#weeklyreview — Public Fediverse posts

#weeklyreview 29/2026

A single screw can screw up the whole day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power!

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

In other news

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

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

I can highly recommend leaving a subscription and supporting her!

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

#weeklyreview 26/2026

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

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

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

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

Amsterdam

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

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

White Dinner

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

#weeklyreview 25/2026

sheeesh…. Thursday already… can hardly remember what happened last week. Going through my photos and Mastodon feed to refresh memory.

My father and his son

Last week Sunday my wife had organised a reading of book by a famous German author in a special location. This was special for us for multiple reasons. The venue is the old royal gymnasium in Templin. It was the location of the Prussian Joachimthalsche Gymnasium for a couple of years in the early 20th century and is quite an impressive ensemble of building in the city of Templin. We ourselves know it from out time at school where it was used as boarding house and external sports facility for our gymnasium. An NGO is currently trying to turn this into a proper school again.

The reader was our former teacher and principal of our Gymnasium. I’d even call him a friend as we were close already during my school time. We were his first class when he became a teacher and later we navigated the time of the German reunion together where he was elected principal and I was part of the pupils council.

The book “my father and his son” is a curated collection of letters from the son of Hans Fallada – a famous German author from the first half of the 20th century. His son was a pupil at the Joachimthalsche Gymnasium in the 1930/40s and had a letter exchange with his father.

The session was accompanied by Boris Bell percussions. This combination (Holger reading and Boris performing percussions) we already witnessed at a reading event last year in Kappe.

The rest of the week was the usually busy with AI stuff at work and fiddling with my own tech. Upgraded my new shiny Linux laptop with stickers and a 1TB SSD drive.

Renovations

On the weekend we did some impromptu renovations at the countryside house. We painted two walls with colours and the rest just white. That was quite exhausting as it’s of course bigger than originally anticipated. I guesstimate that we painted around 150 sqm. Actually ran out of white paint. So will have to finish that part next weekend.

Sunday routine: I give Claude my week — calendar, notes, done list — and ask three questions: what moved the needle, what did I avoid, what should Monday look like?
Fifteen minutes. More honest than journaling, cheaper than a coach.
#AI #weeklyreview

#weeklyreview 24/2026

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

Digital Independence Day Templin/Uckermark

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

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

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

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

Movies & Paintings

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

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

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

Greybeard gathering

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

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

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

Linux to the rescue

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

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

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

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

Beer & Burgers

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

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

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

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

Elk

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

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

Local LLM stuff

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

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

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

ollama-bench Results

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

Per-Model Details

deepseek-r1:1.5b

Per-run breakdown:

embeddinggemma:latest

No successful runs.

gemma4:12b-mlx

Per-run breakdown:

glm–4.7-flash:latest

Per-run breakdown:

gpt-oss:latest

Per-run breakdown:

lfm2.5-thinking:latest

Per-run breakdown:

llama3.2:1b

Per-run breakdown:

llama3.2:latest

Per-run breakdown:

mistral:latest

Per-run breakdown:

qwen3.6:35b-mlx

Per-run breakdown:

qwen3.6:latest

Per-run breakdown:

Model Comparison

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

#weeklyreview 23/2026

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

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

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

LiteLLM

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

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

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

Flowers

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

Reading

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

Konnichiwa

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

#weeklyreview 22/2026

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

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

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

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

Paperless NGX MCP

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

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

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

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

Iris Photos App

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

Linux rules

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

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

Zucchini Schnitzel

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

Jugend Kella PopChor

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

Closing the books on another week. It takes courage to say "no" and protect your energy. If you set a boundary this week to protect your mental health, I am proud of you. Enjoy the weekend! 🎊 #WeeklyReview #BipolarStrong #PositivityClub

Read more: https://open.substack.com/pub/speakingbipolar/p/closing-the-books-on-a-good-week?r=y4fp9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#weeklyreview 21/2026

Summary

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

Evernote to Paperless Migration

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

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

Organ concert

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

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

#weeklyreview 18/2026

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

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

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

Got Bag

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

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

Glitza Band and Open Studio day

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

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

#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.

