#weeklyreview 15/24

Posted on 2024-04-08 by Falko

admittedly this blog post is coming a little late … but hey… better late than never 😉

Snake swimming

During our weekly swim in the lokal lake we encountered a grass snake this Sunday. That snake is living near the water for quite some years now. It can be seen swimming in the summer occasionally. Even when there are people bathing sometimes it is crossing the beach.

The only thing I was surprised about is that it could be seen swimming at this still rather low water temperature of about 11ºC.

BookWyrm update hassle

I tried to update my BookWyrm instance to the latest version (0.7.3 pre-release) this week. This turned out to be a bit more laborious than I thought … Of course there were issues with the pre-release and I had to do a roll-back. The release came with some database migrations (changes to the database schema) that were not backwards compatible. So for the roll-back I had to find the migration information and undo these changes in the database. But then again the migration files of Python Django made this relatively straightforward.

LinkDing now supports Screenshots

Another tool that got an update this week was LinkDing – my bookmark archiving service. The new release now contains an optional container image with the chromium browser engine to take snapshots of the websites you’re adding to your Bookmark archive. This is really neat as the plan of course is to keep this archive around for a long time … likely longer than some of the websites that the links point to.

One can also add more snapshots at a later point in time to the same entry to keep some kind of evolution of the site.

Paperless WorkFlow

Even more software fiddling this week. I’m slightly obsessed with my PaperlessNGX installation now. All my documents go into Paperless meanwhile. Some of them I want to share with other users on my instance. So I created a workflow that adds certain permissions to documents if some conditions are met. In my case the trigger is the correspondent of the new document. If that matches a certain entity, the document is shared with a specific group on my instance.

Wood

Of course we did some more woodworking on the weekend. There were still trees left in the forest for us to fetch. This time it was a little easier as Dad payed a guy with a Forwarder to get us the trees close to the main path. No more hauling the logs with wheelbarrows.

Party Nazis

On Saturday evening we went to a birthday party of one of the locals here. That’s alway fun as one meets whole bunch of people from different backgrounds. Especially different from how we used to live in the big city etc.

I talked to one guy I didn’t know before and he was quite nice. We got along well and talked about where we’re coming from, what we were doing etc. Abruptly the guy asked whether I’d vote for the “DIE GR¨ÜNEN” party. One of the three coalition partners in the current government and the most hated party among the people from the rural area. Hated of course for other reason than the right-wing guys spreading fake narratives about them…

I admitted that most of the times I’d vote for that party. He acknowledged and told me the mandatory story of why he hates the party. Then we switched topics and continued to have a good conversation about all sorts of stuff.

A while later he again asked me – with a little disbelief – whether I’m voting for the “DIE GRÜNEN”. Again I said “yes”. He responded that I surely have noticed by now that he’s on the rather opposite political spectrum. He obviously didn’t like that party, that was obvious. He added that he’d consider himself a Nazi. Blunt straight out. I was a little surprise that he made it that clear. But we still continued to have rather nice and relatable conversations that were by no means Nazi coloured or propaganda. Nobody tried to convince the other of their world view. In fact he emphasised that he enjoyed the conversation and that we got along so well despite our opposite political stance.

Of course some people might now shout: how could you talk to this guy!?

But I believe these kind of conversations and maybe even relationships are very important in keeping the bridge to those people. Showing them that they matter as human and listen to their worries and fears. Building trust and find common ground. So that conversations about the hard topics can take place on a better foundation than mistrust and mutual hate and despise.

Village conversation DIE GRÜNEN

To finish the weekend on a different note this time I stay longer to participate on the village conversation organised by the DIE GRÜNEN Uckermark. Thats a series of talks with the local members of the party but also some higher up staff from the country or even national government on the panel. They briefly introduce themselves to then answer questions asked by the participants. Topics those find relevant and want to ask a party thats member of the government.

It was a small round of about 30 people, but not less interesting and lively.

#weeklyreview 13/24

Posted on 2024-03-24 by Falko

The Zone of Interest

Watched “The Zone of Interest” in the local cinema. The film won 2 Oscars at this years ceremony for best international film and best sound.

In my humble opinion the movie is rather overhyped. It’s ok. The visuals are good and the cast plays really well. The story or maybe rather the script is confusing. The sound was particularly bad at the location we watched it. Not sure that was due to the poor equipment or settings at the venue.

I definitely liked “Treasure” from Julia von Heinz, which I saw at Berlinale a few weeks ago much better on the topic of Auschwitz.

