#wochenrueckblick — Public Fediverse posts

Abenteuer Alltag (04.-10.05.2026)

https://bunte-kuechenabenteuer.de/abenteuer-alltag-04-10-05-2026/

Abenteuer Alltag (04.-10.05.2026)

https://bunte-kuechenabenteuer.de/abenteuer-alltag-04-10-05-2026/

Abenteuer Alltag (04.-10.05.2026)

https://bunte-kuechenabenteuer.de/abenteuer-alltag-04-10-05-2026/

Abenteuer Alltag (04.-10.05.2026)

https://bunte-kuechenabenteuer.de/abenteuer-alltag-04-10-05-2026/

Abenteuer Alltag (27.04.-03.05.2026)

https://bunte-kuechenabenteuer.de/abenteuer-alltag-27-04-03-05-2026/

Abenteuer Alltag (20.-26.04.2026)

https://bunte-kuechenabenteuer.de/abenteuer-alltag-20-26-04-2026/

Die KW 05 / 2026 in Stichpunkten aufbereitet:

• anstrengende und nervige Woche beim Mietezahler
• der Nachwuchs hat voll knorke Zeugnisse vorgelegt
• Little M hat in der Notaufnahme einen neuen Rekord abgeliefert: die meisten Patienten an einem Tag (es geht ihr gut!)
• mit Navidrome einen lokalen Streaming-Dienst auf den heimischen Raspberry Pi gedengelt (Danke Jan, danke #uberblogr IRC!) #uffjedreht
• nichts Neues aus der Schweiz aka es gibt überall Idioten
• Geschirrspüler bettelte nach Update [OK]
• heute im Selbstversuch: Butter Chicken … schaun wa mal

#rinjehaun

Die KW 05 / 2026 in Stichpunkten aufbereitet:

• anstrengende und nervige Woche beim Mietezahler
• der Nachwuchs hat voll knorke Zeugnisse vorgelegt
• Little M hat in der Notaufnahme einen neuen Rekord abgeliefert: die meisten Patienten an einem Tag (es geht ihr gut!)
• mit Navidrome einen lokalen Streaming-Dienst auf den heimischen Raspberry Pi gedengelt (Danke Jan, danke #uberblogr IRC!) #uffjedreht
• nichts Neues aus der Schweiz aka es gibt überall Idioten
• Geschirrspüler bettelte nach Update [OK]
• heute im Selbstversuch: Butter Chicken … schaun wa mal

#rinjehaun

#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

#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.

#wochenrueckblick KW 47 / 2025

Moin! Das Highlight der Woche ist der Gesamtdeutsche Kartoffelsalat, den ich gestern produzierte und heute zum Mittag kredenzen werde. Daran kann man bestimmt schon erkennen aka zwischen den Zeilen lesen, dass die KW 47 auch nicht so pralle war. Der Wurm und so.

Am Dienstag wurden wir zu einem schulischen Feedbackgespräch vorgeladen. Little M war das Thema. Die Kleene ist schon ganz okayisch! Also wir wussten das natürlich schon vorher.

Arbeitsmäßig gibt es viel Ungereimtheiten, die sich momentan nur schwer aufdröseln lassen.

Die Gattin und ich waren diese Woche schon 2x Joggen. Schaun wa mal, wo das alles hinführt.

Oh, Moment! Die Woche hatte doch noch ein weiteres Highlight zu bieten. Die weltbesteste #bnb Selbsthilfegruppe tagte im altehrwürdigen Burgeramt. Jemeinsam! Es gab Double-Trouble, Bierchen und ein weiteres alkoholisches Getränk mit Jurke (oder so). Das nächste Treffen wurde auch schon terminiert. Es wird dann aber ein BnG, Beer n Gans.

Ansonsten so: Ächz! #rinjehaun

https://bln41.de/wochenrueckblick-kw-47-2025/

#weeklyreview 37/2025

back to Berlin

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

Dinner at L’s

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

Hacker Stammtisch

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

Freestyle UNO

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

B&B Friedenau Edition

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

Also the lovely Klappstulli gifted us these team bracelets BnB♾️

energy consultant

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

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

Stella rockt

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

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

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

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

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

#weeklyreview 31/2025

vintage shoes

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

50 at last

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

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

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

Biking in the small town

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

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

Stupid hot fixes

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

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

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

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

Running

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

Hauling wood again

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

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

SystemD Timers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#weeklyreview 20/2025

Good running on Sunday with Jan. Wasn’t as chilly as the week before.

bee stings

I was recording the buzzing of our bees in front of their hive when I got suddenly stung by one of the bees in the arm. Usually not a big deal for me. It hurts for a few hours but then it’s gone.

