Pretty nice run on Sunday with a friend. The little pond in the forrest was still frozen. Swans on the lake showed us their lift-off skills. And finally some cranes were screeching in the flooded meadows of the other village.
Went swimming right after the run and it was …. freaking cold. Water hat around 2ºC. My Apple Watch decided that that’s too cold to operated and turned off. Fortunately only after I finished the swim and the recording of the session.
Beers with a friend
Sunday evening I went out for beers with a new friend. US American, teacher of art. Was a lovely evening and we had lots of fun talking about the good old early days of desktop publishing. Turns out he’s one of the people who have used Aldus PageMaker in the early/mid 1990s before it was bought by Adobe and layed the foundations for Adobe InDesign.
Wednesday was finally time for another session at Chicago Williams BBQ with the colleagues. Still some of the best ribs I ever had.
The little pond
We have a little pond in the forest we own. On Saturday we went checking whether it had gained some water in the last weeks of substantial rain. And it did. Back in autumn last year it was almost completely dried up and only a few puddles and mud at the ground. But now it looks like a pond again. It’s only about 50cm deep water at the moment. But the surrounding deer and boars like it.
Let’s hope it get still some more before they dry season starts.
Another busy week behind. Started with some Kimchi making that almost ruined the kitchen. The kimchi usually ferments over a few days. My batch didn’t do much fermentation for the first few days. So I had closed the lids. But then my daughter noticed that they were starting to bulk and leak. Upon opening the lid almost exploded
Apart from that it came out pretty delicious. The Recipe can be found here:
A night at the Opera
Tuesday was a big day. Birthday of my wife and to celebrate the event we had tickets for the “Dreigroschenoper” at the Berliner Ensemble.
I have to admit I hadn’t been in an Opera before, so I have nothing to compare it with. Had heard about the Dreigroschenoper and of course know the iconic song about Mack the knife.
It was spectacular. The building, the cast, the stage setup, the show. Will probably do this more often 😉 The kids had mixed feelings about it. It was a bit too long and too late in the evening for our youngest one to enjoy. But the two older ones did appreciate.
More Meshtastic
I got really excited about Meshtastic stuff and kept tinkering with the devices I’ve got. Of course that involved 3D printing various cases. So a hobby that addresses all the nerdy senses 😀
At good weather Berlin can see nodes from far away. I’m trying to get a feel for coverage and range. Means how reliable messages are delivered within the city through the mesh.
Got quite a bunch of ideas in my head how this could be used and possibly be applied/expanded in rural areas.
However… when driving to the countryside on the Weekend the mesh pretty much ended on the edge of Berlin. In Templin and around I couldn’t see a single node. There were at least two to be seen in Zehdenick. There is clearly room for improvement.
Gardening Season
The gardening season starts with seeding tomatoes and chilli and grow them seedlings indoors at first. My wife set up the first batches on the weekend.
A few weeks too late for a white christmas it was snowing on the weekend and actually cold enough for the snow to stay. Nevertheless went running with a friend on Sunday and of course swimming. This time there was about 3-5m of ice on the shore before the open water started.
Thats always a bit tricky as the ice shards are quite sharp. And it’s really frickin’ cold to break them and push them away with bare hands. But we managed and it was a beautiful swim in the cold water and the sun was shining. Water temperature was about 2º C.
Still got some cuts and bruises from the ice, but not as bad as last year.
Ice shower
The shower in the gym still doesn’t have warm water. So the week continued with cold showers after the exercise 😉
18 at last
Our 2nd child turned 18 this week. Time flies …
Kiddo doesn’t like presents nor a party. So a family coffee was all that was tolerated. 🤷
At least my wife payed us a visit in Berlin for this occasion 🤗
Pixelfed – another attempt
Since the enshittification of the commercial networks goes on many of their users seems to be migrating currently to Pixelfed.
I had an instance in the past, but were not happy with the buggy setup and flaky support. So eventually deleted my instance.
But with this new influx of users and the native iOS being available now I thought I give it another chance and did a new installation. Not without hiccups of course. But I think I’ve got it running reasonably well.