Charite

On Tuesday we took a friend who’s suffering from severe ME/CFS to an appointment at the Virchow Klinikum of the Charité Berlin. The German healthcare system doesn’t allow him to get a transport voucher and he’s really not in a condition to take public transport nor can he pay for a Taxi.

For us it was a nice trip to Berlin with a good lunch at a Thai restaurant.

For him it was at least the most relaxed trip in his series of visits to the Virchow-Klinikum.

Wood working

We’ve got some woodworking done during the week. My dad organised some trees from the town forest that we were allowed to cut into pieces and haul out of the forest. Since the paths in the forest were still not usable with our cars we again had to carry the wood quite a bit through the forest on to the main paths where our cars with trailers were parked.

We’ve also borrowed an hydraulic wood splitter from friends again to cut the logs into smaller pieces and then stack the freshly cut wood into round stacks for drying.

Started the first stack with a too small diameter and didn’t pay enough attention to the angles. Looks rather wobbly and I needed to secure it with a fence around. The second looks more like a cone but seems to be stable enough to stay without fence support.

D. Kahneman R.I.P.

This week we’ve lost another one of the great thinkers of our time. Daniel Kahneman was probably most famous for his “Prospect Theory“. Explaining why we people often seem to make decisions that are not the most rational. That was something that has bothered John von Neumann and his followers to some extent at least when trying to apply the game theory foundations developed by von Neumann to real world scenarios. Men don’t act purely rational an awful lot of time.

#weeklyreview 12/24

Posted on 2024-03-24 by Falko

Stumbled upon a toot mentioning the “Enable Mastodon Apps” plugin for WordPress. This basically allows Mastodon clients to login to a WordPress instance and post updates and replies. The plugin is still in early beta but works well with Ivory and IceCubes app on the iPhone. I can now post a brief update from within the Mastodon client that will be persisted as an entry on my blog. I find that idea rather neat. Mastodon itself still feels kinda ephemeral to me.

Sports

I’m a bit behind on sports this week I think. Stayed home Wednesday and Thursday. Tried running on Thursday but stopped after one round in the park. Wasn’t feeling it. Tried again on Friday morning and did a good 10k in the park.

I’m keeping up my push-up streak so far. 45 days in a row of at least 20 push-ups. Since begin of March I’m trying 30 per day. Thats hard most days. Some days too hard, so that I only did 20 or 25. But it’s improving slightly. The increase was certainly too steep and I should do smaller increments. And I’m such a habitual animal that I can’t change pace when I started. So I’m leaving it at 30 for the time being and will increase in smaller steps when I feel for it.

Friend is trying to add one more per week. Maybe thats a good strategy. Will see.

GPS Outage

When we were driving from Berlin to the countryside on Friday late afternoon I noticed that the car navigation system lost track of where we are. At first I thought it’s just a short glitch. But it didn’t recover (as usual) after a few turns. For the rest of the journey it was completely off. I checked my phone and noticed that it also couldn’t find its position. Apparently GPS was not working at that time.

Possible GPS Jams can be found after a day at https://gpsjam.org/?lat=49.64017&lon=28.04866&z=4.6&date=2024-03-22

The Man from the Future

I finished reading the biography of Johnny von Neumann. I liked the book very much. Not only because of this amazing achievements and life of von Neumann, but also because of the rich writing style of the book. The language is colourful and sophisticated. The author: Ananyo Bhattacharya is the chief science writer at the London Institute for Mathematical Science. The British English is much more dense that the usual American English of books. I can wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Mudfest

On Saturday we went into the forest to get some firewood from the municipal forest. The trees are already down and we “just” need to cut them and get them out. Plan was to cut them to length of about 30cm already. So that I don’t have to cut them again at my place. We had to get quite deep into the forest. The main paths were OK but we would like to get closer to the allotted trees and go on the side paths. Since it was raining the days before that turned out to be a bad idea. The car got stuck already at the attempt to turn into the path. it was just too muddy and slippery. Fortunately we had a second car and a rope to tow the first car out.

So I ended up carrying the logs about 10 – 30 m from the forest to the main path. Since the logs were also wet and slippery I could only grab one or two at a time. That day I clocked apparently 11km of walking according to my watch. Will definitely need to optimise this for the next round. We only managed to get out 2,5 trees that day. About 2 cubic meters and there is 12 m^3 to fetch …

#weeklyreview 11/24

Posted on 2024-03-13 by Falko

Over the weekend I was fighting with the NextCloud All-in-One Container setup. It’s supposed to make the setup easier and convenient, but in my case it didn’t really. I tried also the normal mere PHP Installer on a web server. But that setup requires me to maintain the Database and additional components like Redis cache and so on myself. I wanted to have all the needed stuff in Docker containers and behind my default Reverse Proxy Traefik. Usually one gets a docker-compose.yml file with all the services and thats it. NextCloud chose a different route and is using a setup container to pull and bring up all the application components. They don’t provide a docker-compose.yml with all these components unfortunately.

