Frost
Finally Winter seems to be closing in. On Sunday the temperature fell below the freezing point (of water) and we had -4ยบ C in the countryside. But we were rewarded with beautiful sunshine and colourful autumn foliage.
Temperature in the lake also dropped a bit over last weekend. I tried out my new digital surface thermometer. That showed 11.4ยบ C. Another thermometer that measured at a depth of about 10cm into the water showed 9ยบ C.
Crossed the lake nevertheless. Still now issue with that.



Back in Berlin I met with my friend Sam for beers. Hadn’t had beers for several weeks … so it was about time. Fun conversations ๐

Winter tires
This year I made the appointment to change the winter tires back in September already. Before the first snow ๐ Free choice of schedule … But they actually advised to not have the tires changed if it’s still above 7ยบ C average. Thats why I only now got the appointment.
Driving through the city is insane. It was always crazy, but it seems in the last quarter the city has added construction sites to EVERY road. In our area one of the main 6 lanes roads is now reduced to two lanes and also all the side roads are blocked. Apparently this will take at least 2 years to finish. But of course you never see anyone actually working…
proper coffee
On Tuesday I decided to take my coffee gear to the office to enjoy a proper coffee without spending 4 EUR on it outside.

This nicely fits into an old camera bag

I might do this more often now (or eventually get a copy of the gear for the office…)
Shortly before I was supposed to get my yearly flu vaccination by the company doctor a fire alarm had us exit the building. Quite a spectacle with police, emergency cars, fire engines and even a helicopter. But fortunately it turned out to be a false alarm and we were allowed back in after about 15 min.

Hacker meeting
This time at the Prater Garten Restaurant. Decent “Wiener Schnitzel” and again an inspiring bunch of old nerds having fun.


CryptPad Installation
I finally took the time to look into installing CryptPad. That’s a secure online editor for documents where multiple people can work on the same document, chat and comment while collaborating. Focus is on security here as all connections and storage of the documents is encrypted.
They meanwhile provide a working docker-compose.yaml and I only had to add the labels for my Traefik reverse proxy.
There some initial challenges in getting the container properly connected to Traefik. One has to get the config.js of CryptPad right.
I’ll share my docker-compose.yaml and my config.js here, so you can take these as inspiration. I basically only put in my domain names in the config.js and docker-compose.yaml. One important piece is to set the httpAddress: 'cryptpad'
in the config.js because the docker-compose.yml sets this as the hostname of the container. If you leave this at localhost
, Traefik will not be able to connect and you’ll just get a “Bad gateway” error when trying to connect.
Next quest is to the get OnlyOffice stuff running to support Spreadsheets and Presentation documents as well…
[Update 2024-11-11] got the OnlyOffice extension working. Had to execute the ‘install-onlyoffice.sh’ from the GitRepo inside the running application container and restart once.
Art Forest hiking
On Saturday we had organised a hike from our neighbour village through the art forest to the “Mittelpunkt der Erde” (middle of the earth) restaurant in Kurtschlag. That was a nice hike with funny and insightful information shared by one of our neighbours.
The restaurant was really lovely as you would imagine an old small village restaurant that fell out of time. There were 3 dishes on the menu and the max price was 7.95 EUR. You could have eaten all 3 and were still cheaper than a normal meal in Berlin. Amazing.
















Fall of Carthage
Sascha and his band “Fall of Carthage” release their new album “Kernel Panic” a few days ago. Of course I had to listen in although I never really like their earlier albums. Not because they were not good. Quite to the contrary. But the previous albums were just not my taste at that time.
The new album however I really do like. The style is still more on the heavy metal side. But I like the arrangements on the new album.
If you like their music and want to support the band, make sure you either buy on Bandcamp or if you’re streaming, then consider donating directly to the band via PayPal. As a small band, there is virtually no revenue for the band from the commercial streaming services.