Hi, I'm Dominik Schwind, friend of the internet. And this is my blog.
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If you need more direct access, you can follow me here with Mastodon or similar sites: @dominik@nona.social. You can also follow this blog via @dominik@lostfocus.de.
Another of these weird, weird weeks.
Talking about weeks – I saw this “My Life in Weeks” page and it’s actually a wee bit scary.
Meanwhile my adventures in microjournaling can be easily summarized in this video. It’s not even that I’m against doing it, quite the opposite. But I just forget.
Another weekend and another week where I’m sitting here, staring at the blank document and going: Hm.
Maybe it’s still the greyness of the light or the state of everything or the fact that I’ve started eating antihistamines like candy (thanks, hazel, for all your early pollen) but to be quite frank: I could sleep all day long lately. And since nobody is around to stop me, that’s basically what I’ve been doing with my free time. It doesn’t really make for good content though, right? (Good god, I haven’t even taken a photo this week. Not a single one!)
Oh well. Time for a nap.
Roughly a year ago I decided I had to do something about my slowly declining enjoyment of taking photos. And because I am me, obviously the solution would be to buy a new camera.
Ever since learning about the system I was very intrigued by the while Micro Four Thirds thing. The early prototypes were so pretty. Later I really liked the GF1 (who could forget that Himalaya field test by Craig Mod?) and playing with Teymur’s version 15(!) years ago, didn’t help. Alas, I had my Nikon and at some point Sony started selling “affordable” full-frame cameras, so I went that way.
So when I felt the need to try something new last year, that’s where I looked. Affordable, pocketable (or at least semi-pocketable) and with interchangeable lenses to satisfy the nerd in me? Sign me up.
As much as I like my Sony (and I really do. It is such an amazing camera) – even with the “small” lenses it is a pretty hefty thing to carry around. So my theory was that I could bring a smaller camera with me everywhere to rekindle the fire and use the Sony when I go somewhere with the goal of taking photos.
So now that I’m in the MFT ecosystem (mostly using a Lumix GX–9 that I bought second-hand.) I am obviously watching what is happening. And today OM-Systems launched a new “premium” MFT camera with retro styling, the OM–3. But oh boy: that thing is very pretty but also rather pricey and to be honest – with the SLR styling it currently doesn’t really do it for me. Even if it is roughly the same size as my Lumix, just on a psychological level it doesn’t feel pocketable. And if that pro is gone, I’d rather buy a Sony a7c2 for that money.
So for now I’ll be happy with the GX–9. Let’s see what happens when Panasonic shows up with an updated version of that. Or when OM-Systems comes around with a new Pen-F.
My lunch breaks usually look like this:
Today I had some potatoes in my lunch and frankly, I blame them (instead of my constant state of tiredness and the dark grey skies) that step 5 was extremely deep today and that I’m still not all there more than half an hour and a cup of strong black coffee later.
The app by Iconfactory is out and as expected it’s pretty and works very well. Two thumbs up, etc.
That’s not really the fascinating part to me, though. When it came out, basically every single old school apple nerd who I follow on Mastodon posted about it. Random blogs who aren’t in the “writing about apps” business wrote about it. (As do I, now.) And while this is usually a sign of a coordinated “Influencer marketing” push, I don’t think that this is the case here. Iconfactory just managed to create such a passionate niche nerdy fan base with their software over the years. Very interesting. (And frankly, well deserved – they seem to be good folks.)
That hasn’t happened in a while: someone bought a whole bunch of followers for my (mostly dormant, but eh) Instagram account by accident.
I like a good writing prompt, especially when it is one that is widely shared. I like to read how differently people answer the same questions. (Which might be why I like Taskmaster so much – the same task, often wildly different interpretations.)
And of course I like to throw my hat in the ring as well – and since I doubt that anyone would directly tag me, I’ll just accept Anh’s open invitation.
I’ve had websites since the late 90s, basically ever since I had access to the internet. I played around with them but somehow never quite got to a point where anything clicked. I even played with early proto-blogging software like NewsPro, which more or less seemed to have vanished from the internet. (I did find this two person reddit thread, though.) At this point I already knew about online diaries and real blogs and by 2002 I decided to give it a go myself. At this point I already felt a bit behind but it all seemed to be good fun.
(Ugh.) WordPress. I’ve been using it for ages, mostly because it is written in PHP and that’s what I know. I’ve been talking about migrating to something else for a long time now, but you know. Inertia is a real thing, especially if one wants to migrate over 20 years worth of posts.
Yes! I started on Blogger. I moved to MovableType (which was a glorious beast) and now I’m here. I also have (had?) a bunch of blogs on Tumblr and I still have a medium dot com account somewhere.
The longer ones (like this one here) start out as a markdown file in Byword. Sometimes I just open the WP backend and post short ones from there.
Either when it is Sunday (which is weeknotes day!) or when I just have a thought that I feel like sharing.
Immediately, usually without putting a lot of deep thought into it. This much should be clear for anyone who has been reading this blog for a while.
My life and the internet, I’d say. Frankly, I don’t have that many people who are willing to listen to my yapping, so I just dump things here.
