Wellness day

Sunday started with a good run in the forest. Further preparation/training for the 2025 Berlin Half-Marathon, in which you can still support me over at the WWF ActionPanda page.

It was partially like running on the beach in sand. The forest keepers had dug up many pathes in the forest because they were quite damaged from the heavy wood hauling trucks.

After the run we had our weekly swimming gathering and I crossed the lake at about 11ºC without any issues still. A friend invited me over to his sauna that he had already fired up in anticipation of the shaking from the cold swim. We had really relaxing two session at nearly 90ºC watching out into the sun lit autumn forest.

To round up the perfect day my wife and I went for ice cream to Prenzlau 🙂

Mushrooms

On Monday I took one meeting for a handover to a colleague while I’m on vacation. But after that, kiddo an me went to pick some mushrooms. We were looking for a specific kind, the porcini mushrooms, which is supposed to be rather delicious. There are quite many mushrooms around in the forest at this time. I know a few types and like searching them. Not too big of a fan for eating them though. So we focused just on the porcini and found a whole basked full.

Vaccination

On Tuesday we took to chance to get our COVID-19 vaccination refreshed at our local doctor. More than half the family lined up on the bench to get our jab. Must have been a funny picture, but no photo unfortunately.

Everyone tolerated their shot quite well. Little bit of pain on the stitch site and slight feel of fever on the first day.

I did not rest on that day but instead drove 350km to do the groceries for a friend with severe ME/CFS and pick up our oldest kid from his final exams in Berlin.

There were dozens, maybe hundreds of students outside the Messe Berlin to celebrate the last exam with sparkling wine and music from their mobile. Seems to be a thing.

While in Berlin we also had dinner at a nice indian restaurant in Lichtenberg together.

More doctors appointments

Wednesday the other half of the family had their doctors appointments in the city. My wife got her quarterly doses of iron infusion and the big kiddo had his stomach issues checked. Apparently he catched a bug that’s currently circulating and causing diarrhoea. But he seems over the hump already.

Delivered him to the train to get back to Berlin.

Later in the afternoon I secured our water pipes for the winter. That means emptying all the hoses and stow them away in the shed. Also emptying the pipes and turn off the well pump. While at it… dig up the roots of some plants my wife wants to keep and store the bulbs down in the well shaft for winter. There it’s dark and frost free.

To round up the garden work I helped two old chaps from the village to rake the leaves around our cemetery at bring them to the central collections place at the end of the village. Always fun to work and chat with these old people. They always tell stories from the old times in the village and joke around. And of course it was rewarded with an after-work beer.

Breakfast

There is a quite good hotel near our village and we always wanted to try out their breakfast buffet. I like hotel breakfast as it’s like brunch. You have a larger variety of stuff to taste from and you wouldn’t usually take that level of effort at home for breakfast. Also … no cleaning of the kitchen needed afterwards 😀

So we reserved a table and showed up early. Of course the buffet was quite nice. But even nicer, was to accidentally meet and old friend of ours who happen to be the director of the Hotel :). So we spent the whole morning chatting and having breakfast. I can deal with that…

Cron vs. Queue

I have a backup job started via CRON on one of my machines. Every once in a while the machine seems to get into high load but low CPU usage stage. Upon checking I figured that this CRON job (an rsync job) seems to hang. But every hour a new process is started and just piling up.

So today I’ve finally switched from simple CRON to a job queue. Instead of starting the backup process by CRON, it’s added to the queue by CRON. Under normal circumstances the queue would be empty and the job started right away. If the previous job isn’t finished yet, then the new job is just queue but not yet started.

I’ll add some monitoring for the queue length too. To install the tool:

sudo apt install task-spooler

Then one can simply add jobs to the queue by calling:

tsp <command>

If the command is called without any parameters, it displays the job queue:

$ tsp
ID   State      Output               E-Level  Times(r/u/s)   Command [run=0/1]
0    finished   /tmp/ts-out.z5XJRx   0        458.62/3.54/13.42 /usr/bin/rsync -rv --delete --exclude=database/ /home/daemon/paperless-ngx/ /opt/synology/nas/linux/daemon/paperless-ngx/

Mastodon Tools

Found two useful Mastodon tools from Ralf Stockmann. One is the Mastowall which displays a whole browser page of toots which contain a certain hashtag. Refreshing on a regular basis. So you can follow live events etc.

The other of his tools is Mastothread, which splits up longer posts into smaller toots so they fit into the posting character limit of your Fediverse instance.