Last week was a quiet one, with my friend Sam returning from her trip to Australia. We caught up and got back into our regular gym routine.
Our Sunday winter swimming sessions took place as usual, but this time we had to clear a patch of ice from the lake to get in the water. The ice was 5cm thick and needed to be cut through using axes. We managed to create a small path into the lake, which we used for our short dip. The water temperature was around 0.5-1°C, but it wasn’t too bad once we were in.
The rest of the week was spent experimenting with the Ollama tool. I’ve been testing various machine learning models and user interfaces, trying to get a better understanding of how they work. My goal is to set up a local installation of a LLM (Large Language Model) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which will allow me to securely work with my personal documents.
Thursday was again family dinner time and I made veggie wraps. Fried the fancy looking Enoki mushrooms. They are trick to eat without cutlery. Much too stringy and hard to chew off. Not recommended for wraps
Overall, it’s been a productive week, but mostly focused on testing and experimentation rather than any major achievements.
Swimming on Sunday was again a little colder than the weekend before. The whole week had rather low temperatures even during the day. So this Sunday the lake water had around 8º C while the air was around 0º C.
Still managed to cross the lake without dying 😉
Procrastination finished
I finally finished my blog post about setting up SSH access with FIDO keys. That was in the drafts folder for a couple of months now. I’m using my two Token2 hardware tokens wherever possible now. Also for SSH connections. Tiny bit annoying to enter the PIN all the time, but better getting used to this additional layer of security.
Cleaning the cemetery in the village
On Saturday the people of the village joined forces to clean the cemetery of the fallen leaves and other stuff. We were also again cutting down some trees that have grown too much. Always a fun event working with these people. It’s a lovey mixture of old residents who spent almost their entire live in this tiny village and then “immigrants” of various age and place that either moved their or have a weekend home in the village. Everyone gets along really well and helps the community. Of course it’s celebrated with some beverages (mostly beer ) in the end.
The kids had fun jumping and diving into the large piles of leaves. The adults had fun using their machinery to cut and shred the trees :D.
In the afternoon some friends and I did an additional brief swimming session in the lake. The water hasn’t cooled much since last week. Was good enough for a short dip.
PopChor is rocking on heavens door
Saturday evening we were attending a concert of the PopChor Templin. That was really nice. If it hadn’t started an hour later than originally scheduled, we would probably have stayed even longer for the two bands after the PopChor. Some impressions from their previous concerts this year can be found on YouTube.
Finally Winter seems to be closing in. On Sunday the temperature fell below the freezing point (of water) and we had -4º 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 11.4º C. Another thermometer that measured at a depth of about 10cm into the water showed 9º 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 😉
Winter tires
This year I made the appointment to change the winter tires back in September already. Before the first snow 😀 Free choice of schedule … But they actually advised to not have the tires changed if it’s still above 7º 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.
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.
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:
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.
It’s still way too warm for late October I’d say. The lake still has about 12ºC water temperature. We had a good swim on Sunday, although we were only two people of our group. Still both made it across the lake and back, which took us about 20 minutes.
Running
Sunday morning I finally took another run with a friend in the village. I had signed up for the Berlin Half Marathon 2025 via the WWF charity program. One tries to collect donations for the WWF forest restoration project and once you reach at least the target of 300 EUR, you can get the ticket for the half-marathon.
So the shit gets real now 😉 I’d try to not only finish the half marathon, but also with a target time of under 2hrs. Finishing is not the problem. Did this several times before. But running fast is my issue 😀
Regardless whether I’ll get a ticket for the Berlin half marathon or not … I’ll run at least one half-marathon in April 2025. Thats my pledge.
Subscription tracking
Moellus found a nifty little open source tool to track your subscriptions and provide sing statistical insights. It’s called Wallos and can be easily self-hosted. Of course I set one up for myself. It provides stats about your regular spent, the top categories etc. It can also send you reminders when renewal or cancellation is due.
Container monitoring
Found a toot with an interesting graph on container workloads. The author pointed me to “Beszel” – an open source lightweight monitoring tool for container environments. Of course I needed to test this out and it was really easy to install.
Had to dig a little deeper into the ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress as my last posting triggered a discussion about ContentWarning for post.
It took me a while to figure out where exactly the CW would be set for a post. It’s actually on the “Post” Settings under “Fediverse”
I was also wondering why my replies from WordPress to comments that came in via the Fediverse did not show the user handle of the person I’m replying to. They are pinged via ActivityPub, it’s just not visible in the Web UI of Mastodon as a visible mention. It’s rather a meta data field that Mastodon UI just doesn’t display. The is an ongoing discussion on the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress to possibly handle this differently.
Cinema
while cleaning her room, kiddo found a voucher for the cinema that was going to expire soon. So we picked a movie to watch. We settled on the latest “Beetlejuice” movie from Tim Burton. Just a week ago we had seen to original one on TV and the new one features actors kiddo likes from other Netflix shows (Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega).
The movie wasn’t that bad actually. At least mildly entertaining.
We went to the UCI Luxe Cinema at the Eastside gallery. That building is just a few years old. But it’s really kinda disgusting already. It’s trimmed for masses with self-serve automatons for beverages and tickets etc. The floor is quite dirty. Popcorn all over the place. The bathrooms, while visibly clean already start to break apart. Tiles fall off the walls and have cracks. Seals around the sinks do not fit anymore. Looks the building was done without quality control and no attention to detail. That’s a shame for a building that is just a few years old.
Preparing for Winter
On Saturday I cleaned up our tomatoes and harvested the last batch of fruits from the plants. Cleaned up all the pots, saved the soil on the raised beet for next years and stowed away the pots. Finally burned some old twigs and branches to have a clean slate for winter (there is more than enough foliage and heaps of branches in the forest behind our property. So no need to store that on our property for the wildlife.)
I’m a big fan of the Ted Lasso TV series. So I had to improve one of our meeting rooms
let’s see how long this lasts
Nerd meet up
On Tuesday I attended gathering of some old hacker dudes. All famous names in the Berlin scene and beyond. Hard fanboy moment to meet Tim Pritlove in person. He’s an icon in the Podcast world and has single handedly established and nurtured podcasts over the decades now with famous formats like Chaos Radio Express, Logbuch Netzpolitik and many more.
Realised we’re getting old and you hardly find people with this depth and breadth of computer knowledge anymore.
flu season
Both kids were off sick for a few days this week. Looks like flu season has started. Fortunately I’m scheduled for my flu shot next week in the company.
At least that gave us some time for a walk in the park and enjoy the autumn.
Swimming
went for a swim in the lake on Saturday. Water is already quite cold. But still comfortably managed to do the large triangle. Of course had the whole lake for myself 🤣
