#project25 — Public Fediverse posts

#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.

#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

#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 🤦🏻‍♂️

#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

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

#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

#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

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

Finally Friday Reads: Project 2025 Plan to Destroy America is Offical

“I’m pretty sure all the Military Brass are impressed that the Secretary of War had his own personal makeup room built in the Pentagon. John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Most of us knew that Project 2025 would be the basis of policy. Republicans have wanted an Imperial Presidency for some time. Republicans have elected at least 3 useful idiots as President with the goal of destroying American democracy in mind. It’s why we have a huge deficit, and spending has been concentrated on the rich who can pay-to-play to get massive tax cuts and huge government subsidies.

There are examples in every state they control. Here in Louisiana, the damage from oil extraction and affiliated chemical industries has created massive damage, and just at the precise time that the EPA has been fully filleted. Not only has nothing real been done to abate the chemical spill that happened earlier this summer after a poorly managed plant that exploded in Roseland, a primarily black community, but it has not been fully abated. The actions behind the removal of LSU’s premier Lake Maurapas researcher have become clearer. Today, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released this important research. “Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ Is More Deadly Than Previously Imagined. New research shows that the industrial pollution—and the risk to human health—on Louisiana’s Cancer Alley have been significantly underestimated.

On an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, communities exist alongside some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical production plants. Since the 1980s, the area has been known as Cancer Alley.

These plants process about 25% of the U.S.’s petrochemical products, Peter DeCarlo, PhD, associate professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, said in the July 2 episode of Public Health On Call—with many of the byproducts and emissions winding up in nearby communities’ air, water, and soil.

Residents of these communities suffer the effects of extreme air pollution, including increased rates and risks of maternal, reproductive, and newborn health harms; respiratory illnesses; and cancer. One area has the highest risk of cancer from industrial air pollution in the U.S.—more than seven times the national average.

But new research from DeCarlo, Keeve Nachman, PhD ’06, MHS ’01, professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, and their teams shows that the pollution—and the risk to human health—has been significantly underestimated.

In this Q&A, adapted from that podcast episode, DeCarlo and Nachman discuss their work measuring levels of pollutants in Louisiana and explain what these conclusions mean for how the U.S. should regulate carcinogens.

We may be drowning in toxic chemicals, but other states and cities are experiencing ICE Raids that resemble SS maneuvers. Additionally, we have new threats. Since the reality on the ground has embarrassed the Trump plan to send the military to “wartorn” Portland to defuse his imagined war on the ground, he’s come up with an alternative plan. This is from ABC News. “Leavitt says Trump exploring cutting aid to Portland.”White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is exploring plans to cut federal funding to Portland due to what she said was a rise in “Antifa” related incidents.”

“We will not fund states that allow anarchy,” she told reporters.

Antifa is not a group, but rather a political philosophy or movement. The term comes from the longer “anti-fascist” and is used as a catchall for groups that oppose the concept of authoritarianism, neo-Nazism and white supremacy.

If you want to sum it up, try this hypothesis for size. Republicans are willing to let all of us starve and die as long as they can get paid for enabling modern-day Robber Barons.

About six months into this reign of terror, murder, and destruction, I’m still not certain the legacy media is getting the bigger picture.  However, yesterday, an announcement by Trump made them perk their ears once more. Will it be enough? This is from the AP. “Trump no longer distancing himself from Project 2025 as he uses the shutdown to further pursue its goals.”

President Donald Trump is openly embracing the conservative blueprint he desperately tried to distance himself from during the 2024 campaign, as one of its architects works to use the government shutdown to accelerate his goals of slashing the size of the federal workforce and punishing Democratic states.

In a post on his Truth Social site Thursday morning, Trump announced he would be meeting with his budget chief, “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

The comments represented a dramatic about-face for Trump, who spent much of last year denouncing Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s massive proposed overhaul of the federal government, which was drafted by many of his longtime allies and current and former administration officials.

