Unfortunately I seem to have brought back some sort of summer flu from last weeks vacation. Coughing and stuffy lungs. Fighting it with tea and vitamin-c now.
Nevertheless I had to deliver K2 to Hamburg for his two week hiking trip in Norway …
I hope he’ll enjoys it as much as his last hiking trip in Sweden two years ago.
Embassy
On Tuesday I accompanied the in-laws on their visit to the South African embassy in Berlin as a translator. They want to apply for a pensioners visa which requires a whole lot of paperwork.
We had to wait for about 4 hours until it was our turn. Eventually some stamps were missing … but that seems to be solvable. But of course will require another visit. But fortunately no help with translation was needed as the embassy staff speaks German really well and was very kind in general.
Ton, Steine, Scherben Podcast
found this marvelous podcast about germany’s first rock band with german lyrics. They are legendary in Germany although they hadn’t been commercially successful at all. What I think is almost unparalleled in Germany is their integrity to their original principles.
On Saturday there was an event at the grounds of the EST. This is the historic school side in Templin. During GDR times this was the place I finally learned to swim some decades ago. As member of “AG Touristik” we wanted to do a canoe tour. But for that everyone would have been able to swim. I wasn’t at that time, so they send us to the local rowing & canoeing club. There we got life safer vests on and were tossed into the lake to swim 😉 Eventually the life vests were omitted and we could swim 🤣
Due to some scheduling mishap I went swimming two times that Sunday. We originally had an appointment for 11:00 am but the guys didn’t show up (of course I still went for a swim). Then the other half of the group agreed on a 1pm meet up. So I took a second round. The lake also gained quite some water over the last weeks of rain. We seem to be back at the level were we’ve been last year this time.
Traefik config voodoo
If you ever need to configure your container in a way that Traefik will allow traffic coming from specific IPs, but require HTTP Basic Authentication from all other IPs … this is how you’d configure this:
You basically have to define two separate Routers for the same service. Each Router has its own matching rules and own middlewares.
Mind that the ClientIP in the routers matching rule only matches on the ClientIP, not on IPs in the X-Forwared-For HTTP Header.
new T-Shirts \o/
QWertee had a special offer where you’d get a free T-Shirt every one you order. Even on the discounted ones … so I ended up with a whole bunch of new nerdy t-shirts 😀
Of course one was already occupied by kiddo
Birthday
another birthday in da house. The kids … they grow up so fast.
Elections
This is the big year of elections. On Saturday our village society elected a new board. That was formal but still fun. Especially as we there was another instance of our “Dorfdisco” afterwards \o/
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.