LostFocus

I added a dominik.md to a project that I only work on once in a while. It contains a list of things still unfinished and a documentation about my decisions I made so far and oh boy is one of my coworkers livid.Frankly, in a time when people add markdown files for a mysterious person with a french first name who I have never seen at the office, this shouldn’t be too controversial. Reply by email

The “Years Ago Today” plugin on my blog just reminded me that I linked to GTA V GeoGuesser four years ago. I clicked just for a laugh, oh, maybe I still remember, haha – and I wasn’t really prepared what a deep feeling of nostalgia and (I guess?) homesickness this would trigger.A long time ago “hanging out in GTA Online with the boys” was my number one third place – there was a time when I just knew I could switch on my Xbox and Skype (yes, it was that long ago) and someone would be willing to…

Another data point for my thoughts about blog posts and especially weeknotes being personal or not: Roy read my post and decided to be less personal. Which is interesting – he does also mention that he is writing a private journal as well, which I am not. Basically what I blog and what I remember organically are all that I can recall in the future, which might explain my predilection to post boring interna. Meanwhile it’s been a weird week. While the heat wave might be over, the current weather…

For the last couple of days when it was really hot I had my big fan running almost 24/7: during the day to bring some respite through moving air and during the night to make sure that the cooler air from outside makes it into the parts of the apartment where there isn’t much of a natural flow of air.So just for the record: today has been the first day in a while when I didn’t turn it on because frankly – it’s fresh enough as it is, even with the sun shining. Reply by email

A few weeks ago I talked with Dirk about blogging and while this conversation got him to write a post about the state of the world he told me that week notes aren’t for him as they are too personal. I’ve been thinking about this conversation a lot since then. I read a lot of blogs, through my feed reader, bubbles.town, Kagi Small Web, indieblog.page and more. There are a lot of people who write extremely personal things! And there are a lot of people who manage to write interesting posts almost…

I guess it was the heat that got to people’s brains. This week I more than ever in the just about nine years I’ve been on Mastodon I had to block and mute and filter to keep my timeline halfway sane. On Monday evening I went to a photo walk in Basel. The vibe in the city was great, everyone was in a relaxed evening mood. I am spending most of the weekend watching the 24h of Spa, which should be the last of the 24h races of the year that I follow along. It’s been pretty exciting so far and there…

I have linked to videos from OTR a few times on my link blog but this one deserves a post on here. It’s a feature-length documentary about the “Golden Triangle” within Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, the history how it became the center of the global drug trade and how it in many ways still is. A fascinating story of lost armies, hill tribes, gangsters and – of course, because it is ORT – food. Very much worth the time. Reply by email

I mostly spend this week up in Cologne. A bunch of in-person meetings, a bit of hanging out with friends and coworkers, good (and some not so good) food and the days went by very quickly. For the first time in quite some while I took the train instead of driving and frankly – when it works and once you’re in the train, it is really a nice way to travel distances like this. Train stations are a bit of a slog, though. Now over the weekend I’m slowly acclimating myself to the warm weather that…

I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment. (This one I really can’t explain. It’s not my kind of music. I can’t remember hearing it anywhere lately. And yet here we are.) This morning it was Senza Una Donna by Zucchero and Paul Young – and frankly, I hope I can exorcise it by writing this blog post. Reply by email

Another big 24 hour race this week, this time the Le Mans one. I’m usually not a WEC guy but this one is special, of course. Otherwise this week was a calm one, again. (Next week won’t. Foreshadowing!) Taskmaster Series 21 concluded, which is always a bit sad. The ten episodes are going by so fast. Before this series I usually watched it on the Friday in my lunch break, this time I stayed up on Thursday until it popped up on YouTube – and it is quite funny how different it feels as late night…

I very much prefer the fediverse aka Mastodon (yes, I know) over the other text-based social networks. Especially over the one that used to be so important to me.But it does have it downsides and I usually notice them when I am trying to see who else besides the people I follow is talking about stuff. Especially during events like the Nürburgring 24h, LeMans this weekend, in general all motorsports events. The target demographics don’t seem to overlap all that much. (And no, it’s not because…

A calm and rather cool summer week. Not quite as rainy as forecast but not the hot temperatures of the last few weeks.I didn’t do all that much – slept a lot, futzed around with my websites and learned more about Vietnamese addresses, reverse geocoding and the OpenStreetMap data model than I ever wanted to know. Reply by email

This is a copy of an issue that I just created in the Nominatim repository. Sadly my skills in Python (and my knowledge of the OSM data model) aren’t good enough to poke around in the code on my own to figure out what is happening. Reverse Geocoding in the Ho Chi Minh City center return wrong city What did you search for? https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=geojson&lat=10.7686020&lon=106.6900885 What result did you get? The address field in the JSON response returns Thủ Đức as…

You get old and you start thinking, “Oh, I better make the world around me miserable. Then I won’t mind leaving so much.” That’s what you got to fight against.– Bob Mortimer Reply by email