I’ve also downloaded my data archive from Instagram. Then I saw a friend posting batches of photos from his Insta Backup and thought that’s a nice idea, to post them month wise. But a tool to do that posting from the backup folder would be nice.
This is a protocol on top of the free 868MHz packet radio frequency that can be used for message exchange and routing. The good thing about the mesh network is, that there is no central infrastructure. The messages are just passed from node to node in a store/forward fashion. It resembles a little bit the robustness of the early Internet with multiple paths and redundancy and resilience in mind.
Screenshot
I can see dozens of nodes in Berlin and if the weather conditions are right, then even nodes from Poland, Hamburg, Halle (Saale), Zeitz etc. This is pretty amazing.
overall I was little thrown off this week as there were so many unusual events and meet-ups that I got confused with the weekdays. We also didn’t went to the countryside on the weekend, which added to the confusion 🤪
First full work week of the new year. Of course I started with proper gym sessions. The gym but had some surprises in store. The hot water wasn’t going on Monday so I could combine gym and ice bathing 😁
Had some good rowing sessions this week and also did some high-intensity interval sessions on the rowing machine.
Meta -> MAGA
Zuckerberg caved in proactively and declared Meta is no longer doing content moderation for their services (Instagram, Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp etc.). So the shitshow that is their social media platforms will turn even worse. That’s surely gonna work out. It worked great for Twitter under first lady Musk turning it into a right-wing cesspool.
I saw first Mastodon instance admins already announcing that they’ve now finally blogged the threads.net domain from federation with the Fediverse. Threads was meant to properly federate with Mastodon and the likes via ActivityPub. But looks like that’s not going to expand much further with their current trajectory.
I’m not yet blocking Threads on my instance but rather leave it up to the individual users to set up a block for their own account.
Cold Brew
When it’s cold outside (It was snowing in Berlin this week) one can use the balcony to make cold brew coffee 😉
It wasn’t too cold though. No risk of the water freezing and cracking the jar.
fiddling with CSV files
I recently found a great tool for playing around with CSV files. Often I have to export some data from a tool to CSV format to process it further. Sometimes I just want to answer a relatively simple question. Like how many lines match a certain value in column C?
Probe is helping with that exact problem by providing an SQL like interface for CSV files (and even Parquet files). Simple binary that use open the CSV file with and start writing your queries.
I’m running my NextCloud instance with the AOI Mastercontainer setup. To monitor such an instance, you can call a special monitoring URL that is displayed for the administrator under System Info.
However, you need to authenticate your request to the monitoring URL. For this you’re supposed to generate an access token. I was searching in the user interface for that option and couldn’t find it. Turns out that the access token is just a random string that you then have to configure as access token via the occ command line tool.
Now how to get to that occ tool on the AIO installation?
First you generate that random string using openssl:
openssl rand -hex 32
The result should be a 32 character string of hexadecimal numbers.
On the machine where your AIO containers run, you then call the main next cloud container like this:
That should set the Token for the server info URL and you can now call your monitoring endpoint with curl if you like to verify it:
curl -H "NC-Token: <your random hext string goes here>" https://nextcloud.example.com/ocs/v2.php/apps/serverinfo/api/v1/info
It should give you an XML document (unless configured to produce JSON output) with a whole bunch of NextCloud status information.
Winter finally
it had snowed already several times this week. But at least at the beginning of the week the snow didn’t last long as it was too warm still.
Tuesday evening on our way to the „Hacker Stammtisch“ there was proper rain/snow mix. Fortunately I got my rain coat „Friesen-Nerz“ and rain trousers and arrived dry. Moellus wasn’t dressed for the weather but still used the bike. R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
On Thursday the snow snow started to stay and it looked like Berlin was wildly unprepared. There roads were not cleared of the snow from what I could tell.
It did start to look rather nice on the weekend in the countryside. 3 weeks too late for a white Christmas though.
Herbstgold
On Saturday there was a documentary film evening organized in our village. Two films were on display. A short animation film by Adrienne Zeitler called “Die Frau und Landschaft” and a documentary by Jan Tenhaven called “Herbstgold“.
