My first photo post about my trip to South Africa was about pictures from the huge Addo Elephant National Park, where you can drive around for days and still see something new. Directly adjacent to it is the Schotia Safaris Private Game Reserve, a much smaller and privately run park that only offers guided tours, but with more service around it.

Another difference is that state-run national parks such as Addo are only allowed to have animals that occur naturally in the area. This is different in private reserves and so in Schotia (named after a protected old tree species) you will find giraffes, wildebeests, impalas, hippos, crocodiles and rhinos alongside the animals of the area, such as elephants, buffaloes, kudus and warthogs.

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In 2024, the best wife in the world and I had decided that it was time to explore South Africa, especially as I had never been south of the equator, but she had already traveled to the southernmost tip of Africa with a friend 10 years ago and had been raving about it ever since. I also can’t remember having allowed myself three weeks in a row to relax, but for a trip like this it needs to be, and preferably over the Christmas holidays to escape the hustle and bustle in Germany. No “Oh Tannenbaum”, “Kling Glöckchen Klingelingeleing” with a disgusting warm spiced red wine in my hand, but elephant stamping at 32 degrees in the shade … Yes!

We had planned our trip as a round trip: first Cape Town and Hout Bay, then east by car towards Mossel Bay and on to Addo. Then back via Plettenberg Bay and some Stellenbosch in the last two days to round off the experience. Always with me, of course, my camera(s) … I had already assumed that I would take a few more photos in South Africa than usual, but in the end I ended up with 4,366 shots (!) and 82GB of RAW data, which I synchronized with my server at home wherever I had WiFi.

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Since yet another tech billionaire (this time the one from Meta) has decided that he can go without morality and decency and crawl as far as possible into the far-right a*** of the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States, there has been a considerable significant migration of users from Instagram to the Fediverse alternative Pixelfed, a photo-centric platform that has so far led a rather shadowy existence alongside the big player Mastodon.

I am very pleased about the fact that the Pixelfed inventor @Dansup currently has to increase the resources of his pixelfed.social server every day, on which I also have an account, to cope with the rush. Instagram is, alongside Threads, the last meta-product where I have an account, and I can only welcome an open and decentralized counterweight to it.

But I have to admit that although I regularly publish my photos on Pixelfed, I’m not 100% satisfied with the platform. On the one hand, the UI and handling are currently (still) quite clumsy and on the other hand, it is more a platform for everyday pictures of the selfie generation than a photo platform, as 500px has been for me for years. I spend my free time with photography and therefore want to present my work primarily in the context of a portfolio-based approach. This is only partially the case for Pixelfed, due to its focus on being an Instagram replacement.

I feel much more comfortable on the new and rising star in the Fediverse sky called Vernissage by Marcin Czachurski, that I discovered a few weeks ago and fell in love with.

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When I started Mentions United to collect and display the interactions of syndication from the various Fediverse platforms on my static blog, I initially focused on my needs with regard to the range of functions… see also Mentions United… 3, 2, 1, Go.

At the top of the list were, of course, Webmentions, closely followed by Mastodon and the classic non-Fediverse platforms such as Flickr, where I syndicate my photos, among other things. I was able to cover this group of platforms completely with the Webmentions provider plugin, because thanks to brid.gy and webmention.io, their interactions are also converted into Webmentions.

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I have customized my Hexo installation a lot over the last few years to generate my blog kiko.io. This mainly concerns countless generators that help me to create content aside from posts and integrate it into the structure. There are also a few that have to load data from external web servers, such as my Blogroll.

Sometimes I also travel to areas with only limited Internet coverage, as I am currently doing in the mountains of South Africa, and of course all those generators that need external data throw errors and the build process stops. Changing code on the off chance, committing it and hoping that the GitHub Action doesn’t throw any errors is, to say the least, suboptimal. A small automatic switch was needed to at least allow me to build and test the new feature when working on the blog, as long as one of these generators is not affected.

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With this post, I would like to continue what I started last year and what inspired me, among others, Robb Knights App Defaults.

Meanwhile, I also have a detailed and updated list of all the things I absolutely need as a slash page under /USES, but here is a brief summary of my current app defaults for this year:

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Anyone who has been following this blog for a while knows that I am over 50 and have only recently developed an interest in football. Of course, I primarily follow my home team, SV Wehen Wiesbaden, but I also follow other teams, especially those underdogs who tend to lose out in the big business, but who have exactly the heart that makes football what it is or should be.

Today, I stumbled across one completely unexpectedly: in Hout Bay, South Africa at an arts/crafts/food market by the harbour. I was looking for something interesting to eat and my eye fell on a stand with colourful shirts with two young guys behind it who were selling Lebkuchen (Gingerbread) and Stollen (no translation possible). LEBKUCHEN and STOLLEN!? As a German, I know that you can hardly escape this stuff during the Christmas season (my belly speaks volumes), but with my trip I tried exactly that and I obviously failed ;)

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