OmniFocus 4 Update odyssey

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OmniGroup released a new major version of OmniFocus this week. So I upgraded and installed the new app on my Mac. This replaced the old app and didn’t import the old database. But instead relies on the Sync setup I guess.

I thought that wouldn’t be a problem as I’m using their OmniSync server to sync my database between devices. Entered my OmniSync credentials and thought it would just sync. But instead it asked me for a document decryption passphrase … which I didn’t recall.

Browsing through their help document it appears that when they initially introduced the OmniSync service the device used the account passphrase to encrypt the database before transfer to their server. So the database sits encrypted on their servers.

At some point later I had changed my password for the OmniSync service. But the passphrase for the database encryption didn’t change. Unfortunately I don’t remember the old account password and thus can’t decrypt the database after sync.

The app which still syncs to the server also does not show this password. I can reveal the OmniSync account password on the device, but not the encryption password.

Fortunately I still had the old OmniFocus 3 app on my iPhone with a recent copy of my data. The new OmniFocus 4 installs in parallel on the iPhone and has the same syncing issue as the desktop app. The OmniFocus 3 app can’t export its own backup for import into any of the other app instances. So what now?

I ended up turning off the sync on the OmniFocus 3 app on the phone. Then configured a new sync to my own private WebDav server (NextCloud). Idea was, that I’d sync now via WebDAV instead of the OmniSync service.

On the initial setup I entered my NextCloud username and password and clicked on “Sync”. But that gave me an error message. Because I’m using 2FA on NextCloud I first have to create an app-specific password in NextCloud. Did that and went back to OmniFocus 3 on the iPhone. But in the settings there is no fields for username and password. Just the Server URL for WebDAV. I’m starting to curse silently …

Apparently there is no way to change the credentials once you’ve entered them in OmniFocus … Found one blog entry where someone had to reset their OmniFocus database to get to change the credentials. That is what I definitely want to avoid.

Lucky enough I was able to put the credentials directly into the URL as https://username:password@server.url

This finally enabled the WebDAV sync and uploaded my OmniFocus database to my NextCloud server. I then entered the same settings into the OmniFocus 4 desktop app. Now again it was asking me for a decryption passphrase …

I checked the OmniFocus 3 app on the phone and revealed the password in the WebDav settings. Surprisingly this was a password I recognise. Not the one for my OmniSync account and not the one for my NextCloud account. Nor the app specific NextCloud credentials…. I have no idea where from OmniFocus was pulling this password…

And of course … this password I tried with the OmniSync service for decrypting the database. But it didn’t work either.

At least I’ve got a working sync now after the upgrade to Version 4 …

#weeklyreview 08/24

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18.02. – 24.02.2024

It seems like spring is coming. It’s way too warm for what used to be the coldest month of the year. The crocuses are coming out all over the place.

Berlinale

Watched “Treasure” from Julia von Heinz at the Berlinale. Invited by my friend Sam. She got us the tickets for Thursday night. The movie is the story of a daughter and father visiting the fathers childhood sites and concentration camp (her father is a Jew) in Poland. Very good story and very good play by Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry.

3D Printing

printed some door hooks to hang them shirts

Nocci posted the first part if his Spoolman series. A tool to track your filament spools for your 3D printer. I did my own installation of this nifty little tool the other week and had to fiddle with some Traefik settings for it as described here last week.

And after several weeks of rain and grey skies the weekend finally had sunshine all day long.

#weeklyreview 07/24

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11.02. – 17.02.2024

Due to some scheduling mishap I went swimming two times that Sunday. We originally had an appointment for 11:00 am but the guys didn’t show up (of course I still went for a swim). Then the other half of the group agreed on a 1pm meet up. So I took a second round. The lake also gained quite some water over the last weeks of rain. We seem to be back at the level were we’ve been last year this time.

Traefik config voodoo

If you ever need to configure your container in a way that Traefik will allow traffic coming from specific IPs, but require HTTP Basic Authentication from all other IPs … this is how you’d configure this:

    labels:
       - "traefik.enable=true"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.rule=( Host(`spooly.example.com`) && ClientIP(`192.168.75.0/24` ))"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.entrypoints=websecure"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.rule=Host(`spooly.example.com`) && !ClientIP(`192.168.75.0/24` )"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.entrypoints=websecure"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.tls=true"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.middlewares=auth-users"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.tls=true"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.service=svc-spoolman"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.service=svc-spoolman"
       - "traefik.http.services.svc-spoolman.loadbalancer.server.port=8000"
       - "traefik.http.middlewares.auth-users.basicauth.users=admin:$$2y$$05$$K5HviqYOC3ScWoRqUIQ80elXe.QByrAvpvmaDp9yj0oaA4L0LiCE6"

You basically have to define two separate Routers for the same service. Each Router has its own matching rules and own middlewares.