You may recall that the implication of this document was central to the Democratic Party campaign. Kamala Harris made it a focal point of the convention and other speeches.

Top Trump campaign leaders spent much of 2024 livid at The Heritage Foundation for publishing a book full of unpopular proposals that Democrats tried to pin on the campaign to warn a second Trump term would be too extreme.

While many of the policies outlined in its 900-plus pages aligned closely with the agenda that Trump was proposing — particularly on curbing immigration and dismantling certain federal agencies — others called for action Trump had never discussed, like banning pornography, or Trump’s team was actively trying to avoid, like withdrawing approval for abortion medication.

Trump repeatedly insisted he knew nothing about the group or who was behind it, despite his close ties with many of its authors. They included John McEntee, his former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, and Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump insisted in July 2024. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Trump’s campaign chiefs were equally critical.

“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” wrote Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita in a campaign memo. They added, “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”

Trump has since gone on to stock his second administration with its authors, including Vought, “border czar” Tom Homan, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller and Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission and now chairs the panel.

Heritage did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. But Dans, the project’s former director, said it’s been “exciting” to see so much of what was laid out in the book put into action.

“It’s gratifying. We’re very proud of the work that was done for this express purpose: to have a doer like President Trump ready to roll on Day One,” said Dans, who is currently running for Senate against Lindsey Graham in South Carolina.

It was frequently averred that Stephen Miller was central to all plans for the project’s implementation. Only a few public intellectuals continued to warn of the plan and steps taken, while Yam Tit still shrugged off any implication that he was following the plan’s blueprint during the first six months.  Well, that curtain has dropped.

AXIOS sums this evolution up neatly.  “Trump charts path to total control amid government shutdown.’ This is reported by Zachary Basu.

President Trump is seizing on the government shutdown as an “unprecedented opportunity” to consolidate control in the Oval Office, accelerating a trend toward unchecked power.

Why it matters: Many Democrats see the shutdown as a necessary evil to halt — or at least slow — Trump’s steamrolling of democratic norms and independent institutions. So far, the standoff is only emboldening the White House.

Zoom in: Trump said he met Thursday with White House budget chief Russ Vought to discuss what “Democrat agencies” should get cuts, casting the shutdown as a chance to shrink a federal workforce Trump has long viewed as hostile.

• Goading Democrats, Trump flaunted Vought’s role in Project 2025 (“he of PROJECT 2025 Fame”) — the hard-right blueprint for expanding executive power that Trump disavowed on the campaign trail after it became a political liability.
• For Vought, the shutdown offers a unique opening: a live test of theories he has spent years refining on how to weaken Congress, purge the bureaucracy and concentrate power in the presidency.

Already, Vought has announced the termination of nearly $8 billion in funding for clean-energy projects in 16 states, all of which voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and have Democratic senators.

• He also has frozen $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects, a thinly veiled shot at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
• Legal challenges are inevitable: Congress controls the power of the purse, and federal officials privately have warned that Vought’s plans for mass firings during the shutdown may violate appropriations law.

The big picture: As Axios has documented, the shutdown is only one front in Trump’s broader campaign of consolidation.

• Military: In an unprecedented partisan address this week, Trump told more than 800 generals and admirals to prepare for a “war” against domestic “enemies,” urging them to treat America’s cities as “training grounds.”
• Academia: The administration is asking universities to sign a 10-point “compact” that would grant preferential access to federal funding if schools agree to freeze tuition, protect conservative speech, apply strict definitions of gender, limit international students and other Trump priorities.
• Rule of law: Days after Trump publicly pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge his political enemies, the Justice Department indicted former FBI director James Comey. Other Trump foes, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), are under investigation.
• Civil society: FBI director Kash Patel severed ties with the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday, accusing the Jewish civil rights group of “functioning like a terrorist organization” after MAGA activists discovered that Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA was listed in its now-removed “Glossary of Extremism and Hate.” Trump also has urged the Justice Department to investigate Democratic megadonor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations as part of a crackdown on liberal groups following Kirk’s assassination.
• Corporate America: Trump demanded last week that Microsoft fire its head of global affairs, Lisa Monaco, because she served in the Biden administration — a reminder that even corporate giants aren’t immune from political retaliation. Trump had previously called on Intel’s CEO to resign over alleged ties to China, but backed off after the U.S. government took a 10% equity stake in the chip-maker.

