look and eventually noticed that a different mobile phone number suddenly shows up in my Apple ID settings.

That of course immediately made my alarm bells ring. Had I been hacked?

Upon investigation I noticed that my own phone suddenly shows a different phone number for main SIM card. WTF!?

I did some tests with a friends phone: Calls to this new number immediately get cancelled. Calls to my original number still arrive on my phone. As do messages. Very weird.

Since this is a corporate contract, it wasn’t easy to get support from T-Mobile as I lack the relevant access codes. A bit back and forth via our corporate support eventually solved this mystery …

I have a rather old contract that had two SIM cards for the same mobile number. The second SIM cards sits in a mobile hotspot that I used during my on-call days. Hadn’t used this mobile hotspot in ages. But turned it on last week during vacation. Everything worked. But soon after that weird iOS message about to add the new number showed up. Which I kept declining.

T-Mobile stopped supporting multiple SIM cards for the same number on their side. When my mobile hotspot booked into the mobile network, they assigned a new number from their pool to my main SIM to keep their systems consistent. Two active SIM cards for the same mobile number are no longer supported. They solved this by assigning a new number. Why they assigned it to my main and already active SIM … I don’t know.

That was a relief – I wasn’t hacked but just ran into a technical edge case I guess. Issue is solved meanwhile.

medication foo

Kid is going on a vacation trip to Norway in two weeks. Since he’s got some prescriptive medics we needed to tell the trip organizer which ones he needs. My wife fortunately found out, that we also would need some official papers to accompany the drugs when traveling to Norway. A certified statement from the prescribing doctor in addition to an officially signed and stamped paper from the city of Berlin.

And of course there were only two days left to organize this as we were about to leave for our next week of vacation….

Fortunately everything fell into place and just took a whole lot of traveling the city to collect all the paperwork.

CamSnap camera

a few friends recently got a small digital camera that got some popularity lately. Not for its features, but rather for the lack thereof.

It’s super simple, no screen, no settings, no different lenses. Just turn on and shoot. Download later.

CamSnap is promoted as a summer camp camera which if super affordable and lets you focus on capture the moment instead of over engineering the images and immediately share them to the world.

I like the idea in principle. But decided for the time being against jumping that bandwagon. I miss some key features in the camera which I would meanwhile consider essential:

accurate meta data in the images: time, orientation

This would allow the images to just be stored without much manual sorting etc. The current model doesn’t keep time. The camera just doesn’t have a clock. There are some workaround, but this would require post processing the images …

Orientation is also quite essential for me now. I don’t want to rotate pictures later …

#weeklyreview 30/24

Posted on 2024-08-17 by Falko

vacation

First full week of school holidays was spent in the “sächsische Schweiz” in Bad Schandau and surroundings. We had booked a small apartment directly at the river Elbe. Plan was to explore the usual sights hiking as I did as a kid with my parents some 40 years ago 😉

First trip was to the Bastei. We parked at a nearby hill and first had to go down to the city of Kurort Rathen to climb up to the Bastei. One could have driven all the way to the Bastei with the car. But where’s the fun in that?

Next day we hit the castle at Festung Königstein

Then the Lilienstein:

And finally the Pfaffenstein with the Barberine

#weeklyreview 29/24

Posted on 2024-07-29 by Falko

est charity concert

On Sunday we attended the yearly charity concert for the est in Templin. Again the “lautten compagney” played together with the “Singakademie zu Berlin” and the Ukrainian choir “Kammerton”. This time the topic was the music collection of Sara Levy.

What I liked the most again was the narration that was given between the music to set context and provide historic information about the music, the author but also the school the concert took place in.

After the concert we attended a little guided tour across the property and learned about the progress of the renovations and the plans for the school.

last day of school

Kids got their report cards this week as it was the last day of school for the 23/24 school year. Both kids did good at their schools and we couldn’t be happier as parents given the particular circumstances. Schooling has really become challenging these days for various reasons. The decline of german school institution and system is certainly one big factor to it. We’re looking forward to when all kids are finally done with that system and can take more control themselves at their further education…

golden wedding aniversary

On Saturday we celebrated the 50th wedding aniversary of my parents. The weather was just perfect and they had booked a really nice venue at a lake in the countryside for the event. Was fun to see so many of the old relatives and friends. It was also fun to sift through old scanned films and photos to create the mandatory review slide show.