Wrapping up the week with some fresh air.
Nature didn’t cure my bipolar,
but it definitely made the week easier to handle.
I’ll absolutely take that win. 🍃
#NatureIsMedicine #WeeklyReview #BipolarLife

Read more: https://open.substack.com/pub/speakingbipolar/p/did-you-get-your-green-time-this?r=y4fp9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#weeklyreview 14-15/2026

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

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

Beijing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chongqing

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

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

Zhangjiajie

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

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

Hong Kong

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

#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

If you're journaling with WordPress, you might want to consider this plugin: https://repos.mxhdr.net/maxheadroom/fedi-journal-plugin

It lets you sent messages from the Fediverse to your WordPress Author profile and appends those to a weekly draft post. At the end of the week you can then choose to edit and publish.

Wrote this for my own #weeklyreview #WordPress #activitypub /cc @falko

#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 🤦🏻‍♂️

On Saturdays I take a moment to review my week.
I keep what works and toss what doesn't.
My routine works for me.
What works for you?

#WeeklyReview #SelfReflection #BipolarLife

Read more: https://open.substack.com/pub/speakingbipolar/p/did-your-routine-work-for-you-this?r=y4fp9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#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.

Your inbox is a todo list written by everyone but you. Learn how multiple communication channels destroy focus and what to do about it – from a productivity workshop that changed how an entire team works.

#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.

The week is over.
I’m taking a moment to reflect on what I learned.
I’m resetting for next week with new knowledge.
#WeeklyReview #Growth #MentalHealthJourney

Read More: https://open.substack.com/pub/speakingbipolar/p/reflecting-on-your-wins-and-what?r=y4fp9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#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

Frisch gebloggt:

Plus–Minus–Next: Eine einfache Struktur für Reviews ➕ ➖ ➡️

Wöchentliche, regelmässige Reviews haben einen seltsamen Ruf. Viele wissen, dass sie sinnvoll wären, nur bleiben sie oft abstrakt: zu offen, zu zeitaufwendig oder zu nahe an der Selbstkritik. Eine der schlichtesten und zugleich brauchbarsten Formen dafür ist die Methode Plus–Minus–Next.

Plus–Minus–Next ist einfach, begrenzt und anschlussfähig. Als Struktur für wöchentliche Reviews hilft sie, Erfahrungen zu ordnen, ohne sich in Details zu verlieren, und aus Rückblicken konkrete Anpassungen abzuleiten.

https://epicmind.ch/plus-minus-next-eine-einfache-struktur-fuer-reviews

#PKM #ProductivityPorn #WeeklyReview #Journaling

#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

@b30 Bestimmt extra für die #weeklyreview Blogger ;)

#weeklyreview 51/2025

Second to last week of 2025

One last official work week for this year. We found the time to have a joint dinner at the Chicago Williams BBQ in Charlottenburg.

The dinner was nice. But somehow they screwed us over with the reservation. We booked for 8 people about 3 weeks ago via the OpenTable booking partner. One day before the event they send the usual reminder to confirm the reservation. I did that. Then on the day, they called and asked whether we’re really going to be 8 people and whether we’ve seen to clause that with 8 people we can’t order a la cart but have to take the shared meat platter at 45 EUR/person.

I had not seen that condition. Checked my emails and only found it in their second eMail. Which I believe is an illegal change of original terms.

At the event we turned out to be only 7 instead of 8. And of course they refused to let go of the shared platter condition but reduced the mandatory share to 5 instead 7.

I get it that they have to plan and all that. But it’s not a small restaurant. A group of 8 people will not mess up their planning for an evening where they serve hundreds of people…

This won’t happen again to me with them…

This was my dessert after the meat platter (mix of chicken roast, pastrami, pulled pork, sausages, pork ribs, mash and gravy, mac’n’cheese, pickles ) – another 500g of ribs 😀

Crash Clock

Read an interesting thread on Mastodon from Professor Sam Lawler about the doomsday conditions in low earth orbit

Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon

the clock was at 2,8 days back in June

Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon

means, if no active control of the thousands of satellites in LEO is done a fatal crash is likely going to happen within 2,8 days.

And fatal crash means a domino effect that’ll likely knock out many/most satellites in LEO and leaving this space with deadly debris. Basically rendering earths orbit unusable for human (Keppler event).

Friday

On Friday I accidentally met a friend in the streets that I haven’t seen all year unfortunately. Despite us living in neighbouring streets. Was good to briefly catch up over a coffee.