The latter was about really old people still competing in Sports. Very lovely movie with unique characters and touching stories. Really funny at times.
Studio Ghibli Mucke
and last, not least some tunes from Joe Hisaishi that K2 was practising
early afternoon we’ve got the admittedly slightly crazy idea to watch the official fireworks at Binz on Rügen island. So we hit the road to be there by 6 pm and watched it with hundreds of other people at the beach of the Baltic Sea.
Been back for our own little Sylvester dinner with cheese fondue by 10:30 pm. Fortunately it was relatively quite in our village and we were in bed right after the mandatory cheers at 12 o’clock:D
Back to (school) business
Heading back to Berlin on 1st as the rest of the week was officially no holiday for the school kids. Slightly stupid if you ask me to get back to school for just 2 days. I bet many kids and even teachers were probably not showing up because of holiday induced “illness”.
Bots talking to bots
Looks like Meta is going to allow A.I. bots on their platforms to appear as “normal” user accounts. What could possibly go wrong?
On 27 December, Meta’s vice-president of product for generative AI, Connor Hayes, told the Financial Times that a new set of AI products would allow users to create AI bots that “exist on our platforms… in the same way that accounts do”. The bots, he explained, would “have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content”. Before long, it is probable that much of what is posted on Facebook and Instagram (and perhaps to a certain extent WhatsApp) will not have been written by a human being. Bots talking to bots, sharing AI glurge, and upvoting is “where we see all of this going”, Hayes told the FT.
I was neglecting my 3D printer for several month now. But today I needed a frame for a pop filter for a microphone. Found a model on printables, sliced it and spend about 1 hour debugging the networking of the RaspberryPi running Mainsail & Klipper.
But finally the printer just delivered without any issues. No calibration or other maintenance needed.
Subskription tracking
My friend Boerge pointed me to a software to track ones subscriptions. Of course is installed it as a self-hosting service. Recently introduced another friend to it and she seems to like it. In the wake of that I created a little introductory video.
Service overview
Also related to that friend starting to use one of my self-hosted services, I thought it’s about time to create an overview of all the services I do self-host. Mostly for myself, because I sometimes forget that I have a certain services and then I can’t always remember the URLs …
I wanted this to be a static site as it’s really just a simple overview. So I decided to look into HUGO CMS again. Which is a static site generator CMS.
I watched most parts of the documentary “The Playlist” about Spotify on Netflix. And the founder Daniel Ek doesn’t come across as someone I’d want as a friend. Their customer support sucks and now I read this article about how they betray real artists with their own fake artists.
As a user I still like the simplicity a single app for all my listening desires brings. I also like the idea of paying per use. Means I don’t have buy an album upfront but rather pay for the times I’m listening to tracks. I don’t know the economics of this model and whether it could ever work out as artists hope it would.
But it looks like something needs to change to make this whole setup enjoyable again.
Smarter, not harder
Renewable energy sources are the future and many countries pushing to reach their goals in building out these sources. But the planning approaches are not yet adopted to actual use. A new study shows that a more fine grained planning approach can improve the actual use of the generated energy and thus avoid the need for costly storage solutions.
Christmas – too much food
Oh there was too much food involved on Christmas. We had a duck and cooked it on low temperature (80° C) for several hours. Red cabbage was prepared a day ahead. Roast potatoes as a side and fruit salad, Tiramisu and Mohnpielen as dessert. The duck came out good this year. Crispy on the outside, tender inside.
Shrinking
Was binge watching “Shriking” on AppleTV+ over the holidays. Really lovely show. I like the characters and the acting. One thing that stroke me as a bit too much is, that almost all of the characters where a bit too quick-witted. I mean I love snappy comments and catchy dialogues. But I think this show has taken it a bit too far. Nobody I’ve met so far is that quick and fluent. Especially not in that density of characters. You might have one or two friends which are quick-witted. But all your friends & family? C’mon.
Still a nice show though. And the final episode… I think I’ve got something in my eye watching that. Bill Lawrence certainly is a wizard of his trade.