Mind that the ClientIP in the routers matching rule only matches on the ClientIP, not on IPs in the X-Forwared-For HTTP Header.

new T-Shirts \o/

QWertee had a special offer where you’d get a free T-Shirt every one you order. Even on the discounted ones … so I ended up with a whole bunch of new nerdy t-shirts 😀

Of course one was already occupied by kiddo

Birthday

another birthday in da house. The kids … they grow up so fast.

Elections

This is the big year of elections. On Saturday our village society elected a new board. That was formal but still fun. Especially as we there was another instance of our “Dorfdisco” afterwards \o/

From the camera roll

#weeklyreview 06/24

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This week there were winter holidays for the kids. They got their report cards on the last school day. Both kids still in school doing rather good. So we can’t be happier about their achievements. 🎉

Of course we spent the week in the countryside. Didn’t felt for skiing holidays this year as there doesn’t seem to be much snow in the areas we used to go to anyway – due to climate catastrophe of course!

So I just spend the week working from the countryside doing some light activities with the kids.

Wednesday we went to the cinema with a friends kid to watch the new Studio Ghibli move “The boy and the heron“.

still frame from the movie, provided for personal use by Studio Ghibli, all rights reserved

As expected this was a colourful adventure. Some scenes might be a bit drastic (scary) for young kids, but overall this goes well in line with the previous Studio Ghibli movies.

Much richer, deeper and more fantastic than your Disney movies.


A friend started a blog about 3D printing and asked me whether I’d want to contribute. Of course I want. Even had a small topic to write about: the Z-Offset mystery.

On Saturday we did a day trip to Szczecin, Poland again. Plan was to see the city during daylight, as last time we’ve been there it was already pitch black night.

This plan only worked out partially. The day started very misty in our area. So we checked the weather forecast for Szczecin and that predicted at least partial sunshine for the afternoon. Turned out that was wrong. It stayed misty and foggy and maybe only got worse in the afternoon. We went to the Cafe 22, which is on the 22nd floor of a hotel. Theoretically a nice panoramic view over the whole city. Not on that Saturday. We could barely see the city right down to our feet. The rest was just inside clouds.

this was all we could see from the Autobahn

But we still managed to walk the city a bit a take a look at some beautiful old houses in the city.

#weeklyreview 05/24

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Sunday fun day

As every Sunday, we tried to swim in the local lake. The ice that we skated on the weekend before was all molten way by Friday. So we thought swimming should be possible. To our surprise the night from Saturday to Sunday had low temperature of about -6º C. So the lake again was completely frozen over. Fortunately just a few millimetres of ice and we were able to break it open to at least have a dip in the water.

At first I thought it’s thin enough to just swim through … but that turned out to be too optimistic. The ice was between 4-8 mm think. Easy to break with ones hand, but no chance to break and push it away with swimming. Of course we could quite some cuts all over the body from the sharp ice edges.

Sport

Made it to the gym 4 days this week. Also added one more (hopefully regular) running appointment with my good friend Andrea. She’s got a professional personal training company and they’re the best you can get in Berlin/Potsdam. Check them out if you want to improve your health and/or fitness. Maybe I’m biased because I know her since our time at school. But she must do something right because she managed to not only found this company and permanently employ personal trainers (in a field where you usually only have individual freelancers or gym studio chain staff) but also steer it through the pandemic and come out alive and kicking.

Wednesday I had slightly sore legs from the running and felt a little groggy hitting the rowing machine again in the gym. But again it’s those days when you feel the most inner resistance that you usually hit the ball out of the park. Finished my 30 minutes of rowing with a strong 7035 m distance.