But eventually I’ve got the thing running and snug behind by Reverse Proxy which takes care of the SSL certificates.

Cold?

I think a brought back a slight cold from the weekend. Went to bed with a stuffy nose and slight headache on Monday evening. Decided to stay home on Tuesday and figure oute whether thats a cold (or even COVID) or maybe just allergies. Took a COVID test which fortunately turned out negative. Went for a short run in the park to see whether my endurance is impacted. Doesn’t seem to be. So just added a few freshly made ginger shots. Felt much better on Wednesday already. Guess that was a short cold or something then.

Stammtisching

On Wednesday I went out Stammtisching with two friends and learned a lot about Berlin night club scene. Maybe a bit too much …

Unfortunately the waiter at the venue showed his misogynist side and treated by female friend rather badly. She had him reported to the manager and filed a formal complaint against him. The guy was treating all women rather badly. Commanding them around and didn’t pay attention to them.

He even had the balls to approach us outside after the complaint and ask what he was doing wrong. Say that he didn’t do any misconduct. But in that only addressing me and my other male friend. Not even looking at the woman among us.

He’s got a passionate and enduring enemy now …

Nails

Thursday was about time to get our nails done again. So I brought my wonderful pouch to the office and we practiced our nail game.

That same night our notorious Beer & Burger crew finally met for another session and my dear friend Klappstulli gifted me a stunning new color of nail polish

Ray Cokes

This week I saw a post on Insta that the Berlin based radio station “radio eins” will host a new live show by Ray Cokes. Yes! The Ray Cokes who hosted MTV Most wanted in the early 1990s.

Why is that so remarkable for me? Because I learned English by watching MTV most of the time in the early 1990s. And especially Ray Cokes and Steve Blame shows on MTV. I opted out of English lessons in school (yes, that was possible at some point) as I felt I don’t learn much new from the teacher at that time.

We actually had a legendary good teacher at my later school (Gymnasium). But unfortunately he wasn’t my teacher and I had already opted out then.

To my regards these lessons actually worked out good enough to admit me to the higher level English course during my apprenticeship at SIEMENS NIXDORF. During the screening test for the courses I thought I’d make it only to the entrance level course as an Ossi. But turned out my English was already pretty good. I was just lacking speaking experience.

I thanked Ray Cokes for teaching me English back in the days and I’ll definitely going to listen to that radio show.

Alice & Bob

On Friday I attended a workshop and get-together of the Alice & Bob Company. That was founded by a friend and ex-colleague of mine a few years ago. They showed how they’re helping their clients to build a digital foundation for their businesses and help them keeping the complexity of that foundation in check. I’m always happy and proud seeing friends founding and running their own companies successfully.

Felling trees

On Saturday we feel a dead tree in our forest. The pine died from a strangling fungus infection a few years ago and was at risk of falling in the next storm. So we took it down. The fungus it was suffering from caused the trunk to saturate with natural resin at a certain height. This resin saturated wood can be used to kindle a fire. It was even used instead of candles before the 20th century.

#weeklyreview 10/24

Posted on 2024-03-13 by Falko

Wow… 10 weeks into the new year already. Time is flying fast.

Of course we started the new week with swimming again. This time we also brought a thermometer and can tell that the water was 6º C. Water level in the lake is back at where it was last year this time. That is good.

Vabali

I had gotten a voucher for the Vabali Spa in Berlin for my birthday. This week it was about time to use that. The weather was set to be perfect – cold and sunny. So I booked a slot for the early morning and enjoyed 5 or 6 sauna sessions while continue reading “The man f r om the future” – The visionary life of John von Neumann.

Still blown away by the life of von Neumann and also the book. Very well written with lots of background information. I can highly recommend. There was even a chapter about 3D printers

The Spa itself was very good. Lots of space, many large saunas and some pools and hot tubs, several bars and a restaurant. But even on a normal workday it gets rather crowded. Not so much that you don’t find a spot in the sauna, restaurant or the many many relaxation areas. But still quite a bunch of people to ignore. Cause apparently there is a high percentage of people which use this for a show off.