Bike Ride
After all that food I had to do at least some exercise. As I also got a brand new bike helmet from Santa, I took my crappy bike for spin in the countryside. 30 km in 90 min across gravel and roads. My favorite songs on the headphones. Can hardly get any better than this.
Open Stage
On Saturday we attended the last open stage event in the MKC Templin. As always it was good music and interesting artists. This time it ranged from solo singers from Norway, renaissance tunes, handpan + flute, Rock’n’Roll to German Rap and songwriter music. Always amazed of the bandwidth they manage to bring on stage.
This time I particularly like that there was a “FCK AFD” sticker prominently placed on the Laptop on the stage. The AFD threatened the MKC in Templin with defunding because they were not allowed to rent the venue for their party shit.
pushing through the last work week of 2024. Almost finished the project I’m working on with just a few things left to be pushed into 2025.
In general I conclude that I personally find it much harder to work solo on a project than to tandem with a partner. That being said, this is true for project and program management work, not necessarily on technical tasks.
While technical work is mostly solving a particular technical problem that you can approach by various solo techniques: reading documentation, trial and error, experimenting etc.
With project management and program management there are also well known patterns but they require certain structures in the organization to exist. If theses structures do not exist, you have to get creative to compensate. Often this involves talking to people, explain stuff, get feedback and drive conclusions and decisions.
All this I find easier when I have a peer that I can work and reflect with. Mutual encouragement, reflection and support.
This book should have been a blog post
I was reading “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman. I truly interesting book about his research on the inner workings of human thinking.
But for me it’s rather repetitive and thus I decided to put it down for the time being. I didn’t made much progress lately on it. And while talking to a good friend about the book he had the same issue and said “This book should have been a blog post”. Don’t get me wrong. It’s very important work and eventually earned Kahneman a Nobel prize award. But I need to move on for the moment and read something else. I might finish this one later.
A breathtakingly ambitious retelling of the earliest human societies offers a new understanding of world history
Dinner with friends – again
On Tuesday I had the privilege of another dinner at my friends house. Together with another friend of hers we enjoyed Mac & Cheese and good conversations.
Although I had to really focus to understand the English accent of the other guy. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t initially tell why. Later I learned he’s from Manchester. That’s also where the Oasis brothers Gallagher come from. And their accent is also almost incomprehensible
Christmas shopping
On Thursday I did some last bits of Christmas shopping at the Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus. That’s always a treasure chest of magic. One always gets out with more than originally planned. Kind of like the IKEA for cultural goods.
Village advent events
On Friday it was our turn for this years living advent calendar in our village community. This year instead of being a host ourselves we joined forces with a few people from our village and organized the public event at the weather hut in our village. We brought hot wine , beer, cake, curly kale, dim sum and other stuff. Had a fire pit and luck with the weather.
Overall a very lovely evening with delicious food and good company. Good to see this community effort and spirit growing the third year in a row now.
Over all we had more people hosting events this advent and more people attending. People who hadn’t hosted in previous years and also an bunch of first time attendees.
On Saturday the final event took place in the neighboring village with self baked bread and self baked Stollen. Rather delicious.
Went a bit too long on the rowing machine and bruised my bum. Probably also due to improper wardrobe (sitting on a seam or something). So rest of the week was more stepper, strength and gymnastics
Shell history tool
Found a tool that help managing the shell command history slightly better: atuin.sh
The tool provides sort of a GUI for browsing and search the command history. You can see stats for individual commands and also sync your shell history across machines if you feel fancy. The syncing can be done either via atuin main server (E2E encrypted), or via a self-hosted backend.
Banana!
More fruit dehydration fun. I tried Bananas and they come out crips and delicious after about 12hrs and 50º C.
Christmas concert at school
The annual Christmas concert of K2s school took place on Wednesday. Of course kiddo only told me one day before. Fortunately I didn’t had any meetings that day. So I could attend and witness the progress the kids made – or made not 😉
Let’s be frank … sometimes the music can only be loved by parents. Some kids simply just don’t practice enough or don’t like to play at all. But hey, that’s OK. At least they tried and improve over time. Most of the performances were actually good and impressive. Especially the string instruments (violin and such) are really difficult to play. Even more stunning that they manage to get something reasonable out after just half a year with their instruments.
