#project-25 — Public Fediverse posts

#weeklyreview 33/2026

Week 33 started with cooking tomatoe sauce from a bucket of tomatoes I got from my dad. Let it simmer for a good 8 hours. Eventually that made 4 portions of delicious pasta sauce.

Tried the new Korean restaurant in the Oranienburger Strasse named “Bandol”. I like it a lot. They put some effort in the decoration of the job and the food was delicious. Only complaint is about them handing out single use plastic gloves so people don’t get dirty hands. There are napkins and a bathroom. Why produce more plastic trash? At first we were a little puzzled why they add condoms to the meal?

Tuesday evening the Beer & Burger crew met at “Die Alte Turnhalle” in Friedrichshain. The verdict is: ok food. Little choice, high prices. Was a fun evening nevertheless with the folks.

Had to pass on the Hackerstammtisch though this month due to the scheduling conflict.

living dangerously

Our tenant renting a room in our flat really went over the top this week. I was working from home and all of a sudden my monitors went off. Odd time for a power outage I thought. Checked the rest of the flat and it became apparent that it must be something in our flat. The lights were still working. Just the power sockets were off. Checked the fuse box and found the FI (error current fuse ) triggered. Started checking all the power sockets to see what’s causing this. Eventually the tenant came out of her room complaining about the power loss. I asked her to remove everything from the power sockets to find the cause. Eventually the fuse stayed in. So that must have been something in her room. I asked whether I can check and she let me in. I found a power distribution unit sitting in the floor in a puddle of water. And she was happily operating it. The PDU was also wet.

Apparently she had accidentally poured water over it and didn’t bother to disconnect or dry it. Just kept on with her business of using her face sauna. I was utterly speechless about such stupidity and ignorance.

Contract terminated.

Praying Mantis

Next morning I saw a pretty large insect on our house door in Berlin. A beautiful green praying mantis. I had never seen them in the wild here before. Thought they are not endemic here. But turns out they are meanwhile. And just by accident I saw two other people post pictures about their sightings in the following days around here.

#project25

Got rid of a whole bunch of cardboard and started removing the floor in the next room. Also checked how thick the concrete in the ground floor is over the bare earth.

N8N, Paperless, Mastodon, LinkDing

Spent some time optimising my document workflow. When I upload new documents into my PaperlessNGX instance a N8N workflow is triggered. This will add a summary into a custom field and generate a meaningful document title. Things Paperless doesn’t do out of the box yet.

Since that depends on my Laptop with a running Ollama to be online, it fails when the laptop is not connected. So I split the workflow into a queue and processor. Adding documents in Paperless just adds them to a queue table in my N8n. A timer kicks off the processing workflow every 5 minutes. This one iterates over the documents one by one now and removes the document from the queue only when it finishes successfully. This way the documents get processed eventually. Even when my laptop isn’t online all the time.

Second workflow I was working on is the archival of my Mastodon Bookmarks. A regular check reads my latest bookmarks in Mastodon and adds them to my LinkDing instance if they are not already there.

LinkDing will also create an HTML Archive of every bookmark upon submission. This way I have a copy of content that might vanish over time.

#weeklyreview 32/2026

Monday was a really lovely summer night in Berlin. We seized it at a rooftop bar in Mitte with a few good cocktails.

On my way back home I snapped a picture of a public ad display that seemed to have issues with its hard disk and this displaying Linux console information. Posted that on the Fediverse of course and was surprised by the attention that post got. Almost 500 likes by the time of writing.

Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon

I’m not after a lot of likes or boost in my feed. What I’m but happy about is, that the Fediverse seems large and popular enough for a tiny fringe instance to get that far of a reach.

Kiddo was home in Berlin this week and we had lunch together in the city on Monday and were dining out at a Sushi restaurant on Wednesday. Weather in principle was bearable in Berlin I’d say. I was even surprised that the cooling in the office was working. We don’t have an actual air condition, but rather a weird cooling system that is broken more often than not.

Friday evening we attended the mobile summer cinema in Templin. That’s a summer event series were the local cinema is traveling around with their mobile projection setup and show movies at various places in the Uckermark. This time they were screening “Amrum” from German director Fatih Akin. Very lovely movie. Beautiful pictures, good actors and good story.

Weird enough it was a cold evening and people were showing up with their winter coats in preparation for temperatures around 12º C. Pretty weird when just a day ago we were akin under more than 30º C during the day.

Saturday started with a long overdue run with my buddy Jan in the village. Just a short round to get into it again for us two old battle horses.

The rest of the day I spent ripping out the floor in #project25.

Oh… and we finally got the new kitchen installed in the village house. Finally. But the new fangled appliances are the end boss. One really needs to read the fuckin instruction manual to get the induction cooking field with touch control started. I miss the good old time of physical buttons. I mean it’s a bloody cooking field. You have 4 stoves that you can turn on or off. Why does that need sophisticated touch control?