More at the link.

MSNBC’s Maddow Blog has this analysis.  As usual, Steve Benen has the led.  “Trump picks a convenient time to change his tune about the Project 2025 agenda. Remember last year when Trump feigned ignorance about the right-wing governing blueprint? A year later, the president no longer bothers with the pretense.”

As the second full day of the latest government shutdown got underway, Donald Trump published an odd message to his social media platform, which raised plenty of eyebrows throughout the political world.

“I have a meeting today with [White House Budget Director] Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat [sic] Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” the president wrote.

We don’t yet know what transpired at that meeting, but Trump’s weird phrasing was itself notable. For example, there are no federal departments or offices that should be called “Democrat Agencies.” There are only American agencies, which do work on behalf of the American people and which are currently led, at least in part, by Trump’s own appointees.

Similarly, the idea that federal agencies deserve to be condemned as “a political SCAM” is every bit as bizarre as it sounds. We’re talking about offices, some of which have been around for many years, that were created by Congress. Their existence is reinforced in federal law, which the president is required to enforce.

As for the possibility that Trump and the far-right head of his Office of Management and Budget might “permanently” weaken departments that the White House no longer likes, it’s worth keeping in mind that such efforts might very well be illegal.

But let’s also not brush past that other phrase: Vought, the president wrote, is “of PROJECT 2025 Fame.” As The Associated Press summarized:

President Donald Trump is openly embracing the conservative blueprint he desperately tried to distance himself from during the 2024 campaign, as one of its architects works to use the government shutdown to accelerate his goals of slashing the size of the federal workforce and punishing Democratic states.

For those who might benefit from a refresher, throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump realized that the Project 2025 agenda was so radical and unpopular that he treated is as radioactive. “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” the Republican said over the summer about the blueprint largely written by members of his own team. He added, “I have nothing to do with them.”

Here’s some analysis from Time Magazine‘s Editorial Fellow Connor Greene. “Trump Is No Longer Denying Support for Project 2025: What to Know.”

President Donald Trump has changed his tune on the conservative policy plan Project 2025 after actively distancing himself from it for months during his reelection campaign.

Trump announced on Thursday that he would be meeting with Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” to decide which “Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

The post marks a significant shift from the President’s past disavowals of the unpopular right-wing policy blueprint, which was created by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation ahead of the 2024 election. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it,” Trump said in a debate last year with former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Despite Trump’s repeated insistence that he didn’t know anything about Project 2025, however, he had close ties with a number of its authors, several of whom have served in his Administrations—including Vought. And since he returned to the White House in January his second Administration has taken steps to implement a number of the proposals detailed in the over 900-page document.

Now, amid the government shutdown, Trump is moving to further fulfill Project 2025’s goals of reducing the federal workforce and extending his executive powers—and, it appears, openly embracing the plan.

The big question sis what does this mean for the shutdown and the country?

Despite his criticisms of Project 2025, many of the Trump Administration’s actions since he returned to office have mirrored aspects of the blueprint. An analysis by TIME in January found that nearly two-thirds of Trump’s early executive actions reflected—in whole or in part—proposals in Project 2025.

Among the parts of the plan that Trump has carried out is its recommendation to aggressively reduce the size and scope of the federal government.

Trump and hisDepartment of Government Efficiency moved quickly to cut more than 200,000 federal employees, though some of the layoffs have since been held up in the courts after being challenged by lawsuits. His Administration has also looked to slash federal funding through various freezes, clawbacks, cuts, and recissions.

Trump has announced plans to execute still more cuts amid the government shutdown. In the leadup to the deadline to fund the government this week, the White House directed agencies to prepare for mass firings in the event that Congress couldn’t reach a deal, rather than furloughing those not deemed essential as in past shutdowns.

