Tech updates

• had to scrape my Pixelfed instance and re-create it
  • DB was somehow broken
  • started from scratch and noticed that Mastodon instances seem to automatically follow my account again. Looks like Mastodon is treating it similar to an account migration in the Fediverse
• Also set up some Jenkins CI/CD pipelines to update Pixelfed and Elk automagically if there are updates on the upstream repos

Health

• finally got my 4th COVID vaccination. Last one was from November 2021 an expired meanwhile. I’m still lucky to not have catched the disease at all so far. But why take a risk?
• swimming on Sunday was good. Sun was shining and no ice on the lake. Water temperature was between 2-3ºC

Black Holes

On Wednesday K2 and me have been at the presentation of Dr. Victoria Grinberg on black holes and her research about them in the Zeiss Grossplanetarium Berlin.

It was very interesting to learn how she’s using black holes as “x-ray “light bulbs” x-ray the solar winds of blue giant stars.

Books

• Had our 3rd family book club session on Sunday
  • Kids are slowly getting into it
  • I’m currently reading “” and found some memorable quotes

Diese und andere ähnliche Heuristiken legen ein übergeordnetes Prinzip in der Entscheidungsfindung nahe, das der Wirtschaftswissenschaftler und Nobelpreisträger Daniel Kahneman als Verfügbarkeitsheuristik oder auch WYSIATI bezeichnet hat. WYSIATI steht für What you see is all there is (auf Deutsch: Was du siehst, ist alles, was es gibt) und meint unsere Tendenz, uns bei Entscheidungen auf die Informationen zu verlassen, die gerade verfügbar sind, statt noch umständlich nach weiteren Informationen zu suchen.

“Die Illusion der Vernunft” – Philipp Sterzer – page 149

In unserem Zusammenhang ist die wichtigste Erkenntnis diese: Allein die Tatsache, dass wir uns für etwas entschieden haben, lässt uns gute Argumente für diese Entscheidung finden.

“Die Illusion der Vernunft” – Philipp Sterzer – page 151

Movies

• watched the whole 1st season of “The Consultant” at Amazon Prime with the brilliant Christoph Waltz – rating 4/5
• StarTrep Picard Season 3 – rating 4/5 so far

Music

• lately on heavy rotation “What’s your pleasure?” from Jessie Ware
  • she’s my latest Discovery from my automated Spotify playlists
  • to me she sounds like a mixture of Kylie Minogue, Roisin Murphy and Sophie Ellis Baxtor – very groovy.
• On our trip to the countryside on the weekend I was listening to “The Blues Brothers – Original Soundtrack”
  • this recalled memories of a show act we did back in school at one of those legendary parties where I played Elwood.

Tech updates

• new version of GoToSocial deployed. It still crashes Ivory and other Fediverse Clients don’t seem to like it either
• set up a continuous update pipeline for Elk – the fediverse web front-end – using Jenkins
• Fixed my Pixelfed Avatar problem – my account should show an avatar picture again
• switched the Docker engine on my home server to send logs to my NAS – to take off disc pressure
• set up my own LinkDing instance to host my bookmarks

Movies

• Finally watched „Avatar 2“ in cinema – 3/5 ⭐️
• Picard Season 3 – Episode 1 – 4/5 ⭐️
• „Three thousand years of longing“ -5/5 ⭐️

Sport

no Sport this week due to reasons. Now swimming on last Sunday due to too thick ice on the lake.

3D Printing

finally got some 3D printing done again. Tried out the new release of the PrusaSlicer which now sports organic support structures. Means, it will generate support structures that look like organically grown trees to support the overhanging parts of the models. This will save time during printing and also a great deal of material.

Fedithoughts

There are quite a bunch of Fediverse services meanwhile. And it’s nice that one can have a Twitter-like experience on Mastodon, an Instagram-like experience on Pixelfed, a GoodReads-like experience on BookWyrm etc.