Karaoke

On Saturday a friend hosted an advent event as part of our annual living advents calendar in the village. He put up a large screen and set up his karaoke machine. Along with hot wine and a camp fire people were dancing and singing their heart out. It was fun. Some people actually were good singers. Others not so much 😉 But that’s part of the fun.

#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 46/2025

I finally gave in and accepted the aging of my body. Went to an optometrist to get my eyes measured for glasses for work. I noticed that my arms are getting shorter and it’s harder to read at short distance.

First I had tried the cheap reading glasses from the grocery store. But these only work at really short distance for me. Like 30cm from my face. I need something that improves the readability at arms length for me.

The guy at the Augenoptik Mitte measured short sightedness of up to 1.25 dpt and also warped lenses. So compensation glasses were in order. I tried several frames and had family and friends give their opinion. Eventually settled for 0.75 dpt and warp correction glasses and this frame as a compromise. I would have also gone with a more prominent, Colin Farrell Gentleman style frame. But the majority vote was on this more subtle model.

And what shall I say … the make a difference. Much less stress on the eyes watching computer screens and mobile phones now.

VHS

On Monday I held a little AI introductory course at the community college (VHS) in Templin. 9 people showed up and were eager to learn how the most common tools work and what are the caveats and risks with these tools. The audience was mostly 50+ of age. I guess that’s the normal VHS audience.

Sloppy preparation

On Tuesday we had our monthly gathering of ye old greybeards (I’m actually the only one with a beard in that group). Our usual spot is the Pratergarten Restaurant which is usually empty at that time. But not this Tuesday… as it was Saint Martins day, they had goose on the menu and were fully booked. So we had to find an alternative place in walking distance. Settle for an Indian restaurant that had to bear with our tech rambling.

Ribs at last

The feast continued on Wednesday at Chicago Williams BBQ in Charlottenburg. My best friend @slamr invited me for dinner at my favourite rib place. And of course it was delicious and juice and lovely. We rounded it up with Espresso Martinis.

Weird coffee based drinks

Speaking of coffee … the Espresso Martini was a first for me. Not too bad I’d say. I’m embracing some variety in my coffee consumption and also had a bulletproof coffee (Ghee, MCT oil, Coffee) and an Orangespresso this week.

Great stabbility

Thursday a “drama” unfolded. I was stabbed … in the arm… in a pharmacy.

But I had actually asked for it and eventually payed for it. It was my refresher for the COVID-19 vaccine that was conveniently offered at the pharmacy next door to the office.

That morning I did weight training in our gym. So my arms hurt evenly despite the vaccination was just on one side 😆

Party

On Saturday we had our annual year end party of the village society. Again friends offered their house to be the venue for the gathering and we enjoyed delicious food and conversations while reflecting on the past year. The society makes a difference in the village by taking an effort to bring people together at various events. This sparks conversations and often times brings new perspectives and a feeling of belonging.

My contribution to the buffet was a square version of my notorious New York Cheesecake. I caramelised the base with brown sugar and a torch on our terrace to make sure the filling doesn’t soak the base took quickly. It worked will.

Tinkering

I was playing around with Claude Agents this week. Idea was to help with generating a draft for my weekly blog posts. Normally I’d look at the photos I took in the last week to remember what was going on. Additionally I look at my Mastodon posts. That’s all stuff an agent could do for me and create a summarised draft. So I cobbled together some agents that would fetch my Mastodon posts, get my photos from my Immich instance, generate image descriptions for these images and out of that content generate a draft blog post.

I’m not posting these drafts verbatim as the LLMs are usually too chatty and not my style. But I might going to use it as an input for my own write up of the past week.

The state of the agent can be seen here: https://repos.mxhdr.net/maxheadroom/weekly-blogging-agent

The draft for this post that came out of the agent looks like this:

title: “Week 46: November 9-16, 2025”
date: 2025-11-16
week: 46
year: 2025
author: Falko
tags:

• weekly
• cheesecake
• coffee
• vaccination
• uckermark
• social
  summary: “A week of baking experiments, caffeinated adventures, vaccination humor, and quality time with friends”
  stats:
  posts: 11
  photos: 54
  locations:

– Uckermark

Weekly Highlights

Welcome to this week’s roundup! It’s been a busy week here in Uckermark, filled with baking experiments, interesting beverages, social gatherings, and even a medical procedure that turned into a comedy routine. Let me walk you through some of the highlights.