Can you believe it’s Sunday already? It’s still nice and sunny but the weather forecast (and a look outside) tells me that this is going to be over soon. There was a lot of family this week – it would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday, so my aunts and a whole bunch of cousins were in town for a remembrance dinner. And because this is exactly the kind of situation where ideas can happen, one of my cousin decided to go to Zürich on the next day with his daughter for the Metallica concert…

This series is an incredible deep dive into the cryptic short codes that are behind flight bookings and how the systems behind the curtain work all the way until the passenger reaches the destination. I’ve read them all the way through yesterday and I’ll likely read through them again today. I already checked on the entries on my old flight tickets and some example booking on the Matrix Airfare Search and this is exactly the kind of look into big complicated systems that is extremely…

A sunny Sunday, a few clouds in the sky, windows wide open, iced coffee, Italo disco on moderate volume, this is a good early summer morning. My “cleaning out my personal side-projects”-project is moving very slowly. Mostly because I’m faster at having new ideas than being able to let go of the old ones.Oh well. Reply by email

Last night I was feeling like playing some New Age easy listening music while reading and this morning I found out that my 100.000th scrobble is now “Age Of Loneliness” by Enigma. I’m not sure what to make of that. Reply by email

I really managed to mess up my sleep schedule beyond anything resembling smart. I’m wide awake now. I won’t be tomorrow morning, quite the opposite. Reply by email

By now you might have noticed that I use week notes to keep myself from abandoning this blog. And yeah, I quite enjoy writing them, too, most week. Even though lately they’ve been a bit calmer than I’d like them to be. It is what it is.On my travels through the internet I found a service for people who might like to do this as well but don’t have their own website. (Even though you really should!) I haven’t tested weeknotes.me but it does look nice and easy enough. Reply by email

A week with a public holiday is a pretty good week. I got talked into going for an indoor miniature golf outing with my nieces and nephews which went about as well as expected.I’ve been watching the Nürburgring 24h race and all the things around it for the last couple of days. Right now it’s still roughly four more hours and frankly, it got a bit boring on Saturday evening. I don’t regret going to bed at a normal time. Reply by email

Back when we did things like “buy a cd and use iTunes to turn the music into mp3s” I used MusicBrainz Picard a lot to get all the metadata I needed. And then I kind of forgot about MusicBrainz.Turns out: it is still going strong. It does lack quite a lot of the music I listen to, though. Which might not be so surprising because while I (mostly) listen to pop, there is also a whole bunch of dangdut and Luk thung. So I guess I’ll be doing a whole lot of editing MusicBrainz. And don’t ask me why.…

I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment. This morning it was D:Ream with Things Can Only Get Better Reply by email

Hm. I moved all the little scripts I had running on a Raspberry Pi to my Mac Mini so I could install Home Assistant to it. So far I haven’t done anything wild with it, except created a bunch of dashboards. Who’d have known that the carbon dioxide level is directly influenced by humans and by open windows? (Yes, everybody. Including me. But now I have nice little lines in my browser to see it in almost real-time.) Reply by email

I can’t help to note just how nice it is to wake up three days in a row without an alarm.I had a little bit too much beef (the food, not disagreeing with people) on Friday, so obviously I needed the whole of Saturday to recover. And today I went to visit two museums with my nieces and my brother-in-law, which was rather fun. So all in all a rather successful weekend. Successful enough that I managed to completely forget what happened during the four days before that. Which might be more of a…

I have seen a blog post asking Who knows that you blog? making the rounds lately and for me the answer is pretty easy: probably everyone who knows me but not many people are even remotely interested. (Some are and: thank you! I really appreciate it.) I have noticed (or at least it’s something I tell myself) that it isn’t primarily about me but about the medium. Not many people I know in real life are looking at websites for fun.I guess more people would read/look at my stuff if I sent it out by…

Another calm week that went by very fast, not much to tell. I didn’t even take a single photo, that is all pretty remarkable.As I’ve written about on Thursday I started cleaning out my side-projects. Annoyingly enough it rather gave me more ideas instead of the motivation to delete (or at least consolidate) what is sitting around. Good grief. And in case you haven’t seen those, yet – I decided to turn the four videos I took during my vacation public: Reply by email

I just went through a tour de force of going through all the subdomains (and domains, lol) that I have gotten and set up for random side projects over the year. Good god. I cancelled a whole bunch of auto-renews and now have a long todo list of cleaning up. Reply by email

Bubbles mostly seems to be a place to vote for blog posts about Bubbles. (I kid, of course. It looks nice and I’ve bookmarked it.) Reply by email

First asparagus dinner of the season. Can’t complain except someone wasn’t peeling them properly which was a bit of a problem. (That someone was me, obviously.) Went to have a quick planespotting evening with my cousin, which ended up being a bit underwhelming but still, a good reason to be out for a while after work and hang. Reply by email