But what slightly annoys me is the fact that it’s all separate accounts. People would have to follow several accounts of me to consume the various content types. Wouldn’t it be nicer if it would be just one account to follow and maybe just select the type of content that you wanna see? WordPress has different types of posts. What if WordPress would be fully Fediverse capable and could be used as the single account home instance. I would use the Pixelfed client to post pictures there and consume a stream of pictures from other people I follow. I would use one of the many Mastodon clients to consume a Twitter-like feed. Or I’d go to the web page itself (the Blog) to consume all content types at once.

Thoughts?

Sport

This week got a bit messed up as I didn’t made it into the office. So I missed my rowing sessions in the gym. Also missed the running with a friend on Monday as it was rather icy and slippery outside. But towards the end of the week I got my cadaver out two days in a row for running in the park at least. First day I really felt the rust. Second day, although there wasn’t any rest day in between was much better.

On Sunday we were swimming in the lake and had to toss off some ice. The lake was almost covered with a thin layer, but fortunately near the beach it was open.

Betraying Capitalism

Our oven broke the second time now in about 8 years. Every 4 years the lower heater seem to burn out. Last time I had it repaired for about 180 EUR. This time, with some hints from the Fediverse I managed to swap out the heat pipe myself. So the whole repair was only 20 EUR. Hope it lasts the next 4 years at least.

Disclaimer: This is seriously dangerous stuff if you don’t know what you’re doing. The kitchen ovens usually have their own dedicate power circuit and fuses because they draw so much power. This is current that can and will kill you if you make mistakes. So please don’t try this at home unless you’re qualified.

Bleeding Edge

Since the Pinafore Web-Based Mastodon client is discontinued, everyone seems to gravitate towards Elk as a replace. The elk team is building a rather beautiful web client for the fediverse. It can be tried out on their own instance at https://elk.zone/ or one can host it herself.

I tried the latter and built the Docker container to run the service. There are some caveats to that. The documentation is still rather sparse and doesn’t mention that the service must be accessed via HTTPS and also need a proper domain name. But thanks to Boerge I moved past that hurdle and got it somehow working. Of course not after some more struggle with file permissions in the Docker container. I submitted a Pull Request to the Elk team to fix the documentation and docker-compose.yml. Let’s see when this makes it into the main branch.

nerd stuff

On monday my Mastodon server acted up. I noticed that images were not properly loading but only displaying a blurry preview. But not all of them, just some. I suspected issues with the Object Storage Provider IONOS that I had recently configured.

After some digging I found out that my host couldn’t resolve DNS names anymore. Somehow the resolver died. So I rebooted the whole machine … not remembering that I had unfinished business in /etc/fstab which shadow mounted my home directory causing new weird issues …

In the wake of blaming the external object storage provider I had started looking into open-source alternatives. Like open-source software to set up a self-hosted S3-compatible object store. Stumbled over minio.io and quickly did a test installation on one of my machines at home.

After fixing all the issue on my server and finishing the setup of minio, I was ready to test it on some real live services: my personal Pixelfed instance. Since I’m the only user on that one, I considered it a safe playground. After a few rounds of trail and error (Pixelfed documentation still gives me the shivers) I’ve got the configuration right and test postings worked as expected.

Ready for prime time

I had configured my Mastodon instance at https://hub.uckermark.social/ to use external object storage provider for media content. The reason is, that Mastodon caches all the media in posts it federates. This can grow to several gigabytes very quickly. The more users on remote instances you local users follow, the more content the Mastodon instance will cache.

I followed the article of Thomas Leister, admin of the Mastodon instance https://metalhead.club/ to configure the S3 compatible storage from IONOS. While that technically worked out, I wasn’t really happy with the IONOS administration interface. They currently do not show any metrics for the object storage nor the data transfer. That means, flying blind for using their service until the invoice arrives. They claimed to have a billing API where the data is supposedly available. I had a brief look at it and decided that I’m too lazy to go that route.

So when IONOS issued the warning, that my trial period will run out in a few days I have decided to switch also my Mastodon instance to my self-hosted object storage backed by Minio. I copied over the existing data from IONOS object storage using the Minio Command Client. That is really comfortable.

