After the successful mushroom foraging session on Saturday it was now my duty to risk my life and eat them.

If you’re reading this … I survived 😉 Turned into one delicious meal 😉

Was playing around with ownTracks as a self-hosted location tracking app. The idea is to have the ability to track various mobile devices but keep the data under my control. While the built-in iOS (“Find my”) and Android (Google Maps) are convenient, the also leave the data on Apples/Google server to fuck around with.

ownTracks is a simple app that can send the position data to an arbitrary MQTT backend. I’m hosting my own Mosquitto instance and use the ownTracks Recorder app to visualise the data on OpenStreetMaps.

The connection to the MQTT broker is of course using TLS encryption. To add security and hide the data from the MQTT broker one can define an encryption passphrase. Now the MQTT broker sees only encrypted data. Via this secret you can also share your position with friends. All devices with the same encryption key can see the location of the other members.

It gets interesting when you add POIs and geofences. The clients can send a special message when leaving or entering a certain location. This way one can automate geo location based events (e.q. the classical “turn the lights on when I’m coming home” example etc.). The ownTracks Recorder app also records “tracks” means it doesn’t only collect the individual points but draws line/routes where one moved. So you can display your own moving profile over time.

Wednesday

I felt fancy and took my coffee gear to the office. Thats the Wacaco Picopresso and the HARIO Travel Grinder. I pre-weighed the coffee beans at home and stored them in the little metal containers I’ve kept from my coffee bean advent calendar last year.

Saturday – mushrooms again

On Saturday we’ve been invited over to our friends place in the next village for a little walk in the forest and maybe some mushroom picking again.

And it was crazy. On just a 30m strip right outside the village we filled 3 baskets of mushrooms and had to stop as our storage capacity was exceeded. Those will be cut into small pieces and dried up for later use. Mostly in sauces to stews and the like.

Sheeesh, already late again with my weekly review.

Tried to up my gym game again this week. Starting with rowing machine on Monday. Resting a bit on Tuesday and then doing some long walks on Wednesday. Our bunch of weirdoes considers a hiking trip in Greenland next year. In preparation I need to stark doing longer hikes with weight in the backpack. So I took my large rucksack to carry my work backpack and my gym backpack and walked all the way to the office. Also had session on the “Elliptical Strider” and Sam forced me into a core workout 😀

This week the sun came out the time I was traveling to the office and gave a nice glow to some building tops. Although the days were mostly cloudy and rainy, that was still a nice sight.

In the evening our little travel group met for beers and I might have slightly had too much of the Lemke’s IPA.

Thursday another meeting of our infamous Beer & Burger group took place at Hirsch & Eber. Delicious burger with game meet. Can definitely recommend.

Another jogging session in the morning on Friday since my running partner from our house was out sick again this week I had go alone.

Saturday @sirki & @moellus finally came over to reinstantiate our yearly mushroom foraging session. That was paused for some years due to my wife’s health conditions.

That was a lovely reunion although almost all our kids opted out. Back in the days our two families were a force of nature as we tend to show up with 10 people from just two families 😀

We made Pizza and even found some mushrooms on our stroll through the forest.

I’ve got a super lovely new coffee cup from @moellus. This is my new favourite cup in the house now 🙂

Tried to stay away from carbohydrates in my diet this week. Of course had a few cheat meals, but slowly getting there.

Some bookmarks from this week:

• visualising Apple Health data with Grafana – source: toot from Schenkl
• Hookmark – source: toot from @pixelgraphix

Sunday we had lunch at my parents side and enjoyed the kids favourite German dumplings menu 🙂

Swam the lake and figured that the Apple Watch can record the heart rate while swimming. In contrast to my Garmin Fenix which refused to do so. The GPS tracking during swimming seems to be a tad bit better with the Fenix though. But I was out of training and had to do a couple of breast strokes. The water finally has temperature around 10ºC. Unfortunately the Apple Watch that I have doesn’t have a temperature sensor.

On Monday I had to get back to work. Working remotely though as the kids were still on vacation. So we spent the time in the countryside.

Tuesday

This was our 16th wedding anniversary. But we live together for much longer already. And hopefully for many more years to come <3

Formally I had to work, but in the afternoon the stormy weather caused a power outage in our village and also took away mobile data reception. Good excuse to have a trip to the Werbellinsee and Szczecin, Poland

Wednesday

Saw a large pike at the lake

Thursday

Spontaneous trip to a “nearby” cinema to watch “Killers Of The Flower Moon” by Martin Scorsese. Very good (and rather long) movie. Awesome performance by Lily Gladstone.

Saturday

Finally cleaning up the property of all the half-dead plants and fallen off leaves. It’s finally getting a bit of autumn vibes. Apparently we had a whole lot of pots in use for this years tomato growing.

I have to catch up with my review. The last one I just finished, but it was from the week before. Hope this one is going to come more in time.

Was thinking of whether it would make sense to publish the post already at the begin of the week and successively update the posting every day. Whats your opinion?