The Administration has additionally used the shutdown to cancel $8 billion in green energy projects in Democratic-led states, withhold $18 billion in transportation projects in New York City, and pause $2.1 billion in infrastructure projects in Chicago.

Here’s a just a bit of the latest information on Russell Voight. This startling headline is from Politico. “Thune warns Democrats about Russ Vought: ‘We don’t control what he’s going to do’  The Senate majority leader spoke out as some Republicans express qualms about the White House slash-and-burn campaign.”  The reporter for this piece is Jourdain Carney.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t endorsing the slash-and-burn campaign White House budget director Russ Vought has planned for the federal government during the pending shutdown.

But he says Democrats have no one to blame for it but themselves.

“This is the risk of shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought,” the Senate majority leader said in an exclusive interview Wednesday in the Capitol, adding that “there should have been an expectation” among Democrats that Vought’s Office of Management and Budget could broadly target government workers and programs in a shutdown.

Thune spoke on the same day that several Republicans aired discomfort with Vought’s moves after the shutdown went into effect. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York spoke out against his decision to hold up major transportation projects in his state, while Reps. Blake Moore of Utah and Brian Babin of Texas spoke up on a private House GOP call with Vought raising qualms about potential mass layoffs.

Vought’s actions also risk being a distraction for Republicans, who have sought to stick to a simple message putting the onus on Democrats to reopen the government. Pressed on whether Vought was muddying the waters, Thune said, “The only thing I would say about that is yes, and we don’t control what he’s going to do.”

The White House has made no secret that its strategy is to inflict maximum political pressure on Democrats to try to get them to reopen the government. Vought warned ahead of the start of the shutdown that OMB would take aggressive steps beyond typical furloughs, where employees are brought back to work after the government reopens.

The budget office directed agencies in a memo first reported by POLITICO last week to put together plans for reductions-in-force — or firings — of federal employees. Vought himself told House Republicans during the Wednesday call that those firings would start in a “day or two.”

“I can’t control that,” Thune said about decisions made by OMB. “But the Democrats ought to think long and hard about keeping this thing going for a long time, because it won’t be without consequence, I’m sure.”

This final suggested read is from Mother Jones. “Russ Vought Is Trump’s Shutdown Hero. His Neighbors Think His Work Is “Abhorrent.” The people living near Trump’s “grim reaper” of government cuts have put up signs letting him know they stand with federal workers.” This is reported by Isabela Dias.

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump shared a music video on Truth Social. In it, an AI-generated Russ Vought—Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a Project 2025 mastermind—is the grim reaper, carrying a scythe along a hallway lined with portraits of Democratic leaders. Vought, the video’s soundtrack explains, “wields the pen, the funds, and the brain” to enforce the president’s plans to axe federal workers.

“Everyone still remembers when he said he wanted to cause maximum trauma to federal workers,” the neighbor said. “And that’s hard to forget.”

Most of Vought’s neighbors I talked to for this article declined to speak on the record or asked to remain anonymous. Some said they didn’t want to create a rift in an otherwise cordial neighborhood, while others worried about retribution or negative repercussions from their employers.

“I just wish he would have gotten to know us,” Hunter said. “We consider ourselves good Americans, we have good values. And I don’t think he’s been interested in getting to know any of us, in hearing if we might have a difference of opinion.”

Last week, Vought sent around a memo blaming Democrats’ “insane demands” for the imminent lapse in funding and instructing agency heads to start making plans to cut non-mandatory programs “not consistent with the President’s priorities” and “use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force.” Appearing on Fox Business, Vought claimed an “authority to make permanent change to the bureaucracy here in government” during the shutdown.

He has since announced pauses to funding for infrastructure projects in New York—home state of House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), who called Vought a “malignant political hack”—and slowdowns in clean energy projects in several blue states.

Vought, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said on Fox News, “has been dreaming about and preparing for his moment since puberty.”