Missed my running sessions this week as both my running partners bailed out. Only 3 gym session this week. But managed to increase my daily push-up score from 20 to 30 💪

International Women’s Day

Lucky enough this day is a public holiday in Berlin. So we could leave for the countryside on Thursday evening and enjoy the sunny Friday in the Uckermark. Of course most places were crowded with Berliners …

Saturday kiddo and me visited my old biology teacher for a coffee. One could consider this kind of preparation for the presentation about the local flora & fauna by one of the village residents in the evening 😉 . Very interesting what rare species we still have around here. He presented a whole lot of pictures and plants, birds, insects and amphibians etc. And of course a lot of knowledge and stories around the same.

#weeklyreview 09/24

Posted on 2024-03-08 by Falko

3D Printer calibration

I was generally happy with my 3D printing setup of Klipper and the Creality Ender 3 V2. Especially the KAMPS plugin seems to make for a much better 1st layer.

But lately it problems with the 1st layer sticking to the bed and the bed mesh picture showed that my bed seems to be severely tilted and needs calibration.

One disadvantage of my Klipper setup is, that the printers Display doesn’t work anymore and I can’t trigger a manual bed levelling at the printer itself. But I found the slightly hidden settings in Klippers Web Interface to trigger the leveling.

It’s called “Bed Screw Adjust” and hidden behind the 3 dots menu of the toolhead widget.

After that adjustment I saw that my bed seems still below what the software considered as Z-Axes 0. So I also calibrated the Z-Probe again.

Finally that made a difference and the 1st layers are perfect again.

The next thing I was curious about was the extrusion. My prints were generally good I’d say. But I was wondering whether the extrusion factor was correct. Klipper calculates the extrusion itself using a pressure advance factor. That factor must be determined per filament type.

So I followed their calibration instructions and printed the square calibration box. This time I actually saw the difference in the changing pressure advance values of the individual layers.

You can clearly see that the corners below the red arrow bulge to the outside and the layers above shrink to the inside.

And finally we found the time to meeting @rudelbildung and @saumselig at home and also help him get his 3D-Printer set up. Turns out 3D printing is still a rather geeky sport as it has way too many things in between the model you wanna print and the actual printer. In this particular case a wrong (power only) USB cable and a changed USB device path on the RaspberryPi was a hinderance. But after fixing this, we’ve got the printer working easily.

OmniFocus 4 Update

OmniGroup released a new major version of OmniFocus this week. The upgrade was a little more involved than I originally thought. Had to write down my little sync encryption odyssey.

Open Stage

On Saturday evening there was another session of the Open stage in the MKC Templin. Artists can apply to perform and the entrance is free for spectators. This was my second visit to this event series and it was really good again. I’m still amazed to see amazing talents from the local area and also the crowd really appreciative of the event. Wouldn’t have thought this possible in my slightly dusty and provincial home town.

As often in the last years, there is always some last minute drop-outs due to sickness or other events. That is the chance for people in the audience to take the stage. To my honest surprise there were multiple people volunteering to perform and two acts were chosen by the organisers.

Jackson from Templin played guitar and performed a song about Templin that he wrote himself. It was really cool.

#weeklyreview 08/24

Posted on 2024-02-29 by Falko

18.02. – 24.02.2024

It seems like spring is coming. It’s way too warm for what used to be the coldest month of the year. The crocuses are coming out all over the place.

Berlinale

Watched “Treasure” from Julia von Heinz at the Berlinale. Invited by my friend Sam. She got us the tickets for Thursday night. The movie is the story of a daughter and father visiting the fathers childhood sites and concentration camp (her father is a Jew) in Poland. Very good story and very good play by Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry.

3D Printing

printed some door hooks to hang them shirts

Nocci posted the first part if his Spoolman series. A tool to track your filament spools for your 3D printer. I did my own installation of this nifty little tool the other week and had to fiddle with some Traefik settings for it as described here last week.

And after several weeks of rain and grey skies the weekend finally had sunshine all day long.

#weeklyreview 07/24

Posted on 2024-02-22 by Falko

11.02. – 17.02.2024

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:

    labels:
       - "traefik.enable=true"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.rule=( Host(`spooly.example.com`) && ClientIP(`192.168.75.0/24` ))"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.entrypoints=websecure"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.rule=Host(`spooly.example.com`) && !ClientIP(`192.168.75.0/24` )"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.entrypoints=websecure"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.tls=true"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.middlewares=auth-users"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.tls=true"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman.service=svc-spoolman"
       - "traefik.http.routers.spoolman-internal.service=svc-spoolman"
       - "traefik.http.services.svc-spoolman.loadbalancer.server.port=8000"
       - "traefik.http.middlewares.auth-users.basicauth.users=admin:$$2y$$05$$K5HviqYOC3ScWoRqUIQ80elXe.QByrAvpvmaDp9yj0oaA4L0LiCE6"

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/

From the camera roll

#weeklyreview 05/24

Posted on 2024-02-05 by Falko

Sunday fun day

As every Sunday, we tried to swim in the local lake. The ice that we skated on the weekend before was all molten way by Friday. So we thought swimming should be possible. To our surprise the night from Saturday to Sunday had low temperature of about -6º C. So the lake again was completely frozen over. Fortunately just a few millimetres of ice and we were able to break it open to at least have a dip in the water.