This week brought together 11 original posts (plus 29 shares of interesting content I found), and my camera captured 54 moments worth remembering. From the fog-shrouded landscapes of rural Brandenburg to the warmth of friends gathering around food and drinks, it’s been a week rich with experiences.

The Great Stabbening: COVID Vaccination Edition

Wednesday brought what I can only describe as a medical thriller told in four acts. It started dramatically:

November 13, 2025 at 8:48 PM

I was stabbed today

View on Mastodon

The tension built:

November 13, 2025 at 8:49 PM

… in a pharmacy … in the arm… with a syringe.

View on Mastodon

The reveal:

November 13, 2025 at 8:50 PM

… To get my COVID vaccination. The doctor didn’t cry.

View on Mastodon

And the punchline:

November 13, 2025 at 8:51 PM

frankly I got great stabbility

View on Mastodon

This thread got some great engagement, with folks sharing their own vaccination stories and appreciation for the wordplay. Sometimes the mundane moments of life become the most entertaining when you approach them with the right attitude.

New York Cheesecake: A Square Adventure

Saturday morning brought the revelation of my baking experiment – my first attempt at making a square-shaped New York Cheesecake.

November 16, 2025 at 9:02 AM

Tried to make a square shape New York Cheesecake for the first time yesterday. It was meant to be shared at a party and I thought it would be easier to share in smaller pieces. It came out good I think. The base was solid enough to get the out of the pan. I also properly caramelized the top of the base so it doesn’t soak as quickly #NewYorkCheesecake #foodporn #foodpornofmastodon

View on Mastodon

This turned out to be my most engaged post of the week with 8 favorites! The square shape idea actually worked surprisingly well – easier to portion, and the caramelized base held up beautifully.

Caption: The finished product – note that perfectly caramelized base!

From the Department of Weird Coffee-Based Drinks

Friday brought an exploration of unconventional caffeinated beverages:

November 14, 2025 at 6:46 AM

From the department of weird coffee based drinks we present: the #Espresso Martini, the #Orangepresso and a bulletproof coffee #tasskaff

View on Mastodon

The Espresso Martini stole the show this week. There’s something magical about the combination of coffee and cocktail culture.

Caption: That perfect foam top – the mark of a well-made espresso martini

Caption: Another angle of the evening’s caffeinated cocktails

The Orangepresso and bulletproof coffee were interesting experiments too, but there’s something about that espresso martini that just hits different.

Social Moments: Friends, Food, and Good Times

Throughout the week, I captured several moments of friends gathering together. Whether it’s at a bar, in someone’s living room, or around a table full of food, these moments of connection are what make life rich.

Caption: Cheers! Good friends, good food, good times

Caption: Cozy evening gatherings

These casual moments – the toasts, the laughter, the shared meals – they’re the fabric of a well-lived life. Saturday was particularly social, with 17 photos captured in just one day.

Honorable Mentions

A few other moments from the week:

• Pastpuzzle battles: Two attempts this week, with mixed results. Some days you nail it, some days… you don’t.
• Uckermark in the fog: “I set render distance to 20m #Uckermark” – when the weather gives you gaming jokes
• Music sharing: That Tyrone track on Spotify deserved a share
• Forest facts: Germany’s forests are only about 10,000 years old – fascinating tidbits from the datawrapper folks

Closing Thoughts

Looking back on this week, it’s been a delightful mix of creativity (that cheesecake!), humor (stabbility!), and connection (all those social gatherings). The fog that rolled through Uckermark this weekend feels like a fitting metaphor – sometimes we can’t see far ahead, but that doesn’t mean the journey isn’t worthwhile.

With 54 photos and 11 original posts, this week was more active than I initially realized. The best moments weren’t always the planned ones – sometimes they were the spontaneous wordplay about vaccinations or the casual photos of friends just being together.

Here’s to more baking experiments, more weird coffee drinks, and more moments worth capturing. Thanks for following along!

Generated with assistance from the Weekly Blogging Agent System

#espresso #foodporn #foodpornofmastodon #newyorkcheesecake #orangepresso #tasskaff #uckermark #weeklyreview