#enen — Public Fediverse posts

#weeklyreview 29/2026

A single screw can screw up the whole day

We just wanted to do a short trip to project25 on Sunday. But all of a sudden the tire pressure sensor showed an alarm for declining pressure.

So we drove to the nearest gas station to check and perhaps top up. There I saw the reason for the loss of pressure – a screw deep inside the tire profile.

Of course the new fangled car doesn’t come with a spare tire. Only a messy TireFit kit witch of course didn’t seal the puncture. But we at least got home to call the roadside service.

They said they would attempt a patch and a while later a young powerful lady from the ADAC showed up to try to fix the tire. In the smoldering sun we tried to patch the hole with some fancy rubber sticks. But couldn’t get it sealed eventually. So had to call the roadside assistance again.

Another while later her colleague showed up with his towing truck and explained that he’d bring the car and me to his tire dealer where they swap the tire.

Since it’s the countryside this of course wasn’t around the corner but a 70min drive one way. The guy was very friendly and quick. Gave me a used tire and then I could drive back home.

In the process we figured that the new car is actually running on winter tires. Which shouldn’t be the case given it’s July.

Took me several phone calls to figure out that I have apparently skipped some checks on the lease company and been able to order winter tires from the OEM. Usually the lease company orders their own winter tires. Now the OEM has shipped thar car with winter tires and of course that needs to be swapped. Fun, fun, fun.

Power!

Charged the car on a how power charger for the first time. From 15% to 80% in about 15 min. That’s very impressive and scary with an electrical engineering background. Seeing 300.000 Watts being pushed into the car is quite something.

In other news

Our small lemon tree eventually shed the first fruit. It was hanging on the tree since last year and I guess it’s sort of ripe now.

I quite love the works of Meike Stoverock. Not only her books Female Choice! and the novels about the detective rabbit (those are outstandingly great in my opinion), but also her Podcast “Olle Kamellen” and her writing in “Amor & Psyche“. She is so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about every topic she writes. And she is brutally honest. But still her writing is very accessible although she’s coming from an academic background and often writing about academic topics. She manages to put them into words that anyone can easily understand and relate to.

I can highly recommend leaving a subscription and supporting her!

And now there was a chance to get one of her wonderful doodles. Of course I couldn’t resist and got the first one!

#art #car #ElectricVehicle #enEN #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 29/2026

A single screw can screw up the whole day

We just wanted to do a short trip to project25 on Sunday. But all of a sudden the tire pressure sensor showed an alarm for declining pressure.

So we drove to the nearest gas station to check and perhaps top up. There I saw the reason for the loss of pressure – a screw deep inside the tire profile.

Of course the new fangled car doesn’t come with a spare tire. Only a messy TireFit kit witch of course didn’t seal the puncture. But we at least got home to call the roadside service.

They said they would attempt a patch and a while later a young powerful lady from the ADAC showed up to try to fix the tire. In the smoldering sun we tried to patch the hole with some fancy rubber sticks. But couldn’t get it sealed eventually. So had to call the roadside assistance again.

Another while later her colleague showed up with his towing truck and explained that he’d bring the car and me to his tire dealer where they swap the tire.

Since it’s the countryside this of course wasn’t around the corner but a 70min drive one way. The guy was very friendly and quick. Gave me a used tire and then I could drive back home.

In the process we figured that the new car is actually running on winter tires. Which shouldn’t be the case given it’s July.

Took me several phone calls to figure out that I have apparently skipped some checks on the lease company and been able to order winter tires from the OEM. Usually the lease company orders their own winter tires. Now the OEM has shipped thar car with winter tires and of course that needs to be swapped. Fun, fun, fun.

Power!

Charged the car on a how power charger for the first time. From 15% to 80% in about 15 min. That’s very impressive and scary with an electrical engineering background. Seeing 300.000 Watts being pushed into the car is quite something.

In other news

Our small lemon tree eventually shed the first fruit. It was hanging on the tree since last year and I guess it’s sort of ripe now.

I quite love the works of Meike Stoverock. Not only her books Female Choice! and the novels about the detective rabbit (those are outstandingly great in my opinion), but also her Podcast “Olle Kamellen” and her writing in “Amor & Psyche“. She is so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about every topic she writes. And she is brutally honest. But still her writing is very accessible although she’s coming from an academic background and often writing about academic topics. She manages to put them into words that anyone can easily understand and relate to.

I can highly recommend leaving a subscription and supporting her!

And now there was a chance to get one of her wonderful doodles. Of course I couldn’t resist and got the first one!

#art #car #ElectricVehicle #enEN #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 29/2026

A single screw can screw up the whole day

We just wanted to do a short trip to project25 on Sunday. But all of a sudden the tire pressure sensor showed an alarm for declining pressure.

So we drove to the nearest gas station to check and perhaps top up. There I saw the reason for the loss of pressure – a screw deep inside the tire profile.

Of course the new fangled car doesn’t come with a spare tire. Only a messy TireFit kit witch of course didn’t seal the puncture. But we at least got home to call the roadside service.

They said they would attempt a patch and a while later a young powerful lady from the ADAC showed up to try to fix the tire. In the smoldering sun we tried to patch the hole with some fancy rubber sticks. But couldn’t get it sealed eventually. So had to call the roadside assistance again.

Another while later her colleague showed up with his towing truck and explained that he’d bring the car and me to his tire dealer where they swap the tire.

Since it’s the countryside this of course wasn’t around the corner but a 70min drive one way. The guy was very friendly and quick. Gave me a used tire and then I could drive back home.

In the process we figured that the new car is actually running on winter tires. Which shouldn’t be the case given it’s July.

Took me several phone calls to figure out that I have apparently skipped some checks on the lease company and been able to order winter tires from the OEM. Usually the lease company orders their own winter tires. Now the OEM has shipped thar car with winter tires and of course that needs to be swapped. Fun, fun, fun.

Power!

Charged the car on a how power charger for the first time. From 15% to 80% in about 15 min. That’s very impressive and scary with an electrical engineering background. Seeing 300.000 Watts being pushed into the car is quite something.

In other news

Our small lemon tree eventually shed the first fruit. It was hanging on the tree since last year and I guess it’s sort of ripe now.

I quite love the works of Meike Stoverock. Not only her books Female Choice! and the novels about the detective rabbit (those are outstandingly great in my opinion), but also her Podcast “Olle Kamellen” and her writing in “Amor & Psyche“. She is so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about every topic she writes. And she is brutally honest. But still her writing is very accessible although she’s coming from an academic background and often writing about academic topics. She manages to put them into words that anyone can easily understand and relate to.

I can highly recommend leaving a subscription and supporting her!

And now there was a chance to get one of her wonderful doodles. Of course I couldn’t resist and got the first one!

#art #car #ElectricVehicle #enEN #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 29/2026

A single screw can screw up the whole day

We just wanted to do a short trip to project25 on Sunday. But all of a sudden the tire pressure sensor showed an alarm for declining pressure.

So we drove to the nearest gas station to check and perhaps top up. There I saw the reason for the loss of pressure – a screw deep inside the tire profile.

Of course the new fangled car doesn’t come with a spare tire. Only a messy TireFit kit witch of course didn’t seal the puncture. But we at least got home to call the roadside service.

They said they would attempt a patch and a while later a young powerful lady from the ADAC showed up to try to fix the tire. In the smoldering sun we tried to patch the hole with some fancy rubber sticks. But couldn’t get it sealed eventually. So had to call the roadside assistance again.

Another while later her colleague showed up with his towing truck and explained that he’d bring the car and me to his tire dealer where they swap the tire.

Since it’s the countryside this of course wasn’t around the corner but a 70min drive one way. The guy was very friendly and quick. Gave me a used tire and then I could drive back home.

In the process we figured that the new car is actually running on winter tires. Which shouldn’t be the case given it’s July.

Took me several phone calls to figure out that I have apparently skipped some checks on the lease company and been able to order winter tires from the OEM. Usually the lease company orders their own winter tires. Now the OEM has shipped thar car with winter tires and of course that needs to be swapped. Fun, fun, fun.

Power!

Charged the car on a how power charger for the first time. From 15% to 80% in about 15 min. That’s very impressive and scary with an electrical engineering background. Seeing 300.000 Watts being pushed into the car is quite something.

In other news

Our small lemon tree eventually shed the first fruit. It was hanging on the tree since last year and I guess it’s sort of ripe now.

I quite love the works of Meike Stoverock. Not only her books Female Choice! and the novels about the detective rabbit (those are outstandingly great in my opinion), but also her Podcast “Olle Kamellen” and her writing in “Amor & Psyche“. She is so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about every topic she writes. And she is brutally honest. But still her writing is very accessible although she’s coming from an academic background and often writing about academic topics. She manages to put them into words that anyone can easily understand and relate to.

I can highly recommend leaving a subscription and supporting her!

And now there was a chance to get one of her wonderful doodles. Of course I couldn’t resist and got the first one!

#art #car #ElectricVehicle #enEN #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 29/2026

A single screw can screw up the whole day

We just wanted to do a short trip to project25 on Sunday. But all of a sudden the tire pressure sensor showed an alarm for declining pressure.

So we drove to the nearest gas station to check and perhaps top up. There I saw the reason for the loss of pressure – a screw deep inside the tire profile.

Of course the new fangled car doesn’t come with a spare tire. Only a messy TireFit kit witch of course didn’t seal the puncture. But we at least got home to call the roadside service.

They said they would attempt a patch and a while later a young powerful lady from the ADAC showed up to try to fix the tire. In the smoldering sun we tried to patch the hole with some fancy rubber sticks. But couldn’t get it sealed eventually. So had to call the roadside assistance again.

Another while later her colleague showed up with his towing truck and explained that he’d bring the car and me to his tire dealer where they swap the tire.

Since it’s the countryside this of course wasn’t around the corner but a 70min drive one way. The guy was very friendly and quick. Gave me a used tire and then I could drive back home.

In the process we figured that the new car is actually running on winter tires. Which shouldn’t be the case given it’s July.

Took me several phone calls to figure out that I have apparently skipped some checks on the lease company and been able to order winter tires from the OEM. Usually the lease company orders their own winter tires. Now the OEM has shipped thar car with winter tires and of course that needs to be swapped. Fun, fun, fun.

Power!

Charged the car on a how power charger for the first time. From 15% to 80% in about 15 min. That’s very impressive and scary with an electrical engineering background. Seeing 300.000 Watts being pushed into the car is quite something.

In other news

Our small lemon tree eventually shed the first fruit. It was hanging on the tree since last year and I guess it’s sort of ripe now.

I quite love the works of Meike Stoverock. Not only her books Female Choice! and the novels about the detective rabbit (those are outstandingly great in my opinion), but also her Podcast “Olle Kamellen” and her writing in “Amor & Psyche“. She is so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about every topic she writes. And she is brutally honest. But still her writing is very accessible although she’s coming from an academic background and often writing about academic topics. She manages to put them into words that anyone can easily understand and relate to.

I can highly recommend leaving a subscription and supporting her!

And now there was a chance to get one of her wonderful doodles. Of course I couldn’t resist and got the first one!

#art #car #ElectricVehicle #enEN #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 28/2026

Oops, I guess I forgot to hit “Publish” in this one…

Sunday evening kiddo an me had to visit the big kiddo in the evening as an emergency service. He played soccer the afternoon and someone mistook his foot for the ball. He thought he’d need to be taken to the ER in hospital. But eventually we decided to keep cooling and monitoring. Wasn’t broken apparently as he happily limped back home and only after a few hours thought the pain is going to be too much.

Next day I delivered food and medication. Foot was already better and he could walk/limp again.

#project25 update

Finally got the new power line connected and the meter moved out of the house into its own box outside the property. Had to attend myself and work from the house. They also installed my Shelly Pro 3EM to measure my electricity consumption. Got it hooked up to the WiFi and sending to my MQTT server right away.

With all these new data sources (new car, energy meter) I need to install a proper stack to hold and visualize the data. So once again set up InfluxDB + Grafana and have Telegraft ingest the data

New Immich features

The 3.x release of my favorite photo management tool Immich brought workflows. With these one can define certain actions to be triggered and executed when new photos are uploaded. So I’ve got a workflow to put files named Screenshot into a special album.

A second workflow adds picture which are take in close proximity of my house into my house album

Immich is really a great piece of software. It run’s silently in the background and does the important job of archiving my photos. Updates are automatically installed via Dockhand on my stack. So far it always worked flawlessly unattended.

Steam Machine

We treated ourselves with a Steam Machine. No, it cannot run Doom. Doesn’t even have a display. But… continuous steam output and can be refilled during operations. That allows for cleaning larger areas without the need to cool the unit down for refill.

This thing is addictive 😀

#enEN #project25 #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 27/2026

quite a busy week. that’s why only some high level notes and pictures

• new car delivered and old one dropped of. Quite a ceremony to receive the new car with all the electronics
• thanks to EU Data Act I can get a whole bunch of data from the car to download from the OEM
  • vibe coded myself a metrics dashboard
• kiddo on school trip to the North Sea. Of course both train trips were severely delayed
• company summer party
• second part of the paint job in the countryside done

#enEN #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 26/2026

as mentioned last week already… the week (I count from Sunday for this blog series) started with a paint job in the house. Was pretty exhausted on Monday still and my neck hurt from looking up to the ceiling for a long time. Definitely a full body workout …

My new breakfast routing is “overnight oats”. While I hate giving in to fashion trends, this one is really good. But it’s not new anyway, just the fancy name. My friend Slamr shows up in the office every once in a while with her jar of overnight oats and I’m like: yeah… should have done this as well.

Looking into it, it’s actually super easy to prepare. I fill a large jar 1/3 with coarse oats, 500g of plain yoghurt, chia seeds, flax seeds and a splash of milk. When I feel fancy I add a whole apple in slices or banana in slices and let it sit in the fridge over night (guess that’s where the name comes from 😉 ). Refreshing and healthy in the morning. And it lasts for almost the whole week. Real easy time saver.

Since I woke up with quite an headache on Monday I also tried lemon espresso which I heard on the Interwebs can act as a painkiller similar to Aspirin. Did some research now and there seems to be no scientific evidence of this effect. What’s know is, that black coffee alone can support the efficiency of painkiller slightly. So it’s actually just a fancy drink then 😉

Amsterdam

On Friday I was in Amsterdam for a business trip. Best day according to the dutch national weather warning system. People were urged to avoid going outside in the sun of they can. Fortunately the office has a real air condition and it’s wasn’t that bad all. Apart from the flight back. Total chaos at Schiphol airport. Massive queue as they had closed down all but a few security lines. I literally only made it last minute to the plane after a long sprint through the whole Airport after security. Just to wait another 45min at the gate because some checked-in passengers were still missing. They had to pry out their luggage from the plane before we could start.

But at least I made it back to Berlin the same day and wasn’t stuck in Amsterdam at 40º C.

White Dinner

On Saturday, in the countryside we had our annual white dinner in the village. Despite the heat still quite many people showed up in the evening and brought their favourite food to share over drinks and conversations. Always really lovely to see how good this works with the really minimal effort and coordination.

#enEN #food #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 26/2026

as mentioned last week already… the week (I count from Sunday for this blog series) started with a paint job in the house. Was pretty exhausted on Monday still and my neck hurt from looking up to the ceiling for a long time. Definitely a full body workout …

My new breakfast routing is “overnight oats”. While I hate giving in to fashion trends, this one is really good. But it’s not new anyway, just the fancy name. My friend Slamr shows up in the office every once in a while with her jar of overnight oats and I’m like: yeah… should have done this as well.

Looking into it, it’s actually super easy to prepare. I fill a large jar 1/3 with coarse oats, 500g of plain yoghurt, chia seeds, flax seeds and a splash of milk. When I feel fancy I add a whole apple in slices or banana in slices and let it sit in the fridge over night (guess that’s where the name comes from 😉 ). Refreshing and healthy in the morning. And it lasts for almost the whole week. Real easy time saver.

Since I woke up with quite an headache on Monday I also tried lemon espresso which I heard on the Interwebs can act as a painkiller similar to Aspirin. Did some research now and there seems to be no scientific evidence of this effect. What’s know is, that black coffee alone can support the efficiency of painkiller slightly. So it’s actually just a fancy drink then 😉

Amsterdam

On Friday I was in Amsterdam for a business trip. Best day according to the dutch national weather warning system. People were urged to avoid going outside in the sun of they can. Fortunately the office has a real air condition and it’s wasn’t that bad all. Apart from the flight back. Total chaos at Schiphol airport. Massive queue as they had closed down all but a few security lines. I literally only made it last minute to the plane after a long sprint through the whole Airport after security. Just to wait another 45min at the gate because some checked-in passengers were still missing. They had to pry out their luggage from the plane before we could start.

But at least I made it back to Berlin the same day and wasn’t stuck in Amsterdam at 40º C.

White Dinner

On Saturday, in the countryside we had our annual white dinner in the village. Despite the heat still quite many people showed up in the evening and brought their favourite food to share over drinks and conversations. Always really lovely to see how good this works with the really minimal effort and coordination.

#enEN #food #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 26/2026

as mentioned last week already… the week (I count from Sunday for this blog series) started with a paint job in the house. Was pretty exhausted on Monday still and my neck hurt from looking up to the ceiling for a long time. Definitely a full body workout …

My new breakfast routing is “overnight oats”. While I hate giving in to fashion trends, this one is really good. But it’s not new anyway, just the fancy name. My friend Slamr shows up in the office every once in a while with her jar of overnight oats and I’m like: yeah… should have done this as well.

Looking into it, it’s actually super easy to prepare. I fill a large jar 1/3 with coarse oats, 500g of plain yoghurt, chia seeds, flax seeds and a splash of milk. When I feel fancy I add a whole apple in slices or banana in slices and let it sit in the fridge over night (guess that’s where the name comes from 😉 ). Refreshing and healthy in the morning. And it lasts for almost the whole week. Real easy time saver.

Since I woke up with quite an headache on Monday I also tried lemon espresso which I heard on the Interwebs can act as a painkiller similar to Aspirin. Did some research now and there seems to be no scientific evidence of this effect. What’s know is, that black coffee alone can support the efficiency of painkiller slightly. So it’s actually just a fancy drink then 😉

Amsterdam

On Friday I was in Amsterdam for a business trip. Best day according to the dutch national weather warning system. People were urged to avoid going outside in the sun of they can. Fortunately the office has a real air condition and it’s wasn’t that bad all. Apart from the flight back. Total chaos at Schiphol airport. Massive queue as they had closed down all but a few security lines. I literally only made it last minute to the plane after a long sprint through the whole Airport after security. Just to wait another 45min at the gate because some checked-in passengers were still missing. They had to pry out their luggage from the plane before we could start.

But at least I made it back to Berlin the same day and wasn’t stuck in Amsterdam at 40º C.

White Dinner

On Saturday, in the countryside we had our annual white dinner in the village. Despite the heat still quite many people showed up in the evening and brought their favourite food to share over drinks and conversations. Always really lovely to see how good this works with the really minimal effort and coordination.

#enEN #food #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 26/2026

as mentioned last week already… the week (I count from Sunday for this blog series) started with a paint job in the house. Was pretty exhausted on Monday still and my neck hurt from looking up to the ceiling for a long time. Definitely a full body workout …

My new breakfast routing is “overnight oats”. While I hate giving in to fashion trends, this one is really good. But it’s not new anyway, just the fancy name. My friend Slamr shows up in the office every once in a while with her jar of overnight oats and I’m like: yeah… should have done this as well.

Looking into it, it’s actually super easy to prepare. I fill a large jar 1/3 with coarse oats, 500g of plain yoghurt, chia seeds, flax seeds and a splash of milk. When I feel fancy I add a whole apple in slices or banana in slices and let it sit in the fridge over night (guess that’s where the name comes from 😉 ). Refreshing and healthy in the morning. And it lasts for almost the whole week. Real easy time saver.

Since I woke up with quite an headache on Monday I also tried lemon espresso which I heard on the Interwebs can act as a painkiller similar to Aspirin. Did some research now and there seems to be no scientific evidence of this effect. What’s know is, that black coffee alone can support the efficiency of painkiller slightly. So it’s actually just a fancy drink then 😉

Amsterdam

On Friday I was in Amsterdam for a business trip. Best day according to the dutch national weather warning system. People were urged to avoid going outside in the sun of they can. Fortunately the office has a real air condition and it’s wasn’t that bad all. Apart from the flight back. Total chaos at Schiphol airport. Massive queue as they had closed down all but a few security lines. I literally only made it last minute to the plane after a long sprint through the whole Airport after security. Just to wait another 45min at the gate because some checked-in passengers were still missing. They had to pry out their luggage from the plane before we could start.

But at least I made it back to Berlin the same day and wasn’t stuck in Amsterdam at 40º C.

White Dinner

On Saturday, in the countryside we had our annual white dinner in the village. Despite the heat still quite many people showed up in the evening and brought their favourite food to share over drinks and conversations. Always really lovely to see how good this works with the really minimal effort and coordination.

#enEN #food #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 26/2026

as mentioned last week already… the week (I count from Sunday for this blog series) started with a paint job in the house. Was pretty exhausted on Monday still and my neck hurt from looking up to the ceiling for a long time. Definitely a full body workout …

My new breakfast routing is “overnight oats”. While I hate giving in to fashion trends, this one is really good. But it’s not new anyway, just the fancy name. My friend Slamr shows up in the office every once in a while with her jar of overnight oats and I’m like: yeah… should have done this as well.

Looking into it, it’s actually super easy to prepare. I fill a large jar 1/3 with coarse oats, 500g of plain yoghurt, chia seeds, flax seeds and a splash of milk. When I feel fancy I add a whole apple in slices or banana in slices and let it sit in the fridge over night (guess that’s where the name comes from 😉 ). Refreshing and healthy in the morning. And it lasts for almost the whole week. Real easy time saver.

Since I woke up with quite an headache on Monday I also tried lemon espresso which I heard on the Interwebs can act as a painkiller similar to Aspirin. Did some research now and there seems to be no scientific evidence of this effect. What’s know is, that black coffee alone can support the efficiency of painkiller slightly. So it’s actually just a fancy drink then 😉

Amsterdam

On Friday I was in Amsterdam for a business trip. Best day according to the dutch national weather warning system. People were urged to avoid going outside in the sun of they can. Fortunately the office has a real air condition and it’s wasn’t that bad all. Apart from the flight back. Total chaos at Schiphol airport. Massive queue as they had closed down all but a few security lines. I literally only made it last minute to the plane after a long sprint through the whole Airport after security. Just to wait another 45min at the gate because some checked-in passengers were still missing. They had to pry out their luggage from the plane before we could start.

But at least I made it back to Berlin the same day and wasn’t stuck in Amsterdam at 40º C.

White Dinner

On Saturday, in the countryside we had our annual white dinner in the village. Despite the heat still quite many people showed up in the evening and brought their favourite food to share over drinks and conversations. Always really lovely to see how good this works with the really minimal effort and coordination.

#enEN #food #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 24/2026

This was a busy week. Two social events and long work days. Of course also more fiddling with tech. But it all started with the 4th

Digital Independence Day Templin/Uckermark

For the fourth time we met in Templin to show and tell people about alternative to big commercial technology. This time a bunch of new faces showed up and we were a total of 8 people. Its getting traction despite our lousy advertisement efforts.

One quote from my partner in crime resonated with me especially:

You don’t need to switch directly from Windows to Linux. Rather start replacing application by application with their open source alternative. Once you’ve replace InternetExplorer or Chrome with Firefox, MS Office with LibreOffice and Outlook with Thunderbird, you’ve likely already covered the majority of your computer use. When you then switch from Windows to Linux you’ll be met with familiar applications already.

The 5th event will take place on July 5th in Templin again.

Movies & Paintings

Back on Sunday evening Berlin K2 started to watch a movie it seem to like. The story is about a woman at the end of the 18th century. She’s supposed to get a portrait of her painted by a another woman.

The scenery looked more and more familiar the longer I watched. Eventually it struck me. One scene of that movie we’ve got as an painting from my dear friend Cristina Carrillo.

The movie is the french “Portrait of a lady on fire” by director Céline Sciamma and it’s really good.

Greybeard gathering

As it was the 2nd Tuesday of the month our group of old hackers gathered again at the Pratergarten. This time it was warm enough to start sitting outside in the beer garden and in the sun. One guy joked that direct sunlight is not the right environment for hackers.

Why greybeards you ask? Because a lot of the original male software developers of Unix (think Kernighan & Ritchie ) were sporting full beards and eventually those became grey. Funny enough in our group I’m the only one with a beard … and I’m not a hacker.

Always quite an interesting meeting as those guys know a lot beside mere programming and computers. Learned quite some things about Taurus weapon systems this time.

Linux to the rescue

A friend of mine water damaged their HP Laptop. Wouldn’t boot up anymore despite the fans turning when powered on. I took out the harddrive to see if that’s still working. And it is. Got Windows 11 on it. Now while we have access to the mere files, some valuable data is still hidden inside programs and their proprietary formats.

