#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.

#weeklyreview 50/23

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Monday – Workout

good start into the week with an 90 min gym session. Winter is gone in Berlin, so was able to ride the bike into the office.

Tuesday – Enpal Solar

Had to drive to the countryside to meet an engineer from Enpal Solar for onsite inspection of our house. They are supposed to make an offer for a PV with storage and Wallbox. The good thing about their offer seems to be it’s really all inklusive. one doesn’t have to worry about permissions, craftsmen etc.

On the backside … their offer sounds really expensive compared to the mere bill of materials. We’ll see.

Later in the day iOS 17.2 was released with the new Journal app. A direct competition to apps like “Day One” I’d say. But after playing around for a bit I’m rather underwhelmed. The automatic suggestions are nice, but the UI over all seems uninspired. Also the app is only available on iOS. Not on the desktop or web (yet). Makes it less useful for me really. But I guess Apple will evolve it over time and eventually push other journaling apps out of business. Bad monopoly move.

Wednesday – Weihnachtsmarkt Kulturbrauerei

A small group of colleagues met at the Christmas market at Kulturbrauerei. Since our teams are now mostly scattered all over the world, the team spirit is a bit trickier to maintain than in the good old days. The remainder of the Berlin systems engineering force got together to enjoy a few Glühwein and Bratwurst at the Christmas market. Kulturbrauerei was only food and crafts stuff. No loud music and other fancy stuff. Still too many people for my taste.

Thursday – Corporate Christmas Party

Our Berlin office Christmas party took place in the office this year. OK with me. What I liked was the fact that the company offered voluntary company sponsored COVID tests upfront for all participants. I hope that many people took the chance and tested themselves. As usual, I came out negative. Which is positive I guess.

Metas microblogging/fediverse network Threads.net is now available in EU. People in Europe can now download the app and turn their Instagram Account into a mastodon-like account with Threads.net.

And of course, no day on the internet without drama. So immediately some instances where shouting out that they will block threads.net on their instances because Meta is evil.

I’ll not (yet) block threads.net on the instance level. I’ll let the individual users decide. I had myself a look at the app. One can read without creating an account. Thats good. But for me it also made it clear at the first glimpse that it’s not even remotely interesting. It seems the same capitalistic shitshow that Twitter was and Instagram is to some extend.

In more exciting new the new Hipstamatic V10 was released. Thats one of my earlier iOS apps at all. I like their visual design and the idea of just combining lenses and films to get digital image effects instead of working with filters. Effectively it’s the same, but I like the skeuomorphism of the app.

Saturday – Living Advents Calendar

The second year in a row our little village community organised what we call a living advent calendar. The idea is to bring the people together for some cosy winter evening. Every day in advent a different household hosts a session and treats the guests with warm beverages, food and all sorts of entertainment. This way you get to know the neighbours better and hopefully make new friends as well.

This Saturday was our turn again and we performed some house music with the accordion and piano. Of course there was Glühwein, Schmalzstullen and fire pits.

#weeklyreview 48/23

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Sheeessh, the year is almost over… time flies.

This week I looked into possible alternatives for Evernote. I pump all my documents into Evernote since decades. It’s a trusty store for all my admin stuff and some notes and has saved my bacon several times when traveling. Whenever I needed some official documents (birth certificates, marriage certificates etc.), I was able to pull them out of Evernote and unlock the things like immigration into South Africa or getting temporary passports at the embassy.

But it’s always good to have alternatives in case the enshittification of services spreads to further tools I use. I also like (and dislike) being in complete control of my own data. So looking at services that would keep notes in a durable format, sync across devices via my own facilities and can possibly import Evernote data.

This time I took a deeper look at Obsidian. A free for personal use note editor that stores in MarkDown files. Sync can be done via file sync services like iCloud Drive, DropBox etc.

Obsidian also offers their own paid sync service.

Using iCloud Sync isn’t optimal as iCloud now has this on-demand sync. If files are not needed for a while, they’ll be deleted from the device and downloaded on demand once needed again. This however will mess with Obsidian as it expects files to be there.