#weeklyreview 30/2026

just a brief one:

• took kiddo to some sights in the city as it’s school holidays
  • the Reichstag rooftop dome
  • Samurai museum
• field trip to the #project25 to meet the plumber
  • hopefully making some progress soon
  • need to get the floor out asap
• last vacation preparations.
  • looking forward to a week of Baltic Sea with all the kiddos
• nice lunch in Flieth

#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.

#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.

This was busy Sunday. Ran 17km with friends, layed concrete tiles around the raised beets, swam in the lake (first time this year 🙈) , met with the craftsman in the #project25 house, made burgers, drove back to Berlin .... time for a relaxing week in the office 🤪

@controlfreak

100%, when people complain about this #NZPol government failing to fulfil their election promises, I am always quick to point out that they are in fact fulfilling their promises and obligations to the foreign interest groups such as #AtlasNetwork and #Project25 which funded their election. The gullibility of the average NZ voter is astounding.

Stellprobe mit Türen #project25

#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.

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

Was #Trump und #Project25 halt auch zeigen: das Primat der Politik über die Wirtschaft ist¹ durchaus gegeben, wenn die Politik nur will. Die großen Firmen kuschen alle, Kapitalistys kaufen sich Plätze an Trumps Buffet², die SuperBowl-Show³ ist weichgespült, nur nicht auffallen, nur nicht aufmucken. Und die TechBros feiern.

Wir müssen lernen, Steuerung und Kontrolle globalisierter Wirtschaft demokratisch zu gestalten nud dürfen uns nicht von irgendwelchen kapitalistischen Zwängen treiben lassen.

__
¹in großen Teilen
²weil sie Geld verdienen und/oder Oligarchys sein wollen
³Werbung

#pol #uspol #depol #Wirtschaftspolitik

#weeklyreview 05/2026

Summary:

Week 05 centred largely around frozen water. First in the form of our frozen lake, then black ice on my way to the office and eventually in beautiful frozen leaves on the weekend.

Sprinkle in some tinkering with flashcards, my new thermal camera and the usual food porn pictures. But there are also some pieces on chronic illness and updates on my reading.

Frozen Water

Sunday

On Sunday the brave winter swimming group gathered on the frozen lake and axed a square hole into the surface. After several weeks of constant below 0º C temperatures the ice thickness was close to 20 cm. With joined forces we managed to get it open with large axes and sledge hammers. A few of us took a refreshing dip in the water. I did not. I’m swimmer… not so much a sitting duck or floater 😀 I must be able to move to try and produce at leaste a little body heat and especially to distract myself from the freakin’ cold.

We left the ice shield right next to the hole and thought thats obvious enough that there is a hole. Unfortunately still a kid later managed to fall into the hole. Fortunately it “just got wet” as the hole isn’t that deep. But still a shock of course. We then tried to mark the hole more clearly with branches and spray paint.

Monday

In the night to Monday, after several days of really cold weather it suddenly started to rain. Instantly a thick layer of black ice formed and made the city really slippery and dangerous. Finally I could put my snow chains for shoes to use. They were sitting in our closet for a decade I think and waiting for their chance. Now it was the time. Strapped them to my boots and happily walked into the office. The trains were not going anyway because of the ice on the tracks and power lines. And biking would have been suicidal (still some people tried… I hope they made it)

Throughout the week it remained really dangerously slippery outside. One day I was brave (or stupid) enough to try the bike. It went OK and I survived. But can’t really recommend.

Saturday

As it continued to be below freezing point all the plants were covered with a visible layer of clear ice. On some plants that lead to beautiful ice sculptures that could be carefully peeled off the leaves. I collected a few of them and took photos graphs. Of course posted it on Mastodon as well and that post really got a lot of attention.

Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon

Tazzie

Finally my friend is back from Tasmania and brought me some sweet gifts. Among those is this super cool Tasmanian devil oven mitten. How cool is that!?

Food porn

I’m a fan of the “nose to tail” philosophy when it comes to meat. If an animal has to die, then we should use as much as possible of it.

On Sunday we had a classic German dish (I’d say): fried chicken liver with Potatoes and glazed onion rings. That was cheap dish my mother used to cook on Saturdays for us. For whatever reason liver was considered less valuable meat. Maybe for the distinctive taste. That’s why it was on Saturdays (an almost normal working day in the GDR) and not for Sundays.

On Monday is was over at a friends place for dinner. She’s a marvellous cook and fixed us chicken roasted on a bed of (basically) leek, white bean and bacon stew. I brought my famous New York Cheesecake for dessert 🙂

During the week kiddo demanded Schnitzel. Another famous staple of my mother. So it was Schnitzel with potatoes and a classic roux sauce and a side of beans.

New Toy

I’ve got myself a little thermal camera to toy with. I was always fascinated with being able to visualise invisible to the human eye things with tech. A thermal camera reveals infrared heat radiation. Now that we’re building out #project25 attic and do the insulation I thought it was a good time to give in and get such a camera (settled for a Thermal Master P1). It’s simply attached to my phone and the accompanying app produces images with various color themes and can also overlay the image from the phone camera. Really nifty toy 🙂

Cronic Illness

My favourite author right now – Kristie De Garis – wrote another brilliant piece last week. This time about her chronic illness and how it’s perceived in society. Again a very on point and reflective post. Honest, concise and easy to read.