Sunday I was running with two friends in the countryside. It had rained on Saturday but Sunday was beautiful and sunny. The paths in the forest were rather wet and even had puddles. That doesn’t happen often over here as the ground is mainly sand. Water usually disappears within a few minutes regardless of how much it rained. So apparently it had rained a lot.

We left early for Berlin that day as daughter was invited to a birthday party. I dropped her off at the venue and met with my friend Leo. We had good walk in the Treptower Park. Later, in the evening I picked up the kid again and had to walk a bit as well to get to the train stations.

Over all that was a lot of steps that day

And of course I was scheduled to run with my neighbor on Monday evening. Good training and contrast to the rest of the week in home office where I usually do far too few steps.

Blast from the past

On Tuesday I finally managed to got a test environment set up to work on a script from 2014. Written by a contractor back in those days this was still running today. But finally needs to be converted to a new stack. Not only is Python 2 no longer supported on the target stack, but also many of the imported libraries must be updated.

Orangespresso

I recorded the whole process of making myself an Orangespresso and don’t want to spare you from it 😉

Using my trusty HARIO Travel Grinder and the Wacaco Picopresso. Yes, this takes a while. But thats my why of limiting my caffeine intake. Have only 2-3 cups a day, but focus on the quality.

Weekend

On Friday evening we went for grocery shopping and it was unusually warm still. When we left the shop and got out a warm gust of air welcomed us. That very much reminded us of the times we arrived in Cape Town airport in winter. When you enter the chain of plains in Germany winter and leave into a warm summer breeze.

On Saturday we cleaned up some tomato plants from the beets. They got partially rotten and there isn’t enough sunlight in that corner of the property to get the remaining fruits red. The plants in front of the house, facing west are still going strong. They still got blossoms and the fruits eventually turn red. That is quite late into the season this year due to the global warming.

The neighbour was cutting down a handful of large fir trees. The other neighbour cut down a pine tree … somehow we must have missed the memo that it was tree cutting weekend. Eventually it was a bit annoying having the chainsaws going direct in front of our window for almost the whole day.

This was a short week. Monday was a so-called “bridge day” as Tuesday was a public holiday in Germany: the “day of German union”. Of course a lot of the main stream media only highlighted the parts where germans are not so united about. Just further supporting the split in my eyes.

Was recently discussing with a friend some Ossi/Wessi things and came to realise that we should probably just stop doing these stereotypes. It wasn’t a “Wessi” who ripped off the people in the former GDR selling them crap cars. It was an asshole. Tying certain behaviours to a geographical region isn’t helping the cause in most cases. There have been idiots and assholes with bad intentions all over the place. Trying to attribute this to their geographical upbringing is only providing them an excuse for making bad decision as a person.

On October 3rd. we celebrated our own East/West reunion (as we do every Sunday) with a swim in the lake. We take a group selfie every weekend there at the beach. This is the image from the wrong side camera 😉

A short week also means a bit of stress doing all the laundry … had to take it back slightly wet to the countryside and hang it there again for drying.

On Saturday we had our first formal members meeting of our local village “Verein”. Agenda was to close off the formalities of board reports and also voting on the new statute to become a charitable non-profit org. That was unanimously accepted. And of course there is always a bake-off at such occasions 😉 One of the members did some special waffles made out of potatoes and yeast dough.

After that meeting we went to Templin to attend the opening of the freshly renovated baptist church “Kirche am Wassertor“. Thats the church my parents go to and I grew up with. Over the course of the last 4 years the building underwent major refurbishment. As usual with such old buildings it turned out to be much more complicated, involved and expensive as originally anticipated. But the religious community took a joint effort and finished the project with a lot of self initiative and also monetary contributions. The result is stunning. More space, more energy efficient and more accessible.

To celebrate the occasion in the evening, there was a concert of a small band of three women from the church community. They sang songs from various artists and some of their own. It was beautiful and moving. All three of them were actually pregnant so there were 7 “humans” on the stage 😉

This is a rather late weekly review… I blame it to the prolonged weekend.

Sometimes I take proactive text notes for my weekly review… but often times I honestly just go through my photos of the week and recap by their contents. Lets go…

Last weekend I was still recovering from the cold and thus couldn’t swim our usual round on Sundays. But I took the ol’ drone for a spin and took got pictures”.:

The rest of the week wasn’t too spectacular. There were a lot of software updates for Apple devices. The new iOS 17 came out and demanded a new charging stand for the phone. So that I can make use of the new night stand feature

The new macOS Sonoma brought new dynamic screensavers and widgets one can pin to the desktop. A feature that seems completely useless to me as I am the kind of messy person who never ever sees their desktop. There are always windows open. Lots of windows …

Looks like this was the last warm week of the year (hopefully). Our vegetable harvest is still ongoing and the tomatoes and chilis are still doing their job.