I found a community plugin for Obsidian which offers a live sync capability via a CouchDB. That I can host myself and thus have all the data location and syncing under my control.

But it turned out that plugin is still under heavy development and changes features rapidly. At least the E2E encryption was replaced while I was testing. That requires a re-sync of the whole database.

I had exported all my Evernote notebooks into the ENEX format. Obsidian is able to read this and import the notes including their attachments and some metadata. So far so good. But turns out that almost 6GB of data seems a bit too chunky for my CouchDB setup. Syncing one device took several days. Given that the plugin changed and I had to re-do the syncing several times … too much hassle for the moment.

I eventually decided to not put the heavy Evernote archive into Obsidian. The app is more for note taking, not so much for storing Documents (as in PDFs and other attachments). Notes are much smaller and sync almost instantly via the CouchDB backend.

Spotify Wrapped

This week the famous Spotify year review came out. Not much surprise in there. I also believe that the stats are wrong. I do like Queens of the Stone Age. But now way I was listening to “Feed don’t fail me now” more often than songs from one of the other top artists in the list. Anyway..

And I know that people keep complaining how Spotify is not paying the artists fairly. For me Spotify is almost the exclusive way to consume music nowadays. They run the infrastructure and pay for the network bandwidth to deliver the music as well as providing clients and integration into a lot of appliances. A hear nobody complain about the major records labels anymore. What value do they provide these days in getting the music to the fans?

Winter

Winter finally arrived and brought a whole bunch of snow. In Berlin especially black ice. Monday I still managed to bike into work. But it was dangerously slippery. Of course the pedestrian and bike paths were mostly not cleared or gritted.

Keto diet

I’ve finally started to seriously try and loose some weight. My approach is a mix of special diet and more exercise.

On the diet side I’m trying a no-carb diet. Simply means avoid any carbohydrates in my diet. No other restrictions. No carbs is almost impossible as almost any food contains some of them. But I’m trying to stay well below 50g/day. Idea is that the body metabolism is adapting from burning carbohydrates for energy to burning fat for energy.

The effect is already visible on the scale 😉

#weeklyreview 47/23

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Admittedly last weeks review was a little late. Too late… To make up for that, I’m publishing this one on Sunday 😉

Last Sunday our weekly swimming was really just a small group as most of the people were busy otherwise. Water was at around 6ºC. Didn’t try to cross the lake as there wasn’t enough time.

Started Monday with one hour of rowing in the office gym. Tuesday I made due with just half an hour of indoor cycling. That was the last day of the week I could properly exercise as on Tuesday morning I received my yearly flu vaccination from the company doctor and was advised to keep it low for the next few days to let the body build the antibodies against the flu.

Nevertheless couldn’t resist to have a long walk Wednesday evening to get at least some exercise and fresh air.

On this day the colleague brought his coffee equipment to the office. So we got to enjoy proper coffee and a show 😉

On Thursday I was tinkering around with the Flipper Zero and its new App Store. Found an App than can read and display the values of the most popular temperature sensors.

Unfortunately the App broke a little later when Flipper pushed out an updated firmware. I checked the repository of the app and tried to build the app myself fixing the things the build process was complaining about.

And after half a night of trial and error I got it running eventually and was able to build me the smallest weather station. I still had a DHT22 sensor which I consider quite bulky for my other projects. But it’s pin-out fits directly into the Flipper Zeros GPIO ports:

The thingy even had a cameo in one of my BeReals 😉

Friday it finally got more seriously cold. During the week we already had a low of -6ºC on the countryside and even Berlin had around -2ºC.

Friday Evening it even started to snow. Enough to cover the lawn with a thin blanket of snow.

Saturday evening we had our annual party of the “Leben in Groß Dölln e.V.”. It was a lovely get-together again in a great venue. Everyone brought their favourite food to share and good wine. Lot’s of fun and inspiring conversations. Really good to see the village community still thriving and growing.

#weeklyreview 46/23

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After the successful mushroom foraging session on Saturday it was now my duty to risk my life and eat them.