It resonates so much with me as my wife is suffering from chronic illness as well and describes the same issue. Chronic illness is not getting better. It’s fighting every day to not get worse. And that fight isn’t usually seen and even less understood by people without chronic illness.

Learning

As complained about last week that I didn’t learn enough I tried to make an explicit effort. Always wanted to learn to use the Linux terminal multiplexer tmux properly. So I looked into it. But quickly my brain veered off into ideas on how to make this into a flashcard. So I started vibe coding a script that would generate printable flashcards from a Markdown file and published it on my Forgejo instance.

But … I eventually also learned about tmux by using my flashcards. Also found a flashcard application for my phone and thought it’s a neat idea to build flashcards while I’m reading a book. So I’m now building a set of flashcards for the Vienna Circle

Reading

I’ve finished the “Manual for Cleaning Woman” by Lucia Berlin. It was a fun read. Unusual writing style for me and at times a little confusing to follow whether it’s autobiographical chapter or a story about someone else.

I’ve now picked up a book about the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis) by Karl Sigmund (with the help of Douglas R. Hofstadter … the author of the famous Gödel, Escher, Bach). The title is “Exact thinking in demented times” and it’s about that gilded age in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th centuries and the breathtaking discoveries that were made by those famous scientists all at the same time fascism and Nazis rose to power in Germany and other European countries.

Still manage to keep my daily reading streak for this year… but then again it’s just January 🤦🏻‍♂️

Terra X fasst nach nur 1 Jahr Trump zusammen, wie weit der das #Project25 bereits umgesetzt hat. Nichts Neues für Menschen, die aufpassen. Aber in der Kompaktheit harter Tobak. Mal sehen, ob es da eine englischsprachige Version geben wird.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9CAQVGLv1s

Im Fußboden des Dachbodens gefunden: Luckanus Kleberöllchen

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/VDJ7Q6XPXKPHFVGXDEVJJIEUAJIUFZZW

#project25 #DDR #GDR

#weeklyreview 04/2026

week04: 2026-01-18 until 2026-01-24

Summary

I picked up a CASIO A168WA-1 watch & love the simplicity and battery life, though I’ll still need to grab my smartwatch when I actually want to track workouts. My automated Mastodon setup is working like a charm; N8N wakes up my Jenkins PC when there’s a new release, and everything updates itself in under 12 hours without me lifting a finger. The attic renovation is looking great now that the roof tiler’s finished with the windows and prep work. Also made some solid Gulasch this week and I’m still working through that Lucia Berlin book. More Ice skating on the weekend.

Old school

Finally got myself an old CASIO watch again. Noticed that the good old vintage watches became popular again. My first watch was the famous CASIO F-91W back in the 1990s. Several years battery life, water proof, sturdy, functional. Had several other CASIO watches after that. Up to the slightly bulky ProTrek with altitude and temperature sensors before GARMIN started to make Forerunner watches.

Now my son started to wear the CASIO A158 and triggered me finally getting one again as well. I had the F-91W in my shopping cart for some years now. But eventually settled for the slightly classier A168WA-1. The A158 is very similar, but to me the light just wasn’t working well enough to be able to read the time in low light condition. The Illuminator backlight of the A168WA works much better for me.

Let’s see how long this will last on me. I like the simplicity and no-worry battery life. It’s also quite affordable and durable enough for me to not worrying about wearing it in all activities.

Only drawback is that I’d have to put on a smart watch for exercises again explicitly to track the heart rate and effort.

Automation

Last week a new Mastodon security release was published. My server is running with a slighly modified version to allow for posts with 5000 characters. So for evey release I have to build a new docker image for my instances. The process of checking out the Mastodon repo, patching the sources, building and uploading the docker images is automated with a Jenkins server. That Jenkins server is an old desktop PC that’s really only used for this purpose and doesn’t have to run all the time. But when there is a new Mastodon release, I want to be able to build the new images as quickly as possible. Especially for security updates.

I’m using N8N for this part. A workflow uses the Mastodon Release RSS feed as a trigger. If there is a new release, the N8N workflow will send a Wake-on-LAN signal to my Jenkins PC and wake it up. Jenkins will do it’s job and produce the new docker images and publish them to my docker hub. On my servers Watchtower (and now a clone of the original, see last weeks post) is checking the running containers whether there are updates to their images available. If so, it’ll pull these images and restart the container.

That automation worked well again for the last Mastodon security update and brought my instance up to the latest release in less than 12hrs without me having to touch anything 🙂

Cooking

Felt the craving for Gulasch (beef stew) this week and set up a large pot for our weekly family dinner. As a side I used carrots and german dumplings. The kids each had 2 refills … so wasn’t that bad apparently.

I like those carrots. It’s really just sliced carrots and a tablespoon of butter in a pot. Cook for about 15-20 minutes until the carrots are soft to your liking. Super simple, super delicious.