AsIwrote in a profile of Vought from 2024, the bespectacled official spent years as a Washington insider and government bureaucrat before becoming the architect of a supersized second Trump presidency.

An avowed Christian nationalist and dedicated America First warrior, he once described the job of OMB director as the “keeper of ‘commander’s intent” and criticized the federal bureaucracy for standing in the way of the president’s agenda. During Trump’s first term, Vought tried to implement an executive order that would have made it easier for political appointees to fire career civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. Now, he’s getting to realize his vision while earning points with the president.

See what’s in the cards for us?  Read them and weep.  The Voight cartoons are from The Nation. They have a primar on Vought that you really should read. “Project 2025: Vought’s Your Problem? Not too bad to be true.”  Steve Brodner is the artist and his cartoons have descriptions of their design.  Go see the rest!

I’ve been a little late today, I’m sorry. I woke up late last night in a lot of pain and took some acetaminophen for relief. In my mind I was seeing it as some sort of ritual to defang Trump’s war on Health Care. I also got a call from youngest with my first grandson. Aiden, like his mémé is quite verbal.  I really worked on this piece because I wanted to get as many sources as I could on this abomination and put my time in it than usual. I was researching stuff like the researcher I am. I am vorasciously reading up on this and I suggest you do too.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

#Repeat1968 #DestructionOfFederalAgencies #governmentShutdown2025m #JohnBuss #LousianaSCancerAlley #PeoplePower #Project25 #RussVought #StevenBrodner

#weeklyreview 37/2025

back to Berlin

Finally back in Berlin after the school holidays. Everyone trying to adapt to the big city and regular schedule again. I noticed that’s it’s getting harder and harder to get back to the big busy city after spending time in the countryside. Everything in Berlin is so busy and hectic and especially peopley.

Dinner at L’s

Nice catch-up dinner at my dear friends L. We hadn’t seen each other for the holidays and a meeting was long overdue. Very delicious food as always 🙂

Hacker Stammtisch

Due to communication breakdown only two of the nerds showed up. Nevertheless a good evening with nerdy conversations at the Pratergarten.

Freestyle UNO

We chose a different game for our weekly Poker night. Kiddo had Minecraft UNO cards and wanted to play UNO. But we tried to play with his extended set of rules that they made up during their bike trip the week before. Quirky rules like “you can’t say the color of the card, but must say this instead…”. Every round he came up with a new rule or changed the ones he already issued. Felt a bit like work were the rules seem to change with each manager and round of reorg. But never make any logical sense….

B&B Friedenau Edition

After quite some walking around the city (I forgot the Fahrzeugschein when delivering my car to the garage to get new TÜV and had to fetch it) I was looking forward to the next B&B meeting Thursday evening at the Boerge HQ in Friedenau. That was rather delicious and garnished with warm hospitality. Unfortunately he set the bar high for home made burgers now :-/

Also the lovely Klappstulli gifted us these team bracelets BnB♾️

energy consultant

On Saturday I met with the local energy consultant to start making a proper renovation plan for #project25. Slowly but surely we’re making progress.

The consultant will look at the condition and our vision how the house and rooms should look etc. and then does the calculation for the heating and what kind and level of insulation we’d need to apply in order to received subsidies for the renovation.

Stella rockt

Saturday afternoon K3 and me drove to nearby Friedrichswalde for their Saalkultur events. That’s various exhibitions and events in the village with its many historic halls. The opening event was an art installation made up of 3772 CDs forming a nice mosaic.

Later there was a comedy fashion show, buffet, bbq and finally a concert by the band “Stella Rockt“.