At first I thought it’s thin enough to just swim through … but that turned out to be too optimistic. The ice was between 4-8 mm think. Easy to break with ones hand, but no chance to break and push it away with swimming. Of course we could quite some cuts all over the body from the sharp ice edges.

Sport

Made it to the gym 4 days this week. Also added one more (hopefully regular) running appointment with my good friend Andrea. She’s got a professional personal training company and they’re the best you can get in Berlin/Potsdam. Check them out if you want to improve your health and/or fitness. Maybe I’m biased because I know her since our time at school. But she must do something right because she managed to not only found this company and permanently employ personal trainers (in a field where you usually only have individual freelancers or gym studio chain staff) but also steer it through the pandemic and come out alive and kicking.

Wednesday I had slightly sore legs from the running and felt a little groggy hitting the rowing machine again in the gym. But again it’s those days when you feel the most inner resistance that you usually hit the ball out of the park. Finished my 30 minutes of rowing with a strong 7035 m distance.

Fixing the door

Our flat has rather wide, wheel chair compatible doors. Thats good as my wife needed to have a wheel chair when she was in really bad ME/CFS condition. These door blades are quite heavy and our kitchen door is open most of the time. Eventually the door frame got loose and the door blade was scratching on the ground when moving. This week my dad came over to help me fix this. Looks like the construction company of this building didn’t use the proper glue foam when installing the door frames. Thats why it became loose. But now it’s fixed and the door is freely swinging again. K3 immediately exclaimed “I love this door!” 😂

The new CEO

Thursday our new CEO held a townhall meeting in the Berlin office. I’m usually an optimistic person and give benefit of the doubt to new people. But you know that there are also the die hard pessimists which don’t trust any C-level person out of principle. You have these in every company. To my surprise some of them also gave positive feedback about the new guy. Thats quite something if you ask me.

Of course, he still has to prove himself in day to day business. But making a first impression that extorts a positive statement from those kind of people is an achievement.

Mastodon Emergency Security Update

To make the week a little more interesting there was an emergency security update for the Mastodon Fediverse software. Apparently a remote account impersonation was passible and demanded immediate action from instance admins. I had my instances updated within about 2 hrs. Took a while as I didn’t check my emails or Mastodon feed because of meetings. Then of course my Jenkins build machine currently has some issue I have to debug first. Ended up creating my patched Docker containers for a 5000 character limit Mastodon on a different machine.

Finally some pics from my camera roll from this week for pure entertainment

#weeklyreview 04/24

Posted on 2024-01-29 by Falko

Ice Skating

Last week was cold enough to get our local lake frozen. Frozen thick enough to do some ice skating. I measured the ice and got 10cm. Considered that safe enough for us to walk across the lake and the kids do some skating. Obviously no swimming/bathing this weekend then.

Lautten Compagney

Sunday afternoon we’ve been at the lovely “Gutshaus Friedenfelde” for a little concert of the Lautten Compagney. We’ve seen this ensemble before in July 2023 at the Joachimthalsche Gymnasium Templin. This time there were presenting their new program “Nunmehr soll Frieden sein” as a new year concert. The material was collected from the time of the 30 Years war and following peace negotiations of the “Westfälische Frieden“. The music was enriched by acting and recitation of texts and poems from the time but also new material to glue it all together and build a connection to our own crazy times of wars all over the world.

We liked this new program very much. They are not only good musicians but the whole program with the historic information and play provides entertainment and education at the same time. Can highly recommend.

As a bonus we met an old acquaintance who used to be a rather famous politician. We hadn’t met him in a while but always wanted to catch up. Had a good chat with him and were delighted to see that he’s doing well.

Office Move

On Monday we did an office move. But just inside the building. The new space is a little closer to the other colleagues. So will hopefully bump into colleagues more often again when I’m in the office.

Gym game still going strong. Trying to hit the gym 2-3 days a week for 30min of rowing and 30 min cycling and 20 min strength training. Really enjoying the workout.