Also the stew is pretty simple to make if you just obey some simple rules and have enough time of course. The secret ingredient to good food is usually patients 😉

Mini BnB

On Thursday we had a mini Beer’n’Burger meetup with a slightly reduced crew. Nevertheless delicious burgers at Rembrandt Burgers in Friedrichshain. Still shocked that our friend didn’t knew the Maulfwurfn by René Marik (who’s also outspoken against AfD and other Nazis 🙌).

#project25 updates

The roof tiler is done with his work in the attic. All new windows are in and the roof constructions is prepared for the insulation. It’s a really nice and bright space up there at the moment. Tempted to just turn it into a loft 😉

Ice Skating

This week was rather cold and the ice on the lake got thicker again. As it was thawing a few days the week before, the surface now was rather smooth as the melted water just froze again. Best conditions to go ice skaing again. At some spots the ice was so clear I could see the vegetation below the surface. Some hexagonal air enclosures caught my attention.

Learning

mmh, can’t really recall anything particular learning in that week. Should probably take a more explicit effort next week.

Reading

Still making steady progress with “Manual for Cleaning Woman” by Lucia Berlin.

#weeklyreview 03/2026

Summary

The week started with ice skating on the frozen lake and continued slippery with black ice on Monday and Tuesday during my walk to the office. Birthday of the kid with delicious cake, bunch of software news and finally some more deconstruction in #project25.

Frozen Water

Our rules usually is that Sunday is for swimming as long as the water in the lake is liquid. Well it wasn’t liquid last Sunday. It was a rather hard solid layer of 15cm thick ice and a bit of snow. Our chance to get our ice skates out and score the lake on the surface.

Nevertheless on of friends got an axe out and opened a square hole to take a dip in the lake. That’s not for me. I have to be able to swim to warm myself a little but first and foremost to distract myself from the cold water.

I walked into the office on the first three days of the week. Of course the bike lanes were not cleared from snow and ice and I deemed it just too dangerous to take the bike. So I walked … or partially waddled as it was really slippery. The snow from the weekend had been compressed by too many feet into a solid layer of ice. On Tuesday it got warmer, but the ground was still largely frozen. Thus any moist or thaw turned into more black ice rather quickly.

Due to ongoing renovation we had to move inside the office into another floor and wing. Meanwhile this is a quick move. Because of clean desk policy and formally no dedicated desks we just had to take our cardboard box and walk over to the new space. We also usually move our monitors as we all had order larger screens over the default screens. But even that was done within a few minutes. They crammed our whole department into the same room now. That sounds reasonable on paper since we’re all from the same department. But we’re actually working on different projects with different people. So it’s just a room of people having video conferences with other people most of the time.

On Thursday I could bake my favourite New York Cheesecake for the kids birthday. Came out delicious again. The Cake. Kiddo was happy as well. Especially as his most awaited game finally was released a day before. He was talking about Hytale by Hypixel studio for something like 6 or 7 years. It’s a better version of Minecraft – sort of. And given that Minecraft has been bought by Microsoft and they’ve begun the process of enshittification, chances are good Hytale is taking marketshare quickly. It looks promising from my point of view.

Software tinkering

Jellyfin

I finally got around to install Jellyfin. That’s a streaming software for once own media library. I have a few records that are not available on any streaming service because they are audio rips of DVD that I own. Always wanted to test out whether it’s feasible and usable to have ones own streaming service. Jellyfin looks rather promising. I eventually found a good iOS/macOS client in Manet+. Bought it right away.

Watchtower

After my home servers mysteriously rebooted (I think one of the kids accidentally touched the PDU) I noticed that Watchtower wasn’t running anymore. I order to fix it, I had to eventually switch to a fork of the original. The maintainers had announced the end of their engagement with the software and thus no updates were produced since over a year. That eventually led to it no longer being easily compatible with the new Docker APIs.

Fortunately I found a fork in the issue comments on GitHub and was able to switch to that. It’s actively maintained and practically a drop-in replacement.

Map comparator

Last weekend we talked with a friend about how big various cities and areas are. That our countryside villages probably fit into Berlin. We thought it would be cool if that could be visualised somehow. I recently read that one can have AI coding agents control browser with Playwright in order to debug web applications it’s writing. I took to Claude Code to develop this map comparator application and got a first version up and running. It’s a pure static site with JavaScript and OpenStreetMap as a map provider. The repo can be found here.

Hytale

As mentioned above, this week the first playable release of Hytale by Hypixel studio came out. This is quite remarkable as I thought they’d never make it. They announced that game a little over 6 years ago. Their aim was to build the perfect Minecraft (they developers were running large Minecraft servers with lots of mods themselves). But as you know… perfect is the enemy of done. So they coded and polished, but never released anything, because they wanted it to be perfect. The screenshots they produced from their game as teasers looked promising. Eventually they even got a deal with a developer studio (Riot Games). But couldn’t deliver (for whatever reason). Finally the studio cancelled the release and one of the developers was able to buy back the rights and code from the studio and set out to finish the came himself. And he and his friends finally delivered. They changed their approach to release playable beta versions so they can get feedback from their audience. I believe this approach will work better. The first playable demo looks really good. Feels like minecaft but with lots of improvements. I was positively surprised that it even runs smoothly on Kiddos old gaming Laptop (Nvidia GTX) despite the vastly improved graphics.