#weeklyreview 28/24

Posted on 2024-07-16 by Falko

Klassenfahrt

On Monday I handed off K3 for a week long school trip Frauenstein. A medieval castle where they learn something about the time the castle was in full operation. Apparently that was fun as the kids not only enjoyed the activities but also bonded together and grew their relationships. That was desperately needed as the class had some challenges with separation into small groups instead of being one strong community.

Car emergencies

two car emergencies strikes this week. Somehow my wife managed to unhinge the trunk door and hit her head rather hard with it. The cut on her head looked dramatic. But fortunately she got away without an ambulance.

The next day she somehow managed to set the car on the ground with one front wheel in the air. A small field track was apparently steeper on the sides than what was visible. So I had to get to the rescue and try to get the car out. Of course we didn’t had a proper towing rope at first. Snapped two ropes I had collected from my shed earlier. We had to drive to the nearest gas station to buy a proper towing rope. That did the trick and got the car out of the trench.

Polaroid stands

with the new gadget I needed some simple stand for polaroid photos. So I made one in Fusion360.

House decorations

cleaned up the property on the weekend and propped the house temporarily with a disco ball 😉

#weeklyreview 27/24

Posted on 2024-07-16 by Falko

Bier’n’Burger

This was our summer edition and last sitting before the holiday season. And it seems to be kind of a tradition meanwhile that the weather isn’t too great for outside dining. We’ve been meeting at Rembrandt Burger again and chose boldly to sit outside.

The food of course was good again. And we had fun conversing about good ol’ times and new gadgets mimicking good ol’ times 😉

Plumbing

Had to replace the faucet in the kitchen. Always fun to work in very confined space 🙄

HERE Summer Party

On Thursday we had our corporate summer party and our roof terrace and top floor. Was good to see the colleagues again in one place and also talk to some old colleagues which are still around.

We witnessed awesome clouds over Berlin

Beekeeping

My dad in law inherited the beekeeping equipment from my grandfather and is keeping up the tradition of making honey. K3 was very interested to help this week and got to uncover some honeycombs and then extract the honey. Always a spectacle for all the senses.

#weeklyreview 26/24

Posted on 2024-07-02 by Falko

fancy Chinese food

discovered a new Chinese restaurant in Berlin Mitte. It’s apparently authentic as you have a hard time finding labels in German or English. And the food selection is also rather exotic 🙂

They have kind of a buffet with ingredients you pick into a small basket. When you’re done, you go to the cashier and select a flavour of broth you like to have your ingredients boiled in.

The ingredients range from veggies, mushrooms over chicken feet, duck blood, chopped beef stomach to various sea foods components. Only think I was missing was insects. But maybe that doesn’t go well with broth.

It was definitely delicious

since it was very warm this week in Berlin (~ 30ºC ) I of course had to make a few cold brews with ice cubes. Always delicious and refreshing

Finally got my printer dialled in to properly print on the Zweckform labels for the automatic ASN assignment in PaperlessNGX

School concert

This school years concert of the instrumental classes at the gymnasium of K3 was again impressive. The kids really did progress with their skills over the last concert in winter. Given that most of them play the instrument only since almost a year. Especially strings don’t seem easy. Some kids are obviously more talented (and were also learning their instrument since several years at home already) than other and got a solo. One girl of the 6th grade was playing a harp – stunning.

Spicing up video conference

Took inspiration from a post on Mastodon and build a little LEGO stage to attach to the Laptop lid and spice up video conferences 😉

Weekend – Party time

On Saturday we went to a little party at friends in the next village. The weather was awesome, the food delicious and pets cuddly 😉

#weeklyreview 25/24

Posted on 2024-06-25 by Falko

herbal hike (?)