Farewell
Thursday I attended yet another farewell dinner for a dear friend who’s leaving for Australia for a few month. Awesome people and delicious food. Can’t put in words.
Feuerzangenbowle
On Friday I was invited for a traditional German christmas event of “Feuerzangenbowle“. For this you have a pot of red wine with spices and you soak a cone of sugar with high percentage Rum and set that on fire. The fire will melt the sugar and let it drip into the spicy wine. Making for a spectacular “Glühwein” 😉
totally enjoying to be back in the gym. Of course over exercising according to my fitness apps. But it’s so good to use and feel the body work.
It was also raining quite a bit this week so that I had to dress up properly to not arrive completely soaked in the office. But you know I like weather 🙂
grey beard gathering
This month hacker gathering was smaller than usual. But nevertheless fun. Learned about TypeScript and an Intel 8080 hardware debugger.
BnB crew Christmas party
Our famous Beer’n’Burger crew met to cheat on the burgers and have goose instead at the Prater Garten restaurant. Awesome as always and delicious.
Farewell party
On Friday evening we had the farewell party of my best friend. She’s leaving for Australia for a few week. It was just mind blowing 😉
Event Hoppping
On Saturday we went event hopping. There was of course the living advent calendar in the village that we attended. Also visited an exhibition opening in the MKC in Templin and eventually joined the open studio of the lovely Silke Schmidt where I took the selfie with my spirit animal :D.
new gadget
Got a new gadget from one of the villagers for free. A food dehydrator 🙂
Wanted to get one for quite a while already but never committed to buy one. Now I can make my own dried fruits and maybe even dried meat
Started the Sunday with a run through the rainy forest. Thought my running partner would bail out due to the rain, but he didn’t. That’s why I like partners in crime with sports activities. I would have not have run that morning as it was really too wet. But cancelling a commitment to a friend – no way.
running on the wet groundmisty fields in the forstmisty fields in the forstready to go
And of course we went swimming afterwards. The week was rather cold and even had a bit of snow. The lake cooled down to 4 – 6ºC
Finally the gym is open
After almost half a year of renovation, the gym in the office is finally open again. I know I’m spoiled, but I did miss my almost daily training sessions.
Did three days in a row this week plus running in the evening with a friend. That doesn’t compensate for the laziness the last couple of months, but it’s a start.
HERE Winter Party
On thursday we had our office winter party. That was fun and I met some colleagues and friends from Eindhoven as well 🙂
Angela Merkel
On Tuesday there was a book signing event at the Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus with Angela Merkel. She would be signing her Memoir called “Freiheit”. I showed up one hour earlier to get a spot in the line and a chance to get the book signed. It was a bit chaotic on site. There were queues in the ground and first floor. I tried to find the end to enter the queue. But turned out both queues had turned into a circle with no end or beginning. Asking the staff didn’t help. They were unaware and unorganised at this point in time. But slowly realising that they had to step in. So the just split the queue in the lower flow and guided the ever growing number of people to start forming a queue outside. So I had to wait a bit outside the entrance the queue was quickly growing around the block.
I waited about 1,5hrs in the queue and signing had started meanwhile. But the queue barely moved 4 meters. Eventually a store manager came outside and announced that the people waiting outside will not make it as there are far too many people waiting. Apparently more than 500 people had queued inside already and there was probably the same amount waiting outside. Merkel only was scheduled for 1,5hrs.
So I left without a signature. Will have to catch up with here somewhere in the #Uckermark 😉
Cooking
made a “proper” pasta bolognese from scratch. mmmhhh , that was good.
Christmas tree
On Saturday we had our traditional Christmas tree decoration in the village. As every year, the people of the village gathered around the tree that was donated by of the villagers. We brought some snacks, cakes, bbq, hot and cold drinks etc. and were enjoying to community event.
Our village even managed to have Santa Claus for the children again this year (there was a dispute between the man that used to organise this the last years, and so the former Santa was cancelled this year. Big drama in the village).
