#weeklyreview 06/2025

Again a mixed week

Took Monday off to drive a friend to an examiner for his insurance to assess that he’s not capable of working in his job. He’s got severe ME/CFS, can’t sit or stand upright without passing out in a matter of minutes, has the attention span of squirrel before his brain fog kicks in etc. The examination was originally meant to be 2 days of 4 hours examinations each. But it was clear from the start that he’d not be able to do that. The bloody examiner sit’s in a non-accessible building in the south of Berlin. My friends needs a wheelchair to move around. Of course the building neither had an elevator nor a ramp or something. So it took my friend about 25 minutes to rob in his bum up to the 3rd floor. Yeah… because he can’t stand upright and just walk. And he’s also a bit heavy so can’t be easily carried. And our brilliant health system also does not pay for transport and carrying him upstairs anymore. You’d need three persons to move him, but the default staff on official ambulance cars is only two.

Overall a rather humiliating and exhausting experience for him. I’ll just hope that he’ll finally get’s the deserved payout from his insurance.

The good thing was though, that I 4 hours to roam around in Friedenau and was able to give my good friend Boerge as visit in his new home 😀

Tuesday & Wednesday I was fighting with work bureaucrats the get an exemption for using my corporate USB Disks to free off space on my internal hard disk for experiments mit LLM models. I get the need for rules and restrictions etc. But there must be a way to not prevent people from doing their work. There is all this mandatory security training and tools etc. But I think there should be a way for people to somehow prove that they know what they’re doing and get rid of the usual corporate shackles that prevent you from doing stuff and cripple your expensive corporate hardware.

Baltic Sea

For the rest of the week (which was the Berlin winter holiday week for schools) my daughter and me took off to Usedom island. This time we stayed in Świnoujście on the polish side of the isle.

The weather left room for improvement the first two days with grey clouds, cold wind and drizzle. But that’s kind of what we came for. The sea is awesome at any weather and our hotel had a Spa area where we spent time in the pool and sauna 🙂 I also got a fair bit of reading done on my kindle in the sauna. “The dawn of everything” is really good.

We explored the local restaurants and roamed around the city, beach and piers a bit.

On Saturday we took a trip to the German side and payed Gulliver a visit and had good pizza on the pier restaurant in Heringsdorf.

In the afternoon the sun finally came out and people were flocking to the beach for a walk. We saw the TF Line ferries coming in and eventually had really good Sushi at the Hilton Hotel Sushi Bar and Grill.

Overall a rather relaxing four days at the Baltic Sea.

But there was not a single node on the whole Baltic Sea. I was carrying my T-Echo the whole time to check for any nearby radios. Nothing, nada, zilch.

#weeklyreview 05/2025

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.

Dinner

Monday evening the oldest kid came over for dinner and we made roasted potatoes and broccoli/cauliflower casserole. Looks like we’re making these dinners a regular thing now. Nice 🙂

BBQ Ribs

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.

Antarktis

On Saturday our little village society organised a film evening by a German Astro particle scientist about Antarctica. He had been there several times to carry out Neutrino detection experiments. He also showed us some films of the Antarctica Film Festival and we learned that the German Neumayer Station III is one of the most modern on the continent.

#weeklyreview 04/2025

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.

Seed trays with transparent lids and labels for different plants sit on a floor near a window. A bag of fireplace briquettes is visible outside the window, and there is a red curtain to the right.

#weeklyreview 03/2025

Ice swimming

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 🤗

Dunkin' donut box on a table, encircled by lit tea candles. On the box, there is an easel holding a small canvas painted with a blue and yellow design.

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.

So I asked ChatGPT for help and came up with https://repos.mxhdr.net/maxheadroom/insta-import-pixelfed

This does the job ob posting all images in a certain folder in batches of configurable size.

This looks like this:

Meshtastic

Finally had ordered a Meshtastic device and got it delivered. That was inspired by the tinkering of Jan Wildeboer and is stories about the mesh networking capabilities oft the OLPC. I went with a LILYGO T-Echo

↬social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113137588284826911

↬social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113191557900339340

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.

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.

This can be seen on https://meshmap.de/

confused

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 🤪

#weeklyreview 02/2025

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.

A glass jar filled with amber liquid sits on a slatted wooden table on a balcony, with an out-of-focus cityscape and a blurred plant pot in the background.

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.

↬mastodon.xyz/@johl/113775818903147100

Monitoring NextCloud All-In-On Containers

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:

docker exec --user www-data -it nextcloud-aio-nextcloud php occ config:app:set serverinfo token --value <your random hext string goes here>

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

#weeklyreview 01/2025

Silvester

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.

Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2025/01/mark-zuckerbergs-fake-internet-empire

3D Printing resumed

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.

The result can be found here: https://www.explain-it.org/

It’s still work in progress, but I’m happy with the start.

A webpage titled "Explain IT" displays six project cards, each featuring an image, title, brief description, and a date. The projects include tools and services like Solidtime, Matrix/Element, Tandoor, KitchenOwl, PlantUML, and Teammapper. Navigation links for “Deutsch” and “English” are visible on the left, and "About" and "Contact" links are on the right.

#weeklyreview 52/2024

Spotify is evil

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.

#weeklyreview 51/2024

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.

My next book is “The dawn of everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

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.

A calendar page displayed in a store, featuring an illustrated outdoor scene with a wooden table and chairs under a tree. Sunlight filters through the foliage, casting shadows on the ground. The illustration is titled "Daheim" and is created by Kat Menschik for 2025.

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.

#weeklyreview 50/2024

gyming too hard

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” 😉

#weeklyreview 49/2024

More Gymming

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.

A man with a beard, wearing a beanie and colorful scarf, is smiling next to a large polar bear sculpture.

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

A food dehydrator with sliced apples arranged on the transparent drying trays, set on a workbench surrounded by tools and wires.