If you’re reading this … I survived 😉 Turned into one delicious meal 😉

Was playing around with ownTracks as a self-hosted location tracking app. The idea is to have the ability to track various mobile devices but keep the data under my control. While the built-in iOS (“Find my”) and Android (Google Maps) are convenient, the also leave the data on Apples/Google server to fuck around with.

ownTracks is a simple app that can send the position data to an arbitrary MQTT backend. I’m hosting my own Mosquitto instance and use the ownTracks Recorder app to visualise the data on OpenStreetMaps.

The connection to the MQTT broker is of course using TLS encryption. To add security and hide the data from the MQTT broker one can define an encryption passphrase. Now the MQTT broker sees only encrypted data. Via this secret you can also share your position with friends. All devices with the same encryption key can see the location of the other members.

It gets interesting when you add POIs and geofences. The clients can send a special message when leaving or entering a certain location. This way one can automate geo location based events (e.q. the classical “turn the lights on when I’m coming home” example etc.). The ownTracks Recorder app also records “tracks” means it doesn’t only collect the individual points but draws line/routes where one moved. So you can display your own moving profile over time.

Wednesday

I felt fancy and took my coffee gear to the office. Thats the Wacaco Picopresso and the HARIO Travel Grinder. I pre-weighed the coffee beans at home and stored them in the little metal containers I’ve kept from my coffee bean advent calendar last year.

Saturday – mushrooms again

On Saturday we’ve been invited over to our friends place in the next village for a little walk in the forest and maybe some mushroom picking again.

And it was crazy. On just a 30m strip right outside the village we filled 3 baskets of mushrooms and had to stop as our storage capacity was exceeded. Those will be cut into small pieces and dried up for later use. Mostly in sauces to stews and the like.

#weeklyreview 45/23

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Sheeesh, already late again with my weekly review.

Tried to up my gym game again this week. Starting with rowing machine on Monday. Resting a bit on Tuesday and then doing some long walks on Wednesday. Our bunch of weirdoes considers a hiking trip in Greenland next year. In preparation I need to stark doing longer hikes with weight in the backpack. So I took my large rucksack to carry my work backpack and my gym backpack and walked all the way to the office. Also had session on the “Elliptical Strider” and Sam forced me into a core workout 😀

This week the sun came out the time I was traveling to the office and gave a nice glow to some building tops. Although the days were mostly cloudy and rainy, that was still a nice sight.

In the evening our little travel group met for beers and I might have slightly had too much of the Lemke’s IPA.

they didn’t come for me though

Thursday another meeting of our infamous Beer & Burger group took place at Hirsch & Eber. Delicious burger with game meet. Can definitely recommend.

Another jogging session in the morning on Friday since my running partner from our house was out sick again this week I had go alone.

Saturday @sirki & @moellus finally came over to reinstantiate our yearly mushroom foraging session. That was paused for some years due to my wife’s health conditions.

That was a lovely reunion although almost all our kids opted out. Back in the days our two families were a force of nature as we tend to show up with 10 people from just two families 😀

We made Pizza and even found some mushrooms on our stroll through the forest.

I’ve got a super lovely new coffee cup from @moellus. This is my new favourite cup in the house now 🙂

all my jobs are better with coffee

Tried to stay away from carbohydrates in my diet this week. Of course had a few cheat meals, but slowly getting there.

Some bookmarks from this week:

#weeklyreview 44/23

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Sunday we had lunch at my parents side and enjoyed the kids favourite German dumplings menu 🙂

Swam the lake and figured that the Apple Watch can record the heart rate while swimming. In contrast to my Garmin Fenix which refused to do so. The GPS tracking during swimming seems to be a tad bit better with the Fenix though. But I was out of training and had to do a couple of breast strokes. The water finally has temperature around 10ºC. Unfortunately the Apple Watch that I have doesn’t have a temperature sensor.

On Monday I had to get back to work. Working remotely though as the kids were still on vacation. So we spent the time in the countryside.