Flipper Zero WiFi Board

This week my Flipper Zero WiFi Developer Board finally arrived. Still trying to figure out what I can usually do with it. But it’s a good reason to do more 3D printing 😉

Project25 update

This week the correct and remaining roof windows finally arrived. Our roof tiler was so kind to accept the delivery so I didn’t had to drive out from Berlin just for that. He also already installed the two new large windows and the room is starting to look really nice and light.

My brother and me wrecked the remaining walls in the attic to the tiler and carpenter can reach every beam of the roof properly. Of course it was messier than we thought … But we got it done on Saturday.

Learning

What did I learn this week?

I always had this concept that Berlin was as large as the Ruhrgebiet. Berlin is really large with all the outskirts etc. Using the Map Comparator that I had created I was finally able to do take this to a test. I believe the Ruhrgebiet is a bit larger than Berlin 😉

Reading

Still making steady progress with “Manual for Cleaning Woman” by Lucia Berlin.

#weeklyreview 02/2026

Summary

week 02 of 2026 was still somewhat relaxing as I was still on vacation formally. Took the time to work on our house project25

• Sunday: back to Berlin, watching Lord of the Rings Extended Edition with the kids again. Still epic
• Monday: more learning and tinkering with FreeCAD for projeckt25, attempted shoe shopping with kiddo at Alexa
• Tuesday: more FreeCAD tinkering, 3D Printer Nozzle swap to an 0.2mm nozzle, bringing a friend over to the Fediverse
• Wednesday: onsite project25 for detailed measurement
• Thursday: office stuff and walk in the park, anticipating severe weather on Friday
• Friday: project25 deconstruction, no severe weather in and around Berlin at all
• Saturday: project25 deconstruction, dinner with a friend who brought craft chocolate from Switzerland.

Project25 works

This week the first craftsmen started their work. First things are the roof windows and reinforcment of the roof for the insulation.

Our roof tiler/carpenter is a really nice guy I know from my time at school in the town. Of course it turned out I ordered some windows in the wrong colour. Wood instead of plastic white. Fortunately we hadn’t opened the boxes yet. So I called the webshop I had ordered the windows from and they happily offered to swap the wrong windows out for just the price difference. That was easier than I thought.

Also ordered another small window to replace the small window meant for the chimneysweeper to get out on the roof.

The new windows will bring much more light into the attic.

On Wednesday I was on site to take precise measures of all the rooms and feature with my new laser distance meater. Much easier than crawling around with these foldable measure sticks. Plan is to build a digital twin with FreeCAD in which I can to the further planning.

On Friday and Saturday I’ve got help from my brother to rip out some old drywalling and bricks in the attic that need to go out before the insulation and builtout starts in the attic. The 30 year old styrofoam was ultra brittle and dissolved to dust when we tried to touch it. Eventually we used a vacuum to get it all off. Some animals had build themselves a nest in the insulation rock whool and hauled a whole bunch of walnuts in there.

3D Printing

A friend asked me to produce some dust caps for USB-A and USB-C ports. Of course there are readimade models on Printables & Co.

I tried with my default 0.4mm Nozzle first but wasn’t happy with the result. The small structures seem a bit too rough for my taste. I decided to swap out the nozzle for a smaller 0.2mm diameter one. Did some calibrations and now the objects came out much smoother and with higher precision.

Only drawback is of course the longer print time.

Fediverse

A friend started using his Mastodon account. He had created it initially a while ago, but stared to actually use it last week. We were talking every once in a while about it and I tried to get him over. But so far he hadn’t take the time as he thought it to be too niche for him (he’s a filmmaker and uses social media for his work as well).

But his first posts got quite some interaction on the fediverse. The usual greetings to #neuhier postings, lot’s of stars and also a bunch of interaction. From my perspective much more interaction than he usually sees on posts on Instagram. And he noticed that too. So let’s hope it sticks 🙂

Learning

FreeCAD – my YouTube tutorial list

GDR had one of the largest fishing fleets to basically make money by selling the fish to western countries.

Reading

Still reading “Manual for Cleaning Woman” by Lucia Berlin. Was reading at least a few pages every day.

new books added to reading list (pile of shame)

• “The Serpent and the Rainbow” – because
• “Der Tägliche Stoiker”

Links/Bookmarks

notable bookmarks captured last week:

• https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ – macOS Tahoe Icons
• https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/ – 21 lessons from working at Google
• https://git.luj0ga.de/luca/sticker/src/branch/main – Cool Sticker templates
• https://lemmy.world/post/41321800 – Finding a EU eMail Provider
• https://github.com/Dimillian/MastodonCLI – Mastodon CLI

Someone loved walnuts

#renovation #project25

RE: https://snabelen.no/@hopland/115849494142435903

Knowing how #secular people and #humanist organizations will be targeted by #Project25, it's important to note that they'll be the first out of many.