I’ve also hooked up my minio server to Prometheus and Grafana for insights into the usage

Sports

To fight some of the kilos and the rust in general I’ll try to move more. Started that pledge with a run on Sunday. Wanted to start light with maybe 5 km to get back into it. Of course I overdid it with 10.99 km. Payed the price with sore muscles for 2 days.

While our weekly swim in the lake doesn’t count as much moving maybe, we still did it and I spent 3:12 min in the water. I’m heavily cursing at myself and the world when getting into the water. That part doesn’t get easier. But after 3 strokes of swimming thats forgotten and all that remains is the good feeling of beating oneself.

On Wednesday I finally sorted out my access to our office Gym and hit the rowing machine for 30 min and 7 km.

Friday another short round of running with 6.1 km.

For the coming week I found a partner to run hopefully more regular again here in Berlin at home. Lets see how that pans out.

Reading

Almost done with “The Dark Forest” by Cixin Liu. Memorable quote

The historical facts of the Middle Ages and the Great Ravine prove that a totalitarian system is the greatest barrier to human progress. Starship Earth requires vibrant new ideas and innovation, and this can only be accomplished through the establishment of a society that fully respects freedom and individuality.

The Dark Forest – Cixin Liu

Warp

In den vergangenen Wochen hatte ich mal Warp als Terminal getestet. Dafür gabs Einladungen und man musste sich da irgendwie für die Beta Anmelden. Anfangs sah das auch alles ganz schick aus, aber mir kam es schon gleich etwas komisch vor, dass da so ein Hype mit Einladung und künstlicher Verknappung gemacht wurde. Dann vielen mir einige Settings auf, die ich auch nicht mag. Z.B. das Warp als SSH-client eine eigene Implementierung nutzt, damit es im Output seine Blocks verwenden kann. Heißt für mich, das mein ganzer SSH-Traffic durch einen SSH-Client geht von einer Firma bei der noch nicht wirklich klar ist, welche Absichten sie hat.

Jedenfalls bin ich erst einmal wieder zurück zu iTerm2. Da weiß ich was ich hab 😉 Warp werde ich dennoch weiter aus dem Augenwinkel beobachten.

Searchtodon

Jan Lehnardt apparently had too much spare time over the holidays. So he did what Janl does and created a search engine for ones own Mastodon timeline: Searchtodon

This is based on the free Elk browser interface for Mastodon

Ok, let’s do this. If @assbach can do it (again) and @b30 anyway, then I should be able too, right?

Swimming

Of course we started the new year with swimming. Exactly as we closed the old year. Since it’s gotten really warm over new years even the 10cm thick ice that we were skating on shortly before christmas was completely gone.

Office

First day in the office was a slight fail. Went there early to hit the gym just to learn our access has been temporarily removed. That threw a spinner in my sports plan (haha, plan… who am I kidding?). So I went to the kitchen to get me a coffee from the office coffee machine. Fortunately I sense the cheesy smell before taking the first sip. The milk apparently got stale over the holidays. And since I was in early, the housekeeping hadn’t renewed that yet. And because those coffee machines are precious, they are secured with a lock. So I couldn’t fix it myself.

3D Printing

This weeks prints:

Reading

Still reading “The Dark Forest” – the second part of the Trisolaris Trilogy from Cixin Liu. This is the third time I’m reading this trilogy and it’s still very captivating for me.

Also fixed some mail configuration issues in the BookWyrm instance. Now Google Mail users should be able to receive mails again.

Computer Science

Kiddo made it into the next round of the national contest for computer science for young adults. He’s pretty excited about it and already started working on the new assignment. First task almost done.

Unfortunately he’ll not be able choose computer science as major topic in school. Since not enough pupil choose that topic and they wont open a major course with just 5 kids.

In the previous round of the contest only 430 kids participated. I find this pretty concerning. Every freakin’ job in this country depends more or less on devices or services provided by computer science. But apparently nobody seems interested to understand it or its foundations. One of course can’t blame the kids as the schools don’t really encourage them…

Bookmarks

some booksmarks I kept this week on Mastodon

Threads printer for Mastodon: https://thread.choomba.one/