This time however I seem to have had some allergic reaction to the sting. My arm kept swelling until the next day and despite taking anti-histamine and applying cooling stayed pretty swollen. Only towards the end of the week it was mostly gone.

https://hub.uckermark.social/@maxheadroom/114490101484047978

Mac’n’Cheese

No, not the hardware from Cupertino. This time the American version of pasta topped with cheese. I tried the recipe for the first time. Quite heavy. Next time I need to use proper cheese with more taste and color. This was me just using what was available in the fridge.

Car service

This week I had to take my car in for it demanded oil service. Driving through the city is always fun – not. The good thing is… the dealership cleaned the car on the outside AND the inside for free 😀

Hacker Stammtisch

After a pause last month due to other appointments I went to our monthly grey beard get-together. Hans enthusiastically explained how he wrote a mouse emulator for his latest hardware archeology project using AI code generation. And of course we all concluded that for the simple things AI code gen is useful. Especially for people who know what they’re doing. For all others … it will be the begin of disasters to unfold.

Traefik upgrade

Finally upgraded my Traefik instances to Traefik v3. Fortunately the only thing I had to remove in the config of the Traefik container itself was the InfluxDB I no longer use anyway. All other configuration just kept working.

Post by @maxheadroom View on Mastodon

Cheap printing on T-Shirts

A few weeks ago I stumbled over YT video showing someone using bleach and 3D printed stamps to put logos on T-Shirts. Thought that is a neat idea and started to experimenting with it as well.

Post by @maxheadroom View on Mastodon

Crisis mode

This is actually a post scriptum to last week. Since last year I was taking part in disaster recovery training for one of our departments located in India. In case the whole of India should be be unable to work a team in Europe and the US would have to take over the duties of that department until their capacity is restored. Since the department is redundantly set up in India we thought this scenario is highly unlikely. But nevertheless we did the training and even insisted on regular dry run sessions to practice and stay up-to-date.

Now last week that disaster recovery plan was actually activated in standby mode due to conflict between India & Pakistan.

And we’ve just recently seen in Europe that it’s not totally unlikely that a whole country goes offline.

Blocking AI Agents

I’m running all my services behind Traefik as reverse proxy. Lately I’ve got the impression that AI scrapers are making a up a good portion of my traffic and wanted to block them centrally. Services like Pixelfed and Mastodon bring their own robots.txt to address the problem. But others services do not. I fiddled a bit with Traefik config and think I’ve found a way to centrally serve a robots.txt file via Traefik for all my services.

I’m using a lean nginx:alpine container to serve this static file. I’ve set up the Traefik labels for this service so it matches the Path /robots.txt for all entry points. Explicitly not putting a Domain name rule. I also gave this rule a very high priority so it’s evaluated first in Traefik for incoming requests. This practically catches all requests for this URI for all my services. No I can centrally manage that file without having to update each individual service.

services:  robots:    image: nginx:alpine    container_name: robots-server    volumes:      - ./static/robots.txt:/usr/share/nginx/html/robots.txt:ro    labels:      - "traefik.enable=true"      # Router für *alle* Hosts + /robots.txt      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.rule=Path(`/robots.txt`)"      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.entrypoints=web,websecure"      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.priority=3000"      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.service=robots"      - "traefik.http.routers.robots.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"      - "traefik.http.services.robots.loadbalancer.server.port=80"    networks:      - external_network

I also found a Plugin for Traefik meanwhile which claims to do just this: https://plugins.traefik.io/plugins/681b2f3fba3486128fc34fae/robots-txt-plugin

Also a GitHub Repo with a list of bots: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

The Traefik Plugin is using this repo … and might not work anymore since GitHub blocks anonymous access to public repos after a few requests.

Jugendweihe

On Saturday we attended the “Jugendweihe” (a secular coming-of-age ceremony of eastern Germany) celebrations of my niece. Really lovely lunch and even more awesome river cruise with a charter boat through Berlin. Although it was quite chilly outside on the upper deck we had fun nevertheless.