Unfortunately the Disk didn’t fit in own HP laptop as it’s got a different SSD connector. What I had though is a SSD-to-USB adapter. I thought it should be possible to create a virtual machine though that simulates the original Laptop to some extend and use the USB-device as it’s hard drive. The normal VM wizard didn’t lead to success so I asked Perplexity to help me create the correct QEMU/KVM call.

And it delivered. I needed to create a software TPM device first as the original Laptop uses UEFI. After some fiddling I actually got the original OS booting up on my trusty Linux Laptop despite some 10 years hardware difference. The Documentation and explanation of the steps can be found here.

My friend but has now bought a similar laptop as replacement. We’ll put the disc into the new Laptop and will hope that the system will just come up. Let’s see. But good to know that my approach would have worked using virtualization.

Beer & Burgers

On Thursday it was time for our beer & burger gathering again. This time in West Berlin … Upper Burger Grill in Charlottenburg.

The Burger was quite OK. Not the best I ever had … but also not the worst 😉

After the burgers we felt fancy and decided to pay the Monkey Bar a visit. That’s a quite popular bar at the moment at the end of the Bikini House Berlin. It oversees the “Zoologischer Garten” and I guess you could see the monkeys during the day.

The view is indeed stunning. You can see over to the Gedaechtniskirche, the Bikini House and of course the Zoo. What I found most interesting was the audience. Every age group from Teenagers (I hope 16+) to people probably approaching their 80s were there. So they’re doing something right attracting such a diverse age group. Then again the Ku’damm area feels a little weird to me. Everyone seems to be pretending their rich and famous. Some surely are. Most just pretend and want to part of the hype. Also… it seems to be mostly russian speaking people nowadays in that Area.

Elk

This week the Version 1.0 of the alternative web client for Fediverse services named “Elk” was release. I’m hosting my own instance and are using it currently as my main Mastodon Client on the web.

One nice notable feature (among many others) is it’s ability to compose longer threads. The compose window let’s you split your longer writings into multiple properly linked posts. I know that some people struggle with this. Many Fediverse instances have a character limit for their posts – usually 500. I’ve patched my Mastodon instance to allow 5000 characters in a single post. So if your instance has a short limit and you want to post longer texts then consider using Elk for this purpose.

Local LLM stuff

I’ve continued playing with my LiteLLM setup. Also finally got OpenCode configured and used Qwen3.6 with Ollama on my laptop to write me some Ansible playbooks for installing and configuring OpenCode. That worked quite well.

I’ve also tried to calculate the cost of my Ollama setup on my Laptop at the energy price of 30ct/kWh. The M2 Max CPU/GPU seem to be able to churn out ~ 50 Tokens/s while consuming 65W. For 1M tokens it would roughly need 5.5 hours at 65W. That’s about 0,3575 kWh and thus ~ 10,7ct/1M tokens.

Of course I build myself a benchmark tool that produces the numbers for all available models on my machine and spits out a respective config file for LiteLLM

Full Report

ollama-bench Results

Date: 2026–06–15 18:28 Models: 11 Prompts: 3 Runs/prompt: 3 Max tokens: 200
Power draw: 65W Electricity: 30 cent/kWh

Per-Model Details

deepseek-r1:1.5b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed164.58 tok/s±2.04Time to first token345 ms—Total wall time1571 ms—Energy consumed28.22 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000042327—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0423—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200159.46199858.76€0.000000088146#2200165.2113324.29€0.000000036442#3200165.7513124.19€0.000000036278#4200166.0415824.63€0.000000036946#5200165.7813324.22€0.000000036336#6200165.4413324.26€0.000000036397#7200165.3015724.71€0.000000037068#8200163.9513224.45€0.000000036668#9200164.2813424.44€0.000000036665

embeddinggemma:latest

No successful runs.

gemma4:12b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed25.33 tok/s±1.73Time to first token441 ms—Total wall time8376 ms—Energy consumed151.04 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000226563—Cost per 1M tokens€0.2266—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120029.632633169.43€0.000000254139#220025.97126141.34€0.000000212014#320025.60109143.04€0.000000214565#420024.92338151.04€0.000000226557#520024.41112149.95€0.000000224931#620024.25100150.73€0.000000226102#720024.19333155.31€0.000000232968#820024.54106149.07€0.000000223605#920024.49111149.46€0.000000224189

glm–4.7-flash:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed49.06 tok/s±2.71Time to first token1104 ms—Total wall time5202 ms—Energy consumed93.78 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000140672—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1407—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120052.427969212.82€0.000000319226#220052.5022972.97€0.000000109457#320051.7922073.76€0.000000110633#420047.7230181.17€0.000000121749#520048.6822278.23€0.000000117351#620048.0522579.28€0.000000118926#720047.8632181.28€0.000000121927#820048.2822278.84€0.000000118265#920044.2722585.67€0.000000128512

gpt-oss:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed51.89 tok/s±5.22Time to first token1195 ms—Total wall time4883 ms—Energy consumed87.95 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000139035—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1390—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120064.297670194.70€0.000000292055#220056.0432470.33€0.000000105494#320049.2035279.81€0.000000119716#416949.4638768.75€0.000000122042#520050.0838879.18€0.000000118768#614547.3339062.41€0.000000129125#720049.3442880.98€0.000000121468#820050.5940978.83€0.000000118245#919450.6540876.58€0.000000118427

lfm2.5-thinking:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed220.08 tok/s±25.13Time to first token179 ms—Total wall time1110 ms—Energy consumed19.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000029775—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0298—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200254.3090330.53€0.00000004579#2200256.758115.55€0.000000023331#3200246.508116.14€0.000000024204#4200193.0210620.65€0.000000030974#5200197.348719.90€0.000000029855#6200205.028219.13€0.000000028694#7200206.7010519.39€0.000000029091#8200209.448218.75€0.000000028132#9200211.658418.60€0.000000027903

llama3.2:1b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated133—Generation speed169.33 tok/s±9.77Time to first token348 ms—Total wall time1163 ms—Energy consumed20.82 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000046968—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0470—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200155.79178555.43€0.000000083146#2200156.2716626.15€0.000000039231#3200161.4316525.39€0.000000038085#468185.091799.90€0.00000004367#5117173.1216515.21€0.000000039005#672176.9816210.30€0.000000042897#7116173.4717915.34€0.000000039682#8117169.4916515.47€0.000000039674#9107172.3616414.20€0.000000039822

llama3.2:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated140—Generation speed81.62 tok/s±2.52Time to first token524 ms—Total wall time2250 ms—Energy consumed40.45 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000086673—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0867—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120080.353315104.81€0.00000015722#220083.2616446.41€0.000000069612#320083.5116646.32€0.000000069477#411386.1620027.37€0.000000072663#510482.3816525.83€0.000000074512#611381.1116728.21€0.000000074901#711180.1320628.79€0.000000077798#810880.2516627.35€0.000000075972#911177.4316728.94€0.000000078218

mistral:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed36.54 tok/s±1.59Time to first token373 ms—Total wall time5595 ms—Energy consumed100.72 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000159125—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1591—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120039.252688140.58€0.00000021087#220039.288393.54€0.000000140311#320035.6549102.23€0.000000153349#420035.21160105.52€0.000000158286#520035.4552102.85€0.000000154271#617335.665588.65€0.000000153722#717236.4115888.21€0.000000153854#818735.905495.07€0.000000152513#917735.995489.84€0.000000152266

qwen3.6:35b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed66.81 tok/s±2.82Time to first token980 ms—Total wall time3987 ms—Energy consumed71.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000107768—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1078—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120069.277994196.48€0.000000294719#220070.3610053.15€0.00000007972#320070.296152.49€0.000000078734#420068.6716155.50€0.000000083247#520065.4810156.97€0.000000085461#620065.106556.64€0.000000084967#720065.0016958.62€0.000000087933#820063.759858.43€0.000000087638#920063.347358.33€0.000000087495

qwen3.6:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed57.33 tok/s±1.49Time to first token1332 ms—Total wall time4859 ms—Energy consumed87.37 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000131056—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1311—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120059.589619234.39€0.000000351579#220059.6027765.84€0.000000098764#320058.2427167.18€0.000000100772#420056.8936070.31€0.000000105468#520055.6927470.08€0.000000105124#620056.1627269.55€0.000000104324#720057.0337370.38€0.000000105568#820056.9327168.61€0.000000102909#920055.8727470.00€0.000000104995

Model Comparison

ModelSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost/token (EUR)Cost/1M tokens (EUR)deepseek-r1:1.5b164.5834528.22€0.000000042327€0.0423embeddinggemma:latest—————gemma4:12b-mlx25.33441151.04€0.000000226563€0.2266glm–4.7-flash:latest49.06110493.78€0.000000140672€0.1407gpt-oss:latest51.89119587.95€0.000000139035€0.1390lfm2.5-thinking:latest220.0817919.85€0.000000029775€0.0298llama3.2:1b169.3334820.82€0.000000046968€0.0470llama3.2:latest81.6252440.45€0.000000086673€0.0867mistral:latest36.54373100.72€0.000000159125€0.1591qwen3.6:35b-mlx66.8198071.85€0.000000107768€0.1078qwen3.6:latest57.33133287.37€0.000000131056€0.1311

Ranked by generation speed:
1. lfm2.5-thinking:latest — 220.08 tok/s
2. llama3.2:1b — 169.33 tok/s
3. deepseek-r1:1.5b — 164.58 tok/s
4. llama3.2:latest — 81.62 tok/s
5. qwen3.6:35b-mlx — 66.81 tok/s
6. qwen3.6:latest — 57.33 tok/s
7. gpt-oss:latest — 51.89 tok/s
8. glm–4.7-flash:latest — 49.06 tok/s
9. mistral:latest — 36.54 tok/s
10. gemma4:12b-mlx — 25.33 tok/s

#burger #did #enEN #food #Linux #LiteLLM #QEMU #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 24/2026

This was a busy week. Two social events and long work days. Of course also more fiddling with tech. But it all started with the 4th

Digital Independence Day Templin/Uckermark

For the fourth time we met in Templin to show and tell people about alternative to big commercial technology. This time a bunch of new faces showed up and we were a total of 8 people. Its getting traction despite our lousy advertisement efforts.

One quote from my partner in crime resonated with me especially:

You don’t need to switch directly from Windows to Linux. Rather start replacing application by application with their open source alternative. Once you’ve replace InternetExplorer or Chrome with Firefox, MS Office with LibreOffice and Outlook with Thunderbird, you’ve likely already covered the majority of your computer use. When you then switch from Windows to Linux you’ll be met with familiar applications already.

The 5th event will take place on July 5th in Templin again.

Movies & Paintings

Back on Sunday evening Berlin K2 started to watch a movie it seem to like. The story is about a woman at the end of the 18th century. She’s supposed to get a portrait of her painted by a another woman.

The scenery looked more and more familiar the longer I watched. Eventually it struck me. One scene of that movie we’ve got as an painting from my dear friend Cristina Carrillo.

The movie is the french “Portrait of a lady on fire” by director Céline Sciamma and it’s really good.

Greybeard gathering

As it was the 2nd Tuesday of the month our group of old hackers gathered again at the Pratergarten. This time it was warm enough to start sitting outside in the beer garden and in the sun. One guy joked that direct sunlight is not the right environment for hackers.

Why greybeards you ask? Because a lot of the original male software developers of Unix (think Kernighan & Ritchie ) were sporting full beards and eventually those became grey. Funny enough in our group I’m the only one with a beard … and I’m not a hacker.

Always quite an interesting meeting as those guys know a lot beside mere programming and computers. Learned quite some things about Taurus weapon systems this time.

Linux to the rescue

A friend of mine water damaged their HP Laptop. Wouldn’t boot up anymore despite the fans turning when powered on. I took out the harddrive to see if that’s still working. And it is. Got Windows 11 on it. Now while we have access to the mere files, some valuable data is still hidden inside programs and their proprietary formats.

Unfortunately the Disk didn’t fit in own HP laptop as it’s got a different SSD connector. What I had though is a SSD-to-USB adapter. I thought it should be possible to create a virtual machine though that simulates the original Laptop to some extend and use the USB-device as it’s hard drive. The normal VM wizard didn’t lead to success so I asked Perplexity to help me create the correct QEMU/KVM call.

And it delivered. I needed to create a software TPM device first as the original Laptop uses UEFI. After some fiddling I actually got the original OS booting up on my trusty Linux Laptop despite some 10 years hardware difference. The Documentation and explanation of the steps can be found here.

My friend but has now bought a similar laptop as replacement. We’ll put the disc into the new Laptop and will hope that the system will just come up. Let’s see. But good to know that my approach would have worked using virtualization.

Beer & Burgers

On Thursday it was time for our beer & burger gathering again. This time in West Berlin … Upper Burger Grill in Charlottenburg.

The Burger was quite OK. Not the best I ever had … but also not the worst 😉

After the burgers we felt fancy and decided to pay the Monkey Bar a visit. That’s a quite popular bar at the moment at the end of the Bikini House Berlin. It oversees the “Zoologischer Garten” and I guess you could see the monkeys during the day.

The view is indeed stunning. You can see over to the Gedaechtniskirche, the Bikini House and of course the Zoo. What I found most interesting was the audience. Every age group from Teenagers (I hope 16+) to people probably approaching their 80s were there. So they’re doing something right attracting such a diverse age group. Then again the Ku’damm area feels a little weird to me. Everyone seems to be pretending their rich and famous. Some surely are. Most just pretend and want to part of the hype. Also… it seems to be mostly russian speaking people nowadays in that Area.

Elk

This week the Version 1.0 of the alternative web client for Fediverse services named “Elk” was release. I’m hosting my own instance and are using it currently as my main Mastodon Client on the web.

One nice notable feature (among many others) is it’s ability to compose longer threads. The compose window let’s you split your longer writings into multiple properly linked posts. I know that some people struggle with this. Many Fediverse instances have a character limit for their posts – usually 500. I’ve patched my Mastodon instance to allow 5000 characters in a single post. So if your instance has a short limit and you want to post longer texts then consider using Elk for this purpose.

Local LLM stuff

I’ve continued playing with my LiteLLM setup. Also finally got OpenCode configured and used Qwen3.6 with Ollama on my laptop to write me some Ansible playbooks for installing and configuring OpenCode. That worked quite well.

I’ve also tried to calculate the cost of my Ollama setup on my Laptop at the energy price of 30ct/kWh. The M2 Max CPU/GPU seem to be able to churn out ~ 50 Tokens/s while consuming 65W. For 1M tokens it would roughly need 5.5 hours at 65W. That’s about 0,3575 kWh and thus ~ 10,7ct/1M tokens.

Of course I build myself a benchmark tool that produces the numbers for all available models on my machine and spits out a respective config file for LiteLLM

Full Report

ollama-bench Results

Date: 2026–06–15 18:28 Models: 11 Prompts: 3 Runs/prompt: 3 Max tokens: 200
Power draw: 65W Electricity: 30 cent/kWh

Per-Model Details

deepseek-r1:1.5b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed164.58 tok/s±2.04Time to first token345 ms—Total wall time1571 ms—Energy consumed28.22 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000042327—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0423—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200159.46199858.76€0.000000088146#2200165.2113324.29€0.000000036442#3200165.7513124.19€0.000000036278#4200166.0415824.63€0.000000036946#5200165.7813324.22€0.000000036336#6200165.4413324.26€0.000000036397#7200165.3015724.71€0.000000037068#8200163.9513224.45€0.000000036668#9200164.2813424.44€0.000000036665

embeddinggemma:latest

No successful runs.

gemma4:12b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed25.33 tok/s±1.73Time to first token441 ms—Total wall time8376 ms—Energy consumed151.04 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000226563—Cost per 1M tokens€0.2266—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120029.632633169.43€0.000000254139#220025.97126141.34€0.000000212014#320025.60109143.04€0.000000214565#420024.92338151.04€0.000000226557#520024.41112149.95€0.000000224931#620024.25100150.73€0.000000226102#720024.19333155.31€0.000000232968#820024.54106149.07€0.000000223605#920024.49111149.46€0.000000224189

glm–4.7-flash:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed49.06 tok/s±2.71Time to first token1104 ms—Total wall time5202 ms—Energy consumed93.78 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000140672—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1407—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120052.427969212.82€0.000000319226#220052.5022972.97€0.000000109457#320051.7922073.76€0.000000110633#420047.7230181.17€0.000000121749#520048.6822278.23€0.000000117351#620048.0522579.28€0.000000118926#720047.8632181.28€0.000000121927#820048.2822278.84€0.000000118265#920044.2722585.67€0.000000128512

gpt-oss:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed51.89 tok/s±5.22Time to first token1195 ms—Total wall time4883 ms—Energy consumed87.95 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000139035—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1390—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120064.297670194.70€0.000000292055#220056.0432470.33€0.000000105494#320049.2035279.81€0.000000119716#416949.4638768.75€0.000000122042#520050.0838879.18€0.000000118768#614547.3339062.41€0.000000129125#720049.3442880.98€0.000000121468#820050.5940978.83€0.000000118245#919450.6540876.58€0.000000118427

lfm2.5-thinking:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed220.08 tok/s±25.13Time to first token179 ms—Total wall time1110 ms—Energy consumed19.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000029775—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0298—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200254.3090330.53€0.00000004579#2200256.758115.55€0.000000023331#3200246.508116.14€0.000000024204#4200193.0210620.65€0.000000030974#5200197.348719.90€0.000000029855#6200205.028219.13€0.000000028694#7200206.7010519.39€0.000000029091#8200209.448218.75€0.000000028132#9200211.658418.60€0.000000027903

llama3.2:1b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated133—Generation speed169.33 tok/s±9.77Time to first token348 ms—Total wall time1163 ms—Energy consumed20.82 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000046968—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0470—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200155.79178555.43€0.000000083146#2200156.2716626.15€0.000000039231#3200161.4316525.39€0.000000038085#468185.091799.90€0.00000004367#5117173.1216515.21€0.000000039005#672176.9816210.30€0.000000042897#7116173.4717915.34€0.000000039682#8117169.4916515.47€0.000000039674#9107172.3616414.20€0.000000039822

llama3.2:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated140—Generation speed81.62 tok/s±2.52Time to first token524 ms—Total wall time2250 ms—Energy consumed40.45 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000086673—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0867—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120080.353315104.81€0.00000015722#220083.2616446.41€0.000000069612#320083.5116646.32€0.000000069477#411386.1620027.37€0.000000072663#510482.3816525.83€0.000000074512#611381.1116728.21€0.000000074901#711180.1320628.79€0.000000077798#810880.2516627.35€0.000000075972#911177.4316728.94€0.000000078218

mistral:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed36.54 tok/s±1.59Time to first token373 ms—Total wall time5595 ms—Energy consumed100.72 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000159125—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1591—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120039.252688140.58€0.00000021087#220039.288393.54€0.000000140311#320035.6549102.23€0.000000153349#420035.21160105.52€0.000000158286#520035.4552102.85€0.000000154271#617335.665588.65€0.000000153722#717236.4115888.21€0.000000153854#818735.905495.07€0.000000152513#917735.995489.84€0.000000152266

qwen3.6:35b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed66.81 tok/s±2.82Time to first token980 ms—Total wall time3987 ms—Energy consumed71.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000107768—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1078—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120069.277994196.48€0.000000294719#220070.3610053.15€0.00000007972#320070.296152.49€0.000000078734#420068.6716155.50€0.000000083247#520065.4810156.97€0.000000085461#620065.106556.64€0.000000084967#720065.0016958.62€0.000000087933#820063.759858.43€0.000000087638#920063.347358.33€0.000000087495

qwen3.6:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed57.33 tok/s±1.49Time to first token1332 ms—Total wall time4859 ms—Energy consumed87.37 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000131056—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1311—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120059.589619234.39€0.000000351579#220059.6027765.84€0.000000098764#320058.2427167.18€0.000000100772#420056.8936070.31€0.000000105468#520055.6927470.08€0.000000105124#620056.1627269.55€0.000000104324#720057.0337370.38€0.000000105568#820056.9327168.61€0.000000102909#920055.8727470.00€0.000000104995

Model Comparison

ModelSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost/token (EUR)Cost/1M tokens (EUR)deepseek-r1:1.5b164.5834528.22€0.000000042327€0.0423embeddinggemma:latest—————gemma4:12b-mlx25.33441151.04€0.000000226563€0.2266glm–4.7-flash:latest49.06110493.78€0.000000140672€0.1407gpt-oss:latest51.89119587.95€0.000000139035€0.1390lfm2.5-thinking:latest220.0817919.85€0.000000029775€0.0298llama3.2:1b169.3334820.82€0.000000046968€0.0470llama3.2:latest81.6252440.45€0.000000086673€0.0867mistral:latest36.54373100.72€0.000000159125€0.1591qwen3.6:35b-mlx66.8198071.85€0.000000107768€0.1078qwen3.6:latest57.33133287.37€0.000000131056€0.1311

Ranked by generation speed:
1. lfm2.5-thinking:latest — 220.08 tok/s
2. llama3.2:1b — 169.33 tok/s
3. deepseek-r1:1.5b — 164.58 tok/s
4. llama3.2:latest — 81.62 tok/s
5. qwen3.6:35b-mlx — 66.81 tok/s
6. qwen3.6:latest — 57.33 tok/s
7. gpt-oss:latest — 51.89 tok/s
8. glm–4.7-flash:latest — 49.06 tok/s
9. mistral:latest — 36.54 tok/s
10. gemma4:12b-mlx — 25.33 tok/s

#burger #did #enEN #food #Linux #LiteLLM #QEMU #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 24/2026

This was a busy week. Two social events and long work days. Of course also more fiddling with tech. But it all started with the 4th

Digital Independence Day Templin/Uckermark

For the fourth time we met in Templin to show and tell people about alternative to big commercial technology. This time a bunch of new faces showed up and we were a total of 8 people. Its getting traction despite our lousy advertisement efforts.

One quote from my partner in crime resonated with me especially:

You don’t need to switch directly from Windows to Linux. Rather start replacing application by application with their open source alternative. Once you’ve replace InternetExplorer or Chrome with Firefox, MS Office with LibreOffice and Outlook with Thunderbird, you’ve likely already covered the majority of your computer use. When you then switch from Windows to Linux you’ll be met with familiar applications already.

The 5th event will take place on July 5th in Templin again.

Movies & Paintings

Back on Sunday evening Berlin K2 started to watch a movie it seem to like. The story is about a woman at the end of the 18th century. She’s supposed to get a portrait of her painted by a another woman.

The scenery looked more and more familiar the longer I watched. Eventually it struck me. One scene of that movie we’ve got as an painting from my dear friend Cristina Carrillo.

The movie is the french “Portrait of a lady on fire” by director Céline Sciamma and it’s really good.

Greybeard gathering

As it was the 2nd Tuesday of the month our group of old hackers gathered again at the Pratergarten. This time it was warm enough to start sitting outside in the beer garden and in the sun. One guy joked that direct sunlight is not the right environment for hackers.

Why greybeards you ask? Because a lot of the original male software developers of Unix (think Kernighan & Ritchie ) were sporting full beards and eventually those became grey. Funny enough in our group I’m the only one with a beard … and I’m not a hacker.

Always quite an interesting meeting as those guys know a lot beside mere programming and computers. Learned quite some things about Taurus weapon systems this time.

Linux to the rescue

A friend of mine water damaged their HP Laptop. Wouldn’t boot up anymore despite the fans turning when powered on. I took out the harddrive to see if that’s still working. And it is. Got Windows 11 on it. Now while we have access to the mere files, some valuable data is still hidden inside programs and their proprietary formats.

Unfortunately the Disk didn’t fit in own HP laptop as it’s got a different SSD connector. What I had though is a SSD-to-USB adapter. I thought it should be possible to create a virtual machine though that simulates the original Laptop to some extend and use the USB-device as it’s hard drive. The normal VM wizard didn’t lead to success so I asked Perplexity to help me create the correct QEMU/KVM call.

And it delivered. I needed to create a software TPM device first as the original Laptop uses UEFI. After some fiddling I actually got the original OS booting up on my trusty Linux Laptop despite some 10 years hardware difference. The Documentation and explanation of the steps can be found here.

My friend but has now bought a similar laptop as replacement. We’ll put the disc into the new Laptop and will hope that the system will just come up. Let’s see. But good to know that my approach would have worked using virtualization.

Beer & Burgers

On Thursday it was time for our beer & burger gathering again. This time in West Berlin … Upper Burger Grill in Charlottenburg.

The Burger was quite OK. Not the best I ever had … but also not the worst 😉

After the burgers we felt fancy and decided to pay the Monkey Bar a visit. That’s a quite popular bar at the moment at the end of the Bikini House Berlin. It oversees the “Zoologischer Garten” and I guess you could see the monkeys during the day.