Fixing the door

Our flat has rather wide, wheel chair compatible doors. Thats good as my wife needed to have a wheel chair when she was in really bad ME/CFS condition. These door blades are quite heavy and our kitchen door is open most of the time. Eventually the door frame got loose and the door blade was scratching on the ground when moving. This week my dad came over to help me fix this. Looks like the construction company of this building didn’t use the proper glue foam when installing the door frames. Thats why it became loose. But now it’s fixed and the door is freely swinging again. K3 immediately exclaimed “I love this door!” 😂

The new CEO

Thursday our new CEO held a townhall meeting in the Berlin office. I’m usually an optimistic person and give benefit of the doubt to new people. But you know that there are also the die hard pessimists which don’t trust any C-level person out of principle. You have these in every company. To my surprise some of them also gave positive feedback about the new guy. Thats quite something if you ask me.

Of course, he still has to prove himself in day to day business. But making a first impression that extorts a positive statement from those kind of people is an achievement.

Mastodon Emergency Security Update

To make the week a little more interesting there was an emergency security update for the Mastodon Fediverse software. Apparently a remote account impersonation was passible and demanded immediate action from instance admins. I had my instances updated within about 2 hrs. Took a while as I didn’t check my emails or Mastodon feed because of meetings. Then of course my Jenkins build machine currently has some issue I have to debug first. Ended up creating my patched Docker containers for a 5000 character limit Mastodon on a different machine.

Finally some pics from my camera roll from this week for pure entertainment

#weeklyreview 04/24

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Ice Skating

Last week was cold enough to get our local lake frozen. Frozen thick enough to do some ice skating. I measured the ice and got 10cm. Considered that safe enough for us to walk across the lake and the kids do some skating. Obviously no swimming/bathing this weekend then.

Lautten Compagney

Sunday afternoon we’ve been at the lovely “Gutshaus Friedenfelde” for a little concert of the Lautten Compagney. We’ve seen this ensemble before in July 2023 at the Joachimthalsche Gymnasium Templin. This time there were presenting their new program “Nunmehr soll Frieden sein” as a new year concert. The material was collected from the time of the 30 Years war and following peace negotiations of the “Westfälische Frieden“. The music was enriched by acting and recitation of texts and poems from the time but also new material to glue it all together and build a connection to our own crazy times of wars all over the world.

We liked this new program very much. They are not only good musicians but the whole program with the historic information and play provides entertainment and education at the same time. Can highly recommend.

As a bonus we met an old acquaintance who used to be a rather famous politician. We hadn’t met him in a while but always wanted to catch up. Had a good chat with him and were delighted to see that he’s doing well.

Office Move

On Monday we did an office move. But just inside the building. The new space is a little closer to the other colleagues. So will hopefully bump into colleagues more often again when I’m in the office.

Gym game still going strong. Trying to hit the gym 2-3 days a week for 30min of rowing and 30 min cycling and 20 min strength training. Really enjoying the workout.

Links:

here are the links I’ve collected over the last few weeks. Maybe there is something interesting in there for you:

#weeklyreview 03/24

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On Monday it was the birthday for one of our kids. As that kid absolutely isn’t into gifts we had to come up with something else. As a surprise my wife came to Berlin and payed us a visit and we had fancy donuts and a cheese fondue for dinner. That was great fun.

Got myself a Nintendo Switch for a few weeks. Just to try whether it might entertain me and the kids for a while. And it’s surprisingly good so far. I like the fact that you can play on the go or on the big screen in multi-player mode. Also their controller concept is pretty versatile. In two month I’m checking whether I’ll keep it or not.

Got an Xbox 360 with Kinect collecting dust here since years. The concept was great. But then again we didn’t really made use of it.

I finally managed to get Klipper working on my 3D printer. Klipper is an alternative firmware to control the printer. The original firmware for my Creality Ender 3 V2 is based on the popular Marlin Firmware. That sits directly on the controller board (MCU) of the printer and controls all the hardware component and executes the printing of G-Code files.

Klipper in contrast is modular. Only a very basic firmware is flashed onto the controller board of the printer and acts as counterpart to the more complex Klipper Host process that sits on a computer. In my case a RaspberryPi 4. The computer hosting the Klipper host process is usually more powerful than the MCU of the printer and can perform more stuff to make for a smooth print. The Raspberry Pi is connected via USB-Serial to the printer to connect Klipper host process and Klipper firmware.

The downside is, that one has to configure Klipper properly for the printer. There are readymade profiles for popular printers available that should give a good start. But I have modified my Ender quite a bit and thus had to do a whole lot of calibrations for the Dual Z-Axes, the direct drive Extruder, Filament sensor, CR-Touch probe etc.

