Schafe sind bessere Rasenmäher

We took a trip to Mundenhof animal park yesterday. I’ve been hiding inside most of the summer, because temperatures around here have been insane. After a shorter heatwave with days over 40°C, this second heatwave hasn’t been quite as hot (mid 30s °C), but long and relentless. This obviously had a serious effect on nature, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I really saw the full extent of the damage. I realize that there are tons of other places that have it way worse. As far as I know, there…

My kids, 6 and not-quite-4, are learning chess — and they are kicking my ass. Well, okay…I’ll admit that it’s a bit click-baity, because they have yet to beat me. And I’m actually not all that good at chess myself. But I’m seriously impressed at how quickly they’ve picked it up. I think I was 10 or 11 when I first learned chess, first from a friend that I met on vacation and later from my grandpa. I eventually got good enough to consistently beat my grandpa, but that was a long time ago and…

I feel like I’m bitching a lot about my kids and while I sometimes neeeeed to get this off my chest, I do love both of them dearly. I’ve already described one key moment that I had with my older son1, but I’ve been missing something similar with my little one. There are tons of memorable moments, but nothing that stuck out to me … until the weekend before last. We were on a playground, next to a little fireplace where a large group was celebrating a kids’ birthday party. They were playing kids…

I find it incredibly fascinating how memory works. This morning, I saw a post from my friend Forrest where he linked to http://lostmyspace.com/ . Apparently somebody way back when archived about 500,000 songs from the site, before MySpace lost everything in a botched server migration. My friend and I also had a MySpace page back in the day and uploaded a bunch of crappy demos and cool guitar riffs. When I heard that MySpace lost everything, I went looking for them in my offline data hoard, but…

One of the most valuable things that I was taught as a software developer, is to write “good” Git commit messages. Obviously “good” is very subjective, so let me dive into it a bit. I want to explain what I think a “good” message is, but also why I think it’s relevant that you write a good message. I’m hoping that towards the end of this post, I could convince at least one other person to improve their workflow and write more relevant and thoughtful commit messages. If the rest of this post…

My wife and I went to see the band Foreigner yesterday. If you’re not familiar with the band…like…have you been living under a rock!?!?! I promise you that you could have gone to the concert and you would have recognized 90% of the songs, just from hearing them in movies, TV shows, on the radio, singing them back in school, whatever. Let me give you a selection: Urgent Juke Box Hero I wanna know what Love is Cold as Ice Waiting for a Girl like You Feels like the first time Trust me — you know…

While writing my last post about growing my own software, I also started thinking about which languages I use for my projects.1 Bash I live on Linux now, so Bash seems like the obvious choice for smaller scripts. You can do a lot with Bash glueing your terminal tools together, but there’s a hard to anticipate maximum point of complexity where things start to get uncomfortable. I say hard to anticipate, because I regularly find myself with a huge complicated Bash script and wish that I’d have…

I’ve been thinking about coding my own KOReader Sync Server. At the moment I’m using a lightweight implementation by b1n4ryj4n, which has served me well for years. But recently I’ve been looking for a way to improve the interaction between my Xteink X4 and my ancient Kindle running KOReader. With the server I’m using, I’m stuck with the binary comparison of books, where a hash of the actual ebook is uploaded, instead of just comparing the book’s name. This prevents me from applying epub…

I’ve mentioned it before, but we got a new bike a few weeks before and I absolutely love it! It’s a longtail cargo bike, meaning that it has a longer and reinforced luggage rack. And the luggage I’m carrying around? Well…kids. 😅 This is an Urban Arrow Breeze, a pretty new model that we tried on a whim when we went looking at cargo bikes a few months ago. The main reason we went looking at all was, that my 6 year old is now too big and too heavy for a kids seat and kinda also too big for the…

Hell yeah! Let’s start by swearing! Swearing is good! This is not a “Fuuuuck”, that slow, defeated, sigh of a fuck. This is “Fuck it!!!”, the one that nails you to the wall, the one that makes you grin like a maniac, because you just had a terrible idea, but it just might work. Yesterday I was at a pretty low point. Quite a few people have reached out to me, for which I’m very grateful. I also feel bad, that I made people worry, but that’s been a me-problem forever and I try to ignore that…

I recently read two thoughtful posts that oiled the gears in my mind and eventually sparked this idea to write through what the hell is going on with me at the moment. One post was Pulling the Master Sword by Forrest, the other was Nostalgia always includes a temporal context by Wouter. You don’t necessarily need to read these posts to follow along, but both come highly recommended by me. They are kinda about the same topic, but I feel like I’m going to drift away from both while writing. I’ve…

Together with the kids, we are currently reading Lichterland. It’s a wonderful children’s book, which sadly hasn’t been translated to English (yet?). We’re already on the second book of the series and both adults and kids are enjoying the story and characters a lot. The second book starts with the main characters, Karla and Frederick, building a treehouse. An annoying candle-kobold is playing tricks on them and throwing away all their boards, so they call on the great magician Poklorius for…

I recently added a /now slash-page to my blog. It’s mostly empty, except for the current book I’m reading and the last three books I’ve finished. Because I’m incredibly lazy and don’t want to keep this list updated manually, I went looking for a way to automate things. I already use Jelu to bring some order to my book reading. I have a list of books that I want to read next, I can easily mark one of them as “currently reading” and once I finish it, I write a short review for myself — mostly as…