The view is indeed stunning. You can see over to the Gedaechtniskirche, the Bikini House and of course the Zoo. What I found most interesting was the audience. Every age group from Teenagers (I hope 16+) to people probably approaching their 80s were there. So they’re doing something right attracting such a diverse age group. Then again the Ku’damm area feels a little weird to me. Everyone seems to be pretending their rich and famous. Some surely are. Most just pretend and want to part of the hype. Also… it seems to be mostly russian speaking people nowadays in that Area.

Elk

This week the Version 1.0 of the alternative web client for Fediverse services named “Elk” was release. I’m hosting my own instance and are using it currently as my main Mastodon Client on the web.

One nice notable feature (among many others) is it’s ability to compose longer threads. The compose window let’s you split your longer writings into multiple properly linked posts. I know that some people struggle with this. Many Fediverse instances have a character limit for their posts – usually 500. I’ve patched my Mastodon instance to allow 5000 characters in a single post. So if your instance has a short limit and you want to post longer texts then consider using Elk for this purpose.

Local LLM stuff

I’ve continued playing with my LiteLLM setup. Also finally got OpenCode configured and used Qwen3.6 with Ollama on my laptop to write me some Ansible playbooks for installing and configuring OpenCode. That worked quite well.

I’ve also tried to calculate the cost of my Ollama setup on my Laptop at the energy price of 30ct/kWh. The M2 Max CPU/GPU seem to be able to churn out ~ 50 Tokens/s while consuming 65W. For 1M tokens it would roughly need 5.5 hours at 65W. That’s about 0,3575 kWh and thus ~ 10,7ct/1M tokens.

Of course I build myself a benchmark tool that produces the numbers for all available models on my machine and spits out a respective config file for LiteLLM

Full Report

ollama-bench Results

Date: 2026–06–15 18:28 Models: 11 Prompts: 3 Runs/prompt: 3 Max tokens: 200
Power draw: 65W Electricity: 30 cent/kWh

Per-Model Details

deepseek-r1:1.5b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed164.58 tok/s±2.04Time to first token345 ms—Total wall time1571 ms—Energy consumed28.22 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000042327—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0423—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200159.46199858.76€0.000000088146#2200165.2113324.29€0.000000036442#3200165.7513124.19€0.000000036278#4200166.0415824.63€0.000000036946#5200165.7813324.22€0.000000036336#6200165.4413324.26€0.000000036397#7200165.3015724.71€0.000000037068#8200163.9513224.45€0.000000036668#9200164.2813424.44€0.000000036665

embeddinggemma:latest

No successful runs.

gemma4:12b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed25.33 tok/s±1.73Time to first token441 ms—Total wall time8376 ms—Energy consumed151.04 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000226563—Cost per 1M tokens€0.2266—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120029.632633169.43€0.000000254139#220025.97126141.34€0.000000212014#320025.60109143.04€0.000000214565#420024.92338151.04€0.000000226557#520024.41112149.95€0.000000224931#620024.25100150.73€0.000000226102#720024.19333155.31€0.000000232968#820024.54106149.07€0.000000223605#920024.49111149.46€0.000000224189

glm–4.7-flash:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed49.06 tok/s±2.71Time to first token1104 ms—Total wall time5202 ms—Energy consumed93.78 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000140672—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1407—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120052.427969212.82€0.000000319226#220052.5022972.97€0.000000109457#320051.7922073.76€0.000000110633#420047.7230181.17€0.000000121749#520048.6822278.23€0.000000117351#620048.0522579.28€0.000000118926#720047.8632181.28€0.000000121927#820048.2822278.84€0.000000118265#920044.2722585.67€0.000000128512

gpt-oss:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed51.89 tok/s±5.22Time to first token1195 ms—Total wall time4883 ms—Energy consumed87.95 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000139035—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1390—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120064.297670194.70€0.000000292055#220056.0432470.33€0.000000105494#320049.2035279.81€0.000000119716#416949.4638768.75€0.000000122042#520050.0838879.18€0.000000118768#614547.3339062.41€0.000000129125#720049.3442880.98€0.000000121468#820050.5940978.83€0.000000118245#919450.6540876.58€0.000000118427

lfm2.5-thinking:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed220.08 tok/s±25.13Time to first token179 ms—Total wall time1110 ms—Energy consumed19.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000029775—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0298—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200254.3090330.53€0.00000004579#2200256.758115.55€0.000000023331#3200246.508116.14€0.000000024204#4200193.0210620.65€0.000000030974#5200197.348719.90€0.000000029855#6200205.028219.13€0.000000028694#7200206.7010519.39€0.000000029091#8200209.448218.75€0.000000028132#9200211.658418.60€0.000000027903

llama3.2:1b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated133—Generation speed169.33 tok/s±9.77Time to first token348 ms—Total wall time1163 ms—Energy consumed20.82 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000046968—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0470—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200155.79178555.43€0.000000083146#2200156.2716626.15€0.000000039231#3200161.4316525.39€0.000000038085#468185.091799.90€0.00000004367#5117173.1216515.21€0.000000039005#672176.9816210.30€0.000000042897#7116173.4717915.34€0.000000039682#8117169.4916515.47€0.000000039674#9107172.3616414.20€0.000000039822

llama3.2:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated140—Generation speed81.62 tok/s±2.52Time to first token524 ms—Total wall time2250 ms—Energy consumed40.45 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000086673—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0867—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120080.353315104.81€0.00000015722#220083.2616446.41€0.000000069612#320083.5116646.32€0.000000069477#411386.1620027.37€0.000000072663#510482.3816525.83€0.000000074512#611381.1116728.21€0.000000074901#711180.1320628.79€0.000000077798#810880.2516627.35€0.000000075972#911177.4316728.94€0.000000078218

mistral:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed36.54 tok/s±1.59Time to first token373 ms—Total wall time5595 ms—Energy consumed100.72 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000159125—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1591—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120039.252688140.58€0.00000021087#220039.288393.54€0.000000140311#320035.6549102.23€0.000000153349#420035.21160105.52€0.000000158286#520035.4552102.85€0.000000154271#617335.665588.65€0.000000153722#717236.4115888.21€0.000000153854#818735.905495.07€0.000000152513#917735.995489.84€0.000000152266

qwen3.6:35b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed66.81 tok/s±2.82Time to first token980 ms—Total wall time3987 ms—Energy consumed71.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000107768—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1078—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120069.277994196.48€0.000000294719#220070.3610053.15€0.00000007972#320070.296152.49€0.000000078734#420068.6716155.50€0.000000083247#520065.4810156.97€0.000000085461#620065.106556.64€0.000000084967#720065.0016958.62€0.000000087933#820063.759858.43€0.000000087638#920063.347358.33€0.000000087495

qwen3.6:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed57.33 tok/s±1.49Time to first token1332 ms—Total wall time4859 ms—Energy consumed87.37 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000131056—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1311—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120059.589619234.39€0.000000351579#220059.6027765.84€0.000000098764#320058.2427167.18€0.000000100772#420056.8936070.31€0.000000105468#520055.6927470.08€0.000000105124#620056.1627269.55€0.000000104324#720057.0337370.38€0.000000105568#820056.9327168.61€0.000000102909#920055.8727470.00€0.000000104995

Model Comparison

ModelSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost/token (EUR)Cost/1M tokens (EUR)deepseek-r1:1.5b164.5834528.22€0.000000042327€0.0423embeddinggemma:latest—————gemma4:12b-mlx25.33441151.04€0.000000226563€0.2266glm–4.7-flash:latest49.06110493.78€0.000000140672€0.1407gpt-oss:latest51.89119587.95€0.000000139035€0.1390lfm2.5-thinking:latest220.0817919.85€0.000000029775€0.0298llama3.2:1b169.3334820.82€0.000000046968€0.0470llama3.2:latest81.6252440.45€0.000000086673€0.0867mistral:latest36.54373100.72€0.000000159125€0.1591qwen3.6:35b-mlx66.8198071.85€0.000000107768€0.1078qwen3.6:latest57.33133287.37€0.000000131056€0.1311

Ranked by generation speed:
1. lfm2.5-thinking:latest — 220.08 tok/s
2. llama3.2:1b — 169.33 tok/s
3. deepseek-r1:1.5b — 164.58 tok/s
4. llama3.2:latest — 81.62 tok/s
5. qwen3.6:35b-mlx — 66.81 tok/s
6. qwen3.6:latest — 57.33 tok/s
7. gpt-oss:latest — 51.89 tok/s
8. glm–4.7-flash:latest — 49.06 tok/s
9. mistral:latest — 36.54 tok/s
10. gemma4:12b-mlx — 25.33 tok/s

#burger #did #enEN #food #Linux #LiteLLM #QEMU #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 24/2026

This was a busy week. Two social events and long work days. Of course also more fiddling with tech. But it all started with the 4th

Digital Independence Day Templin/Uckermark

For the fourth time we met in Templin to show and tell people about alternative to big commercial technology. This time a bunch of new faces showed up and we were a total of 8 people. Its getting traction despite our lousy advertisement efforts.

One quote from my partner in crime resonated with me especially:

You don’t need to switch directly from Windows to Linux. Rather start replacing application by application with their open source alternative. Once you’ve replace InternetExplorer or Chrome with Firefox, MS Office with LibreOffice and Outlook with Thunderbird, you’ve likely already covered the majority of your computer use. When you then switch from Windows to Linux you’ll be met with familiar applications already.

The 5th event will take place on July 5th in Templin again.

Movies & Paintings

Back on Sunday evening Berlin K2 started to watch a movie it seem to like. The story is about a woman at the end of the 18th century. She’s supposed to get a portrait of her painted by a another woman.

The scenery looked more and more familiar the longer I watched. Eventually it struck me. One scene of that movie we’ve got as an painting from my dear friend Cristina Carrillo.

The movie is the french “Portrait of a lady on fire” by director Céline Sciamma and it’s really good.

Greybeard gathering

As it was the 2nd Tuesday of the month our group of old hackers gathered again at the Pratergarten. This time it was warm enough to start sitting outside in the beer garden and in the sun. One guy joked that direct sunlight is not the right environment for hackers.

Why greybeards you ask? Because a lot of the original male software developers of Unix (think Kernighan & Ritchie ) were sporting full beards and eventually those became grey. Funny enough in our group I’m the only one with a beard … and I’m not a hacker.

Always quite an interesting meeting as those guys know a lot beside mere programming and computers. Learned quite some things about Taurus weapon systems this time.

Linux to the rescue

A friend of mine water damaged their HP Laptop. Wouldn’t boot up anymore despite the fans turning when powered on. I took out the harddrive to see if that’s still working. And it is. Got Windows 11 on it. Now while we have access to the mere files, some valuable data is still hidden inside programs and their proprietary formats.

Unfortunately the Disk didn’t fit in own HP laptop as it’s got a different SSD connector. What I had though is a SSD-to-USB adapter. I thought it should be possible to create a virtual machine though that simulates the original Laptop to some extend and use the USB-device as it’s hard drive. The normal VM wizard didn’t lead to success so I asked Perplexity to help me create the correct QEMU/KVM call.

And it delivered. I needed to create a software TPM device first as the original Laptop uses UEFI. After some fiddling I actually got the original OS booting up on my trusty Linux Laptop despite some 10 years hardware difference. The Documentation and explanation of the steps can be found here.

My friend but has now bought a similar laptop as replacement. We’ll put the disc into the new Laptop and will hope that the system will just come up. Let’s see. But good to know that my approach would have worked using virtualization.

Beer & Burgers

On Thursday it was time for our beer & burger gathering again. This time in West Berlin … Upper Burger Grill in Charlottenburg.

The Burger was quite OK. Not the best I ever had … but also not the worst 😉

After the burgers we felt fancy and decided to pay the Monkey Bar a visit. That’s a quite popular bar at the moment at the end of the Bikini House Berlin. It oversees the “Zoologischer Garten” and I guess you could see the monkeys during the day.

The view is indeed stunning. You can see over to the Gedaechtniskirche, the Bikini House and of course the Zoo. What I found most interesting was the audience. Every age group from Teenagers (I hope 16+) to people probably approaching their 80s were there. So they’re doing something right attracting such a diverse age group. Then again the Ku’damm area feels a little weird to me. Everyone seems to be pretending their rich and famous. Some surely are. Most just pretend and want to part of the hype. Also… it seems to be mostly russian speaking people nowadays in that Area.

Elk

This week the Version 1.0 of the alternative web client for Fediverse services named “Elk” was release. I’m hosting my own instance and are using it currently as my main Mastodon Client on the web.

One nice notable feature (among many others) is it’s ability to compose longer threads. The compose window let’s you split your longer writings into multiple properly linked posts. I know that some people struggle with this. Many Fediverse instances have a character limit for their posts – usually 500. I’ve patched my Mastodon instance to allow 5000 characters in a single post. So if your instance has a short limit and you want to post longer texts then consider using Elk for this purpose.

Local LLM stuff

I’ve continued playing with my LiteLLM setup. Also finally got OpenCode configured and used Qwen3.6 with Ollama on my laptop to write me some Ansible playbooks for installing and configuring OpenCode. That worked quite well.

I’ve also tried to calculate the cost of my Ollama setup on my Laptop at the energy price of 30ct/kWh. The M2 Max CPU/GPU seem to be able to churn out ~ 50 Tokens/s while consuming 65W. For 1M tokens it would roughly need 5.5 hours at 65W. That’s about 0,3575 kWh and thus ~ 10,7ct/1M tokens.

Of course I build myself a benchmark tool that produces the numbers for all available models on my machine and spits out a respective config file for LiteLLM

Full Report

ollama-bench Results

Date: 2026–06–15 18:28 Models: 11 Prompts: 3 Runs/prompt: 3 Max tokens: 200
Power draw: 65W Electricity: 30 cent/kWh

Per-Model Details

deepseek-r1:1.5b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed164.58 tok/s±2.04Time to first token345 ms—Total wall time1571 ms—Energy consumed28.22 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000042327—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0423—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200159.46199858.76€0.000000088146#2200165.2113324.29€0.000000036442#3200165.7513124.19€0.000000036278#4200166.0415824.63€0.000000036946#5200165.7813324.22€0.000000036336#6200165.4413324.26€0.000000036397#7200165.3015724.71€0.000000037068#8200163.9513224.45€0.000000036668#9200164.2813424.44€0.000000036665

embeddinggemma:latest

No successful runs.

gemma4:12b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed25.33 tok/s±1.73Time to first token441 ms—Total wall time8376 ms—Energy consumed151.04 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000226563—Cost per 1M tokens€0.2266—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120029.632633169.43€0.000000254139#220025.97126141.34€0.000000212014#320025.60109143.04€0.000000214565#420024.92338151.04€0.000000226557#520024.41112149.95€0.000000224931#620024.25100150.73€0.000000226102#720024.19333155.31€0.000000232968#820024.54106149.07€0.000000223605#920024.49111149.46€0.000000224189

glm–4.7-flash:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed49.06 tok/s±2.71Time to first token1104 ms—Total wall time5202 ms—Energy consumed93.78 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000140672—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1407—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120052.427969212.82€0.000000319226#220052.5022972.97€0.000000109457#320051.7922073.76€0.000000110633#420047.7230181.17€0.000000121749#520048.6822278.23€0.000000117351#620048.0522579.28€0.000000118926#720047.8632181.28€0.000000121927#820048.2822278.84€0.000000118265#920044.2722585.67€0.000000128512

gpt-oss:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed51.89 tok/s±5.22Time to first token1195 ms—Total wall time4883 ms—Energy consumed87.95 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000139035—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1390—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120064.297670194.70€0.000000292055#220056.0432470.33€0.000000105494#320049.2035279.81€0.000000119716#416949.4638768.75€0.000000122042#520050.0838879.18€0.000000118768#614547.3339062.41€0.000000129125#720049.3442880.98€0.000000121468#820050.5940978.83€0.000000118245#919450.6540876.58€0.000000118427

lfm2.5-thinking:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed220.08 tok/s±25.13Time to first token179 ms—Total wall time1110 ms—Energy consumed19.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000029775—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0298—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200254.3090330.53€0.00000004579#2200256.758115.55€0.000000023331#3200246.508116.14€0.000000024204#4200193.0210620.65€0.000000030974#5200197.348719.90€0.000000029855#6200205.028219.13€0.000000028694#7200206.7010519.39€0.000000029091#8200209.448218.75€0.000000028132#9200211.658418.60€0.000000027903

llama3.2:1b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated133—Generation speed169.33 tok/s±9.77Time to first token348 ms—Total wall time1163 ms—Energy consumed20.82 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000046968—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0470—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200155.79178555.43€0.000000083146#2200156.2716626.15€0.000000039231#3200161.4316525.39€0.000000038085#468185.091799.90€0.00000004367#5117173.1216515.21€0.000000039005#672176.9816210.30€0.000000042897#7116173.4717915.34€0.000000039682#8117169.4916515.47€0.000000039674#9107172.3616414.20€0.000000039822

llama3.2:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated140—Generation speed81.62 tok/s±2.52Time to first token524 ms—Total wall time2250 ms—Energy consumed40.45 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000086673—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0867—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120080.353315104.81€0.00000015722#220083.2616446.41€0.000000069612#320083.5116646.32€0.000000069477#411386.1620027.37€0.000000072663#510482.3816525.83€0.000000074512#611381.1116728.21€0.000000074901#711180.1320628.79€0.000000077798#810880.2516627.35€0.000000075972#911177.4316728.94€0.000000078218

mistral:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed36.54 tok/s±1.59Time to first token373 ms—Total wall time5595 ms—Energy consumed100.72 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000159125—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1591—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120039.252688140.58€0.00000021087#220039.288393.54€0.000000140311#320035.6549102.23€0.000000153349#420035.21160105.52€0.000000158286#520035.4552102.85€0.000000154271#617335.665588.65€0.000000153722#717236.4115888.21€0.000000153854#818735.905495.07€0.000000152513#917735.995489.84€0.000000152266

qwen3.6:35b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed66.81 tok/s±2.82Time to first token980 ms—Total wall time3987 ms—Energy consumed71.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000107768—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1078—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120069.277994196.48€0.000000294719#220070.3610053.15€0.00000007972#320070.296152.49€0.000000078734#420068.6716155.50€0.000000083247#520065.4810156.97€0.000000085461#620065.106556.64€0.000000084967#720065.0016958.62€0.000000087933#820063.759858.43€0.000000087638#920063.347358.33€0.000000087495

qwen3.6:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed57.33 tok/s±1.49Time to first token1332 ms—Total wall time4859 ms—Energy consumed87.37 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000131056—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1311—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120059.589619234.39€0.000000351579#220059.6027765.84€0.000000098764#320058.2427167.18€0.000000100772#420056.8936070.31€0.000000105468#520055.6927470.08€0.000000105124#620056.1627269.55€0.000000104324#720057.0337370.38€0.000000105568#820056.9327168.61€0.000000102909#920055.8727470.00€0.000000104995

Model Comparison

ModelSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost/token (EUR)Cost/1M tokens (EUR)deepseek-r1:1.5b164.5834528.22€0.000000042327€0.0423embeddinggemma:latest—————gemma4:12b-mlx25.33441151.04€0.000000226563€0.2266glm–4.7-flash:latest49.06110493.78€0.000000140672€0.1407gpt-oss:latest51.89119587.95€0.000000139035€0.1390lfm2.5-thinking:latest220.0817919.85€0.000000029775€0.0298llama3.2:1b169.3334820.82€0.000000046968€0.0470llama3.2:latest81.6252440.45€0.000000086673€0.0867mistral:latest36.54373100.72€0.000000159125€0.1591qwen3.6:35b-mlx66.8198071.85€0.000000107768€0.1078qwen3.6:latest57.33133287.37€0.000000131056€0.1311

Ranked by generation speed:
1. lfm2.5-thinking:latest — 220.08 tok/s
2. llama3.2:1b — 169.33 tok/s
3. deepseek-r1:1.5b — 164.58 tok/s
4. llama3.2:latest — 81.62 tok/s
5. qwen3.6:35b-mlx — 66.81 tok/s
6. qwen3.6:latest — 57.33 tok/s
7. gpt-oss:latest — 51.89 tok/s
8. glm–4.7-flash:latest — 49.06 tok/s
9. mistral:latest — 36.54 tok/s
10. gemma4:12b-mlx — 25.33 tok/s

#burger #did #enEN #food #Linux #LiteLLM #QEMU #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 24/2026

This was a busy week. Two social events and long work days. Of course also more fiddling with tech. But it all started with the 4th

Digital Independence Day Templin/Uckermark

For the fourth time we met in Templin to show and tell people about alternative to big commercial technology. This time a bunch of new faces showed up and we were a total of 8 people. Its getting traction despite our lousy advertisement efforts.

One quote from my partner in crime resonated with me especially:

You don’t need to switch directly from Windows to Linux. Rather start replacing application by application with their open source alternative. Once you’ve replace InternetExplorer or Chrome with Firefox, MS Office with LibreOffice and Outlook with Thunderbird, you’ve likely already covered the majority of your computer use. When you then switch from Windows to Linux you’ll be met with familiar applications already.

The 5th event will take place on July 5th in Templin again.

Movies & Paintings

Back on Sunday evening Berlin K2 started to watch a movie it seem to like. The story is about a woman at the end of the 18th century. She’s supposed to get a portrait of her painted by a another woman.

The scenery looked more and more familiar the longer I watched. Eventually it struck me. One scene of that movie we’ve got as an painting from my dear friend Cristina Carrillo.

The movie is the french “Portrait of a lady on fire” by director Céline Sciamma and it’s really good.

Greybeard gathering

As it was the 2nd Tuesday of the month our group of old hackers gathered again at the Pratergarten. This time it was warm enough to start sitting outside in the beer garden and in the sun. One guy joked that direct sunlight is not the right environment for hackers.

Why greybeards you ask? Because a lot of the original male software developers of Unix (think Kernighan & Ritchie ) were sporting full beards and eventually those became grey. Funny enough in our group I’m the only one with a beard … and I’m not a hacker.

Always quite an interesting meeting as those guys know a lot beside mere programming and computers. Learned quite some things about Taurus weapon systems this time.

Linux to the rescue

A friend of mine water damaged their HP Laptop. Wouldn’t boot up anymore despite the fans turning when powered on. I took out the harddrive to see if that’s still working. And it is. Got Windows 11 on it. Now while we have access to the mere files, some valuable data is still hidden inside programs and their proprietary formats.

Unfortunately the Disk didn’t fit in own HP laptop as it’s got a different SSD connector. What I had though is a SSD-to-USB adapter. I thought it should be possible to create a virtual machine though that simulates the original Laptop to some extend and use the USB-device as it’s hard drive. The normal VM wizard didn’t lead to success so I asked Perplexity to help me create the correct QEMU/KVM call.

And it delivered. I needed to create a software TPM device first as the original Laptop uses UEFI. After some fiddling I actually got the original OS booting up on my trusty Linux Laptop despite some 10 years hardware difference. The Documentation and explanation of the steps can be found here.

My friend but has now bought a similar laptop as replacement. We’ll put the disc into the new Laptop and will hope that the system will just come up. Let’s see. But good to know that my approach would have worked using virtualization.

Beer & Burgers

On Thursday it was time for our beer & burger gathering again. This time in West Berlin … Upper Burger Grill in Charlottenburg.

The Burger was quite OK. Not the best I ever had … but also not the worst 😉

After the burgers we felt fancy and decided to pay the Monkey Bar a visit. That’s a quite popular bar at the moment at the end of the Bikini House Berlin. It oversees the “Zoologischer Garten” and I guess you could see the monkeys during the day.

The view is indeed stunning. You can see over to the Gedaechtniskirche, the Bikini House and of course the Zoo. What I found most interesting was the audience. Every age group from Teenagers (I hope 16+) to people probably approaching their 80s were there. So they’re doing something right attracting such a diverse age group. Then again the Ku’damm area feels a little weird to me. Everyone seems to be pretending their rich and famous. Some surely are. Most just pretend and want to part of the hype. Also… it seems to be mostly russian speaking people nowadays in that Area.

Elk

This week the Version 1.0 of the alternative web client for Fediverse services named “Elk” was release. I’m hosting my own instance and are using it currently as my main Mastodon Client on the web.

One nice notable feature (among many others) is it’s ability to compose longer threads. The compose window let’s you split your longer writings into multiple properly linked posts. I know that some people struggle with this. Many Fediverse instances have a character limit for their posts – usually 500. I’ve patched my Mastodon instance to allow 5000 characters in a single post. So if your instance has a short limit and you want to post longer texts then consider using Elk for this purpose.

Local LLM stuff

I’ve continued playing with my LiteLLM setup. Also finally got OpenCode configured and used Qwen3.6 with Ollama on my laptop to write me some Ansible playbooks for installing and configuring OpenCode. That worked quite well.