They started with “Lonely Boy” from The Black keys and immediately set the tone for the rest of the concert. Powerful rock music with their own touch. They played cover songs of many famous songs. What I liked is that they didn’t just try to imitate the original but made them proper rock songs with their own twist. Sometimes changing the speed or the tone slightly. All four of them were great performers at their instruments. The lady on the drums absolutely killed it as well did the lead guitarist. I had great fun attending the concert and also lovely conversation with the band afterwards. Can highly recommend them for your next gig.

https://videos.explain-it.org/w/pbSN6agEkwkNTWEVX6uLar

#concert #enEN #Music #project25 #StellaRockt #Uckermark #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick

#weeklyreview 31/2025

vintage shoes

On Sunday we took a visit to the forest with the little pond in the nearby village. Kiddo unearthed an old GDR soccer shoe. Turns out that old brand “Zeha” has been revived and is now offering hand-made shoes again.

50 at last

celebrated the day with cutting down 2 large dead trees on our property. Family and friends helped. It’s always fun having these old folks around and do some work. Reminds me of my childhood where we had to work every weekend on some family members construction site. Of course I’m exaggerating. But we there always seemed to be some construction going on somewhere. And since all family members were some sort of craftsperson, everyone joined in to lend a hand. While at times it was annoying to not have time for friends or just being lazy on these weekends, I have fond memories of jokes and laughter and learning with the my cousins, aunts, uncles, grand parents and many others. Everyone joined in because for refurbishing a house you couldn’t just hire a company in the GDR. There were no companies for hire for private projects.

The two trees were about 25m high. Our property is on a hill and goes down towards the lake. We had to put the trees down towards the lake for safety reasons. Now I have to haul up all the pieces to the street. Thats quite a bit of an exercise. Took me one hour to carry up 43 pieces of log individually. Since the terrain is rough and overgrown, no wheelbarrow or other tools are of any use. Only good old human labor.

I also started to cut back all the grass, bushes and weeds to uncover the second entrance and claim back some space on the property. Powertools with blades and circular saw blades for the win. Friend calls it the ankle grinder. It’s powerful and dangerous. Just as I like it 🙈

Biking in the small town

On Wednesday I took bike trip into the city. Just 8 minutes to my parents. And just 5 minutes from there to the hardware store. Subjectively thats closer than anything in Berlin. Maybe because there are almost no traffic lights in the little town (compared to Berlin).

I like the drive from our place. Our place is almost in the woods. Just surrounded by lake, fields and forrest. A sand path through the forest leads to a proper street. Some houses in the forest tell that civilisation is about to begin here. Then the street with some houses, still the lake in the background. And finally some more streets (even traffic lights), and shops and restaurants – a city. And all that journey in just 5 minutes on a bike. I like it.

Stupid hot fixes

I was putting up an old washing machine that we had standing around in the cellar for some years in the new house. Fixed the pipes and started a first test load. When it came to the tumbling dry phase I wondered that the machines make quite loud noises and seems to jump around in the bathroom. I hopped on it to secure it in place and prevent it from ripping of the pipes.

Then I noticed my rookie mistake. The transportation bolts to secure the drum were still in place. They have to be removed before using the machine so the drum can wiggle inside the housing if needed and not move the whole machine.

My trusty Leatherman pliers came to the rescue to unscrew the bolts and fixtures while the machine was running.

https://hub.uckermark.social/@maxheadroom/114925583828393722

Running

On Thursday evening my running partner that I used to run in the other village and in Berlin with joined me at the new place. We ran around the Stadtsee in Templin, which is a really nice track around the lake that is almost perfectly 10km long. Had pizza on the terrace afterwards with some alcohol free beers. Life’s good 🙂

Hauling wood again

Saturday we were driving the two trees we fell on Monday over to our other property in the village where it will eventually be split, stacked and used as firewood. But to make room for the new wood, one of the old stockpiles had to be moved into the empty compartment of the firewood shed. Kiddo and my wife did this over the course of the week.

We desperately need to organise this better. We touch that wood far too often before it gets burned.

SystemD Timers

Almost every old Linux user has a love-hate-Relationship with systemD. It’s the default in many modern distros nowadays. But it’s not SysV … I know. I recently read this article about the rise of systemD

I new it has a replacement for CRON and job queues, but I also shied away from looking into the configuration as everything systemD seem a little too complicated to old Linux admins who are used to having distinct binaries for single purposes instead of a behemoth doing everything.