I was surprised to see so many herons along the river in the middle of the city. I counted more than 6 in the inner city area between Märkisches Viertel and Charlottenburg.

It’s a custom to give money as a gift for this special occasion. So I prepared a copy of “Das Kapital” of Karl Marx as a gift box.

Fediverse Reactions

#beekeeping #Berlin #enEN #food #Jugendweihe #rivercruise #traefik #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick

#weeklyreview 19/2025

Winter is back

at least temperature wise. After it was almost 30º C last week we started Sunday with just 4ºC in the morning and got down to -4º C on Tuesday. Days are still sunny and temperature might go up to 17ºC.

So we need to still get our seedlings inside over night and hope the frost doesn’t break our water pipes.

Coming back home on Sunday evening after a prolonged weekend we realised that ran out of toilet paper. Because of course the kids would just use it all up and never tell they took the last roll from the storage.

So I had to improvise. The nearby gas station only had kitchen paper rolls. So we had to apply some life-hack tricks 😂

more Meshtastic nodes

This week some more tiny meshtastic nodes arrived from China. A friend and me had ordered tiny nRF52840 & Wio-SX1262 kits. They are not much larger than a thumbs tip and draw only tiny amounts of power.

Also had to upgrade the firmware for all my Meshtastic nodes as there was a security problem (CVE-2025-24797) in the pre 2.6.2 firmware that allowed remote code execution on the microcontrollers.

Let’s play poker

On Thursday we had our first poker night. Kiddo wanted us to play poker and so we’ve got some tokens and got started. I had never played before and I assume we also still make some mistakes with the rules. But it was fun. I won a first few rounds, but eventually kiddo ripped me off.

attic finds

The free day in Berlin was used to clean up some closets. Some old treasures were found and kept …

… while other items went to recycling.

#enEN #gardening #meshtastic #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick

#weeklyreview 18/2025

herbs herbs herbs

Sunday we’ve attended an organised walk through our nearby fields, meadows and forest. The intention was to learn about local herbs and their use. We had these kind of walks last year already in autumn. Good to learn about some new stuff that’s around our place.

Swimming

First time this year I’ve crossed the lake. Water temperature is around 12ºC. Much warmer at the surface and in the shallow water near the beach. Probably around 16ºC there. But when it’s deeper or you let your feet hang down, it’s still quite chilly. Was a good swim though. About 17 minutes across and back and I didn’t feel freezing afterwards.

Water damage

I a large city like Berlin, there is always somewhere a failure of old infrastructure. This time a main freshwater pipe broke and flooded the streets. When I passed by in the morning the water was already stopped and the road still blocked. One can see that the mud and clay on the street is several centimetres thicks. That was some serious flooding and erosion.

Spring cleaning and new traditions

On May 1st, which was a public holiday our village community gather to do the spring cleanup of our beach and lakefront. That’s always fun and quickly done with so many helping hands.

In the afternoon we started a hopefully new tradition of raising a “Maibaum” (maypole). Thats some old german(?) tradition where either a real tree (usually birch) or just a decorated large beam with a colourful wrath at the top is raised to mark the end of winter and greet the spring and summer. Good opportunity to catch up with the neighbours and have some food and drinks together.

E-Truck no more

Near our village was a large test track for electrified trucks that would get their electricity from overhead power lines. Very similar to electric streetcars in the city. But the project from SIEMENS seems finished and they removed all their installation from the site and it now just looks like a strip of autobahn in the middle of the forest again 😉

Nature finds its way

We have a well in the countryside where a pump is buried about 3m under ground in a concrete well. We also use that to store some plant bulbs over winter as it doesn’t freeze that deep down in the ground. When I tried to get those bulbs out for the new season I saw that one brave bulb already grew a stem about 40cm longs with some leaves. All white as there is no light at all in the well when the lid is closed.

Nature finds a way … as Jeff Goldblum used to say…

#enEN #gardening #herbs #Uckermark #Vacation #villageLife #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick

#weeklyreview 17/2025

Easter brunch with the family in the Hotel Döllnsee. Always a good place to go. But way too much food 😉 Could hardly move after the brunch.