I’ve also tried to calculate the cost of my Ollama setup on my Laptop at the energy price of 30ct/kWh. The M2 Max CPU/GPU seem to be able to churn out ~ 50 Tokens/s while consuming 65W. For 1M tokens it would roughly need 5.5 hours at 65W. That’s about 0,3575 kWh and thus ~ 10,7ct/1M tokens.

Of course I build myself a benchmark tool that produces the numbers for all available models on my machine and spits out a respective config file for LiteLLM

Full Report

ollama-bench Results

Date: 2026–06–15 18:28 Models: 11 Prompts: 3 Runs/prompt: 3 Max tokens: 200
Power draw: 65W Electricity: 30 cent/kWh

Per-Model Details

deepseek-r1:1.5b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed164.58 tok/s±2.04Time to first token345 ms—Total wall time1571 ms—Energy consumed28.22 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000042327—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0423—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200159.46199858.76€0.000000088146#2200165.2113324.29€0.000000036442#3200165.7513124.19€0.000000036278#4200166.0415824.63€0.000000036946#5200165.7813324.22€0.000000036336#6200165.4413324.26€0.000000036397#7200165.3015724.71€0.000000037068#8200163.9513224.45€0.000000036668#9200164.2813424.44€0.000000036665

embeddinggemma:latest

No successful runs.

gemma4:12b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed25.33 tok/s±1.73Time to first token441 ms—Total wall time8376 ms—Energy consumed151.04 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000226563—Cost per 1M tokens€0.2266—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120029.632633169.43€0.000000254139#220025.97126141.34€0.000000212014#320025.60109143.04€0.000000214565#420024.92338151.04€0.000000226557#520024.41112149.95€0.000000224931#620024.25100150.73€0.000000226102#720024.19333155.31€0.000000232968#820024.54106149.07€0.000000223605#920024.49111149.46€0.000000224189

glm–4.7-flash:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed49.06 tok/s±2.71Time to first token1104 ms—Total wall time5202 ms—Energy consumed93.78 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000140672—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1407—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120052.427969212.82€0.000000319226#220052.5022972.97€0.000000109457#320051.7922073.76€0.000000110633#420047.7230181.17€0.000000121749#520048.6822278.23€0.000000117351#620048.0522579.28€0.000000118926#720047.8632181.28€0.000000121927#820048.2822278.84€0.000000118265#920044.2722585.67€0.000000128512

gpt-oss:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed51.89 tok/s±5.22Time to first token1195 ms—Total wall time4883 ms—Energy consumed87.95 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000139035—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1390—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120064.297670194.70€0.000000292055#220056.0432470.33€0.000000105494#320049.2035279.81€0.000000119716#416949.4638768.75€0.000000122042#520050.0838879.18€0.000000118768#614547.3339062.41€0.000000129125#720049.3442880.98€0.000000121468#820050.5940978.83€0.000000118245#919450.6540876.58€0.000000118427

lfm2.5-thinking:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed220.08 tok/s±25.13Time to first token179 ms—Total wall time1110 ms—Energy consumed19.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000029775—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0298—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200254.3090330.53€0.00000004579#2200256.758115.55€0.000000023331#3200246.508116.14€0.000000024204#4200193.0210620.65€0.000000030974#5200197.348719.90€0.000000029855#6200205.028219.13€0.000000028694#7200206.7010519.39€0.000000029091#8200209.448218.75€0.000000028132#9200211.658418.60€0.000000027903

llama3.2:1b

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated133—Generation speed169.33 tok/s±9.77Time to first token348 ms—Total wall time1163 ms—Energy consumed20.82 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000046968—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0470—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#1200155.79178555.43€0.000000083146#2200156.2716626.15€0.000000039231#3200161.4316525.39€0.000000038085#468185.091799.90€0.00000004367#5117173.1216515.21€0.000000039005#672176.9816210.30€0.000000042897#7116173.4717915.34€0.000000039682#8117169.4916515.47€0.000000039674#9107172.3616414.20€0.000000039822

llama3.2:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated140—Generation speed81.62 tok/s±2.52Time to first token524 ms—Total wall time2250 ms—Energy consumed40.45 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000086673—Cost per 1M tokens€0.0867—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120080.353315104.81€0.00000015722#220083.2616446.41€0.000000069612#320083.5116646.32€0.000000069477#411386.1620027.37€0.000000072663#510482.3816525.83€0.000000074512#611381.1116728.21€0.000000074901#711180.1320628.79€0.000000077798#810880.2516627.35€0.000000075972#911177.4316728.94€0.000000078218

mistral:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated190—Generation speed36.54 tok/s±1.59Time to first token373 ms—Total wall time5595 ms—Energy consumed100.72 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000159125—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1591—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120039.252688140.58€0.00000021087#220039.288393.54€0.000000140311#320035.6549102.23€0.000000153349#420035.21160105.52€0.000000158286#520035.4552102.85€0.000000154271#617335.665588.65€0.000000153722#717236.4115888.21€0.000000153854#818735.905495.07€0.000000152513#917735.995489.84€0.000000152266

qwen3.6:35b-mlx

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed66.81 tok/s±2.82Time to first token980 ms—Total wall time3987 ms—Energy consumed71.85 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000107768—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1078—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120069.277994196.48€0.000000294719#220070.3610053.15€0.00000007972#320070.296152.49€0.000000078734#420068.6716155.50€0.000000083247#520065.4810156.97€0.000000085461#620065.106556.64€0.000000084967#720065.0016958.62€0.000000087933#820063.759858.43€0.000000087638#920063.347358.33€0.000000087495

qwen3.6:latest

MetricAverageStd DevTokens generated200—Generation speed57.33 tok/s±1.49Time to first token1332 ms—Total wall time4859 ms—Energy consumed87.37 µkWh—Cost per token€0.000000131056—Cost per 1M tokens€0.1311—

Per-run breakdown:

RunTokensSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost per token#120059.589619234.39€0.000000351579#220059.6027765.84€0.000000098764#320058.2427167.18€0.000000100772#420056.8936070.31€0.000000105468#520055.6927470.08€0.000000105124#620056.1627269.55€0.000000104324#720057.0337370.38€0.000000105568#820056.9327168.61€0.000000102909#920055.8727470.00€0.000000104995

Model Comparison

ModelSpeed (tok/s)TTFT (ms)Energy (µkWh)Cost/token (EUR)Cost/1M tokens (EUR)deepseek-r1:1.5b164.5834528.22€0.000000042327€0.0423embeddinggemma:latest—————gemma4:12b-mlx25.33441151.04€0.000000226563€0.2266glm–4.7-flash:latest49.06110493.78€0.000000140672€0.1407gpt-oss:latest51.89119587.95€0.000000139035€0.1390lfm2.5-thinking:latest220.0817919.85€0.000000029775€0.0298llama3.2:1b169.3334820.82€0.000000046968€0.0470llama3.2:latest81.6252440.45€0.000000086673€0.0867mistral:latest36.54373100.72€0.000000159125€0.1591qwen3.6:35b-mlx66.8198071.85€0.000000107768€0.1078qwen3.6:latest57.33133287.37€0.000000131056€0.1311

Ranked by generation speed:
1. lfm2.5-thinking:latest — 220.08 tok/s
2. llama3.2:1b — 169.33 tok/s
3. deepseek-r1:1.5b — 164.58 tok/s
4. llama3.2:latest — 81.62 tok/s
5. qwen3.6:35b-mlx — 66.81 tok/s
6. qwen3.6:latest — 57.33 tok/s
7. gpt-oss:latest — 51.89 tok/s
8. glm–4.7-flash:latest — 49.06 tok/s
9. mistral:latest — 36.54 tok/s
10. gemma4:12b-mlx — 25.33 tok/s

#burger #did #enEN #food #Linux #LiteLLM #QEMU #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 23/2026

Last week was again very busy work wise. Current project involves multiple meetings per day. But that’s not the only project I’m involved in. So hard to find time to actually work on stuff and process all the meetings.

AI tools at least help summarise the meeting transcripts and extract action items from them. This is a bit of an advantage over earlier days when you might have had a meeting recording that no-one ever listens to again. Now we get at least half-decent meeting summaries and action items extracted. But still no time to actually follow up on these 😉

Got a replacement battery for the shiny HP Spectre Laptop I recently got from Slamr/Fi. Swap out was easy and now the thingy lasts between 2-4 hours depending on the workload. I love this device. It’s almost like a new MacBook Air. Small, sleek, fast and with stamina. Given it’s about 10 year old hardware I’m amazed.

LiteLLM

started to play around with LiteLLM as an AI and MCP gateway. Part of my job fortunately but also out of curiosity. Idea is to hide all the various LLM providers behind a central gateway/proxy and control access and budgets centrally.

In my case the LLM providers are Ollama on my Laptop and desktop server as well as my OpenAI subscription. I’ve also registered my Paperless MCP server at the gateway so tools can use it via HTTPS.

My use case of n8n here is, that a new Paperless NGX document triggers an n8n workflow. This workflow will summarise the document content and populate this into and custom field of the Paperless document. Paperless NGX doesn’t do this out of the box yet. Also write myself a few SKILLs to analyse and optimise Paperless documents with tools like OpenCode or Claude using my MCP.

Flowers

Near Templin is a field which is planted with poppy seeds this year. Last week that was in full bloom and it’s obviously very beautiful. Many cars stopped for the people to get out take pictures…. so did I 🙂

Reading

Making good progress on my current book “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and quite like it. So much so that I also got a German copy of the book for my kids. I’m reading a crappy version from Apple Books. But at least that way I can read in the gym while being on the machines.

Konnichiwa

And we’ve finally been able to check out the Japanese style restaurant “TOWA” in Eberswalde. Very lovely place and delicious food. We’ll be back

#enEN #Flowers #food #Hardware #Linux #refurbish #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 23/2026

Last week was again very busy work wise. Current project involves multiple meetings per day. But that’s not the only project I’m involved in. So hard to find time to actually work on stuff and process all the meetings.

AI tools at least help summarise the meeting transcripts and extract action items from them. This is a bit of an advantage over earlier days when you might have had a meeting recording that no-one ever listens to again. Now we get at least half-decent meeting summaries and action items extracted. But still no time to actually follow up on these 😉

Got a replacement battery for the shiny HP Spectre Laptop I recently got from Slamr/Fi. Swap out was easy and now the thingy lasts between 2-4 hours depending on the workload. I love this device. It’s almost like a new MacBook Air. Small, sleek, fast and with stamina. Given it’s about 10 year old hardware I’m amazed.

LiteLLM

started to play around with LiteLLM as an AI and MCP gateway. Part of my job fortunately but also out of curiosity. Idea is to hide all the various LLM providers behind a central gateway/proxy and control access and budgets centrally.

In my case the LLM providers are Ollama on my Laptop and desktop server as well as my OpenAI subscription. I’ve also registered my Paperless MCP server at the gateway so tools can use it via HTTPS.

My use case of n8n here is, that a new Paperless NGX document triggers an n8n workflow. This workflow will summarise the document content and populate this into and custom field of the Paperless document. Paperless NGX doesn’t do this out of the box yet. Also write myself a few SKILLs to analyse and optimise Paperless documents with tools like OpenCode or Claude using my MCP.

Flowers

Near Templin is a field which is planted with poppy seeds this year. Last week that was in full bloom and it’s obviously very beautiful. Many cars stopped for the people to get out take pictures…. so did I 🙂

Reading

Making good progress on my current book “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and quite like it. So much so that I also got a German copy of the book for my kids. I’m reading a crappy version from Apple Books. But at least that way I can read in the gym while being on the machines.

Konnichiwa

And we’ve finally been able to check out the Japanese style restaurant “TOWA” in Eberswalde. Very lovely place and delicious food. We’ll be back

#enEN #Flowers #food #Hardware #Linux #refurbish #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 23/2026

Last week was again very busy work wise. Current project involves multiple meetings per day. But that’s not the only project I’m involved in. So hard to find time to actually work on stuff and process all the meetings.

AI tools at least help summarise the meeting transcripts and extract action items from them. This is a bit of an advantage over earlier days when you might have had a meeting recording that no-one ever listens to again. Now we get at least half-decent meeting summaries and action items extracted. But still no time to actually follow up on these 😉

Got a replacement battery for the shiny HP Spectre Laptop I recently got from Slamr/Fi. Swap out was easy and now the thingy lasts between 2-4 hours depending on the workload. I love this device. It’s almost like a new MacBook Air. Small, sleek, fast and with stamina. Given it’s about 10 year old hardware I’m amazed.

LiteLLM

started to play around with LiteLLM as an AI and MCP gateway. Part of my job fortunately but also out of curiosity. Idea is to hide all the various LLM providers behind a central gateway/proxy and control access and budgets centrally.

In my case the LLM providers are Ollama on my Laptop and desktop server as well as my OpenAI subscription. I’ve also registered my Paperless MCP server at the gateway so tools can use it via HTTPS.

My use case of n8n here is, that a new Paperless NGX document triggers an n8n workflow. This workflow will summarise the document content and populate this into and custom field of the Paperless document. Paperless NGX doesn’t do this out of the box yet. Also write myself a few SKILLs to analyse and optimise Paperless documents with tools like OpenCode or Claude using my MCP.

Flowers

Near Templin is a field which is planted with poppy seeds this year. Last week that was in full bloom and it’s obviously very beautiful. Many cars stopped for the people to get out take pictures…. so did I 🙂

Reading

Making good progress on my current book “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and quite like it. So much so that I also got a German copy of the book for my kids. I’m reading a crappy version from Apple Books. But at least that way I can read in the gym while being on the machines.

Konnichiwa

And we’ve finally been able to check out the Japanese style restaurant “TOWA” in Eberswalde. Very lovely place and delicious food. We’ll be back

#enEN #Flowers #food #Hardware #Linux #refurbish #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 23/2026

Last week was again very busy work wise. Current project involves multiple meetings per day. But that’s not the only project I’m involved in. So hard to find time to actually work on stuff and process all the meetings.

AI tools at least help summarise the meeting transcripts and extract action items from them. This is a bit of an advantage over earlier days when you might have had a meeting recording that no-one ever listens to again. Now we get at least half-decent meeting summaries and action items extracted. But still no time to actually follow up on these 😉

Got a replacement battery for the shiny HP Spectre Laptop I recently got from Slamr/Fi. Swap out was easy and now the thingy lasts between 2-4 hours depending on the workload. I love this device. It’s almost like a new MacBook Air. Small, sleek, fast and with stamina. Given it’s about 10 year old hardware I’m amazed.

LiteLLM

started to play around with LiteLLM as an AI and MCP gateway. Part of my job fortunately but also out of curiosity. Idea is to hide all the various LLM providers behind a central gateway/proxy and control access and budgets centrally.

In my case the LLM providers are Ollama on my Laptop and desktop server as well as my OpenAI subscription. I’ve also registered my Paperless MCP server at the gateway so tools can use it via HTTPS.

My use case of n8n here is, that a new Paperless NGX document triggers an n8n workflow. This workflow will summarise the document content and populate this into and custom field of the Paperless document. Paperless NGX doesn’t do this out of the box yet. Also write myself a few SKILLs to analyse and optimise Paperless documents with tools like OpenCode or Claude using my MCP.

Flowers

Near Templin is a field which is planted with poppy seeds this year. Last week that was in full bloom and it’s obviously very beautiful. Many cars stopped for the people to get out take pictures…. so did I 🙂

Reading

Making good progress on my current book “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and quite like it. So much so that I also got a German copy of the book for my kids. I’m reading a crappy version from Apple Books. But at least that way I can read in the gym while being on the machines.

Konnichiwa

And we’ve finally been able to check out the Japanese style restaurant “TOWA” in Eberswalde. Very lovely place and delicious food. We’ll be back

#enEN #Flowers #food #Hardware #Linux #refurbish #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 23/2026

Last week was again very busy work wise. Current project involves multiple meetings per day. But that’s not the only project I’m involved in. So hard to find time to actually work on stuff and process all the meetings.

AI tools at least help summarise the meeting transcripts and extract action items from them. This is a bit of an advantage over earlier days when you might have had a meeting recording that no-one ever listens to again. Now we get at least half-decent meeting summaries and action items extracted. But still no time to actually follow up on these 😉

Got a replacement battery for the shiny HP Spectre Laptop I recently got from Slamr/Fi. Swap out was easy and now the thingy lasts between 2-4 hours depending on the workload. I love this device. It’s almost like a new MacBook Air. Small, sleek, fast and with stamina. Given it’s about 10 year old hardware I’m amazed.

LiteLLM

started to play around with LiteLLM as an AI and MCP gateway. Part of my job fortunately but also out of curiosity. Idea is to hide all the various LLM providers behind a central gateway/proxy and control access and budgets centrally.

In my case the LLM providers are Ollama on my Laptop and desktop server as well as my OpenAI subscription. I’ve also registered my Paperless MCP server at the gateway so tools can use it via HTTPS.

My use case of n8n here is, that a new Paperless NGX document triggers an n8n workflow. This workflow will summarise the document content and populate this into and custom field of the Paperless document. Paperless NGX doesn’t do this out of the box yet. Also write myself a few SKILLs to analyse and optimise Paperless documents with tools like OpenCode or Claude using my MCP.

Flowers

Near Templin is a field which is planted with poppy seeds this year. Last week that was in full bloom and it’s obviously very beautiful. Many cars stopped for the people to get out take pictures…. so did I 🙂

Reading

Making good progress on my current book “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and quite like it. So much so that I also got a German copy of the book for my kids. I’m reading a crappy version from Apple Books. But at least that way I can read in the gym while being on the machines.

Konnichiwa

And we’ve finally been able to check out the Japanese style restaurant “TOWA” in Eberswalde. Very lovely place and delicious food. We’ll be back

#enEN #Flowers #food #Hardware #Linux #refurbish #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 22/2026

That first super hot day … in may. Fortunately only one day at a sweltering 30º C. The rest of the week was much more acceptable.

I did saw people post pictures of fallen green leaves claiming that the trees in Berlin are shedding their leaves because of the heat. That of course was utter bullshit as it rained quite heavily the week before and our trees don’t shed their leaves at a mere 30º C. I get climate catastrophe urgency. But bluntly and stupidly faking stuff doesn’t help anyone.

The countryside is very beautiful at this time of the year. Lush green and flowers and blossoms all over the place. We’re quite blessed over here.

Our bees have produced the first bucket full of honey. It’s our first honey since we’ve got them bees two years ago. We’re expecting to get around 50kg of honey this year. And we’ve grown from 2 bee hives to 3. Eventually taking over the beekeeping family tradition that went from my grandfather to my father in law and now to my wife and me.

Paperless NGX MCP

I started creating an MCP server for Paperless NGX. My intention was for me to talk to an LLM and have it modify/improve my Paperless documents. Paperless itself already got quite good AI models to do auto-tagging and detect the best correspondent and document type etc.

But I wanted to be able to have a document summary automatically created and also check whether a more powerful model would be able to improve on the tags etc.

I had searched for an existing MCP server. But the one I found didn’t actually work. Guess it was outdated and also fiddly to install. I don’t like the NPM based software as the NPM repository seems to be a huge security risk these days for all the worms infecting packages.

So I started to create an MCP server in Rust with the help of Claude Code. That worked out quite well and I’ve now got a working MCP that is just a single binary you can drop on your machine. Not additional stuff to be downloaded or installed. I’ve also started to write some skills for Claude and OpenCode to encapsulate my Paperless improvement prompts.

Iris Photos App

Stumbled across the Iris Photos app on Mastodon. This looks interesting and I gave it a try. It started to index my rather large photo archive which lives on my home NFS server. That’s more than 2 TB of data and hundred thousands of picture a few thousand videos. I wasn’t patient enough to let it finish. But I keeps picking up the task whenever I connect the NFS mount again. Definitely spend the 14 bucks of an introductory price as the app looks very promising to me. Especially like the stats feature 😉

Linux rules

Got a beautiful old notebook from a friend. An HP Spectre x360 with an Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM and 256GB SATA SSD. Probably about 10 years old. The screen can be folded so the device doubles as a touch tablet. The screen is quite good although I still don’t get what you’d use a touchscreen on a notebook for 😉

I’ve put Debian Linux with LXQT desktop on it, everything work out of the box and it feels like brand new. Unfortunately the RAM is soldered to the board. But at least the dead battery is swappable and I might order a new one. Quite love this device for it has a usable screen with good resolution and good colours and angle visibility.

Zucchini Schnitzel

Had left over Zucchini and prepared it like a german Schnitzel with egg and breadcrumbs and then pan fried it. Quite delicious and pretty simple to fix.

Jugend Kella PopChor

Last weekend the Jugend Kella PopChor from Templin was on their world tour and visited our little village. The kids played life in front of our church and it was marvellous. Great to see their talent and enthusiasm. Also great to see how much the rather old population of our village enjoyed the event.

#beekeeping #enEN #food #Linux #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 22/2026

That first super hot day … in may. Fortunately only one day at a sweltering 30º C. The rest of the week was much more acceptable.

I did saw people post pictures of fallen green leaves claiming that the trees in Berlin are shedding their leaves because of the heat. That of course was utter bullshit as it rained quite heavily the week before and our trees don’t shed their leaves at a mere 30º C. I get climate catastrophe urgency. But bluntly and stupidly faking stuff doesn’t help anyone.

The countryside is very beautiful at this time of the year. Lush green and flowers and blossoms all over the place. We’re quite blessed over here.

Our bees have produced the first bucket full of honey. It’s our first honey since we’ve got them bees two years ago. We’re expecting to get around 50kg of honey this year. And we’ve grown from 2 bee hives to 3. Eventually taking over the beekeeping family tradition that went from my grandfather to my father in law and now to my wife and me.

Paperless NGX MCP

I started creating an MCP server for Paperless NGX. My intention was for me to talk to an LLM and have it modify/improve my Paperless documents. Paperless itself already got quite good AI models to do auto-tagging and detect the best correspondent and document type etc.

But I wanted to be able to have a document summary automatically created and also check whether a more powerful model would be able to improve on the tags etc.

I had searched for an existing MCP server. But the one I found didn’t actually work. Guess it was outdated and also fiddly to install. I don’t like the NPM based software as the NPM repository seems to be a huge security risk these days for all the worms infecting packages.

So I started to create an MCP server in Rust with the help of Claude Code. That worked out quite well and I’ve now got a working MCP that is just a single binary you can drop on your machine. Not additional stuff to be downloaded or installed. I’ve also started to write some skills for Claude and OpenCode to encapsulate my Paperless improvement prompts.

Iris Photos App

Stumbled across the Iris Photos app on Mastodon. This looks interesting and I gave it a try. It started to index my rather large photo archive which lives on my home NFS server. That’s more than 2 TB of data and hundred thousands of picture a few thousand videos. I wasn’t patient enough to let it finish. But I keeps picking up the task whenever I connect the NFS mount again. Definitely spend the 14 bucks of an introductory price as the app looks very promising to me. Especially like the stats feature 😉

Linux rules

Got a beautiful old notebook from a friend. An HP Spectre x360 with an Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM and 256GB SATA SSD. Probably about 10 years old. The screen can be folded so the device doubles as a touch tablet. The screen is quite good although I still don’t get what you’d use a touchscreen on a notebook for 😉

I’ve put Debian Linux with LXQT desktop on it, everything work out of the box and it feels like brand new. Unfortunately the RAM is soldered to the board. But at least the dead battery is swappable and I might order a new one. Quite love this device for it has a usable screen with good resolution and good colours and angle visibility.

Zucchini Schnitzel

Had left over Zucchini and prepared it like a german Schnitzel with egg and breadcrumbs and then pan fried it. Quite delicious and pretty simple to fix.

Jugend Kella PopChor

Last weekend the Jugend Kella PopChor from Templin was on their world tour and visited our little village. The kids played life in front of our church and it was marvellous. Great to see their talent and enthusiasm. Also great to see how much the rather old population of our village enjoyed the event.

#beekeeping #enEN #food #Linux #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 22/2026

That first super hot day … in may. Fortunately only one day at a sweltering 30º C. The rest of the week was much more acceptable.

I did saw people post pictures of fallen green leaves claiming that the trees in Berlin are shedding their leaves because of the heat. That of course was utter bullshit as it rained quite heavily the week before and our trees don’t shed their leaves at a mere 30º C. I get climate catastrophe urgency. But bluntly and stupidly faking stuff doesn’t help anyone.

The countryside is very beautiful at this time of the year. Lush green and flowers and blossoms all over the place. We’re quite blessed over here.

Our bees have produced the first bucket full of honey. It’s our first honey since we’ve got them bees two years ago. We’re expecting to get around 50kg of honey this year. And we’ve grown from 2 bee hives to 3. Eventually taking over the beekeeping family tradition that went from my grandfather to my father in law and now to my wife and me.

Paperless NGX MCP

I started creating an MCP server for Paperless NGX. My intention was for me to talk to an LLM and have it modify/improve my Paperless documents. Paperless itself already got quite good AI models to do auto-tagging and detect the best correspondent and document type etc.