The quote here is relevant.

These two souls might not make it home to Virginia again. They braved the ocean and might get stopped at the border, even though they are citizens.

They spoke about how #hispanics have been used as a testing grounds, not only because #ICE has the tendency of #MoralsPolice, but also for the dissemination of #PsyOp #Propaganda campaigns - in #Spanish speaking media.

It becomes clear why they used certain quotes - and what the goal of #Project25 is.

#weeklyreview 01/2026

Let’s try something slightly new for this year. A more structured weekly review

The first week was obviously full with new years festivities and vacation. Some reflection on the previous year and some outlook onto the new year

Summary

here’s a short recap of the first week of 2026

• Sunday: open stage in Templin
• Monday/Tuesday: chillin’ in the countryside, Christmas Tree out
• Wednesday: early bird to get “Berliners”, Silvester
• Thursday: first run of the new year, back to Berlin
• Friday: back to #project25, IKEA Hack
• Saturday: lot’s of Snow, FreeCAD, LoTR

Open Stage Templin

Last Sunday there was another open stage event at the MKC Templin. As reported before, this is usually great fun. There were again many artists (all musicians) that performed on stage and impressed the audience with their talent. Most notable was a singer/songwrite lady with an incredible voice. She’s also on Spotify.

Also the performance of a local guy who originally came from Sri Lanka was incredible. He joined on a very short notice (the host called him the same day at 6pm whether he can step in for another artist that was sick at 8pm) and rocked the house with raeggae music.

Leatherman strikes again

On our way back from the city to the village we saw a police car stopped on our lane with full flashing lights. This was in the middle of a forest the roads leads through. We approached slowly to check what was going on. My friends concluded that the Police guys must we monitoring some accident with an animal as there was no other car to be seen. My friend happens to be a hunter and so we stopped and asked the police men whether they need any help. They said that they had hit a deer and that it’s wounded, but not dead yet. They have informed the local responisble hunter and waiting for him (or her?) to show up. My friend identified as a hunter and offered to kill the deer so it doesn’t have to suffer much longer. The police men agreed. My friend asked whether they have a sharp knife. But they didn’t.

This was the moment my trusty #leatherman came to shine again. I got it out and gave it to my friend. He professionally killed the deer and said good bye to the policemen and we drove off.

The whole thing didn’t even take 2 minutes. The policemen looked pretty puzzled and I bet they could quite grasp what just happened. Guy stops, says he’s a hunter, got a proper knife from his friend and killed the deer and disappeared. 🤣

Chillin

Monday & Tuesday was mostly relaxing and slighly cleaning up the place. We kicked out the Christmas tree. Which might sound early… but we had also put it up 3 weeks ago already. So it was getting dry and we like to have the house clean and fresh by New Years eve.

Kiddo got a Ramen cookbook for christmas and fixed us some delicious ramen soup

Last preparation on Wednesday was to get into the city early morning to buy “Pfannkuchen” (also known as Berlins) from the local bakery. They didn’t take pre-orders as they don’t have the staff and storage place for many pre-orders. Pfannkuchen are a Silvester tradition in our area. So there was a queue at the bakery even at 6:30 am. But it wasn’t too bad. I just waited about 5 minutes as they were organized and there were only 4 people in front of me.

On New Years Eve (or Silvester as its called locally) we had friends over and did Raclette for dinner. That’s also a german tradition of sorts as it takes quite some time and keeps people busy waiting for midnight.

Since the days around NYE were really cold in the countryside, the lake was frozen and we couldn’t do a last swim of the old year and first swim on the 1st already.

But at least I got the first run of the year under by belly with a friend 🙂

In the afternoon kiddo and me headed back to Berlin so that she has some time to prepare for school and stuff.

#project25 update

Of course as it so happened I had to go back the next morning already as I needed to meet with a local craftsman at #project25. Plann is coming together and the first is about to start next week (if all goes to plan). First thing will be the roof windows.

I also figured that I have to order another roof window. There is currently a small one for the chimney sweeper to get out. That needs to be replaced with one of proper insulation.

I’ll also start wrecking some walls in the attic next week so the carpenter can to the reinforcement of the roof for the insulation.

Finding reliable craftsmen for the work is bit of a challange. They’re all fully booked, about to retired and some or simply unprofessional and rule themselves out.

IKEA Nävelinge repair

We have a bunch of these cheap IKEA Nävlinge LED laps. They come with a plastic clamp to attach to furniture and stuff. But that clamp easily breaks and leaves you with a working LED Lamp that you can’t attach to anything anymore.

I checked Printables and found a repair that would need me to glue an extension to the broken clamp arm. I tried this out and it seems to work quite will. I’ve repaired two of the lamps now and it seems to hold. #3Dprint #3Dprinting #3Ddruck

Digital Independence Day

Last week at the 39C3 there was a presentation by a famous german author Marc-Uwe Kling. He supported the idea of a digital independence day every month. A day were we should try to switch away from survailance capitalist services and use an open alternative instead. Switching from WhatsApp to Signal or Threema, switching from Facebook/X to the Fediverse etc.