My use case was to run a certain script (FediFetcher) on an hourly basis. But I wanted to make sure there only ever run’s once instance of the script (turned out FediFetcher maintains its own lock file). In the old days I would have written a Cronjob that submits a job to the systems job queue. Since the queue is processes sequentially it might get longer, but there is only ever one instance of my script running.

In systemD one has to use combination of Service and Timer to achieve this. The service describes what I want to get executed with a whole bunch of parameters to make it secure etc. The important bit for my use case though is the type of service: Type=oneshot

That means this is not run permanently and kept alive by systemD, but it runs only when explicitly triggered. The trigger could be a call to systemctl start fedifetcher.service or … a time.

This is the second part, a systemD timer that acts as a trigger to call the service on a regular interval.

The Service file goes into /etc/systemd/system/fedifetcher.service

[Unit]Description=FediFetcher ScriptAfter=network-online.target[Service]Type=oneshotExecStart=/usr/bin/bash /home/username/FediFetcher/FediFetcher.shWorkingDirectory=/home/username/FediFetcherUser=usernameGroup=groupnameStandardOutput=journalStandardError=journalTimeoutStartSec=2700TimeoutStopSec=60KillMode=control-groupRemainAfterExit=noSyslogIdentifier=fedifetcherProtectSystem=yes# ProtectHome=truePrivateTmp=trueNoNewPrivileges=trueReadWritePaths=/home/user/FediFetcherRestrictAddressFamilies=AF_INET AF_INET6 AF_UNIX

And the Time files goes to /etc/systemd/system/fedifetcher.timer

[Unit]Description=Run FedFetcher Script hourlyRequires=fedifetcher.service[Timer]OnCalendar=*:00/30Persistent=trueAccuracySec=1min[Install]WantedBy=timers.target

After a systemctl daemon-reload and this should run once every 30 min as described in the OnCalendar=*:00/30 line.

systemD will take care of ensuring that there is only ever one instance of the service running.

#enEN #leatherman #project25 #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick #woodworking

#weeklyreview 28/2025

#Project25

last weekend we spent the first night camping in the new house. Since we have no furniture yet, we used Air mattresses. Otherwise further cleaning and cutting of bushes and trees outside. Figured that the oil tank is empty and we need to order new oil for the heating and warm water generation.

When we sat out on the terrace for breakfast we saw a red squirrel jumping off a large tree. I was was able to capture the moment with my camera to some extend:

More Prompt driven development testing

I continued to play around with the prompt-driven development script. As mentioned last week, the initial results were somewhat mixed. Impressed by the idea honing “skills” of the prompt. Not so much about the actual coding.

I started over from scratch with my project idea and slightly modified the pdd-script before. Telling it to use an iterative approach to create a minimum viable product in each step of the code generation so that I could test and catch issues earlier on.

In the first attempt during the workshop the tool generated a whole bunch of code and I ended up with dozens of files to test and didn’t knew where to start debugging.

My modified script worked better in that sense that a minimal implementation was produced and testable.

I ended up creating a WordPress Plugin that uses an LLM to generate image descriptions for selected media gallery items. The repository contains the PDD script, the planning documents and the iterations in the git history for you to check. I didn’t had to write any code myself. Just use the command line tool and answer questions and provide error reports etc. Took a few iterations after the initial code generation to get it right, but eventually I was happy with the result.

I was also able to add features later that were missing in the initial idea and specification. This is of course only anecdotal evidence and I’ve used it for hobby projects or POCs. I didn’t had to write a single line of code. I have not checked all the generated source code in detail for quality. As I am not a professional software developer, I would also not have produced the highest quality code when I had coded this myself. For hobby projects I usually also only go with an MVP approach. These tools saved me a whole lot of time coding and debugging. Instead I could focus on the idea honing and feature description and provided input for the debugging to the tool.