But I wanted to be able to have a document summary automatically created and also check whether a more powerful model would be able to improve on the tags etc.

I had searched for an existing MCP server. But the one I found didn’t actually work. Guess it was outdated and also fiddly to install. I don’t like the NPM based software as the NPM repository seems to be a huge security risk these days for all the worms infecting packages.

So I started to create an MCP server in Rust with the help of Claude Code. That worked out quite well and I’ve now got a working MCP that is just a single binary you can drop on your machine. Not additional stuff to be downloaded or installed. I’ve also started to write some skills for Claude and OpenCode to encapsulate my Paperless improvement prompts.

Iris Photos App

Stumbled across the Iris Photos app on Mastodon. This looks interesting and I gave it a try. It started to index my rather large photo archive which lives on my home NFS server. That’s more than 2 TB of data and hundred thousands of picture a few thousand videos. I wasn’t patient enough to let it finish. But I keeps picking up the task whenever I connect the NFS mount again. Definitely spend the 14 bucks of an introductory price as the app looks very promising to me. Especially like the stats feature 😉

Linux rules

Got a beautiful old notebook from a friend. An HP Spectre x360 with an Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM and 256GB SATA SSD. Probably about 10 years old. The screen can be folded so the device doubles as a touch tablet. The screen is quite good although I still don’t get what you’d use a touchscreen on a notebook for 😉

I’ve put Debian Linux with LXQT desktop on it, everything work out of the box and it feels like brand new. Unfortunately the RAM is soldered to the board. But at least the dead battery is swappable and I might order a new one. Quite love this device for it has a usable screen with good resolution and good colours and angle visibility.

Zucchini Schnitzel

Had left over Zucchini and prepared it like a german Schnitzel with egg and breadcrumbs and then pan fried it. Quite delicious and pretty simple to fix.

Jugend Kella PopChor

Last weekend the Jugend Kella PopChor from Templin was on their world tour and visited our little village. The kids played life in front of our church and it was marvellous. Great to see their talent and enthusiasm. Also great to see how much the rather old population of our village enjoyed the event.

#beekeeping #enEN #food #Linux #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 22/2026

That first super hot day … in may. Fortunately only one day at a sweltering 30º C. The rest of the week was much more acceptable.

I did saw people post pictures of fallen green leaves claiming that the trees in Berlin are shedding their leaves because of the heat. That of course was utter bullshit as it rained quite heavily the week before and our trees don’t shed their leaves at a mere 30º C. I get climate catastrophe urgency. But bluntly and stupidly faking stuff doesn’t help anyone.

The countryside is very beautiful at this time of the year. Lush green and flowers and blossoms all over the place. We’re quite blessed over here.

Our bees have produced the first bucket full of honey. It’s our first honey since we’ve got them bees two years ago. We’re expecting to get around 50kg of honey this year. And we’ve grown from 2 bee hives to 3. Eventually taking over the beekeeping family tradition that went from my grandfather to my father in law and now to my wife and me.

Paperless NGX MCP

I started creating an MCP server for Paperless NGX. My intention was for me to talk to an LLM and have it modify/improve my Paperless documents. Paperless itself already got quite good AI models to do auto-tagging and detect the best correspondent and document type etc.

But I wanted to be able to have a document summary automatically created and also check whether a more powerful model would be able to improve on the tags etc.

I had searched for an existing MCP server. But the one I found didn’t actually work. Guess it was outdated and also fiddly to install. I don’t like the NPM based software as the NPM repository seems to be a huge security risk these days for all the worms infecting packages.

So I started to create an MCP server in Rust with the help of Claude Code. That worked out quite well and I’ve now got a working MCP that is just a single binary you can drop on your machine. Not additional stuff to be downloaded or installed. I’ve also started to write some skills for Claude and OpenCode to encapsulate my Paperless improvement prompts.

Iris Photos App

Stumbled across the Iris Photos app on Mastodon. This looks interesting and I gave it a try. It started to index my rather large photo archive which lives on my home NFS server. That’s more than 2 TB of data and hundred thousands of picture a few thousand videos. I wasn’t patient enough to let it finish. But I keeps picking up the task whenever I connect the NFS mount again. Definitely spend the 14 bucks of an introductory price as the app looks very promising to me. Especially like the stats feature 😉

Linux rules

Got a beautiful old notebook from a friend. An HP Spectre x360 with an Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM and 256GB SATA SSD. Probably about 10 years old. The screen can be folded so the device doubles as a touch tablet. The screen is quite good although I still don’t get what you’d use a touchscreen on a notebook for 😉

I’ve put Debian Linux with LXQT desktop on it, everything work out of the box and it feels like brand new. Unfortunately the RAM is soldered to the board. But at least the dead battery is swappable and I might order a new one. Quite love this device for it has a usable screen with good resolution and good colours and angle visibility.

Zucchini Schnitzel

Had left over Zucchini and prepared it like a german Schnitzel with egg and breadcrumbs and then pan fried it. Quite delicious and pretty simple to fix.

Jugend Kella PopChor

Last weekend the Jugend Kella PopChor from Templin was on their world tour and visited our little village. The kids played life in front of our church and it was marvellous. Great to see their talent and enthusiasm. Also great to see how much the rather old population of our village enjoyed the event.

#beekeeping #enEN #food #Linux #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 22/2026

That first super hot day … in may. Fortunately only one day at a sweltering 30º C. The rest of the week was much more acceptable.

I did saw people post pictures of fallen green leaves claiming that the trees in Berlin are shedding their leaves because of the heat. That of course was utter bullshit as it rained quite heavily the week before and our trees don’t shed their leaves at a mere 30º C. I get climate catastrophe urgency. But bluntly and stupidly faking stuff doesn’t help anyone.

The countryside is very beautiful at this time of the year. Lush green and flowers and blossoms all over the place. We’re quite blessed over here.

Our bees have produced the first bucket full of honey. It’s our first honey since we’ve got them bees two years ago. We’re expecting to get around 50kg of honey this year. And we’ve grown from 2 bee hives to 3. Eventually taking over the beekeeping family tradition that went from my grandfather to my father in law and now to my wife and me.

Paperless NGX MCP

I started creating an MCP server for Paperless NGX. My intention was for me to talk to an LLM and have it modify/improve my Paperless documents. Paperless itself already got quite good AI models to do auto-tagging and detect the best correspondent and document type etc.

But I wanted to be able to have a document summary automatically created and also check whether a more powerful model would be able to improve on the tags etc.

I had searched for an existing MCP server. But the one I found didn’t actually work. Guess it was outdated and also fiddly to install. I don’t like the NPM based software as the NPM repository seems to be a huge security risk these days for all the worms infecting packages.

So I started to create an MCP server in Rust with the help of Claude Code. That worked out quite well and I’ve now got a working MCP that is just a single binary you can drop on your machine. Not additional stuff to be downloaded or installed. I’ve also started to write some skills for Claude and OpenCode to encapsulate my Paperless improvement prompts.

Iris Photos App

Stumbled across the Iris Photos app on Mastodon. This looks interesting and I gave it a try. It started to index my rather large photo archive which lives on my home NFS server. That’s more than 2 TB of data and hundred thousands of picture a few thousand videos. I wasn’t patient enough to let it finish. But I keeps picking up the task whenever I connect the NFS mount again. Definitely spend the 14 bucks of an introductory price as the app looks very promising to me. Especially like the stats feature 😉

Linux rules

Got a beautiful old notebook from a friend. An HP Spectre x360 with an Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM and 256GB SATA SSD. Probably about 10 years old. The screen can be folded so the device doubles as a touch tablet. The screen is quite good although I still don’t get what you’d use a touchscreen on a notebook for 😉

I’ve put Debian Linux with LXQT desktop on it, everything work out of the box and it feels like brand new. Unfortunately the RAM is soldered to the board. But at least the dead battery is swappable and I might order a new one. Quite love this device for it has a usable screen with good resolution and good colours and angle visibility.

Zucchini Schnitzel

Had left over Zucchini and prepared it like a german Schnitzel with egg and breadcrumbs and then pan fried it. Quite delicious and pretty simple to fix.

Jugend Kella PopChor

Last weekend the Jugend Kella PopChor from Templin was on their world tour and visited our little village. The kids played life in front of our church and it was marvellous. Great to see their talent and enthusiasm. Also great to see how much the rather old population of our village enjoyed the event.

#beekeeping #enEN #food #Linux #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 21/2026

Summary

Still fiddling with the Evernote migration to Paperless. Very good organ concert in Prenzlau.

Evernote to Paperless Migration

Still importing old Evernote documents into my Paperless instance. Takes a while to churn through 10GB of archived data and index them all again. But Paperless is doing it quite well.

Now that I have all my data in my own system with proper API access I’m experimenting with an app to improve the Paperless Metadata. While Paperless is already using OCR and machine learning to classify and tag documents, I thought maybe I can improve on that by using beefier AI modules on my Mac. Let’s see how that turns out. Was also playing around with Paperless AI a bit. That’s a software that tries to provide an AI interface for paperless so that you can search in natural language and get AI answers based on your documents. I’m not yet fully convinced of that piece.

Organ concert

On Sunday we went to the last session of the opening concerts of the new organ in the St. Marien church in Prenzlau. That old church was severely destroyed during WWII and only after the 1970s restoration began. While the building has a roof and floor again, the organ was missing. Eventually they found an old Scottish organ from 1904 which was donated by former West Parish Church Kilbarchan in Scotland to this building. Now it is in full operation and was christened on the weekend.

The organist was very well versed with these majestic instruments and picked songs that demonstrated the full glory of the instrument and the building. You could literally feel the thundering bass of the large pipes. But also the quiet and bird-like passages of the small pipes came out perfectly. Looking forward to hear and see many more concerts in that magnificent building.

#enEN #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 21/2026

Summary

Still fiddling with the Evernote migration to Paperless. Very good organ concert in Prenzlau.

Evernote to Paperless Migration

Still importing old Evernote documents into my Paperless instance. Takes a while to churn through 10GB of archived data and index them all again. But Paperless is doing it quite well.

Now that I have all my data in my own system with proper API access I’m experimenting with an app to improve the Paperless Metadata. While Paperless is already using OCR and machine learning to classify and tag documents, I thought maybe I can improve on that by using beefier AI modules on my Mac. Let’s see how that turns out. Was also playing around with Paperless AI a bit. That’s a software that tries to provide an AI interface for paperless so that you can search in natural language and get AI answers based on your documents. I’m not yet fully convinced of that piece.

Organ concert

On Sunday we went to the last session of the opening concerts of the new organ in the St. Marien church in Prenzlau. That old church was severely destroyed during WWII and only after the 1970s restoration began. While the building has a roof and floor again, the organ was missing. Eventually they found an old Scottish organ from 1904 which was donated by former West Parish Church Kilbarchan in Scotland to this building. Now it is in full operation and was christened on the weekend.

The organist was very well versed with these majestic instruments and picked songs that demonstrated the full glory of the instrument and the building. You could literally feel the thundering bass of the large pipes. But also the quiet and bird-like passages of the small pipes came out perfectly. Looking forward to hear and see many more concerts in that magnificent building.

#enEN #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 21/2026

Summary

Still fiddling with the Evernote migration to Paperless. Very good organ concert in Prenzlau.

Evernote to Paperless Migration

Still importing old Evernote documents into my Paperless instance. Takes a while to churn through 10GB of archived data and index them all again. But Paperless is doing it quite well.

Now that I have all my data in my own system with proper API access I’m experimenting with an app to improve the Paperless Metadata. While Paperless is already using OCR and machine learning to classify and tag documents, I thought maybe I can improve on that by using beefier AI modules on my Mac. Let’s see how that turns out. Was also playing around with Paperless AI a bit. That’s a software that tries to provide an AI interface for paperless so that you can search in natural language and get AI answers based on your documents. I’m not yet fully convinced of that piece.

Organ concert

On Sunday we went to the last session of the opening concerts of the new organ in the St. Marien church in Prenzlau. That old church was severely destroyed during WWII and only after the 1970s restoration began. While the building has a roof and floor again, the organ was missing. Eventually they found an old Scottish organ from 1904 which was donated by former West Parish Church Kilbarchan in Scotland to this building. Now it is in full operation and was christened on the weekend.

The organist was very well versed with these majestic instruments and picked songs that demonstrated the full glory of the instrument and the building. You could literally feel the thundering bass of the large pipes. But also the quiet and bird-like passages of the small pipes came out perfectly. Looking forward to hear and see many more concerts in that magnificent building.

#enEN #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 21/2026

Summary

Still fiddling with the Evernote migration to Paperless. Very good organ concert in Prenzlau.

Evernote to Paperless Migration

Still importing old Evernote documents into my Paperless instance. Takes a while to churn through 10GB of archived data and index them all again. But Paperless is doing it quite well.

Now that I have all my data in my own system with proper API access I’m experimenting with an app to improve the Paperless Metadata. While Paperless is already using OCR and machine learning to classify and tag documents, I thought maybe I can improve on that by using beefier AI modules on my Mac. Let’s see how that turns out. Was also playing around with Paperless AI a bit. That’s a software that tries to provide an AI interface for paperless so that you can search in natural language and get AI answers based on your documents. I’m not yet fully convinced of that piece.

Organ concert

On Sunday we went to the last session of the opening concerts of the new organ in the St. Marien church in Prenzlau. That old church was severely destroyed during WWII and only after the 1970s restoration began. While the building has a roof and floor again, the organ was missing. Eventually they found an old Scottish organ from 1904 which was donated by former West Parish Church Kilbarchan in Scotland to this building. Now it is in full operation and was christened on the weekend.

The organist was very well versed with these majestic instruments and picked songs that demonstrated the full glory of the instrument and the building. You could literally feel the thundering bass of the large pipes. But also the quiet and bird-like passages of the small pipes came out perfectly. Looking forward to hear and see many more concerts in that magnificent building.

#enEN #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 21/2026

Summary

Still fiddling with the Evernote migration to Paperless. Very good organ concert in Prenzlau.

Evernote to Paperless Migration

Still importing old Evernote documents into my Paperless instance. Takes a while to churn through 10GB of archived data and index them all again. But Paperless is doing it quite well.

Now that I have all my data in my own system with proper API access I’m experimenting with an app to improve the Paperless Metadata. While Paperless is already using OCR and machine learning to classify and tag documents, I thought maybe I can improve on that by using beefier AI modules on my Mac. Let’s see how that turns out. Was also playing around with Paperless AI a bit. That’s a software that tries to provide an AI interface for paperless so that you can search in natural language and get AI answers based on your documents. I’m not yet fully convinced of that piece.

Organ concert

On Sunday we went to the last session of the opening concerts of the new organ in the St. Marien church in Prenzlau. That old church was severely destroyed during WWII and only after the 1970s restoration began. While the building has a roof and floor again, the organ was missing. Eventually they found an old Scottish organ from 1904 which was donated by former West Parish Church Kilbarchan in Scotland to this building. Now it is in full operation and was christened on the weekend.

The organist was very well versed with these majestic instruments and picked songs that demonstrated the full glory of the instrument and the building. You could literally feel the thundering bass of the large pipes. But also the quiet and bird-like passages of the small pipes came out perfectly. Looking forward to hear and see many more concerts in that magnificent building.

#enEN #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 19/2026

Summary

3. Digital Independence Day #Uckermark in Templin, Michael Seemann (@mspro) extending his power formula. Some 3D printing at last, new open source software of doctors office reception, iOS 26 Safari swipe tip, my new bag setup, UNESCO bioshere talk in Gollin, new well pump.

Di.Day

last week Sunday was our 3rd event of the digital independence. Again taking place in the BündnisBüro in Templin, prepared and held by my friend @René

Although there were only two people (we were really sloppy with the advertisement and the weather was just too nice) showing up, the conversations nevertheless were very engaging and hopefully fruitful for the participants.

We again talked about the Fediverse and privacy around location tracking.

BATNA – mspro thread

Michael Seeman, probably better know as @mspro, extended his power formula with the “BATNA” concept. That is the “best alternative to a negotiated agreement” … in his context I read it as a “safety net” to agreements that are not the person favour (not the desired outcome of said negotiations for said person). Adding a quote from his blog here

Der Exit ist nicht nur eine Möglichkeit, die man wahrnehmen kann oder nicht, er ist ein BATNA: Ein „Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement“ (Roger Fisher & William Ury, „Getting to Yes“ (1981).)

BATNA spielt eine besondere Rolle, denn sie zieht in der U_scheitert Funktion einen zweiten Boden ein. Einen Boden, auf den man fällt, wenn die aktuelle Verhandlung scheitert.

Mit der Einführung von BATNA in die Theorie verändert sich alles, weswegen es sich lohnt, die ganze Formel nochmal aufzugleisen.

He then goes on to explain this effect to all sorts of scenarios and relates to known power structures (like wealthy heirs etc.) in his thread: https://fnordon.de/@mspro/116526882427577720

He publishes this stuff on his blog at length if you’re curious.

As his theory is getting quite complex, some people have started summarising it. One of those is Felix Stalder for the DIE ZEIT in “Wer reguliert die Regulierer?”

3D Printing

Had to dust off my trusty 3D printer and dry my filaments spools this week. Was printing two cases for Heltec V3 for my friend @thinkberg. Had finally talked him into joining the mesh radio bandwagon 😀

Open Reception

a new open source software reached Version 1.0 last week that piqued my interest. It’s Open Reception, a software meant for doctors office to allow patients to make digital appointments reservations.

A lot of doctors in Germany use the DoctoLib for this. Which is a privacy nightmare. You have to share a lot of personal details with that company just to make an appointment. Even worse, I’ve seen practices which do no longer offer making appointments via phone or walk-in. Thus making it mandatory to share your date with DoctoLib. Wouldn’t be surprised if this is illegal actually.

In short… this makes me so angry that I’m considering hosting an Open Reception instance and reach out to some doctor I’m acquainted with whether they want to give it a try. Just need to find the time …

Safari Swipe

everyone hates the new iOS 26 user interface. There are also a bunch of changes to the UX that people get annoyed with. For instance the changes to the Safari browser. It seems toke take much more effort to get to the overview of open tabs.

Fortunately that’s not quite true. As the way you get to the overview has “just changed”. One can swipe up from the address bar at the bottom of the screen to get to the tab overview in one go.

EDC

As my friend @gemlog was wondering about the size of new bag pack and took a picture of the contents. I carry a lot of stuff with me. I try to be prepared for a lot of nerdy situations and have all sorts of tools on me. Whole bunch of cables and adapters, power banks, pens etc.

To make it not too messy inside, I use various pouches to bring some order into this chaos. The Got Bag itself comes with a nice laptop pouch that is fixed with velcro tape to the inside of the bag.

Biosphere Reserve Schorfheide-Chorin

On Friday our local society organised an info event about the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve “Schorfheide-Chorin“.

That is the special protection zone our village is located in. The head of the administration office, Dr. Susanne Winter gave an interesting introduction about the concept and the local application of the UNESCO program.

What I didn’t know is, that this explicitly not a mere nature reserve but also a cultural heritage program that aims to foster and nurture the wellbeing of men and nature in that area. Human society and its dwellings are not seen as mere invaders but as part of said biosphere.

Unfortunately the administration is severely understaffed and underfunded to fulfil all their duties. A change to the country legislation is currently in the talks and stirring up some heated discussions.

new pump

Our old well pump gave up after about 3,5 years. We didn’t had a pressure tank so far. I guess we’re paying that price now. I ordered a new one with a 20L pressure tank and installed it on Saturday.

Of course this involved a whole lot of fiddling as the new connectors of the new pump had different sizes and the new pump was taller than the old one. Eventually I got it working. Let’s see how long this one lasts.

Bookmarks

This weeks bookmark collection:

• Kodak Instant Kamera https://chaos.social/@ubahnverleih/116528011284079888
• Canon EOS Infrared filter removed: https://mystical.garden/@janamarie/116527887020070338
• SystemD runs docker images natively: https://infosec.exchange/@phileas/116529683639003532
• bidirectional links in Joplin: https://mastodon.social/@kantel/116494964066942138

#3Dprinting #DIday #EDC #enEN #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 19/2026

Summary

3. Digital Independence Day #Uckermark in Templin, Michael Seemann (@mspro) extending his power formula. Some 3D printing at last, new open source software of doctors office reception, iOS 26 Safari swipe tip, my new bag setup, UNESCO bioshere talk in Gollin, new well pump.

Di.Day

last week Sunday was our 3rd event of the digital independence. Again taking place in the BündnisBüro in Templin, prepared and held by my friend @René

Although there were only two people (we were really sloppy with the advertisement and the weather was just too nice) showing up, the conversations nevertheless were very engaging and hopefully fruitful for the participants.

We again talked about the Fediverse and privacy around location tracking.

BATNA – mspro thread

Michael Seeman, probably better know as @mspro, extended his power formula with the “BATNA” concept. That is the “best alternative to a negotiated agreement” … in his context I read it as a “safety net” to agreements that are not the person favour (not the desired outcome of said negotiations for said person). Adding a quote from his blog here

Der Exit ist nicht nur eine Möglichkeit, die man wahrnehmen kann oder nicht, er ist ein BATNA: Ein „Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement“ (Roger Fisher & William Ury, „Getting to Yes“ (1981).)

BATNA spielt eine besondere Rolle, denn sie zieht in der U_scheitert Funktion einen zweiten Boden ein. Einen Boden, auf den man fällt, wenn die aktuelle Verhandlung scheitert.

Mit der Einführung von BATNA in die Theorie verändert sich alles, weswegen es sich lohnt, die ganze Formel nochmal aufzugleisen.

He then goes on to explain this effect to all sorts of scenarios and relates to known power structures (like wealthy heirs etc.) in his thread: https://fnordon.de/@mspro/116526882427577720

He publishes this stuff on his blog at length if you’re curious.

As his theory is getting quite complex, some people have started summarising it. One of those is Felix Stalder for the DIE ZEIT in “Wer reguliert die Regulierer?”

3D Printing

Had to dust off my trusty 3D printer and dry my filaments spools this week. Was printing two cases for Heltec V3 for my friend @thinkberg. Had finally talked him into joining the mesh radio bandwagon 😀

Open Reception

a new open source software reached Version 1.0 last week that piqued my interest. It’s Open Reception, a software meant for doctors office to allow patients to make digital appointments reservations.

A lot of doctors in Germany use the DoctoLib for this. Which is a privacy nightmare. You have to share a lot of personal details with that company just to make an appointment. Even worse, I’ve seen practices which do no longer offer making appointments via phone or walk-in. Thus making it mandatory to share your date with DoctoLib. Wouldn’t be surprised if this is illegal actually.

In short… this makes me so angry that I’m considering hosting an Open Reception instance and reach out to some doctor I’m acquainted with whether they want to give it a try. Just need to find the time …

Safari Swipe

everyone hates the new iOS 26 user interface. There are also a bunch of changes to the UX that people get annoyed with. For instance the changes to the Safari browser. It seems toke take much more effort to get to the overview of open tabs.

Fortunately that’s not quite true. As the way you get to the overview has “just changed”. One can swipe up from the address bar at the bottom of the screen to get to the tab overview in one go.

EDC

As my friend @gemlog was wondering about the size of new bag pack and took a picture of the contents. I carry a lot of stuff with me. I try to be prepared for a lot of nerdy situations and have all sorts of tools on me. Whole bunch of cables and adapters, power banks, pens etc.

To make it not too messy inside, I use various pouches to bring some order into this chaos. The Got Bag itself comes with a nice laptop pouch that is fixed with velcro tape to the inside of the bag.

Biosphere Reserve Schorfheide-Chorin

On Friday our local society organised an info event about the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve “Schorfheide-Chorin“.

That is the special protection zone our village is located in. The head of the administration office, Dr. Susanne Winter gave an interesting introduction about the concept and the local application of the UNESCO program.

What I didn’t know is, that this explicitly not a mere nature reserve but also a cultural heritage program that aims to foster and nurture the wellbeing of men and nature in that area. Human society and its dwellings are not seen as mere invaders but as part of said biosphere.

Unfortunately the administration is severely understaffed and underfunded to fulfil all their duties. A change to the country legislation is currently in the talks and stirring up some heated discussions.

new pump

Our old well pump gave up after about 3,5 years. We didn’t had a pressure tank so far. I guess we’re paying that price now. I ordered a new one with a 20L pressure tank and installed it on Saturday.

Of course this involved a whole lot of fiddling as the new connectors of the new pump had different sizes and the new pump was taller than the old one. Eventually I got it working. Let’s see how long this one lasts.

Bookmarks

This weeks bookmark collection:

• Kodak Instant Kamera https://chaos.social/@ubahnverleih/116528011284079888
• Canon EOS Infrared filter removed: https://mystical.garden/@janamarie/116527887020070338
• SystemD runs docker images natively: https://infosec.exchange/@phileas/116529683639003532
• bidirectional links in Joplin: https://mastodon.social/@kantel/116494964066942138

#3Dprinting #DIday #EDC #enEN #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 19/2026

Summary

3. Digital Independence Day #Uckermark in Templin, Michael Seemann (@mspro) extending his power formula. Some 3D printing at last, new open source software of doctors office reception, iOS 26 Safari swipe tip, my new bag setup, UNESCO bioshere talk in Gollin, new well pump.

