#weeklyreview 45/24

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 ๐Ÿ˜‰

Winter tires

This year I made the appointment to change the winter tires back in September already. Before the first snow ๐Ÿ˜€ 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.

A bunch of coffee gear lined up on a wooden tabletop. Left to right: metal jug with coffee, a cup of ready cappuccino, a Subminimal milk frother, AeroPress chamber and grid lid, AeroPress piston and Coretto permanent steel filter for the AeroPress, Hario Travel Grinder and finally Hario Mill stick.

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.

a helicopter, slightly blurry, in front of a blueish sky.

Hacker meeting

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

↬wandzeitung.xyz/@moellus/113431974931326324

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 Carthagerelease 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.

#weeklyreview 18/24

Party Time

We are approaching to make our “Walpurgisnacht” party a tradition. This year it was a little spontaneous but nevertheless a very lovely evening with our friends from countryside. We had a small buffet, some drinks and two camp fires (and our guests doubled as mosquito buffet ๐Ÿ™ˆ).

Beach Cleaning

Also a tradition already: the yearly cleaning of the local beach by the village community. We meet with rakes and wheel barrows to clean up the beach on the lake from last year’s leaves and possible trash and branches from the winter. This is a really nice tradition which brings the people together for some activity that everyone benefits from. Of course there is self-made cake and beverages after the work. We were around 20 people and work was done in less than an hour. Now everyone can enjoy a clean beach. The weather was perfect. Not too warm yet, but sunny with a fresh breeze.

Good bye Gittea – Hello Forgejo

I was running my own Git Repo site based on GitTea so far. But apparently there are some discrepancies in transparency that caused a decision by the soft fork Forgejo to consider becoming a hard fork and go their own way in the future. Forgejo seems to be more committed to stay a truly independent and community driven project. So I’ve decided to switch to Forgejo as well. Especially as the migration currently is rather seamless as the codebases hardly differ.

Open Studio weekend

On the weekend it was the annual “open studio” weekend in Brandenburg. Local artist opened their studios and galleries for visitors all across the country. We visited the wonderful site of Silke Schmidt and even bought some pictures of her.

Her place is an old GDR kids holiday camp (Ferienlager) and had wonderful vibes of the past. Had to take a picture of the famous GDR F70 compass that I used to own.

Action Sampler

Another quite magical place was the garden of local artist Siegfried Haase. Beside this being an awesome garden (wonderfully planned and maintained by his wife) there is so much stuff to discover: sculptures he made from scraps and old gear he found around in the area. The whole property is like a large “Wimmelbild“.

And last, not least we attended a session of the Daumenkino of Volker Gerling. We had seen this before two years ago and it’s still magic. One would think ‘how magic can a mere flip book be?’. But what Volker does from it is truly marvellous. Time seems to stop and you listen to his stories and watch the pictures come to life when he presents them. Go check his schedule of exhibits!