Still we went watching the new lambs of a befriended shepherd in the afternoon.

Dad in law took care of our beehives. Out of two only one hive survived. But we’ll create a new hive by splitting the one left.

Docker container debugging

Every once in a while I have issues with docker containers running wild. It’s not entirely trivial to figure out to which container a certain process belongs when you have multiple containers running on the same host. Due to an open bug in Uptime-Kuma I had to dig a little deeper and wrote myself a shell script to show the process tree of each running container:

#!/bin/bash# iterate over all running containersfor container_id in `docker ps --format "{{.ID}}"`; do        # Find the containers main PID        CONTAINER_PID=`docker inspect --format "{{.State.Pid}}" ${container_id}`        # Find the containers name        CONTAINER_NAME=`docker inspect --format "{{.Name}}" ${container_id}`        # Print container name and pstree        echo "$CONTAINER_NAME"        pstree -as ${CONTAINER_PID}done

The output looks something like this:

/cryptpad-cryptpad-1systemd  └─containerd-shim -namespace moby -id dfb89938eb040038d51a03c016ca04d769eaf0829c00e10c0abe8cf4e6ec0d67 -address /run/containerd/containerd.sock      └─npm start          ├─sh -c node server.js          │   └─node server.js          │       ├─node ./lib/http-worker.js          │       │   └─10*[{node}]          │       ├─node ./lib/http-worker.js          │       │   └─10*[{node}]          │       ├─node lib/workers/db-worker          │       │   └─10*[{node}]          │       ├─node lib/workers/db-worker          │       │   └─10*[{node}]          │       └─10*[{node}]          └─10*[{npm start}]/asciinema-asciinema-1systemd  └─containerd-shim -namespace moby -id 4af82a250865da13c45431423d042cb6d79d6daaead8536c2f60d6e38a7ee640 -address /run/containerd/containerd.sock      └─tini -- /opt/app/bin/server          ├─beam.smp -- -root /opt/app -bindir /opt/app/erts-13.1.4/bin -progname erl -- -home /root -- -noshell -s elixir start_cli -mode embedded-setcook          │   ├─erl_child_setup 1048576          │   │   ├─cpu_sup          │   │   ├─inet_gethost 4          │   │   │   └─inet_gethost 4          │   │   ├─memsup          │   │   └─sh -s disksup          │   └─19*[{beam.smp}]          └─epmd -daemon/traefiksystemd  └─containerd-shim -namespace moby -id 100922f0440f49a306caa163a025c0a948d60ca37d2adfd80b090abd4b34a3ab -address /run/containerd/containerd.sock      └─traefik traefik --accesslog=true --api=true --api.dashboard=true --api.insecure=false --certificatesresolvers.myresolver.acme.tlschallenge=true...          └─12*[{traefik}]

This should help identifying the process and the container it belongs to. Now finding the respective docker-compose.yml on your disk is a different story 😉

Pop-Up Dinner

On Thursday evening we went to a pop-up dinner at Fechtner Deli. Delicious italian-indonesian-indian fusion kitchen. All veggie and very delicious. I can tell, because I had the left-overs from my friends as the portions were rather big.

Asparagus

As a German it’s customary to celebrate asparagus this time of the year. Large quantities will be consumed in the next few weeks. We did our part siding it with grilled salmon and self-made Sauce Hollandaise.

Gardening

Finally cut the hedge on the weekend. Quite exhausting due to the unusual movement of holding the electric hedge cutter overhead…

Also prepared the raised beet for the new season. We still wait for one or two more weeks to put our tomatoes outside as the nights are still too cold. It was below 0º C on the weekend again.

#docker #enEN #gardening #scripting #Shell #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick

#weeklyreview 15/2025

burger crafting

On Monday I spontaneously did some burgers as I had the bun’s left over from the weekend. Invited kiddo over and got some bacon, almost burned the buns and finally assembled the damn thing. The bacon makes the difference 😀

Backup

Was looking into restic backup with rclone to nextcloud. Restic is a really fifty command line utility to do encrypted backups. Either to local directories or attached volumes or to remote destinations. Restic supports a whole bunch of remotes out of the box.

It can be extended to further destinations by using “rclone” … another command line utility that tries to provide an abstraction of remote filesystems.