Di.Day

last week Sunday was our 3rd event of the digital independence. Again taking place in the BündnisBüro in Templin, prepared and held by my friend @René

Although there were only two people (we were really sloppy with the advertisement and the weather was just too nice) showing up, the conversations nevertheless were very engaging and hopefully fruitful for the participants.

We again talked about the Fediverse and privacy around location tracking.

BATNA – mspro thread

Michael Seeman, probably better know as @mspro, extended his power formula with the “BATNA” concept. That is the “best alternative to a negotiated agreement” … in his context I read it as a “safety net” to agreements that are not the person favour (not the desired outcome of said negotiations for said person). Adding a quote from his blog here

Der Exit ist nicht nur eine Möglichkeit, die man wahrnehmen kann oder nicht, er ist ein BATNA: Ein „Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement“ (Roger Fisher & William Ury, „Getting to Yes“ (1981).)

BATNA spielt eine besondere Rolle, denn sie zieht in der U_scheitert Funktion einen zweiten Boden ein. Einen Boden, auf den man fällt, wenn die aktuelle Verhandlung scheitert.

Mit der Einführung von BATNA in die Theorie verändert sich alles, weswegen es sich lohnt, die ganze Formel nochmal aufzugleisen.

He then goes on to explain this effect to all sorts of scenarios and relates to known power structures (like wealthy heirs etc.) in his thread: https://fnordon.de/@mspro/116526882427577720

He publishes this stuff on his blog at length if you’re curious.

As his theory is getting quite complex, some people have started summarising it. One of those is Felix Stalder for the DIE ZEIT in “Wer reguliert die Regulierer?”

3D Printing

Had to dust off my trusty 3D printer and dry my filaments spools this week. Was printing two cases for Heltec V3 for my friend @thinkberg. Had finally talked him into joining the mesh radio bandwagon 😀

Open Reception

a new open source software reached Version 1.0 last week that piqued my interest. It’s Open Reception, a software meant for doctors office to allow patients to make digital appointments reservations.

A lot of doctors in Germany use the DoctoLib for this. Which is a privacy nightmare. You have to share a lot of personal details with that company just to make an appointment. Even worse, I’ve seen practices which do no longer offer making appointments via phone or walk-in. Thus making it mandatory to share your date with DoctoLib. Wouldn’t be surprised if this is illegal actually.

In short… this makes me so angry that I’m considering hosting an Open Reception instance and reach out to some doctor I’m acquainted with whether they want to give it a try. Just need to find the time …

Safari Swipe

everyone hates the new iOS 26 user interface. There are also a bunch of changes to the UX that people get annoyed with. For instance the changes to the Safari browser. It seems toke take much more effort to get to the overview of open tabs.

Fortunately that’s not quite true. As the way you get to the overview has “just changed”. One can swipe up from the address bar at the bottom of the screen to get to the tab overview in one go.

EDC

As my friend @gemlog was wondering about the size of new bag pack and took a picture of the contents. I carry a lot of stuff with me. I try to be prepared for a lot of nerdy situations and have all sorts of tools on me. Whole bunch of cables and adapters, power banks, pens etc.

To make it not too messy inside, I use various pouches to bring some order into this chaos. The Got Bag itself comes with a nice laptop pouch that is fixed with velcro tape to the inside of the bag.

Biosphere Reserve Schorfheide-Chorin

On Friday our local society organised an info event about the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve “Schorfheide-Chorin“.

That is the special protection zone our village is located in. The head of the administration office, Dr. Susanne Winter gave an interesting introduction about the concept and the local application of the UNESCO program.

What I didn’t know is, that this explicitly not a mere nature reserve but also a cultural heritage program that aims to foster and nurture the wellbeing of men and nature in that area. Human society and its dwellings are not seen as mere invaders but as part of said biosphere.

Unfortunately the administration is severely understaffed and underfunded to fulfil all their duties. A change to the country legislation is currently in the talks and stirring up some heated discussions.

new pump

Our old well pump gave up after about 3,5 years. We didn’t had a pressure tank so far. I guess we’re paying that price now. I ordered a new one with a 20L pressure tank and installed it on Saturday.

Of course this involved a whole lot of fiddling as the new connectors of the new pump had different sizes and the new pump was taller than the old one. Eventually I got it working. Let’s see how long this one lasts.

Bookmarks

This weeks bookmark collection:

• Kodak Instant Kamera https://chaos.social/@ubahnverleih/116528011284079888
• Canon EOS Infrared filter removed: https://mystical.garden/@janamarie/116527887020070338
• SystemD runs docker images natively: https://infosec.exchange/@phileas/116529683639003532
• bidirectional links in Joplin: https://mastodon.social/@kantel/116494964066942138

#3Dprinting #DIday #EDC #enEN #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 18/2026

Again a very busy week with work-related stuff. I’m working on a global that involves AI technology. It’s hard as a large international company to keep pace with how fast the industry moves in this area. Before we even have a chance to evaluate a new tool, model, concept etc. the object has likely changed. Leadership members are of course demanding more speed and just repeat the marketing bullshit from all the AI companies. Expecting unicorns and glitter to be delivered in no time. That’s going to end in tears and everyone knows. A bit similar to climate catastrophe…

I jailbroke an old Kindle eReader just for the fun of it. I saw multiple people posting their projects of liberating their Kindle devices with instructions from https://kindlemodding.org

It’s not entirely easy as it requires multiple steps in the correct order. But it’s doable. I didn’t manage to load my books with Calibre so far as there are some network issues to be solved.

Got Bag

I finally got myself a new backup. The old one was decomposing severely and too small anyway. I always carry a lot of stuff beside the mere work laptop. I’m prepared with all sorts of cables, power banks, tools and stuff.

I settled on a got-bag Rolltop 2.0 with the Seashepherd logo. Got delivered within 3 days and I love it. It’s large, versatile (got multiple inner pockets and a pouch for a laptop) and comfy.

Glitza Band and Open Studio day

On the weekend it was open studio day again in the whole country. Our local artists of course participated. We went to Silke Schmidt again as she had the slightly unfair advantage that the local band Glitza was playing a little concert on her terrace.

Very lovely. There were missing two musicians of their usual setup and had to improvise a bit. They called it an open practice session. Delivered with as much enthusiasm and talent as always.

#art #enEN #Kindle #modding #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 18/2026

Again a very busy week with work-related stuff. I’m working on a global that involves AI technology. It’s hard as a large international company to keep pace with how fast the industry moves in this area. Before we even have a chance to evaluate a new tool, model, concept etc. the object has likely changed. Leadership members are of course demanding more speed and just repeat the marketing bullshit from all the AI companies. Expecting unicorns and glitter to be delivered in no time. That’s going to end in tears and everyone knows. A bit similar to climate catastrophe…

I jailbroke an old Kindle eReader just for the fun of it. I saw multiple people posting their projects of liberating their Kindle devices with instructions from https://kindlemodding.org

It’s not entirely easy as it requires multiple steps in the correct order. But it’s doable. I didn’t manage to load my books with Calibre so far as there are some network issues to be solved.

Got Bag

I finally got myself a new backup. The old one was decomposing severely and too small anyway. I always carry a lot of stuff beside the mere work laptop. I’m prepared with all sorts of cables, power banks, tools and stuff.

I settled on a got-bag Rolltop 2.0 with the Seashepherd logo. Got delivered within 3 days and I love it. It’s large, versatile (got multiple inner pockets and a pouch for a laptop) and comfy.

Glitza Band and Open Studio day

On the weekend it was open studio day again in the whole country. Our local artists of course participated. We went to Silke Schmidt again as she had the slightly unfair advantage that the local band Glitza was playing a little concert on her terrace.

Very lovely. There were missing two musicians of their usual setup and had to improvise a bit. They called it an open practice session. Delivered with as much enthusiasm and talent as always.

#art #enEN #Kindle #modding #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 18/2026

Again a very busy week with work-related stuff. I’m working on a global that involves AI technology. It’s hard as a large international company to keep pace with how fast the industry moves in this area. Before we even have a chance to evaluate a new tool, model, concept etc. the object has likely changed. Leadership members are of course demanding more speed and just repeat the marketing bullshit from all the AI companies. Expecting unicorns and glitter to be delivered in no time. That’s going to end in tears and everyone knows. A bit similar to climate catastrophe…

I jailbroke an old Kindle eReader just for the fun of it. I saw multiple people posting their projects of liberating their Kindle devices with instructions from https://kindlemodding.org

It’s not entirely easy as it requires multiple steps in the correct order. But it’s doable. I didn’t manage to load my books with Calibre so far as there are some network issues to be solved.

Got Bag

I finally got myself a new backup. The old one was decomposing severely and too small anyway. I always carry a lot of stuff beside the mere work laptop. I’m prepared with all sorts of cables, power banks, tools and stuff.

I settled on a got-bag Rolltop 2.0 with the Seashepherd logo. Got delivered within 3 days and I love it. It’s large, versatile (got multiple inner pockets and a pouch for a laptop) and comfy.

Glitza Band and Open Studio day

On the weekend it was open studio day again in the whole country. Our local artists of course participated. We went to Silke Schmidt again as she had the slightly unfair advantage that the local band Glitza was playing a little concert on her terrace.

Very lovely. There were missing two musicians of their usual setup and had to improvise a bit. They called it an open practice session. Delivered with as much enthusiasm and talent as always.

#art #enEN #Kindle #modding #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 18/2026

Again a very busy week with work-related stuff. I’m working on a global that involves AI technology. It’s hard as a large international company to keep pace with how fast the industry moves in this area. Before we even have a chance to evaluate a new tool, model, concept etc. the object has likely changed. Leadership members are of course demanding more speed and just repeat the marketing bullshit from all the AI companies. Expecting unicorns and glitter to be delivered in no time. That’s going to end in tears and everyone knows. A bit similar to climate catastrophe…

I jailbroke an old Kindle eReader just for the fun of it. I saw multiple people posting their projects of liberating their Kindle devices with instructions from https://kindlemodding.org

It’s not entirely easy as it requires multiple steps in the correct order. But it’s doable. I didn’t manage to load my books with Calibre so far as there are some network issues to be solved.

Got Bag

I finally got myself a new backup. The old one was decomposing severely and too small anyway. I always carry a lot of stuff beside the mere work laptop. I’m prepared with all sorts of cables, power banks, tools and stuff.

I settled on a got-bag Rolltop 2.0 with the Seashepherd logo. Got delivered within 3 days and I love it. It’s large, versatile (got multiple inner pockets and a pouch for a laptop) and comfy.

Glitza Band and Open Studio day

On the weekend it was open studio day again in the whole country. Our local artists of course participated. We went to Silke Schmidt again as she had the slightly unfair advantage that the local band Glitza was playing a little concert on her terrace.

Very lovely. There were missing two musicians of their usual setup and had to improvise a bit. They called it an open practice session. Delivered with as much enthusiasm and talent as always.

#art #enEN #Kindle #modding #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 18/2026

Again a very busy week with work-related stuff. I’m working on a global that involves AI technology. It’s hard as a large international company to keep pace with how fast the industry moves in this area. Before we even have a chance to evaluate a new tool, model, concept etc. the object has likely changed. Leadership members are of course demanding more speed and just repeat the marketing bullshit from all the AI companies. Expecting unicorns and glitter to be delivered in no time. That’s going to end in tears and everyone knows. A bit similar to climate catastrophe…

I jailbroke an old Kindle eReader just for the fun of it. I saw multiple people posting their projects of liberating their Kindle devices with instructions from https://kindlemodding.org

It’s not entirely easy as it requires multiple steps in the correct order. But it’s doable. I didn’t manage to load my books with Calibre so far as there are some network issues to be solved.

Got Bag

I finally got myself a new backup. The old one was decomposing severely and too small anyway. I always carry a lot of stuff beside the mere work laptop. I’m prepared with all sorts of cables, power banks, tools and stuff.

I settled on a got-bag Rolltop 2.0 with the Seashepherd logo. Got delivered within 3 days and I love it. It’s large, versatile (got multiple inner pockets and a pouch for a laptop) and comfy.

Glitza Band and Open Studio day

On the weekend it was open studio day again in the whole country. Our local artists of course participated. We went to Silke Schmidt again as she had the slightly unfair advantage that the local band Glitza was playing a little concert on her terrace.

Very lovely. There were missing two musicians of their usual setup and had to improvise a bit. They called it an open practice session. Delivered with as much enthusiasm and talent as always.

#art #enEN #Kindle #modding #Music #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 17/2026

I know, this is a bit later for week 17 review. There wasn’t too much to talk about. Very busy at work and that’s why not much time to do much other things.

It was slightly weird weather as the sun came out but it was still rather cold. Down to -3ºC in the countryside and also Berlin was rather cold in the morning. The sunshine almost made me not wear a jacket on the bike ride to the office. But fortunately I checked the weather app before.

Nevertheless we had few nice lunches outside in the sun. One time in the new Szechuan restaurant at Torstrasse/Tucholskystrasse. The menu looks very authentic and the food was rather good as well. Might do this more often.

#project25

We had a lot of scrap wood ripped out of the attic of the house. That was still on site and I want to recycle parts of it for a new shed in the countryside. In order to transport it over there we but had to remove all the nails that were poking out still. That was more intense than I anticipated. They’ve used a lot of nails back in GDR construction times. One very thick (as thick as my pinky finger) nail flipped off the crowbar and hit me in the face. Fortunately no lasting damages on my side. But that was a close call for the eye. Wear protective glasses!

By brother and dad properly decommissioned some more debris from the attic at the local dump sites. Good progress over all.

Open Stage in Templin

On Saturday night it was time again for open stage at the MKC in Templin.

As always a colourful mix of artists who gave their best. This time an old author lady recited some poems and aphorisms of her own. That was surprisingly good.

A duo did some experimental music performance that reminded me a little bit of Deichkind. Their setup crashed several times at the beginning and they almost gave up. Nobody knew whether that was part of the performance or actual software problems 🤣

My highlight was the last band named “VEB Klangschalen”. They played rock music of their own creation and some cover songs – and with much verve and energy. For a local band absolutely outstanding und surprising as I’ve never heard of them before nor knew those guys would play in a band (Templin isn’t that big, so I know quite many people one or the other way).

Again a fun packed evening.

#enEN #Music #project25 #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 17/2026

I know, this is a bit later for week 17 review. There wasn’t too much to talk about. Very busy at work and that’s why not much time to do much other things.

It was slightly weird weather as the sun came out but it was still rather cold. Down to -3ºC in the countryside and also Berlin was rather cold in the morning. The sunshine almost made me not wear a jacket on the bike ride to the office. But fortunately I checked the weather app before.

Nevertheless we had few nice lunches outside in the sun. One time in the new Szechuan restaurant at Torstrasse/Tucholskystrasse. The menu looks very authentic and the food was rather good as well. Might do this more often.

#project25

We had a lot of scrap wood ripped out of the attic of the house. That was still on site and I want to recycle parts of it for a new shed in the countryside. In order to transport it over there we but had to remove all the nails that were poking out still. That was more intense than I anticipated. They’ve used a lot of nails back in GDR construction times. One very thick (as thick as my pinky finger) nail flipped off the crowbar and hit me in the face. Fortunately no lasting damages on my side. But that was a close call for the eye. Wear protective glasses!

By brother and dad properly decommissioned some more debris from the attic at the local dump sites. Good progress over all.

Open Stage in Templin

On Saturday night it was time again for open stage at the MKC in Templin.

As always a colourful mix of artists who gave their best. This time an old author lady recited some poems and aphorisms of her own. That was surprisingly good.

A duo did some experimental music performance that reminded me a little bit of Deichkind. Their setup crashed several times at the beginning and they almost gave up. Nobody knew whether that was part of the performance or actual software problems 🤣

My highlight was the last band named “VEB Klangschalen”. They played rock music of their own creation and some cover songs – and with much verve and energy. For a local band absolutely outstanding und surprising as I’ve never heard of them before nor knew those guys would play in a band (Templin isn’t that big, so I know quite many people one or the other way).

Again a fun packed evening.

#enEN #Music #project25 #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 17/2026

I know, this is a bit later for week 17 review. There wasn’t too much to talk about. Very busy at work and that’s why not much time to do much other things.

It was slightly weird weather as the sun came out but it was still rather cold. Down to -3ºC in the countryside and also Berlin was rather cold in the morning. The sunshine almost made me not wear a jacket on the bike ride to the office. But fortunately I checked the weather app before.

Nevertheless we had few nice lunches outside in the sun. One time in the new Szechuan restaurant at Torstrasse/Tucholskystrasse. The menu looks very authentic and the food was rather good as well. Might do this more often.

#project25

We had a lot of scrap wood ripped out of the attic of the house. That was still on site and I want to recycle parts of it for a new shed in the countryside. In order to transport it over there we but had to remove all the nails that were poking out still. That was more intense than I anticipated. They’ve used a lot of nails back in GDR construction times. One very thick (as thick as my pinky finger) nail flipped off the crowbar and hit me in the face. Fortunately no lasting damages on my side. But that was a close call for the eye. Wear protective glasses!

By brother and dad properly decommissioned some more debris from the attic at the local dump sites. Good progress over all.

Open Stage in Templin

On Saturday night it was time again for open stage at the MKC in Templin.

As always a colourful mix of artists who gave their best. This time an old author lady recited some poems and aphorisms of her own. That was surprisingly good.

A duo did some experimental music performance that reminded me a little bit of Deichkind. Their setup crashed several times at the beginning and they almost gave up. Nobody knew whether that was part of the performance or actual software problems 🤣

My highlight was the last band named “VEB Klangschalen”. They played rock music of their own creation and some cover songs – and with much verve and energy. For a local band absolutely outstanding und surprising as I’ve never heard of them before nor knew those guys would play in a band (Templin isn’t that big, so I know quite many people one or the other way).

Again a fun packed evening.

#enEN #Music #project25 #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 17/2026

I know, this is a bit later for week 17 review. There wasn’t too much to talk about. Very busy at work and that’s why not much time to do much other things.

It was slightly weird weather as the sun came out but it was still rather cold. Down to -3ºC in the countryside and also Berlin was rather cold in the morning. The sunshine almost made me not wear a jacket on the bike ride to the office. But fortunately I checked the weather app before.

Nevertheless we had few nice lunches outside in the sun. One time in the new Szechuan restaurant at Torstrasse/Tucholskystrasse. The menu looks very authentic and the food was rather good as well. Might do this more often.

#project25

We had a lot of scrap wood ripped out of the attic of the house. That was still on site and I want to recycle parts of it for a new shed in the countryside. In order to transport it over there we but had to remove all the nails that were poking out still. That was more intense than I anticipated. They’ve used a lot of nails back in GDR construction times. One very thick (as thick as my pinky finger) nail flipped off the crowbar and hit me in the face. Fortunately no lasting damages on my side. But that was a close call for the eye. Wear protective glasses!

By brother and dad properly decommissioned some more debris from the attic at the local dump sites. Good progress over all.

Open Stage in Templin

On Saturday night it was time again for open stage at the MKC in Templin.

As always a colourful mix of artists who gave their best. This time an old author lady recited some poems and aphorisms of her own. That was surprisingly good.

A duo did some experimental music performance that reminded me a little bit of Deichkind. Their setup crashed several times at the beginning and they almost gave up. Nobody knew whether that was part of the performance or actual software problems 🤣

My highlight was the last band named “VEB Klangschalen”. They played rock music of their own creation and some cover songs – and with much verve and energy. For a local band absolutely outstanding und surprising as I’ve never heard of them before nor knew those guys would play in a band (Templin isn’t that big, so I know quite many people one or the other way).

Again a fun packed evening.

#enEN #Music #project25 #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 17/2026

I know, this is a bit later for week 17 review. There wasn’t too much to talk about. Very busy at work and that’s why not much time to do much other things.

It was slightly weird weather as the sun came out but it was still rather cold. Down to -3ºC in the countryside and also Berlin was rather cold in the morning. The sunshine almost made me not wear a jacket on the bike ride to the office. But fortunately I checked the weather app before.

Nevertheless we had few nice lunches outside in the sun. One time in the new Szechuan restaurant at Torstrasse/Tucholskystrasse. The menu looks very authentic and the food was rather good as well. Might do this more often.

#project25

We had a lot of scrap wood ripped out of the attic of the house. That was still on site and I want to recycle parts of it for a new shed in the countryside. In order to transport it over there we but had to remove all the nails that were poking out still. That was more intense than I anticipated. They’ve used a lot of nails back in GDR construction times. One very thick (as thick as my pinky finger) nail flipped off the crowbar and hit me in the face. Fortunately no lasting damages on my side. But that was a close call for the eye. Wear protective glasses!

By brother and dad properly decommissioned some more debris from the attic at the local dump sites. Good progress over all.

Open Stage in Templin

On Saturday night it was time again for open stage at the MKC in Templin.

As always a colourful mix of artists who gave their best. This time an old author lady recited some poems and aphorisms of her own. That was surprisingly good.

A duo did some experimental music performance that reminded me a little bit of Deichkind. Their setup crashed several times at the beginning and they almost gave up. Nobody knew whether that was part of the performance or actual software problems 🤣

My highlight was the last band named “VEB Klangschalen”. They played rock music of their own creation and some cover songs – and with much verve and energy. For a local band absolutely outstanding und surprising as I’ve never heard of them before nor knew those guys would play in a band (Templin isn’t that big, so I know quite many people one or the other way).

Again a fun packed evening.

#enEN #Music #project25 #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 14-15/2026

This is a combined review for the weeks 14 & 15. These two weeks we’ve spend in China – our long awaited vacation in the land of the rising sun.

We flew from Frankfurt/Main to Beijing with Air China. Flight time was about 9,5 hours for roughly 7800 km. 6 hours time difference. A friend and former colleague of mine was so kind to pick us up at the airport and take us to our hotel. He also took a lot of time and effort to guide us around Beijing the next few days.

Beijing

Right on the second day in Beijing he drove us to The Great Wall near Mutianyu up north of Beijing. We climbed the stairs up to the wall and wandered around for a few kilometres on the top. The weather was perfect that day. Not yet too hot and sunny.

It’s as impressive as you’d expect. In this part the wall was in pretty good shape still and is actively maintained. Fortunately it wasn’t the tourist hot spot although there was tourist infrastructure at the bottom of the mountain where we had parked the car.

In the late afternoon, back in the city we enjoyed our first Peking duck in a somewhat fancy restaurant. The whole roasted duck is prepared right next to the table by a chef.

Next day we had booked tickets for the forbidden city and joined masses of tourists to see the old home of the Chinese emperors. I had seen the forbidden city before in the year 2000. Back then it was almost quite as not many tourists were around that time. Now it was pretty crowded.

In the afternoon we visited an art district. That was a former industrial area that has been repurposed to host a whole bunch of galleries and exhibitions as well as small arts & crafts shops.

In the evening our friend had organised a “team dinner” with a bunch of our former team mates in a cosy little restaurant in the Hutong area near the Drum Tower. That was great to see the old colleagues over good feed and drinks. Even my kids enjoyed to the restaurant and conversations. Before the restaurant we roamed through the remaining old Hutongs in that area. Back in 2000 there were much more of these areas. But they have mostly been removed during the rebuilding and expansion of the city for the Olympics in the early 2000s.

On the last full day in Beijing we went out west to the old summer palace. But… with a boat. Starting at the Bamboo Palace was about half an hour ride out to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace itself was also crowded, although it was a really nice day with clear views, sunshine, and everything. It was pretty crowded, and we walked around the lake, saw that famous bridges, all the little boats on the lake, and climbed up the stairs to that famous temple in the back of the lake, and wandered around a bit. Unfortunately, the old stone boat that used to be a teahouse, that was closed back in 2000, I had tea with my wife in that stone boat.

Early the next morning, we took the high-speed train from Beijing to Chongqing. It was pretty early, and we had to get to the train station like two hours ahead of departure because that was recommended by the train booking app, as they have airport-like security at the train stations as well. Eventually, I think that wasn’t necessary, so I think maybe an hour earlier would have been sufficient. They have large waiting halls at the large train station. It feels like an airport; it’s huge. The train ride was interesting. A high-speed train going at 350 kilometers per hour across the countryside took more than seven hours to get to Chongqing, because that’s I think, 1,600 kilometers away or something like that. So it’s definitely a huge country.