On Saturday I took my usual triangle track in the local lake. Water was still around 20ºC. Hope its going to get colder the next weeks so that swimming becomes a more exclusive endeavour again 😉

And finally some assorted bookmarks from this week:

• Blinrys Git Game: https://ohmygit.blinry.org
• ConBee II – free Zigbee Gateway: https://phoscon.de/de/conbee2
• Michael Seemann: Was sind Large Language Models und wie funktionieren sie?
• README – Uncurled
• Things every hacker once knew
• MastoReader – for long threads

Was mostly a work-week, still trying to find the optimal setup with my new work device. Running the corporate VPN inside a VM together with a Dante proxy. First tried this on Linux x86_64 (because the legacy VPN software is not available for ARM Linux). Then realised while talking to Moellus that I could possibly use a macOS VM which uses ARM CPU and got the VPN client and might be able to compile Dante SOCKS. Guest VMs which use ARM CPU are much much faster on the M2 CPUs.

So quickly installed macOS in a VM and compiled Dante. Worked OKish. Unfortunately there is some tcp session issue with Dante and macOS. So back to Linux x86.

Next networking challenge was the Name Resolution. I usually us my personal PiHole as DNS-Resolver to block Ads and Youtube and so on. The PiHole sits outside my home networks so it’s reachable from any location I’m working in. That results in my laptop inability to resolve local network names properly as it would query the PiHole first. But fortunately there is a way to teach the macOS DNS resolver to use different DNS Servers for certain domains.

You’ll have to create a directory /etc/resolver and place file with your special resolver settings in there. Mine is called fritz.box and has the following content:

domain fritz.box
search fritz.box
nameserver 192.168.175.1

This tells the macOS DNS resolver to use this IP address for the domain fritz.box.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I finally met with Daniel again for a run in the Tiergarten. Early morning meeting at the Brandenburger Tor.

3D-Printing

after not using the 3D-Printer for many weeks over the summer I fired up the trusty OctoPi and the printer to print out a case for my new RaspberryPi 4. And everything just worked. I didn’t even had to level the bed or something. It just worked at the first attempt.

Power saving

I have an old PC serving as a Jenkins server to regularly update some docker images for me. The upstream projects don’t change that often and a build about once a day seems sufficient for me. Having the PC running all day long seems like a waste of resources.

I’ve another old PC running continuously to serve S3-compatible object storage for my Mastodon instances. So there is already a machine running 24/7. I used this machine to send a Wake-On-LAN signal at a specific time each day. Waking up that Jenkins PC to let it check its repositories and execute the builds. The PC will shutdown at a fixed time as well and thus run only a fraction of the time for roughly the same result. I’ll have daily new images of my Docker stuff if need be.

Fediverse

I asked the “Volkshochschule” #Uckermark (adult education centre) whether they think a social media course with focus on the Fediverse would be something that their audience would be interested in. They seem to like the idea and now I have to come up with a plan and course material. Fortunately the new semester for them starts only next years. So will be only February 2024 or so.

Barbie

On Saturday we decided to spontaneously go an watch the “Barbie” movie in the local cinema. As it was a super hot summer day, the cinema was rather empty. We had cosy lounge seats and coffee was served at the table.

The movie itself was quite good. Really good acting by the main characters and some funny quirks.

This movie is certainly not for weak masculine egos. Thats why I like it 😀

Monday

Finally back in the office after 6 weeks of vacation and working from the countryside. Not too bad actually. Good to see the colleagues in person again.

Tuesday – long drive

K1 is spending a semester in Leuven, Belgium. So we drove there to pick up the “apartment” keys and bring some stuff over. Total of 1500km trip and two times 8 hrs drive.

Leuven is a nice city with a beautiful old town. The old city center is largely blocked from car traffic and only pedestrians and bikes are allowed.

We were lucky on our way there and passed Magdeburg much earlier than a devastating truck accident happened there. Had to take a large detour in the middle of the night on our way back.

Wednesday

We came back only at around 2:30am from our long trip to Leuven. That was obviously a rather short night as I had to make sure the younger kids get out to school.

Thursday

Eventually got a proper haircut again. The last one I got in the countryside and apparently the hairdresser wasn’t up to his game that day. Went again the “Schicke Friese” in the hood and am very satisfied with the results.

Found an issue in my Pixelfed instance. I tried to use a private Account as a replacement for WhatsApp stories. Was wondering whether there was almost no interaction on the photos and started to debug a bit. Turns out that replies from other Fediverse accounts which have their reply privacy settings set to “followers only” (which should be the correct reply type for followers only posts) will just be ignored by Pixelfed.

Filed this as bug on Github.

Friday

Picked up running with a friend from our house again. Still a bit rusty, but getting back into it again.

Saturday – Dorffest

Our village turned 275 years old this year. So it was our duty to organise and host the yearly “Dorffest” of the municipality. The whole village got involved and helped preparing the event. I did a Photo Booth were people could have a picture taken in front of a decorative banner. Either dressed up with fancy costumes or plain.

We had quite some fun and good conversations with neighbours and acquaintances from around the village. Adding colour to already known stories and getting to know new stories. Always rather entertaining.

There was also a flea market where I’ve got a special device from my youth. An original GDR “Allesschneider” (cutter for everything) including the original packaging.

We had this thing when I was a kid. It was donated to the flea market by the oldest inhabitant of the village. A 91 year old lady who is still rather fit and lovely.