The idea is, to make this a regular effort supported by a community. That should make it easier for people who’ve hesitated so far and also give a bit more visibility to these alternatives to the media.

Of course there was almost instantly critique about this action. Not really on the idea and goal, but of course about the wording. People complain that the initiative uses the wrong words. Claiming higher moral ground and by that just making the world more miserable instead of helping anyone. Congratulations! Please pick up your moral competition participation certificate at the exit.

Learnings

I watched some FreeCAD tutorials in order to make my own model of #project25 and create proper technical drawings. It has quite a learning curve. Autodesk Fusion is a bit more intuitive and has a better UI. But of course it’s also a commercial product. But I think FreeCAD should be able to deliver what I need and I’ll continue playing with it.

• Technische Zeichnungen mit FreeCAD erstellen
• FreeCad Complete beginner tutorial

Reading

Trying to get more reading done … as every year 🙈

Will try to set myself a weekly reading goal. That seems to work well with the weekly blogging. So maybe it sticks with reading as well.

I’ve continued reading “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. While I still like the topic and insights, it’s also a bit of a drag to read. Maybe that’s because there is too much time in between my reading sessions. Maybe it’s because he’s continuing to go into lots of details without making much progress on the matter (for my taste). I decided to stop it for the moment and pick up another book.

The book I chose for next reading is “A manual for Cleaning Woman” by Lucia Berlin. I picked this up based on a recommendation by my beloved Kristie De Garis. Liking it a lot so far.

Links

Material/Links if found interesting this week:

• SPBuchsatz – Buchsatz LaTeX templates
• Digital Independency Day
• A website to destroy all websites
• FracturedJSON – very human readable JSON formatting
• Many weak and few strong links: the importance of link strength distributions for stabilising patterns in competition networks

Puh…kurz gedacht ich hätte die falschen Dachfenster bestellt. Aber stimmt nicht. Sind die richtigen … #project25

#weeklyreview 49/2025

Busy week, kind of.

Started on Sunday with meeting the drywaller at #project25. Hopefully plans are coming together and construction can start soon.

On Monday the new roof windows have been delivered as the first new parts for the house. Had to spend the whole there and was working from the countryside.

Of course had to fiddle a little bit to get the internet bandwidth optimized. Would do anything for bandwidth 😉

Goosebumps

On Tuesday I first met with friends to bid farewell for a traveling friend.

Later that evening the BnB crew met for the Christmas dinner at Pratergarten.

Regular might ask: why Pratergarten Restaurant? They don’t serve burgers.

But we were there for their Christmas menu of roasted goose with German dumplings and red cabbage/kale

And they delivered. It was delicious 🤤

We also had our own little jule club that we drew elaborately on our last burger session at the Burgeramt. Almost everyone got a little something 😉

Sushi

we recently discovered making Sushi at home. It’s really simple if one takes the time to prepare the rice in time. The rice should be cold. So one needs to plan ahead in cooking and cooling the rice. The rest really is just slicing a bit of cucumber, avocado and maybe salmon (yes, raw) and roll it in the sea weed sheets (Nori).

Reading session

It’s advent season again and our villages continues the (almost a) tradition of open door advent events. This is where every day in advent a different household is hosting a little festive event for the village community. It can be as simple as offering a warm fire and hot drinks to more sophisticated events like organising a public reading of a journalist.

The latter is what we attended on Friday over at our friends house. Their friend Hartmut Palmer, a former investigative journalist of the SPIEGEL newspaper was reading from his latest book. A fictional story but sprinkled with real world facts about a right wing party and some crimes. After the reading he told a few stories from his career as journalist. Quite interesting stuff about old German politics and figures 😉

#enEN #project25 #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

Internet #Uckermark Style #project25

Gleich in die #Uckermark pendeln weil heute die Dachfenster für #project25 kommen ...

#weeklyreview 45/2025

Of course started the week with a swim in the lake. It’s getting colder and below 10ºC now. No more casual swimmers for sure 😉

Also back in the office after two weeks of vacation. Was really looking forward to putting my hand on the Atlassian AI tools that have been enabled in our production instance. But then had to learn that the feature I was intending to use (build your own agents) is blocked for everyone because its pending works council approval. I get that this is important. Would just have been nice if IT wouldn’t have announce the stuff being available already know that it’s practically not.

Fiddled with the normal Atlassian Cloud automation for confluence and of course got frustrated that even the most simple things don’t seem to be possible. Create a new page from a template, ask the user to fill out a few fields and then replace variables in the template with the user input. How hard can this be. Atlassian’s answer: YESSSS!!!!

Cleaning up iCloud

I ran out of iCloud storage because I sync my Photos via iCloud. Now how to download and delete photos there? Turns out there is a tool called iCloud-downloader that can do just that. And also in a smart way by either just downloading, syncing or moving the files off iCloud. Unfortunately I had to temporarily disable certain security features (advanced data protection (e2e encryption) and 2FA with Passkeys) in my Apple Account for the script to work. But those can be turned on later again. The download maxed out my DLS Line and was done after a few hours. It placed the files in a folder structure like I would normally do: YYYY/MM/DD.