Chongqing

Chongqing is, from an area perspective, the largest city in the world. It’s apparently almost as large as Austria, and millions and millions of people live there. It’s in the mountains a bit, so not super high mountains, but it is certainly hilly, and you have to climb stairs all the time in the city. The Yangtze River is going through the city, and you have all these skyscrapers, and they are beautifully lit during the night. Very, very interesting and modern city to some extent, with all the modern skyscrapers and stuff like that. We walked around and explored the old city, some nice little restaurants at the side of a hill where you have a very good view over the city in the evening at sunset. Enjoyed beers and BBQ dinner over there. Whatever else did we do? There was a large restaurant in what feels like an old metro tunnel or something like that, a tunnel going straight 300 meters straight into the mountain, and that was used as a restaurant. You couldn’t see the end of it, and we had dinner with the famous Chongqing hot pot, where you basically get a stove with an iron cast skillet. Then you order a whole bunch of ingredients, like meat and vegetables and stuff like that. And in the skillet you cook, like, a broth or something like that. The skillet is actually divided in two parts, so you can have two different flavors of broth. We went for the traditional chili-based hot, very spicy broth, and the other one I think was chicken or something. Yeah, very fancy, very traditional in that area, and, of course, delicious. I like that stuff.

On two evenings, we saw a large drone show over the city. What was amazing to see is that all these skyscrapers have their individual light show, basically displaying advertisements at the facade. Briefly before the light show starts, the whole city lights are coordinated and blink with the same rhythm, I think, to announce and prepare tourists and people for the drone show that’s coming up. Then you have this huge swarm of apparently 7,000 drones painting a 3D movie in the sky. It’s pretty amazing to see.

Zhangjiajie

After these three nights in Chongqing, we continued our journey again by high-speed train to Zhangjiajie. That’s an area where the Chinese people have their national forests and mountains, and this area is famous for their rock formations. These rock formations have been used in James Cameron’s Avatar movies; that’s why they also have the nickname the Avatar Mountains. We went on to see these mountains over three days, I think, because it’s a large national park, and you have multiple spots that you can go to and start your journey and hike into the mountains. The view also very much depends on the weather. We had a bit of luck on the first day when it slightly cleared up, and we could see some of the landscape. On the second day, it was completely foggy, and you could not see more than five to seven meters apart. Although we had been on the top of the mountain and were supposed to see the impressive stone columns and stone bridges and stuff like that, there was really almost nothing to see; it was just foggy. Still, on the second day, it was very crowded with tourists from all over China, a very small percentage of foreign tourists. Still, amazing to see.

On the third day, again the weather was much better, and we hiked up the mountain and down, which was pretty amazing. I think it was overall a 15-kilometer hike or something like that. Very hot, I think it was 26 degrees Celsius, and super humid as well, so we were sweating like hell, but it was very interesting, very nice, stunning views and all that, very, very well.

Hong Kong

Then again, we took the high-speed train from Zhangjiajie to Hong Kong. That was another seven-hour ride, as that’s also a pretty large distance from the middle of the country all the way south to the coast. Spent another three nights in Hong Kong, which is still kind of a separate country. You have to go through immigration twice, actually leaving China mainland, entering Hong Kong, and stuff like that. Hong Kong, as you expect, it’s a much more western city, a colony city with a large western influence. But China is slowly creeping in there. What was most notable is that the traffic in the streets was much, much louder, noisier, and smellier than in China mainland, because in China mainland I’d say almost 90 percent of the cars are electric cars. So it’s quiet, there’s no exhaust pollution and stuff like that, and that was immediately noticeable in Hong Kong where they still have combustion engines a lot.

In Hong Kong, we also just roamed through the city a bit. On the last full day we spent there, we hiked up Victoria Peak to view the sunset over the city. You see all this nice skyline with the skyscrapers and their colorful lights and stuff over the harbor.

Eventually we took a flight back to Beijing because that’s a huge distance to cover from Hong Kong to Beijing. So we took a flight which almost took four hours to get to Beijing and had one night stay over in Beijing to eventually fly back to Frankfurt.

Summary

Overall, it was a very nice trip. Very, very interesting country. Very friendly people. It was amazing to see how the country has changed in the last 26 years since I’ve been there first from a maybe underdeveloped country with a lot of air pollution problems to a very modern country. Everything is digital. You can use your phone to do everything: you order your food, you order your rides, you pay with the phone. And it works at every occasion just flawlessly, that also solves the “we don’t know how to queue up” problem because every little shop has their own app in WeChat and you just order your food, you get an order number, and you don’t have to build a queue then.

Was amazing to see that in Beijing they also seem to agree on a battery pack standard for the motor scooters, so you have these large charging cabinets where there are multiple compartments, and you just go there and swap out your battery, and then it’s charged. They also have mobile phone charger, like basically power banks charging stations for power banks, all over the city. In every city we saw them at every corner. So you don’t need to worry about running out of juice with your phone because you can just rent these phone power banks everywhere, and they had them obviously also in the National Park, right at every little kiosk. So you have all these charging stations, and thinking about it, I think that’s also a good way to store the excess electrical energy that they get from all their renewable energies, right from the solar panels and the wind turbines and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s amazing to see.

And then again, the electrification of the transport system is amazing in China Mainland. Subjectively, ninety percent of all the cars are electric. That obviously helped with the air pollution. The air quality was really good in all the cities we’ve been, except a little bit from Hong Kong, but Chongqing, Beijing, Zhangjiajie were all like perfect air quality.

So what you need to prepare for your China trip is the WeChat app to communicate within the country and also for payments. You need AliPay for payment and public transport as well as ride hailing with the DidiApp within AliPay. You might want to use Trip.com to book your hotel and trains inside the country.

If you’re going to Hong Kong make sure you’ve got the proper visa if you need one. Also AliPay has a special Hong Kong app. Some shops in Hong Kong didn’t work with the

#Beijing #China #Chongqing #enEN #HongKong #Vacation #weeklyreview #Zhangjiajie

#weeklyreview 14-15/2026

This is a combined review for the weeks 14 & 15. These two weeks we’ve spend in China – our long awaited vacation in the land of the rising sun.

We flew from Frankfurt/Main to Beijing with Air China. Flight time was about 9,5 hours for roughly 7800 km. 6 hours time difference. A friend and former colleague of mine was so kind to pick us up at the airport and take us to our hotel. He also took a lot of time and effort to guide us around Beijing the next few days.

Beijing

Right on the second day in Beijing he drove us to The Great Wall near Mutianyu up north of Beijing. We climbed the stairs up to the wall and wandered around for a few kilometres on the top. The weather was perfect that day. Not yet too hot and sunny.

It’s as impressive as you’d expect. In this part the wall was in pretty good shape still and is actively maintained. Fortunately it wasn’t the tourist hot spot although there was tourist infrastructure at the bottom of the mountain where we had parked the car.

In the late afternoon, back in the city we enjoyed our first Peking duck in a somewhat fancy restaurant. The whole roasted duck is prepared right next to the table by a chef.

Next day we had booked tickets for the forbidden city and joined masses of tourists to see the old home of the Chinese emperors. I had seen the forbidden city before in the year 2000. Back then it was almost quite as not many tourists were around that time. Now it was pretty crowded.

In the afternoon we visited an art district. That was a former industrial area that has been repurposed to host a whole bunch of galleries and exhibitions as well as small arts & crafts shops.

In the evening our friend had organised a “team dinner” with a bunch of our former team mates in a cosy little restaurant in the Hutong area near the Drum Tower. That was great to see the old colleagues over good feed and drinks. Even my kids enjoyed to the restaurant and conversations. Before the restaurant we roamed through the remaining old Hutongs in that area. Back in 2000 there were much more of these areas. But they have mostly been removed during the rebuilding and expansion of the city for the Olympics in the early 2000s.

On the last full day in Beijing we went out west to the old summer palace. But… with a boat. Starting at the Bamboo Palace was about half an hour ride out to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace itself was also crowded, although it was a really nice day with clear views, sunshine, and everything. It was pretty crowded, and we walked around the lake, saw that famous bridges, all the little boats on the lake, and climbed up the stairs to that famous temple in the back of the lake, and wandered around a bit. Unfortunately, the old stone boat that used to be a teahouse, that was closed back in 2000, I had tea with my wife in that stone boat.

Early the next morning, we took the high-speed train from Beijing to Chongqing. It was pretty early, and we had to get to the train station like two hours ahead of departure because that was recommended by the train booking app, as they have airport-like security at the train stations as well. Eventually, I think that wasn’t necessary, so I think maybe an hour earlier would have been sufficient. They have large waiting halls at the large train station. It feels like an airport; it’s huge. The train ride was interesting. A high-speed train going at 350 kilometers per hour across the countryside took more than seven hours to get to Chongqing, because that’s I think, 1,600 kilometers away or something like that. So it’s definitely a huge country.

Chongqing

Chongqing is, from an area perspective, the largest city in the world. It’s apparently almost as large as Austria, and millions and millions of people live there. It’s in the mountains a bit, so not super high mountains, but it is certainly hilly, and you have to climb stairs all the time in the city. The Yangtze River is going through the city, and you have all these skyscrapers, and they are beautifully lit during the night. Very, very interesting and modern city to some extent, with all the modern skyscrapers and stuff like that. We walked around and explored the old city, some nice little restaurants at the side of a hill where you have a very good view over the city in the evening at sunset. Enjoyed beers and BBQ dinner over there. Whatever else did we do? There was a large restaurant in what feels like an old metro tunnel or something like that, a tunnel going straight 300 meters straight into the mountain, and that was used as a restaurant. You couldn’t see the end of it, and we had dinner with the famous Chongqing hot pot, where you basically get a stove with an iron cast skillet. Then you order a whole bunch of ingredients, like meat and vegetables and stuff like that. And in the skillet you cook, like, a broth or something like that. The skillet is actually divided in two parts, so you can have two different flavors of broth. We went for the traditional chili-based hot, very spicy broth, and the other one I think was chicken or something. Yeah, very fancy, very traditional in that area, and, of course, delicious. I like that stuff.

On two evenings, we saw a large drone show over the city. What was amazing to see is that all these skyscrapers have their individual light show, basically displaying advertisements at the facade. Briefly before the light show starts, the whole city lights are coordinated and blink with the same rhythm, I think, to announce and prepare tourists and people for the drone show that’s coming up. Then you have this huge swarm of apparently 7,000 drones painting a 3D movie in the sky. It’s pretty amazing to see.

Zhangjiajie

After these three nights in Chongqing, we continued our journey again by high-speed train to Zhangjiajie. That’s an area where the Chinese people have their national forests and mountains, and this area is famous for their rock formations. These rock formations have been used in James Cameron’s Avatar movies; that’s why they also have the nickname the Avatar Mountains. We went on to see these mountains over three days, I think, because it’s a large national park, and you have multiple spots that you can go to and start your journey and hike into the mountains. The view also very much depends on the weather. We had a bit of luck on the first day when it slightly cleared up, and we could see some of the landscape. On the second day, it was completely foggy, and you could not see more than five to seven meters apart. Although we had been on the top of the mountain and were supposed to see the impressive stone columns and stone bridges and stuff like that, there was really almost nothing to see; it was just foggy. Still, on the second day, it was very crowded with tourists from all over China, a very small percentage of foreign tourists. Still, amazing to see.

On the third day, again the weather was much better, and we hiked up the mountain and down, which was pretty amazing. I think it was overall a 15-kilometer hike or something like that. Very hot, I think it was 26 degrees Celsius, and super humid as well, so we were sweating like hell, but it was very interesting, very nice, stunning views and all that, very, very well.

Hong Kong

Then again, we took the high-speed train from Zhangjiajie to Hong Kong. That was another seven-hour ride, as that’s also a pretty large distance from the middle of the country all the way south to the coast. Spent another three nights in Hong Kong, which is still kind of a separate country. You have to go through immigration twice, actually leaving China mainland, entering Hong Kong, and stuff like that. Hong Kong, as you expect, it’s a much more western city, a colony city with a large western influence. But China is slowly creeping in there. What was most notable is that the traffic in the streets was much, much louder, noisier, and smellier than in China mainland, because in China mainland I’d say almost 90 percent of the cars are electric cars. So it’s quiet, there’s no exhaust pollution and stuff like that, and that was immediately noticeable in Hong Kong where they still have combustion engines a lot.

In Hong Kong, we also just roamed through the city a bit. On the last full day we spent there, we hiked up Victoria Peak to view the sunset over the city. You see all this nice skyline with the skyscrapers and their colorful lights and stuff over the harbor.

Eventually we took a flight back to Beijing because that’s a huge distance to cover from Hong Kong to Beijing. So we took a flight which almost took four hours to get to Beijing and had one night stay over in Beijing to eventually fly back to Frankfurt.

Summary

Overall, it was a very nice trip. Very, very interesting country. Very friendly people. It was amazing to see how the country has changed in the last 26 years since I’ve been there first from a maybe underdeveloped country with a lot of air pollution problems to a very modern country. Everything is digital. You can use your phone to do everything: you order your food, you order your rides, you pay with the phone. And it works at every occasion just flawlessly, that also solves the “we don’t know how to queue up” problem because every little shop has their own app in WeChat and you just order your food, you get an order number, and you don’t have to build a queue then.

Was amazing to see that in Beijing they also seem to agree on a battery pack standard for the motor scooters, so you have these large charging cabinets where there are multiple compartments, and you just go there and swap out your battery, and then it’s charged. They also have mobile phone charger, like basically power banks charging stations for power banks, all over the city. In every city we saw them at every corner. So you don’t need to worry about running out of juice with your phone because you can just rent these phone power banks everywhere, and they had them obviously also in the National Park, right at every little kiosk. So you have all these charging stations, and thinking about it, I think that’s also a good way to store the excess electrical energy that they get from all their renewable energies, right from the solar panels and the wind turbines and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s amazing to see.

And then again, the electrification of the transport system is amazing in China Mainland. Subjectively, ninety percent of all the cars are electric. That obviously helped with the air pollution. The air quality was really good in all the cities we’ve been, except a little bit from Hong Kong, but Chongqing, Beijing, Zhangjiajie were all like perfect air quality.

So what you need to prepare for your China trip is the WeChat app to communicate within the country and also for payments. You need AliPay for payment and public transport as well as ride hailing with the DidiApp within AliPay. You might want to use Trip.com to book your hotel and trains inside the country.

If you’re going to Hong Kong make sure you’ve got the proper visa if you need one. Also AliPay has a special Hong Kong app. Some shops in Hong Kong didn’t work with the

#Beijing #China #Chongqing #enEN #HongKong #Vacation #weeklyreview #Zhangjiajie

#weeklyreview 14-15/2026

This is a combined review for the weeks 14 & 15. These two weeks we’ve spend in China – our long awaited vacation in the land of the rising sun.

We flew from Frankfurt/Main to Beijing with Air China. Flight time was about 9,5 hours for roughly 7800 km. 6 hours time difference. A friend and former colleague of mine was so kind to pick us up at the airport and take us to our hotel. He also took a lot of time and effort to guide us around Beijing the next few days.

Beijing

Right on the second day in Beijing he drove us to The Great Wall near Mutianyu up north of Beijing. We climbed the stairs up to the wall and wandered around for a few kilometres on the top. The weather was perfect that day. Not yet too hot and sunny.

It’s as impressive as you’d expect. In this part the wall was in pretty good shape still and is actively maintained. Fortunately it wasn’t the tourist hot spot although there was tourist infrastructure at the bottom of the mountain where we had parked the car.

In the late afternoon, back in the city we enjoyed our first Peking duck in a somewhat fancy restaurant. The whole roasted duck is prepared right next to the table by a chef.

Next day we had booked tickets for the forbidden city and joined masses of tourists to see the old home of the Chinese emperors. I had seen the forbidden city before in the year 2000. Back then it was almost quite as not many tourists were around that time. Now it was pretty crowded.

In the afternoon we visited an art district. That was a former industrial area that has been repurposed to host a whole bunch of galleries and exhibitions as well as small arts & crafts shops.

In the evening our friend had organised a “team dinner” with a bunch of our former team mates in a cosy little restaurant in the Hutong area near the Drum Tower. That was great to see the old colleagues over good feed and drinks. Even my kids enjoyed to the restaurant and conversations. Before the restaurant we roamed through the remaining old Hutongs in that area. Back in 2000 there were much more of these areas. But they have mostly been removed during the rebuilding and expansion of the city for the Olympics in the early 2000s.

On the last full day in Beijing we went out west to the old summer palace. But… with a boat. Starting at the Bamboo Palace was about half an hour ride out to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace itself was also crowded, although it was a really nice day with clear views, sunshine, and everything. It was pretty crowded, and we walked around the lake, saw that famous bridges, all the little boats on the lake, and climbed up the stairs to that famous temple in the back of the lake, and wandered around a bit. Unfortunately, the old stone boat that used to be a teahouse, that was closed back in 2000, I had tea with my wife in that stone boat.

Early the next morning, we took the high-speed train from Beijing to Chongqing. It was pretty early, and we had to get to the train station like two hours ahead of departure because that was recommended by the train booking app, as they have airport-like security at the train stations as well. Eventually, I think that wasn’t necessary, so I think maybe an hour earlier would have been sufficient. They have large waiting halls at the large train station. It feels like an airport; it’s huge. The train ride was interesting. A high-speed train going at 350 kilometers per hour across the countryside took more than seven hours to get to Chongqing, because that’s I think, 1,600 kilometers away or something like that. So it’s definitely a huge country.

Chongqing

Chongqing is, from an area perspective, the largest city in the world. It’s apparently almost as large as Austria, and millions and millions of people live there. It’s in the mountains a bit, so not super high mountains, but it is certainly hilly, and you have to climb stairs all the time in the city. The Yangtze River is going through the city, and you have all these skyscrapers, and they are beautifully lit during the night. Very, very interesting and modern city to some extent, with all the modern skyscrapers and stuff like that. We walked around and explored the old city, some nice little restaurants at the side of a hill where you have a very good view over the city in the evening at sunset. Enjoyed beers and BBQ dinner over there. Whatever else did we do? There was a large restaurant in what feels like an old metro tunnel or something like that, a tunnel going straight 300 meters straight into the mountain, and that was used as a restaurant. You couldn’t see the end of it, and we had dinner with the famous Chongqing hot pot, where you basically get a stove with an iron cast skillet. Then you order a whole bunch of ingredients, like meat and vegetables and stuff like that. And in the skillet you cook, like, a broth or something like that. The skillet is actually divided in two parts, so you can have two different flavors of broth. We went for the traditional chili-based hot, very spicy broth, and the other one I think was chicken or something. Yeah, very fancy, very traditional in that area, and, of course, delicious. I like that stuff.

On two evenings, we saw a large drone show over the city. What was amazing to see is that all these skyscrapers have their individual light show, basically displaying advertisements at the facade. Briefly before the light show starts, the whole city lights are coordinated and blink with the same rhythm, I think, to announce and prepare tourists and people for the drone show that’s coming up. Then you have this huge swarm of apparently 7,000 drones painting a 3D movie in the sky. It’s pretty amazing to see.

Zhangjiajie

After these three nights in Chongqing, we continued our journey again by high-speed train to Zhangjiajie. That’s an area where the Chinese people have their national forests and mountains, and this area is famous for their rock formations. These rock formations have been used in James Cameron’s Avatar movies; that’s why they also have the nickname the Avatar Mountains. We went on to see these mountains over three days, I think, because it’s a large national park, and you have multiple spots that you can go to and start your journey and hike into the mountains. The view also very much depends on the weather. We had a bit of luck on the first day when it slightly cleared up, and we could see some of the landscape. On the second day, it was completely foggy, and you could not see more than five to seven meters apart. Although we had been on the top of the mountain and were supposed to see the impressive stone columns and stone bridges and stuff like that, there was really almost nothing to see; it was just foggy. Still, on the second day, it was very crowded with tourists from all over China, a very small percentage of foreign tourists. Still, amazing to see.

On the third day, again the weather was much better, and we hiked up the mountain and down, which was pretty amazing. I think it was overall a 15-kilometer hike or something like that. Very hot, I think it was 26 degrees Celsius, and super humid as well, so we were sweating like hell, but it was very interesting, very nice, stunning views and all that, very, very well.

Hong Kong

Then again, we took the high-speed train from Zhangjiajie to Hong Kong. That was another seven-hour ride, as that’s also a pretty large distance from the middle of the country all the way south to the coast. Spent another three nights in Hong Kong, which is still kind of a separate country. You have to go through immigration twice, actually leaving China mainland, entering Hong Kong, and stuff like that. Hong Kong, as you expect, it’s a much more western city, a colony city with a large western influence. But China is slowly creeping in there. What was most notable is that the traffic in the streets was much, much louder, noisier, and smellier than in China mainland, because in China mainland I’d say almost 90 percent of the cars are electric cars. So it’s quiet, there’s no exhaust pollution and stuff like that, and that was immediately noticeable in Hong Kong where they still have combustion engines a lot.

In Hong Kong, we also just roamed through the city a bit. On the last full day we spent there, we hiked up Victoria Peak to view the sunset over the city. You see all this nice skyline with the skyscrapers and their colorful lights and stuff over the harbor.

Eventually we took a flight back to Beijing because that’s a huge distance to cover from Hong Kong to Beijing. So we took a flight which almost took four hours to get to Beijing and had one night stay over in Beijing to eventually fly back to Frankfurt.

Summary

Overall, it was a very nice trip. Very, very interesting country. Very friendly people. It was amazing to see how the country has changed in the last 26 years since I’ve been there first from a maybe underdeveloped country with a lot of air pollution problems to a very modern country. Everything is digital. You can use your phone to do everything: you order your food, you order your rides, you pay with the phone. And it works at every occasion just flawlessly, that also solves the “we don’t know how to queue up” problem because every little shop has their own app in WeChat and you just order your food, you get an order number, and you don’t have to build a queue then.

Was amazing to see that in Beijing they also seem to agree on a battery pack standard for the motor scooters, so you have these large charging cabinets where there are multiple compartments, and you just go there and swap out your battery, and then it’s charged. They also have mobile phone charger, like basically power banks charging stations for power banks, all over the city. In every city we saw them at every corner. So you don’t need to worry about running out of juice with your phone because you can just rent these phone power banks everywhere, and they had them obviously also in the National Park, right at every little kiosk. So you have all these charging stations, and thinking about it, I think that’s also a good way to store the excess electrical energy that they get from all their renewable energies, right from the solar panels and the wind turbines and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s amazing to see.

And then again, the electrification of the transport system is amazing in China Mainland. Subjectively, ninety percent of all the cars are electric. That obviously helped with the air pollution. The air quality was really good in all the cities we’ve been, except a little bit from Hong Kong, but Chongqing, Beijing, Zhangjiajie were all like perfect air quality.

So what you need to prepare for your China trip is the WeChat app to communicate within the country and also for payments. You need AliPay for payment and public transport as well as ride hailing with the DidiApp within AliPay. You might want to use Trip.com to book your hotel and trains inside the country.

If you’re going to Hong Kong make sure you’ve got the proper visa if you need one. Also AliPay has a special Hong Kong app. Some shops in Hong Kong didn’t work with the

#Beijing #China #Chongqing #enEN #HongKong #Vacation #weeklyreview #Zhangjiajie

#weeklyreview 14-15/2026

This is a combined review for the weeks 14 & 15. These two weeks we’ve spend in China – our long awaited vacation in the land of the rising sun.

We flew from Frankfurt/Main to Beijing with Air China. Flight time was about 9,5 hours for roughly 7800 km. 6 hours time difference. A friend and former colleague of mine was so kind to pick us up at the airport and take us to our hotel. He also took a lot of time and effort to guide us around Beijing the next few days.

Beijing

Right on the second day in Beijing he drove us to The Great Wall near Mutianyu up north of Beijing. We climbed the stairs up to the wall and wandered around for a few kilometres on the top. The weather was perfect that day. Not yet too hot and sunny.

It’s as impressive as you’d expect. In this part the wall was in pretty good shape still and is actively maintained. Fortunately it wasn’t the tourist hot spot although there was tourist infrastructure at the bottom of the mountain where we had parked the car.

In the late afternoon, back in the city we enjoyed our first Peking duck in a somewhat fancy restaurant. The whole roasted duck is prepared right next to the table by a chef.

Next day we had booked tickets for the forbidden city and joined masses of tourists to see the old home of the Chinese emperors. I had seen the forbidden city before in the year 2000. Back then it was almost quite as not many tourists were around that time. Now it was pretty crowded.

In the afternoon we visited an art district. That was a former industrial area that has been repurposed to host a whole bunch of galleries and exhibitions as well as small arts & crafts shops.

In the evening our friend had organised a “team dinner” with a bunch of our former team mates in a cosy little restaurant in the Hutong area near the Drum Tower. That was great to see the old colleagues over good feed and drinks. Even my kids enjoyed to the restaurant and conversations. Before the restaurant we roamed through the remaining old Hutongs in that area. Back in 2000 there were much more of these areas. But they have mostly been removed during the rebuilding and expansion of the city for the Olympics in the early 2000s.