Closing of the music school year

This week was the last concert of kiddos class at the school. Their 2 years of instrumental education at her school now comes to a formal end. The kids played well and a new school band was introduced from the 6 graders. The previous band left the school last years as they all had finished school in 2024. Of course the 6 graders were not perfect. But it was nevertheless impressive to see their energy and bravery to go up to the stage and perform. They’ll be good musicians and hopefully continue to have fun with it.

Hackerstammtisch

Tuesday we met with the old greybeards again (there were actually two grey bearded guys this time, one was me). The usual rambling, ranting and contemplation about AI and stuff. Always fun.

Beer Beauties

Wednesday the beer beauties (a bunch of queer friends) met and had beers.The conversation remains private. 🤣

HERE Summer Party

On Thursday we had our company summer party celebrating 40 years of Navteq/NOKIA/Gate5/HERE Technologies. Took place at a really nice rooftop at Potsdamer Platz with a stunning view over the city. We were also lucky with the weather with provided for a dramatic sky.

Tax 2023

finally got around to collect our 2023 tax material and sent it to the tax advisor. Hope I’ve got everything and they can finally submit it. Paperless NGX helps a great deal here. I had tagged all the documents as they came in with a special tag. Now I just created a special Storage Path in Paperless for these documents and had that zipped and submitted to the Tax Advisers.

Mastodon 4.4.1 update

This update required a bit manual intervention as the Redis namespaces were eventually removed in this version. I had one instance which made use of Redis namespaces and thus needed to have its posts converted to non-namespaced version. I had ignored the migration instructions at first and the result was that all posts that were in a Redis namespace did not show in the timeline. So it looked like almost all of the previous posts were gone.

After that was fixed, the old posts did show up again.

Dance Performance

On Saturday kiddo had a dance performance from here dance company. The show was really nice and showed what the various groups and styles had achieved in the last year. Really creative choreography and good performance by all the dancers.

The only thing that pissed me off was that display of patriarchy again where the boys got scene applause during their breakdance performance. They were merely OK, mediocre I’d say compared to all the other performances. But the audience cheered and applauded as they simulated some sort of dance battle.

The performance of the other groups (majority girls) were much better, but nobody gave scene applause.

#enEN #LLM #project25 #weeklyreview

Alan Kohler decries #MadKingTrump ‘s attempt to circumvent the legal system and shoring up support by pardoning convicted criminals. Rule by ‘fiat’ seems to be the #TrumpAdministration mantra fueled by the ideology behind #Project25 .

Source:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-02/donald-trump-unitary-executive-theory/105362150?

#USPol #ANZUS #Australia #ForeignPolicy

(On)gelijkheid... https://levenshorizonten.com/2024/11/27/ongelijkheid/ #Broederschap, #Censuur, #Dictatuur, #Egalité, #ExtreemRechts, #Fraternité, #Gelijkheid, #Gelijkwaardigheid, #Gender, #Homoseksualiteit, #Hypocrisie, #Kapitalisme, #KarinAmatmoekrim, #Kolonialisme, #Liberté, #Nachtmerrie, #NederlandsePolitiek, #Neo-nazis, #PartijVoorVerdraaiiing, #Politiek, #Project25, #Racisme, #Slavernij, #Trump, #Uitbuiting, #Vluchtelingen, #Vrijheid, #VS, #Woke, #Zagajewski, #Zusterschap

PROJECT 25 will end American democracy.

#project25 #heritagefoundation #trump #maga #magamovement #patriotmovement #patriots #rightwing #right #radicalright #gop #republicans $democracy #deepstate #autocracy #rightwingmedia #supremecourt #scotus #freedomcaucus #chaoscaucus #kleptocracy #trumptrials #trumpcrimes #trumpcrimefamilt #bannon #stevebannonwarroom #sedition #insurrection #january6 #january6th

Please marvel at the chonkyness of my new walkie talkie! #Tait #Taint #TP9100 #P25 #Project25 #Penis25 #HamRadio #HamR #AmateurRadio