Now having the files locally, I started to import them into my Immich instance. For that I used an Immich CLI container to consume the file I had just downloaded and feed them into my instance. This tool would delete the files that it had already uploaded into Immich. Before the upload starts, the tool build checksums of all files to detect files that have already been uploaded to Immich. Those would be skipped for uploading. Rather neat. That tool can even watch a directory and continuously consume images into Immich.

In combination with the iCloud downloader that also has a watch mode, one could potentially build a continuous upload from iCloud into Immich. Of course only if you don’t have the Immich App installed on your iPhone that’s backup up all photos to Immich anyway.

Sushi & Poker

After a bit back and forth on the schedule of our weekly poker night we settled on wednesday this week. For dinner we decided for self-made Sushi again. Just simple one with cucumber, avocado and raw salmon. It’s actually a quick meal to prepare of the rice is already read. That takes the longest as it needs to cook for about an hour and then cool down again for at least as long.

That dinner got the blessing of our oldest kid as delicious 😉

The clear highlight though was a powerpoint presentation of our youngest to sell a China vacation to her brothers. She was working on that the whole week and did her research where to go, what’s the local thinks to visit (and why), the accommodations, cost, flights. etc.

n8n vibe coding

Finally found some use case for my n8n instance. I’m capturing some web links in my Wallabag instance. If I want to make sure those links are still available in a few years, I should probably submit them to the Internet Archive so I can use their Wayback Machine to find it if has been removed or changed by then on it’s original place.

For that I needed a n8n node for Wallabag. Couldn’t find one from the community so I asked Claude Code to create one for me.

It’s now working for me. Still need to polish the N8n workflow, but for my use case the Wallabag node seems to do what it needs to do.

While I was at it … I also had Claude create a node for Immich.

AeroPress

My default coffee make is the trusty AeroPress. I just got a new one for Berlin as I took the old one to #project25. The new AeroPress now has clear plastic and one can see the coffee grounds soaking pretty clearly now. On to many years of good coffee.

glasses

I’m considering getting glasses for work eventually. It’s getting slightly more difficult to read small text at arms length. Given my age and spending almost 35 years in front of computer screens for several hours a day I think it’s OK to admit that eyesight is slowly but surely deteriorating. So I got my eyes measured and was testing some frames. I think the final candidates are:

Will do another round of testing next week and then probably order. Will just use them for screen work and stuff. Far sight is still perfectly fine.

Dorfdisco

On Saturday evening I joined a few friends to a small dancing / disco outing at a nearby small village. Really lovely old village restaurant with a small room with a bar where the food and drinks were served. A larger ball room in the back was set up with a DJ for dancing. Met quite a lot of people I know from when I grew up in Templin. The dinner of a pork schnitzel was really good and affordable. Will definitely come again as the place was tidy nice and neat and staff very friendly.

#enEN #food #Immich #project25 #vibecoding #Wallabag #weekly #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 44/2025

Week started with having all kids around in the countryside. That’s not so common anymore since they’re all almost grown up now. We even managed to get some work done by restacking firewood into the wood shed 😀 They love that of course …

Made pizza on the grill for lunch as a treat.

On Monday a good friend came for a visit with the kids. The weather wasn’t the best for day outside as it was pouring rain every couple of minutes. But we made the best of it and played cards, ate cake and even had a campfire on the terrace with the an attempt of stick bread.

Also took a short stroll through the city of Templin and bought some new nail polish with the kiddos.

Seized the rest of the week to get some planning work done for the #project25 renovation. Also took out the old oven and disposed it properly at the local recycling site.

The light out in our house is really stunning at all seasons. Now in nearly winter it’s very bright in before lunch as the sun comes up across the lake and also reflects from the lake surface into the rooms.

On Friday we seized the holiday and took a trip to #Szczecin again for some shopping and of course delicious lunch

Finally managed to damage my macOS on the external SSD with an #macOS Update. It keeps booting into Recovery mode claiming the previous startup was not properly finished. Will have to check if that is fixable. Already repair installed … but to no avail. Fortunately the internal SSD installation is still working properly.

And last not least on Saturday we went for a #swim in the evening with a friend who visited us that evening. It was already pretty dark at the lake and I swam with my headlamp on. Surely must have looked spooky

#enEN #macOS #project25 #swim #Szczecin #Uckermark #Vacation #weekly #weeklyreview

Dekonstruktion! #project25

Guter Kaffee ist auch auf der Baustelle wichtig. Deswegen immer die Bohnen frisch mahlen! #Uckermark #project25 #Makita #Hario #hariogrinder

Das gute Wetter für Außenarbeiten genutzt #project25 #Uckermark

That's how they control the narrative. "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/education-decline-low-expectations/684526/?utm_source=feed #uspoli #trump #Project25 #propaganda #illiteracy #education #media