Tuesday

This was our 16th wedding anniversary. But we live together for much longer already. And hopefully for many more years to come <3

Formally I had to work, but in the afternoon the stormy weather caused a power outage in our village and also took away mobile data reception. Good excuse to have a trip to the Werbellinsee and Szczecin, Poland

Wednesday

Saw a large pike at the lake

Thursday

Spontaneous trip to a “nearby” cinema to watch “Killers Of The Flower Moon” by Martin Scorsese. Very good (and rather long) movie. Awesome performance by Lily Gladstone.

Saturday

Finally cleaning up the property of all the half-dead plants and fallen off leaves. It’s finally getting a bit of autumn vibes. Apparently we had a whole lot of pots in use for this years tomato growing.

#weeklyreview 43/23

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The alarm clock went off at 5am on Sunday. Plan was to leave at 6am for #Leuven, Belgium to visit the oldest kid at the University over there for a few days.

We eventually took off at 6:30am which I consider a success. A long drive ahead of us and me as the only driver this time. But since it was a Sunday, the Autobahn was OK. Apart of course from the Ruhrgebiet …

Eventually we arrived in Leuven at around 3pm

We booked the cheapest hotel we could get and the rooms don’t disappoint the low expectations 😉 But the beds are OK and we really don’t use it for more than 3 nights to sleep. So why spend more? Leuven is a rather beautiful city with lots of places to kill time.

Belgian waffles
Floral decoration on my shops
University Library
View from the library tower

On Monday we were visiting various places in Leuven. First the university library which was burned down two times by German soldiers in world war 1 and 2. We had a good view over the city from the top of the library tower. There was an ongoing exhibition about censorship.

Then we went on to the botanical gardens where the city were just about to store all the palm trees for winter that were decorating the city.

Tuesday we took the train to Brussels and payed The Atomium the mandatory visit. Quite impressive from the outside. Inside the usual exhibits about how the place was build and renovated over the years.

After that we drove into the city center by tram to visit the chocolate story museum. That was informative and delicious.

Just around the corner was the famous Mannekin Pis which we only noticed due to a huge crowd of Asian tourists being photographed by their tour guide in front the Mannekin. While writing this review I learned that they apparently dress up the figure on a regular basis with suits. Check the link above for pictures of that.

Wednesday was rather rainy. We had our famous yellow rain jackets and no fear. But the draw back with those jackets is that all the water goes straight down to your legs. If you don’t have watertight trousers as well, you still get rather wet. I also figured out that my trusty Blundstone shoes finally got severely cracked soles and giving me wet feets in the conditions as well.

We had plans to visit the St. Peters church in the old city center. But eventually had to learn that just this month it’s closed on Wednesdays for the public 🙁
So we ended up visiting the old town hall across the street from the church. There was an exhibition about Dieric Bouts – the cities famous painter and sculpture artist.

This was quite impressive as just on this day additional rooms of the town hall were open. There was a very kind old guide in the exhibition which gave us additional explanations in German as the electronic tour guide was only available in English.

In the evening my daughter an me went to the “Grand Cafe Industrie” (I don’t link to their page as that is apparently malware infected at the moment). One of two old but beautifully kept cafes at the place near the train station. Belgium is famous for their beers and of course I had to try one at least once during the drip.

Thursday morning we hit the road again to go back to Berlin. This time during the week, with heavy traffic expected on the Autobahn. Overall I think we were lucky that there was no real standstill for more than 2-3 Minutes. But it was quite full and basically a long chain of Trucks from the German border all the way to Berlin. It just shows that Germany completely messed up its goods transport system. Only relying on Autobahn and trucks is a rather stupid idea. Most of these trucks do long distance transports and could have easily gone on trains.

Over all this trip was quite depressing for “a German”. The Netherlands and Belgium seem to work much better than Germany. People seem more calm, friendlier and overall happier I’d say.

Friday we went off to the countryside after breakfast. Autumn has finally arrived and although rather late. Only now, at the end of October, the trees turn colourful and still got most of their leaves. Sky is grey with heavy clouds and misty rain. If you know me… than you know I like every season 😉

#weeklyreview 42/23

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Uuh… week number #42 … a geek number.