On the last full day in Beijing we went out west to the old summer palace. But… with a boat. Starting at the Bamboo Palace was about half an hour ride out to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace itself was also crowded, although it was a really nice day with clear views, sunshine, and everything. It was pretty crowded, and we walked around the lake, saw that famous bridges, all the little boats on the lake, and climbed up the stairs to that famous temple in the back of the lake, and wandered around a bit. Unfortunately, the old stone boat that used to be a teahouse, that was closed back in 2000, I had tea with my wife in that stone boat.

Early the next morning, we took the high-speed train from Beijing to Chongqing. It was pretty early, and we had to get to the train station like two hours ahead of departure because that was recommended by the train booking app, as they have airport-like security at the train stations as well. Eventually, I think that wasn’t necessary, so I think maybe an hour earlier would have been sufficient. They have large waiting halls at the large train station. It feels like an airport; it’s huge. The train ride was interesting. A high-speed train going at 350 kilometers per hour across the countryside took more than seven hours to get to Chongqing, because that’s I think, 1,600 kilometers away or something like that. So it’s definitely a huge country.

Chongqing

Chongqing is, from an area perspective, the largest city in the world. It’s apparently almost as large as Austria, and millions and millions of people live there. It’s in the mountains a bit, so not super high mountains, but it is certainly hilly, and you have to climb stairs all the time in the city. The Yangtze River is going through the city, and you have all these skyscrapers, and they are beautifully lit during the night. Very, very interesting and modern city to some extent, with all the modern skyscrapers and stuff like that. We walked around and explored the old city, some nice little restaurants at the side of a hill where you have a very good view over the city in the evening at sunset. Enjoyed beers and BBQ dinner over there. Whatever else did we do? There was a large restaurant in what feels like an old metro tunnel or something like that, a tunnel going straight 300 meters straight into the mountain, and that was used as a restaurant. You couldn’t see the end of it, and we had dinner with the famous Chongqing hot pot, where you basically get a stove with an iron cast skillet. Then you order a whole bunch of ingredients, like meat and vegetables and stuff like that. And in the skillet you cook, like, a broth or something like that. The skillet is actually divided in two parts, so you can have two different flavors of broth. We went for the traditional chili-based hot, very spicy broth, and the other one I think was chicken or something. Yeah, very fancy, very traditional in that area, and, of course, delicious. I like that stuff.

On two evenings, we saw a large drone show over the city. What was amazing to see is that all these skyscrapers have their individual light show, basically displaying advertisements at the facade. Briefly before the light show starts, the whole city lights are coordinated and blink with the same rhythm, I think, to announce and prepare tourists and people for the drone show that’s coming up. Then you have this huge swarm of apparently 7,000 drones painting a 3D movie in the sky. It’s pretty amazing to see.

Zhangjiajie

After these three nights in Chongqing, we continued our journey again by high-speed train to Zhangjiajie. That’s an area where the Chinese people have their national forests and mountains, and this area is famous for their rock formations. These rock formations have been used in James Cameron’s Avatar movies; that’s why they also have the nickname the Avatar Mountains. We went on to see these mountains over three days, I think, because it’s a large national park, and you have multiple spots that you can go to and start your journey and hike into the mountains. The view also very much depends on the weather. We had a bit of luck on the first day when it slightly cleared up, and we could see some of the landscape. On the second day, it was completely foggy, and you could not see more than five to seven meters apart. Although we had been on the top of the mountain and were supposed to see the impressive stone columns and stone bridges and stuff like that, there was really almost nothing to see; it was just foggy. Still, on the second day, it was very crowded with tourists from all over China, a very small percentage of foreign tourists. Still, amazing to see.

On the third day, again the weather was much better, and we hiked up the mountain and down, which was pretty amazing. I think it was overall a 15-kilometer hike or something like that. Very hot, I think it was 26 degrees Celsius, and super humid as well, so we were sweating like hell, but it was very interesting, very nice, stunning views and all that, very, very well.

Hong Kong

Then again, we took the high-speed train from Zhangjiajie to Hong Kong. That was another seven-hour ride, as that’s also a pretty large distance from the middle of the country all the way south to the coast. Spent another three nights in Hong Kong, which is still kind of a separate country. You have to go through immigration twice, actually leaving China mainland, entering Hong Kong, and stuff like that. Hong Kong, as you expect, it’s a much more western city, a colony city with a large western influence. But China is slowly creeping in there. What was most notable is that the traffic in the streets was much, much louder, noisier, and smellier than in China mainland, because in China mainland I’d say almost 90 percent of the cars are electric cars. So it’s quiet, there’s no exhaust pollution and stuff like that, and that was immediately noticeable in Hong Kong where they still have combustion engines a lot.

In Hong Kong, we also just roamed through the city a bit. On the last full day we spent there, we hiked up Victoria Peak to view the sunset over the city. You see all this nice skyline with the skyscrapers and their colorful lights and stuff over the harbor.

Eventually we took a flight back to Beijing because that’s a huge distance to cover from Hong Kong to Beijing. So we took a flight which almost took four hours to get to Beijing and had one night stay over in Beijing to eventually fly back to Frankfurt.

Summary

Overall, it was a very nice trip. Very, very interesting country. Very friendly people. It was amazing to see how the country has changed in the last 26 years since I’ve been there first from a maybe underdeveloped country with a lot of air pollution problems to a very modern country. Everything is digital. You can use your phone to do everything: you order your food, you order your rides, you pay with the phone. And it works at every occasion just flawlessly, that also solves the “we don’t know how to queue up” problem because every little shop has their own app in WeChat and you just order your food, you get an order number, and you don’t have to build a queue then.

Was amazing to see that in Beijing they also seem to agree on a battery pack standard for the motor scooters, so you have these large charging cabinets where there are multiple compartments, and you just go there and swap out your battery, and then it’s charged. They also have mobile phone charger, like basically power banks charging stations for power banks, all over the city. In every city we saw them at every corner. So you don’t need to worry about running out of juice with your phone because you can just rent these phone power banks everywhere, and they had them obviously also in the National Park, right at every little kiosk. So you have all these charging stations, and thinking about it, I think that’s also a good way to store the excess electrical energy that they get from all their renewable energies, right from the solar panels and the wind turbines and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s amazing to see.

And then again, the electrification of the transport system is amazing in China Mainland. Subjectively, ninety percent of all the cars are electric. That obviously helped with the air pollution. The air quality was really good in all the cities we’ve been, except a little bit from Hong Kong, but Chongqing, Beijing, Zhangjiajie were all like perfect air quality.

So what you need to prepare for your China trip is the WeChat app to communicate within the country and also for payments. You need AliPay for payment and public transport as well as ride hailing with the DidiApp within AliPay. You might want to use Trip.com to book your hotel and trains inside the country.

If you’re going to Hong Kong make sure you’ve got the proper visa if you need one. Also AliPay has a special Hong Kong app. Some shops in Hong Kong didn’t work with the

#Beijing #China #Chongqing #enEN #HongKong #Vacation #weeklyreview #Zhangjiajie

#weeklyreview 14-15/2026

This is a combined review for the weeks 14 & 15. These two weeks we’ve spend in China – our long awaited vacation in the land of the rising sun.

We flew from Frankfurt/Main to Beijing with Air China. Flight time was about 9,5 hours for roughly 7800 km. 6 hours time difference. A friend and former colleague of mine was so kind to pick us up at the airport and take us to our hotel. He also took a lot of time and effort to guide us around Beijing the next few days.

Beijing

Right on the second day in Beijing he drove us to The Great Wall near Mutianyu up north of Beijing. We climbed the stairs up to the wall and wandered around for a few kilometres on the top. The weather was perfect that day. Not yet too hot and sunny.

It’s as impressive as you’d expect. In this part the wall was in pretty good shape still and is actively maintained. Fortunately it wasn’t the tourist hot spot although there was tourist infrastructure at the bottom of the mountain where we had parked the car.

In the late afternoon, back in the city we enjoyed our first Peking duck in a somewhat fancy restaurant. The whole roasted duck is prepared right next to the table by a chef.

Next day we had booked tickets for the forbidden city and joined masses of tourists to see the old home of the Chinese emperors. I had seen the forbidden city before in the year 2000. Back then it was almost quite as not many tourists were around that time. Now it was pretty crowded.

In the afternoon we visited an art district. That was a former industrial area that has been repurposed to host a whole bunch of galleries and exhibitions as well as small arts & crafts shops.

In the evening our friend had organised a “team dinner” with a bunch of our former team mates in a cosy little restaurant in the Hutong area near the Drum Tower. That was great to see the old colleagues over good feed and drinks. Even my kids enjoyed to the restaurant and conversations. Before the restaurant we roamed through the remaining old Hutongs in that area. Back in 2000 there were much more of these areas. But they have mostly been removed during the rebuilding and expansion of the city for the Olympics in the early 2000s.

On the last full day in Beijing we went out west to the old summer palace. But… with a boat. Starting at the Bamboo Palace was about half an hour ride out to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace itself was also crowded, although it was a really nice day with clear views, sunshine, and everything. It was pretty crowded, and we walked around the lake, saw that famous bridges, all the little boats on the lake, and climbed up the stairs to that famous temple in the back of the lake, and wandered around a bit. Unfortunately, the old stone boat that used to be a teahouse, that was closed back in 2000, I had tea with my wife in that stone boat.

Early the next morning, we took the high-speed train from Beijing to Chongqing. It was pretty early, and we had to get to the train station like two hours ahead of departure because that was recommended by the train booking app, as they have airport-like security at the train stations as well. Eventually, I think that wasn’t necessary, so I think maybe an hour earlier would have been sufficient. They have large waiting halls at the large train station. It feels like an airport; it’s huge. The train ride was interesting. A high-speed train going at 350 kilometers per hour across the countryside took more than seven hours to get to Chongqing, because that’s I think, 1,600 kilometers away or something like that. So it’s definitely a huge country.

Chongqing

Chongqing is, from an area perspective, the largest city in the world. It’s apparently almost as large as Austria, and millions and millions of people live there. It’s in the mountains a bit, so not super high mountains, but it is certainly hilly, and you have to climb stairs all the time in the city. The Yangtze River is going through the city, and you have all these skyscrapers, and they are beautifully lit during the night. Very, very interesting and modern city to some extent, with all the modern skyscrapers and stuff like that. We walked around and explored the old city, some nice little restaurants at the side of a hill where you have a very good view over the city in the evening at sunset. Enjoyed beers and BBQ dinner over there. Whatever else did we do? There was a large restaurant in what feels like an old metro tunnel or something like that, a tunnel going straight 300 meters straight into the mountain, and that was used as a restaurant. You couldn’t see the end of it, and we had dinner with the famous Chongqing hot pot, where you basically get a stove with an iron cast skillet. Then you order a whole bunch of ingredients, like meat and vegetables and stuff like that. And in the skillet you cook, like, a broth or something like that. The skillet is actually divided in two parts, so you can have two different flavors of broth. We went for the traditional chili-based hot, very spicy broth, and the other one I think was chicken or something. Yeah, very fancy, very traditional in that area, and, of course, delicious. I like that stuff.

On two evenings, we saw a large drone show over the city. What was amazing to see is that all these skyscrapers have their individual light show, basically displaying advertisements at the facade. Briefly before the light show starts, the whole city lights are coordinated and blink with the same rhythm, I think, to announce and prepare tourists and people for the drone show that’s coming up. Then you have this huge swarm of apparently 7,000 drones painting a 3D movie in the sky. It’s pretty amazing to see.

Zhangjiajie

After these three nights in Chongqing, we continued our journey again by high-speed train to Zhangjiajie. That’s an area where the Chinese people have their national forests and mountains, and this area is famous for their rock formations. These rock formations have been used in James Cameron’s Avatar movies; that’s why they also have the nickname the Avatar Mountains. We went on to see these mountains over three days, I think, because it’s a large national park, and you have multiple spots that you can go to and start your journey and hike into the mountains. The view also very much depends on the weather. We had a bit of luck on the first day when it slightly cleared up, and we could see some of the landscape. On the second day, it was completely foggy, and you could not see more than five to seven meters apart. Although we had been on the top of the mountain and were supposed to see the impressive stone columns and stone bridges and stuff like that, there was really almost nothing to see; it was just foggy. Still, on the second day, it was very crowded with tourists from all over China, a very small percentage of foreign tourists. Still, amazing to see.

On the third day, again the weather was much better, and we hiked up the mountain and down, which was pretty amazing. I think it was overall a 15-kilometer hike or something like that. Very hot, I think it was 26 degrees Celsius, and super humid as well, so we were sweating like hell, but it was very interesting, very nice, stunning views and all that, very, very well.

Hong Kong

Then again, we took the high-speed train from Zhangjiajie to Hong Kong. That was another seven-hour ride, as that’s also a pretty large distance from the middle of the country all the way south to the coast. Spent another three nights in Hong Kong, which is still kind of a separate country. You have to go through immigration twice, actually leaving China mainland, entering Hong Kong, and stuff like that. Hong Kong, as you expect, it’s a much more western city, a colony city with a large western influence. But China is slowly creeping in there. What was most notable is that the traffic in the streets was much, much louder, noisier, and smellier than in China mainland, because in China mainland I’d say almost 90 percent of the cars are electric cars. So it’s quiet, there’s no exhaust pollution and stuff like that, and that was immediately noticeable in Hong Kong where they still have combustion engines a lot.

In Hong Kong, we also just roamed through the city a bit. On the last full day we spent there, we hiked up Victoria Peak to view the sunset over the city. You see all this nice skyline with the skyscrapers and their colorful lights and stuff over the harbor.

Eventually we took a flight back to Beijing because that’s a huge distance to cover from Hong Kong to Beijing. So we took a flight which almost took four hours to get to Beijing and had one night stay over in Beijing to eventually fly back to Frankfurt.

Summary

Overall, it was a very nice trip. Very, very interesting country. Very friendly people. It was amazing to see how the country has changed in the last 26 years since I’ve been there first from a maybe underdeveloped country with a lot of air pollution problems to a very modern country. Everything is digital. You can use your phone to do everything: you order your food, you order your rides, you pay with the phone. And it works at every occasion just flawlessly, that also solves the “we don’t know how to queue up” problem because every little shop has their own app in WeChat and you just order your food, you get an order number, and you don’t have to build a queue then.

Was amazing to see that in Beijing they also seem to agree on a battery pack standard for the motor scooters, so you have these large charging cabinets where there are multiple compartments, and you just go there and swap out your battery, and then it’s charged. They also have mobile phone charger, like basically power banks charging stations for power banks, all over the city. In every city we saw them at every corner. So you don’t need to worry about running out of juice with your phone because you can just rent these phone power banks everywhere, and they had them obviously also in the National Park, right at every little kiosk. So you have all these charging stations, and thinking about it, I think that’s also a good way to store the excess electrical energy that they get from all their renewable energies, right from the solar panels and the wind turbines and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s amazing to see.

And then again, the electrification of the transport system is amazing in China Mainland. Subjectively, ninety percent of all the cars are electric. That obviously helped with the air pollution. The air quality was really good in all the cities we’ve been, except a little bit from Hong Kong, but Chongqing, Beijing, Zhangjiajie were all like perfect air quality.

So what you need to prepare for your China trip is the WeChat app to communicate within the country and also for payments. You need AliPay for payment and public transport as well as ride hailing with the DidiApp within AliPay. You might want to use Trip.com to book your hotel and trains inside the country.

If you’re going to Hong Kong make sure you’ve got the proper visa if you need one. Also AliPay has a special Hong Kong app. Some shops in Hong Kong didn’t work with the

#Beijing #China #Chongqing #enEN #HongKong #Vacation #weeklyreview #Zhangjiajie

#weeklyreview 13/2026

Final week before the China vacation, so still a bit of organizing to do: getting all the paperwork ready, booking the last trains as they can be available, and giving the last instructions to the craftsman for the house.

Obviously did a very good run on Sunday with a friend in preparation of his half marathon. That was a, I think, almost 18 kilometers run on the countryside and it was surprisingly easy. I hadn’t expected that because I wasn’t really training for anything and skipped a lot of my usual runs. But yeah, that went well, was a really good run in the countryside. Maybe the two bananas I had the day before helped there.

Also got the hardware delivered for my #MeshCore course in April in the community college in Templin and tried that out. That one worked. Really good reception here in Berlin and I saw there’s actually another MeshCore node in Templin beside my own. So looking forward to that after the vacation and let’s see whether we can get some connectivity in Templin going. My friend is also preparing the next Digital Independence Day in Templin that’s taking place on Easter Sunday. So that’s still going to happen. Also looking forward to the next session of that after my vacation. I think we’re going to focus a bit more on Linux there as there was a lot of interest around that one. Also attended the yearly gathering of the hunting community. All owners of forests are mandatory members of that hunting community. That was fun and delicious.

#enEN #food #Meshcore #project25 #Uckermark #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 13/2026

Final week before the China vacation, so still a bit of organizing to do: getting all the paperwork ready, booking the last trains as they can be available, and giving the last instructions to the craftsman for the house.

Obviously did a very good run on Sunday with a friend in preparation of his half marathon. That was a, I think, almost 18 kilometers run on the countryside and it was surprisingly easy. I hadn’t expected that because I wasn’t really training for anything and skipped a lot of my usual runs. But yeah, that went well, was a really good run in the countryside. Maybe the two bananas I had the day before helped there.

Also got the hardware delivered for my #MeshCore course in April in the community college in Templin and tried that out. That one worked. Really good reception here in Berlin and I saw there’s actually another MeshCore node in Templin beside my own. So looking forward to that after the vacation and let’s see whether we can get some connectivity in Templin going. My friend is also preparing the next Digital Independence Day in Templin that’s taking place on Easter Sunday. So that’s still going to happen. Also looking forward to the next session of that after my vacation. I think we’re going to focus a bit more on Linux there as there was a lot of interest around that one. Also attended the yearly gathering of the hunting community. All owners of forests are mandatory members of that hunting community. That was fun and delicious.

#enEN #food #Meshcore #project25 #Uckermark #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 13/2026

Final week before the China vacation, so still a bit of organizing to do: getting all the paperwork ready, booking the last trains as they can be available, and giving the last instructions to the craftsman for the house.

Obviously did a very good run on Sunday with a friend in preparation of his half marathon. That was a, I think, almost 18 kilometers run on the countryside and it was surprisingly easy. I hadn’t expected that because I wasn’t really training for anything and skipped a lot of my usual runs. But yeah, that went well, was a really good run in the countryside. Maybe the two bananas I had the day before helped there.

Also got the hardware delivered for my #MeshCore course in April in the community college in Templin and tried that out. That one worked. Really good reception here in Berlin and I saw there’s actually another MeshCore node in Templin beside my own. So looking forward to that after the vacation and let’s see whether we can get some connectivity in Templin going. My friend is also preparing the next Digital Independence Day in Templin that’s taking place on Easter Sunday. So that’s still going to happen. Also looking forward to the next session of that after my vacation. I think we’re going to focus a bit more on Linux there as there was a lot of interest around that one. Also attended the yearly gathering of the hunting community. All owners of forests are mandatory members of that hunting community. That was fun and delicious.

#enEN #food #Meshcore #project25 #Uckermark #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 13/2026

Final week before the China vacation, so still a bit of organizing to do: getting all the paperwork ready, booking the last trains as they can be available, and giving the last instructions to the craftsman for the house.

Obviously did a very good run on Sunday with a friend in preparation of his half marathon. That was a, I think, almost 18 kilometers run on the countryside and it was surprisingly easy. I hadn’t expected that because I wasn’t really training for anything and skipped a lot of my usual runs. But yeah, that went well, was a really good run in the countryside. Maybe the two bananas I had the day before helped there.

Also got the hardware delivered for my #MeshCore course in April in the community college in Templin and tried that out. That one worked. Really good reception here in Berlin and I saw there’s actually another MeshCore node in Templin beside my own. So looking forward to that after the vacation and let’s see whether we can get some connectivity in Templin going. My friend is also preparing the next Digital Independence Day in Templin that’s taking place on Easter Sunday. So that’s still going to happen. Also looking forward to the next session of that after my vacation. I think we’re going to focus a bit more on Linux there as there was a lot of interest around that one. Also attended the yearly gathering of the hunting community. All owners of forests are mandatory members of that hunting community. That was fun and delicious.

#enEN #food #Meshcore #project25 #Uckermark #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 13/2026

Final week before the China vacation, so still a bit of organizing to do: getting all the paperwork ready, booking the last trains as they can be available, and giving the last instructions to the craftsman for the house.

Obviously did a very good run on Sunday with a friend in preparation of his half marathon. That was a, I think, almost 18 kilometers run on the countryside and it was surprisingly easy. I hadn’t expected that because I wasn’t really training for anything and skipped a lot of my usual runs. But yeah, that went well, was a really good run in the countryside. Maybe the two bananas I had the day before helped there.

Also got the hardware delivered for my #MeshCore course in April in the community college in Templin and tried that out. That one worked. Really good reception here in Berlin and I saw there’s actually another MeshCore node in Templin beside my own. So looking forward to that after the vacation and let’s see whether we can get some connectivity in Templin going. My friend is also preparing the next Digital Independence Day in Templin that’s taking place on Easter Sunday. So that’s still going to happen. Also looking forward to the next session of that after my vacation. I think we’re going to focus a bit more on Linux there as there was a lot of interest around that one. Also attended the yearly gathering of the hunting community. All owners of forests are mandatory members of that hunting community. That was fun and delicious.

#enEN #food #Meshcore #project25 #Uckermark #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 07/2026

February 8th – 14th, 2026

Summary

Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.

AI, AI and more AI

This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.

Fediverse journaling plugin

With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.

I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.

I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.

Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.

The code can be found here.

Some snippets from this weeks journal:

2026-02-11 17:37:06

I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko

2026-02-12 12:59:10

@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falko

I’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.

Project Management in the age of vibe everything

To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.

Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.

It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.

Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.

The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.

What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.

But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.

Rural restaurants

On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉

That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.

It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.

New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.

China here we come

The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.

#project25 update

This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.

Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.

I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.

still ice on the lake

14 at last

Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂

Learning

Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.

Reading

no changes over last week

#activitypub #coffee #enEN #project25 #tasskaff #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wordpress

#weeklyreview 07/2026

February 8th – 14th, 2026

Summary

Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.

AI, AI and more AI

This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.

Fediverse journaling plugin

With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.

I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.

I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.

Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.

The code can be found here.

Some snippets from this weeks journal:

2026-02-11 17:37:06

I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko

2026-02-12 12:59:10

@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falko

I’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.

Project Management in the age of vibe everything

To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.

Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.

It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.

Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.

The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.

What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.

But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.

Rural restaurants

On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉

That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.

It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.

New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.

China here we come

The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.

#project25 update

This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.

Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.

I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.

still ice on the lake

14 at last

Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂

Learning

Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.

Reading

no changes over last week

#activitypub #coffee #enEN #project25 #tasskaff #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wordpress

#weeklyreview 07/2026

February 8th – 14th, 2026

Summary

Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.

AI, AI and more AI

This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.

Fediverse journaling plugin

With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.

I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.

I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.

Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.

The code can be found here.

Some snippets from this weeks journal:

2026-02-11 17:37:06

I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko

2026-02-12 12:59:10

@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falko

I’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.

Project Management in the age of vibe everything

To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.

Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.

It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.

Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.

The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.

What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.

But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.

Rural restaurants

On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉

That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.

It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.

New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.

China here we come

The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.

#project25 update

This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.

Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.

I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.

still ice on the lake

14 at last

Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂

Learning

Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.

Reading

no changes over last week

#activitypub #coffee #enEN #project25 #tasskaff #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wordpress

#weeklyreview 07/2026

February 8th – 14th, 2026

Summary

Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.

AI, AI and more AI

This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.

Fediverse journaling plugin

With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.

I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.

I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.

Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.

The code can be found here.

Some snippets from this weeks journal:

2026-02-11 17:37:06

I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko

2026-02-12 12:59:10

@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falko

I’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.

Project Management in the age of vibe everything

To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.

Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.

It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.

Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.

The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.

What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.

But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.

Rural restaurants

On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉

That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.

It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.

New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.

China here we come

The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.

#project25 update

This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.

Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.

I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.

still ice on the lake

14 at last

Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂

Learning

Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.

Reading

no changes over last week

#activitypub #coffee #enEN #project25 #tasskaff #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wordpress

#weeklyreview 07/2026

February 8th – 14th, 2026

Summary

Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.

AI, AI and more AI

This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.

Fediverse journaling plugin

With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.

I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.

I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.

Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.

The code can be found here.

Some snippets from this weeks journal:

2026-02-11 17:37:06

I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko

2026-02-12 12:59:10

@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falko

I’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.

Project Management in the age of vibe everything

To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.

Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.

It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.

Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.

The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.

What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.

But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.

Rural restaurants

On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉

That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.

It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.

New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.

China here we come

The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.

#project25 update

This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.

Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.

I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.

still ice on the lake

14 at last

Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂

Learning

Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.

Reading

no changes over last week

#activitypub #coffee #enEN #project25 #tasskaff #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wordpress