My goal was to use a NextCloud file storage as restic destination. You can theoretically just the NextCloud desktop client and backup to the local folder that is synced to the NextCloud server. But this way you have to have the storage space for the original AND the backup available locally. I wanted to use NextCloud as a remote storage without syncing to the local files.

So I chose a folder on the NextCloud server which I have excluded from syncing to my local machine (you can do this in the settings of your NextCloud client). Created an rclone configuration for NextCloud following the documentation. And then just backup to the rclone destination:

restic -r rclone:nxtcld:restic-backups/work-macbook backup ./Downloads/Instagram-Backup

Why all this hassle? Because Hetzner is offering StorageShares based on NextCloud at a pretty good price point. Beside using it as mere document sharing space, one can also use it as a backup destination.

macOS Update issues

Im still struggling to update my personal macOS sitting on an external disk to the latest version of 15.4. Apparently Apple has an issue in that version with this particular update type as many others report the same problem. Updating macOS sitting on an external disk seems to fail. Some users claim success , but it’s unclear what they did differently. I’ve tried a whole bunch of attempts already that include turning off FileVault (as the issue seems to relate to encryption) and also installing from a USB stick. No luck so far 🙁

Heating repair

Our floor heating was broken since last year. It didn’t fully turn off in one room. Trying to find a company to repair this wasn’t easy. Most companies I contacted didn’t reply at all or never came back to me after a first attempt. So I had to pull the vitamin b card and call my cousin who runs a very successful plumbing company in the south of Berlin. They were sweet and nice, kept all the appointments and called back when promised. And not because their boss is my cousin. So eventually their guy was there this week to fix the probably broken actor motor of one of the valves. let’s see how long this fixes the issue.

US Colleagues visit

This week we also had two colleagues from the US over. First time in several years that work related travel in the “lower ranks” was approved. Been in a workshop with some AWS folks for two days. That was intense but also good to spend focused time with the whole team on a topic.

And of course there were the obligatory team dinners.

Dinner again

It almost became a tradition to have dinner over at my friends place. This week it was deliciously roasted chicken on the menu. Also some other substances were involved that I didn’t felt the effect of yet 😉

Kiddo requested pasta with salmon and tomato cream sauce as she recently had in a restaurant. So we gave that recipe a try and kiddo approved. Super simple to make actually. We might see this more often now.

Spring finally

It’s getting warmer outside and finally the trees and bushes started to push leaves and blossoms. So I had to do my share of taking and posting pictures of blossoming trees and bushes. Here you go.

Back in the countryside I enjoyed coffee outside on the terrace with my glorious golden mug.

You can see our tomato and chilli seedlings in the background. They eagerly wait to get outside. But we need to be sure the nights are free of frost for sure. We but planted a few herbs and vegetables on the refurbished raised beets on the weekend and also started the well pump.

That pump started immediately to pump water without any fiddling. This also seems to reflect the high level of ground water this year. Although the surface soil is super dry as it hasn’t rained in quite a while substantially. But the trenches in the fields and in the forest are actually filled with water which I haven’t noticed in years in our area.

Knitting

Kiddo found an old blanket he had started several years ago but didn’t finish. So he picket it up and is running through quite some wool now.

New Hardware

It was about time to replace the old 2012 MacBook Air of my wife. With all this taxation kerfuffle going on, it might be a good time to get something new out. Also the current generation of MacBook Air M4 has just arrived and got really good reviews.

#backup #enEN #food #gardening #knitting #mac #MacBook #macOS #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick

#weeklyreview 12/2025

Last week was a lot of fiddling around with my Mac. Decided to have macOS on an external SSD that I can boot from. So that I can have an almost physical separation between my private macOS and my corporate macOS using the very same hardware.

First decision was which type of SSD. I’ve got an SATA-to-USB adapter with an old Crucial SSD that I tried the approach first with. Worked reasonable well. Although the SSD itself probably can only do 450 MB/s read/write. The macBook internal NVMe SSD can probably do ~ 6 GByte/s according to this reddit post.