This process was what ticked me off last time I tried. I just couldn’t get a reliable print out with Klipper. And I didn’t had issues with my Marlin Firmware to begin with. So back then, I switched back to Marlin. This time I wanted to get it working to be able to support a friend who just recently got a used Ender 3 V2 with Klipper firmware.

Eventually I got it all running and even installed “Klipper Advanced Mesh & Purging” (KAMPS) and configured Input Shaping thanks to some helpful articles. KAMPS will analyse the G-Code files and then do the bed calibration with the probe just on the area of the bed where the model will be printed. This gives much more accurate information because it just probes the small printing area with the same amount of probe points. Makes for a better 1st layer.

Input Shaping is voodoo where you measure the printers vibrations during movements and calculate resonance frequencies and the best way to compensate these vibrations during print. I had to solder a sensor and cable to connect the motion sensor to the raspberry pi and then conduct the measuring (fortunately that only needs to be done on hardware changes on the printer).

Finally I was able to produce some acceptable prints that I promised to a friend.

On Saturday we did a day trip to Binz. First time since 2017 that my wife had been there. It was great. The weather was OK and we had good lunch in the famous “Strandhalle” and took a walk on the beach. It wasn’t too crowded as its really off-season at the moment and the weather wasn’t inviting for a long walk.

The lake had ice last weekend already. But it was just 5cm and a friend took the effort to make a hole so we could at least dip in.

#weeklyreview 02/24

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Second week of the year was the first full work week. Got a new task to set up program management for our organisation (again). We had this before in various shapes and forms. Last round of layoffs cut all the program managers away. Now the lack of program management has been identified as a gap. No shit Sherlock.

So I’m reading up on all sorts of material around program management. There is still plenty of material around in the Intranet from previous attempts. Thats good. So I can just copy & paste a whole bunch of material.

What came to my mind during looking at our past and current way to handle projects and programs is, that often times even the projects are not properly or at least explicitly set up. That of course makes it hard to facility program management when the projects you’re supposed to integrate into the program are not properly set up.

This is going to be interesting …

Sport

Last Sunday I went running with a friend. Slightly hilly in the forest and -3ºC outside for about 14km … boy didn’t had sore muscles on Monday 😉

We also went swimming again despite a thin layer of ice at the shore. We managed to push that away with gloves to get into the open water. It was rather cold …

Tuesday was good enough already that I went for a shorter run with my friend here in Berlin. Temperature was at around -8º C in Berlin. I had to wear long trousers and a long shirt …

On the countryside the thermometer hit a low of -16º C … bit chilly.

Tinkering

Started to fiddle with the Klipper Firmware for my 3D-Printer because I want to be able to provide support for @saumselig and his new toy 😀

Thats causing some headache as a lot of the configuration has to be tweaked from the stock printer profile. I hope I’ll manage this time.

Social & Politics

On Saturday we attended the “Dorfgespräch” of “Die Grünen” Uckermark in Buchenhain. That was a good discussion about current politics and issues. The audience was mixed ( not only “Die Grünen” members) and brought a lively but very respectful discussion. It was good to see that people are still able to listen and argue in civilised form – even if they don’t agree on the matter.

Self-Hosting

I also finally tried out Immich – an open source image hosting software that can probably best be described as a replacement for Google Photos or Apple iCloud Photos. The server side hosts the images and makes them available via a decent web interface. One can group photos and videos into albums and share them with others as well. An interesting feature is the face recognition. One can choose from various ML models to do the recognition on your machine and then be able to find the people by name.

There is also a client for iOS which uploads and backs up your photos from the mobile phone. It can upload the photos in the background and will also reflect the albums you might create and also allows to specify and search for peoples faces in the picture.

Overall this seems a viable replacement for evil corp services.

#weeklyreview 01/24

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Started the year with an unexpected long NYE party. We hadn’t planned anything spectacular for NYE and just visited the church in Templin for the fireworks. Coming back home the neighbours had their party going and we went over with a bottle of sparkling wine to wish each other a good new year. That of course escalated quickly and we stayed until 05:00 am – ignoring my running appointment at 09:30am.

So with just a little bit of sleep I started the new year running. That went much better than I expected given the circumstances.

I skipped the new years swimming as I was running already with just 3 hours of sleep. And it was raining the whole day.

Tuesday we took a trip to Neubrandenburg. A city that I visited quite a lot as a kid. Actually – not the city so much, but rather the sports school facilities near the Tollense Lake.