On Sunday we participated in the first herbal hike in our village. A local lady who’s quite knowledgeable about local herbs and their application for medical and cosmetic usage took a small group of people in a hike through the meadows and forest. She was showing us the various plants and explained how to identify them and what they might be used for. Quite interesting.

Cooking

Kiddo loves pasta. And she also loves cooking herself. So we went to make proper Spaghetti Carbonara. You don’t use cream! Just pancetta, egg yolk, grated pecorino cheese and a few spoons of the pasta water. That makes for a very creamy and rich carbonara.

Paperless Document Workflow improvements

I read an article about how to improve the document archiving process with PaperlessNGX. One basically wants some sort of clue between the paper document and the scanned digital copy. So that when you have either document, you can quickly find its counterpart. Paperless has a field for Archive Serial Number (ASN). You can sequentially number your documents if you want. Now you’d also want that serial number on the original paper document as a tie between the original and its digital copy. The trick is, to put a tiny sticker with a pre-generated ASN on the documents before scanning. Paperless can detect this ASN and use it as the serial number of the scanned document.

I was following the instructions in this article to enable the respective settings in my PaperlessNGX setup.

Paperless gets the ASN from QR codes. The stickers container QR codes and a text representation of the ASN for humans to read. The article also contains a link to a Python script which can generate sequential QR codes for various label papers.

I ordered the Avery Zweckform L4731 stickers which are 25,4mm x 10mm small. They fit on almost every document and are still readable. The trickiest part was to print them properly. The python generated labels didn’t seem to fit properly. The margins seems to be off at the top and bottom of the paper and thus the labels were overlapping the cut out stickers. I found out that one can also easily generate the stickers on the website of Avery Zweckform. They have an online editor for the labels which can generate sequential QR Codes and sequential text numbers. At the end you’ll get a PDF generated that you can print out. My print settings had to be A4 paper and explicitly set to scale 100% (not scale to fit or something else) on my Epson WF-4830. This gave me perfect printouts on the pre-cut sticker paper.

public dinner in the village

On Saturday it was finally time for our yearly public dinner in the village. We would gather at the patio in front of the church and dine together. Everyone brings their own food to be shared with other and table cloth and tableware.

This is always a lovely occasion to meet the neighbours, have good conversations and of course good food. It always amazes me that even without coordination there no duplication of food. People just get creative and bring their specialties.

and of course I got my nails done fancy by the kid 🙂

#weeklyreview 24/24

Posted on 2024-06-25 by Falko

3D printing & design

after fixing my printers hotend (the heater was broken) I created a stencil to help put lines on plain paper. That was quick and easy in AutoCAD Fusion 360.

Gotten back into using Fusion360 I also quickly designed and printed a ring to hold the support rods for our tomatoes in place.

And finally I modified someone else’s model of a curtain clip to work with my strong neodium magnets. The original model exposed the magnets and since they are super strong the clips would come off the curtain when trying to open it.

I modified the design so that the magnets are inside the model and covered by a thin layer of filament so they wouldn’t directly touch when two clips connect. The tricky part was to insert them mid print. Took a few iterations, but now it’s working and the clips are sturdy.

Beer & Burgers

we finally managed to meet again for our irregular/regular beer and burgers meeting. The weather was a bit challenging as it was still quite chilly in the evening. It did not rain at least.

Garage

Finally took the car to the garage for it was complaining about its routine maintenance cycle. Driving through the city… always a challenge as it’s super busy. Best part is always the commute back and to the garage with public transport…

Pottery

Finally picked up our stuff from paint-your-style. My cup came out nice I’d say 🙂

Visit to Szczecin

On Saturday we took a quick visit to Szczecin in the evening. Had an awesome dinner at Karczma Polska. I had one of the best duck with red cabbage I’ve ever eaten 😉

#weeklyreview 23/24

Posted on 2024-06-09 by Falko

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 😉

#weeklyreview 22/24

Posted on 2024-06-09 by Falko

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.

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.

My daughter draw me a cool picture of Paul 🙂