Last week I asked regarding the option to publish the weekly review already at the beginning of the week and just add to it as the week progresses. There was one feedback on this from @Sascha. He hinted that this would rather be something for

Monday

The rowing machine has a new display with a power graph. So I got challenged and finished the 30min with 7171m and 177W average output. That was about 1km more than usual 😱

Tuesday

Can you believe it was finally freezing in the morning in Berlin?

And because one day in the gym wasn’t enough, I hit it Tuesday again. But this time only a bit of spinning and strength training as my friend Sam was occupying the rowing machine.

Wednesday

Got an appointment for another COVID vaccination at a local pharmacy. They at first wondered a bit as I’m “well” below my 60s and the last vaccination was only in February this year. But eventually they agreed it makes sense as I’m the first degree care taking person of a high risk patient.

As usual, no symptoms from the vaccination for me. Knocking on wood that I keep my streak of not being sick since a decade. Ditched Corona so far. Might as well be immune or just don’t get symptoms. But I’m also careful and wearing masks again in public and during shopping etc.

In the evening I met with Michael and Sam over beers (alcohol free for me to not disturb the vaccine). We had too much fun and I guess the guests around us were slightly annoyed about us 🤷

Thursday

Lots of rain. Finally. Big storm on the Baltic Sea approaching.

Kid sick and staying home. Hope she’ll be alright by Sunday as we want to go on a short trip to Belgium.

Saturday

Quick trip to the countryside to deliver laundry and supplies for my wife. Spontaneous visit to the Asian restaurant in Prenzlau.

Early to bed as Sunday morning we want to hit the road to Leuven, Belgium.

#weeklyreview 41/23

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I have to catch up with my review. The last one I just finished, but it was from the week before. Hope this one is going to come more in time.

Was thinking of whether it would make sense to publish the post already at the begin of the week and successively update the posting every day. Whats your opinion?

Sunday I was running with two friends in the countryside. It had rained on Saturday but Sunday was beautiful and sunny. The paths in the forest were rather wet and even had puddles. That doesn’t happen often over here as the ground is mainly sand. Water usually disappears within a few minutes regardless of how much it rained. So apparently it had rained a lot.

We left early for Berlin that day as daughter was invited to a birthday party. I dropped her off at the venue and met with my friend Leo. We had good walk in the Treptower Park. Later, in the evening I picked up the kid again and had to walk a bit as well to get to the train stations.

Over all that was a lot of steps that day

And of course I was scheduled to run with my neighbor on Monday evening. Good training and contrast to the rest of the week in home office where I usually do far too few steps.

Blast from the past

On Tuesday I finally managed to got a test environment set up to work on a script from 2014. Written by a contractor back in those days this was still running today. But finally needs to be converted to a new stack. Not only is Python 2 no longer supported on the target stack, but also many of the imported libraries must be updated.

Orangespresso

I recorded the whole process of making myself an Orangespresso and don’t want to spare you from it 😉

Using my trusty HARIO Travel Grinder and the Wacaco Picopresso. Yes, this takes a while. But thats my why of limiting my caffeine intake. Have only 2-3 cups a day, but focus on the quality.

Weekend

On Friday evening we went for grocery shopping and it was unusually warm still. When we left the shop and got out a warm gust of air welcomed us. That very much reminded us of the times we arrived in Cape Town airport in winter. When you enter the chain of plains in Germany winter and leave into a warm summer breeze.

On Saturday we cleaned up some tomato plants from the beets. They got partially rotten and there isn’t enough sunlight in that corner of the property to get the remaining fruits red. The plants in front of the house, facing west are still going strong. They still got blossoms and the fruits eventually turn red. That is quite late into the season this year due to the global warming.

The neighbour was cutting down a handful of large fir trees. The other neighbour cut down a pine tree … somehow we must have missed the memo that it was tree cutting weekend. Eventually it was a bit annoying having the chainsaws going direct in front of our window for almost the whole day.