First time I have been in the city centre in fact. And boy … this city really needs you to be a hardcore GDR fan. It looks like all buildings outside the historic inner city core are built from GDR plate tectonics concrete. The whole city seems to be made in Minecraft. Everything is cubic and apparently from GDR time.

Back then the approach was probably of rather practical nature. Provide affordable living space and social infrastructure. All the apartment buildings were also supplied with little shops and child care centres. But still… rather not so pleasing for the eye nowadays.

The worst building in the city centre was actually the high-rise from the Nordkurier. The dominant local newspaper that has a tendency to spread right-wing fake news and conspiracy shit.

Maybe I know why that is… look what they turned the “house of art and education” into:

On the upside … I found snack garlic 🙂

Last three working days of the week I already had to work again. Fortunately is was relatively quite as most of the colleagues still had the week off.

So I had a little bit of spare time to finally fix my InfluxDB server. I set the data retention policy to indefinitely on the original setup and of course after about 5 years the disk eventually filled up. This can’t be changed after the initial setup… so I just created a fresh setup. The data wasn’t very valuable anyway. This time I configured a year of retention and now have some days to read up on the aggregation functions …

Watched the second seasons of Loki on Disney+. Hated the fact that despite the payed subscription I’m getting to see advertisement. The series itself was rather “meh”, now that the time travel thing isn’t new anymore. The actors gave their best and are lovely. But overall not as good as the first season.

And of course we finished the week off with swimming. The night had a low of about -5º C and there was a rather thin layer if ice on the lake shore. But that didn’t stop us. I prevented us from swimming for more than 2 minutes … but it didn’t stop us 😉

#weeklyreview 52/23

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So this was the final week of 2023. And I managed to create all weekly blog posts … not always in time, but 52 entries. One could almost say it became a habit.

I like it and will keep doing this in 2024.

Christmas

Of course there was the inevitable Christmas holidays last week. We had our whole family together in our house in the countryside and it was lovely. The preparations didn’t felt as stressful as the previous years. I guess because the kids are much more relaxed about the event as they grow up and we also didn’t had too much family duties outside our own family. Large parts of the relatives were not in the country. So no visiting duties this year 😉

Instead we had time to attend some of the last advent gatherings in the village. The Christmas mess in the church was with the largest attendance in years.

I attribute this partially to our successful attempts of improving the village community bonding with the “newly” founded society. It’s now two years old but became quite an institution already.

Our goal was to bring the people closer together again by means of various low level events and communication. The village has a mix of people who live here in the 2nd or 3rd generation, but also quite many people who only use it as a vacation place on the weekends or as a retirement home. One can imagine that these people naturally have rather different expectations (and also backgrounds) to their life in the countryside. This can lead to tensions. Our theory was that once people causally get to know each other over a nice dinner and some drinks for example, they’d start respecting each other a little bit more and develop some more empathy again.

We had several events organised over the course of the year and openly invited everyone. Not just by a poster on the central pinboard, but also by putting flyers into everyone’s mailbox and approaching people on an individual basis. Our emphasis was to make the contact and communication as human and personal as possible. One hardly resists kindness 😉

And I think we already see the positive effects. The tone in the central village WhatsApp group is much more respectful and calm meanwhile. Where we had heated arguments about almost everything in previous years, people now focus on the topic and seem to assume good intentions. As we also meet in person on a regular basis, new acquaintances have been made and I’m tempted so say even new friendships. People discovered their common ground rather than pondering about their differences.

The rest of the Holiday week was calm and relaxing with good food, sauna, reading, swimming in the lake etc.

As last action of the fading year I tried to graph the water level in the local lake. There is a water level gauge that I’m taking pictures of whenever we go swimming. I tried to put the readings in Excel and create a graph to show the changing water level. We’re not back yet at where we’ve been in the begin of 2023. But there is hope as it’s raining a lot lately.

New Years Eve

This year we tried Cheese Fondue but partially failed. I think didn’t had the correct cheese and also missing an essential step: the starch plus the cherry liquor. Anyway… I still enjoyed it.

At around 11pm we drove to Templin to attend the “Orgelknaller” at the Maria-Magdalenen-Kirche. That was a short organ concert after which we climbed up the church tower to watch the fireworks over the city. That was quite spectacular. It’s amazing how much money people still pour into this shit. Yeah it’s looks cool. But seriously … it’s stupid.