While the USB SATA SSD worked reasonably well, I anyway wanted to have a larger capacity and also better speed. Choice was between an USB 3.2 model where the USB port could theoretically transfer up to 10 Gbit/s or go for USB 4 which apparently goes up to 40 Gbit/s. Also which make of the disk. Briefly considered the Sandisk Extreme Portable NVMe SSDs. They are durable and affordable at good speed. Only drawback is their product quality issues. Some badges seem to have bad solder and tend to fail. So I settled with a Samsung T7 2TB NVMe SSD. That only does USB 3.2 but for normal day-to-day work I do not feel any speed difference over the internal SSD. An USB4 model would just be a waste of money for no noticeable gain in my eyes.

Advantage of the Samsung disk is, that it’s small and with an aluminium casing. On heavy usage, these SSDs tend to get warm and thermal management might slow them down. The aluminium finish allows for attaching heat sinks if need be I figured. The Sandisk with their plastic and rugged exterior is probably harder to cool passively.

Google Takeout

I also finished to download my most recent Google Takeout. That’s where you can get a download of all your data on your Google Account. You can choose which services to include. I mainly care about my photos in Google Photos which I use as a convenient backup of my phones camera roll. Over the years I’ve collect about 2TB of data.

Downloading and moving this amount of data is not trivial. Google offers to archive in chunks of 10 to 50 GB as ZIP or Tar.GZ files. After I triggered the takeout it took about 2-3 hours for them to compile the archive and send me a links with the individual downloads. For the 10 GB chunks size that were 203 individual files. I created a second takeout with 50 GB chunks size and tried to download that. Unfortunately the chunks didn’t fit on my machines disk at first. So I had to clean up a little. Tried on other computers etc. Just to find out that after a certain amount of attempts the downloads are blocked on the Google side. Apparently a security feature. 💁

OK, then I went with the 10 GB chunks instead. Those I hadn’t tried that often yet. Took me two days on the office network and home to download all the chunks and store them on my external 4TB USB drive.

To unpack the data I needed another large external USB drive to receive the more than 2TB. Unpacking all the TAR.GZ archives took my Macbook several hours. The limiting factor here was the USB transfer speed of the two physical hard disks.

Next challenge will be to sort unpacked images into my usual naming and folder scheme and then sync it with the data I already have local on my NAS. That will probably also take a couple of days each. Still have to develop a plan to do that on one my spare Linux machines to not block my Mac for several days in place. That amount of data you don’t just transfer over your home WiFi. The machines need to stay connected via cabled LAN and the Disks attached via USB.

Beer & Burger

On Wednesday we finally had our spring session of the legendary beer and burger crew. This time we befell the Burgeramt in Berlin Friedrichshain. Nice location, funny staff and good burgers. Easily a 7/10 for the venue. 15/10 for the crew of course.

#beer #burger #enEN #food #macOS #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick

Ich habe mich anstecken lassen und auch einen kurzen Wochenrückblick geschrieben ... https://pixelgraphix.de/notes/sammelsurium-22
#sammelsurium #Wochenrueckblick #blog #geschrieben

#wochenrueckblick #livebehindbars #schweiz

Im Moment befinden wir uns in einer schon länger anhaltenden Hitzewelle. Ich beschränkte mich in der Regel auf Fahrten am Abend, oder versuche die Fahrt so zu legen, dass ich an der sonnenabgewandten Seite der Hügel hinauffahre, oder auch versuche, vermehrt durch die Wälder zu fahren. Das gelingt natürlich nicht immer.

Das Highlight der Woche dürften die vielleicht 50 Störche auf einem Acker bei Bünzen gewesen sein. Sie li...

https://www.als-aargauer-unterwegs.ch/fotoalben/wochenrueckblicke/2023-2/woche-vom-14-08-2023-bis-20-08-2023

#wochenrueckblick #livebehindbars #schweiz

Woche 2023-32 vom 07.08.2023 bis 13.08.2023:

Die Woche beginnt regnerisch. Nur knapp habe ich es geschafft an grösseren Regenschauern vorbeizukommen. Dann kam der Wind, den nutzte ich für eine flotte Fahrt das Rheintal hinauf.

Am Donnerstag ein erster Versuch des Sommers, wieder zurückzukehren. Es war dies auch der Tag meiner längsten Fahrt in dieser Woche. Ich benutzte die sonnigen und warmen Stunden, um im solothurni...

https://www.als-aargauer-unterwegs.ch/fotoalben/wochenrueckblicke/2023-2/woche-vom-07-08-2023-bis-13-08-2023