Myself, really. I have a little plugin that shows me articles I posted today in the past years and I quite enjoy clicking on those links and read them. I often cringe because quite frankly, especially the older posts could be from a completely different person but still, usually there is something fun in it.
And well, for the few people who read it as well – sometimes I find something fun online and I want to share it.
Oh, I don’t know. Usually the last I posted, so for the next couple of minutes it might be this one.
Haha. Yes. As I said before: I wanted to move away from WordPress for a long time. I could just use one of the options that are out there but frankly, that wouldn’t be very me.
Here you go. Feel free to feel tagged as well! I really like to read your answers.
And since some people might think “an open invitation is no real invitation” – here we go, I want to see answers by Teymur, Martin and Marc.
I don’t even know where to begin. And frankly I don’t even have the energy.
After a couple of warm week with even a hint of sunshine (remember the last weeknotes?) life is back to cold, wet and grey again, which is a wee bit of a bummer.
At least there’s cheese.
Frankly, me praising cheese is quite silly. I’m not a big cheese guy, quite the contrary. Those big cheese selections at the supermarkets usually make me shrug. Not my thing. But hard cheeses on pasta? Molten cheese in a pot or on potatoes or bread? Sign me up.
I have been tracking my personal finances for quite a while now. For a while I used Money Pro and later switched to the excellent (even if slightly flawed) Firefly III.
One thing I learned pretty fast: the ADHD tax is real. Especially when it comes to impulse purchases – both of stuff and even worse in my case: of domains and VMs for random “side projects” that never really go anywhere. I mean it’s nice that I have a status page for my current condition. (In German, though) That could be a single HTML page, though – it hardly ever changes. There is no need for it to be a full web app with ActivityPub integration.
I also don’t necessarily need a whole bunch of little websites that track what I watch, listen to or play. I don’t need two full servers that do nothing but save my location data from OwnTracks, Overland and Swarm/Foursquare. Or a web app to track my coffee. Or one to find the Openstreetmap POIs around me. Or one that allows me to manage my own personal POI database. Or one that tries to map a set of coordinates to their WoEIDs. (Remember those? I sure do. They’ve been irrelevant for a decade now, I think.) Oh, or my own IndieAuth host. (I could go on. But I think you get my point by now.)
Or maybe I need all of these, just not in a state of half-abandonment. And none of them in any kind of state that I’d opensource it.
Sigh.
I need to clean up a bit. Most of this could just be part of my main website. Or just not exist, to be honest.
A sunny Sunday marks the end of the fourth week of this year and we’re almost done with January, too. It’s pretty warm as well – I even had to take off my beanie because it got too warm just now when I went for a walk.
It’s very unusual to have a sunny Sunday and luckily it seems like the clouds are back. It felt weird without everything being grey and bleak.
Remember how I said last week that I started to use pen and paper more? Well. I know that the most important step is to buy new notebooks and pens, so that’s what I did. And wouldn’t you know – my excitement about using them is already pretty low. Maybe because so far I’ve mostly been doing the whole thing for work – and let’s not talk about work here.
I should start to write down things that I’m thinking about while I’m thinking about them – lately I’ve had a lot of things on my mind (haven’t we all?) and putting them down on paper might help organise these thoughts. Sometimes I sit at the computer and try to put them into my text editor which doesn’t work at all. The moment I start typing, it starts to feel like I’m writing a blog post. (like this one) And even though I know that hardly anyone is reading these (“Because you don’t send them out as emails anymore, Dominik! Or let us know on Instagram!”) I immediately start to edit everything. And then, what’s the point? Ugh.
I should really follow Teymur’s lead and start writing things down on a daily basis. It seems to work really well for him and it might help me not just stare at the empty text file in despair every weekend.
Actually I’ve been follow his lead in a way and started to take hand-written notes at work. It worked out about as well as I thought it would. Not only is it impossible to read what I wrote, my hands also cramped up immediately. Well done, Dominik. You used to write and draw so much, all of this seems to be gone.
Work is a bit of a tedium lately, for many reasons – but at least I found some time this week to actually build a whole feature for a client instead of sitting around in meetings and maybe fixing a smaller bug or two in between them.
The first early access version of AC Evo was published this week and boy howdy it is early days. I guess I’ll give it a good couple of updates until I try it again. (And maybe I need to update my PC at some point. While I still think of it as an overpowered gaming machine, it is five years old by now. Or maybe I just get rid of it altogether – Factorio works on MacOS and everything else is just wasting time anyway.
I started to write notes by hand on paper and oh boy, did my handwriting get bad.
The year still feels in a weird trial-mode. Probably because the first week that would have been a proper work week was cut short by a two-day work event. I drove all the way to Düsseldorf to learn about how great AI is. So I guess that’s a good way to spend my time?
Meanwhile my phone suddenly sprang into life a few days back – some of my old classmates are actually organising a 25-year high school reunion. Much to my shame I haven’t really been good at keeping in touch so it is quite a wild ride to see all these names show up in a conversation again. Of course the first little dramas are already erupting, so this is going to be fun to watch.
And maybe that will all the fun that I have with the event – one of the proposed dates is the weekend of one of my closest friends’ wedding and frankly, it’s not even a question where I’ll go if that’s the case.
If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.
Ugh. [via]
Just to be extra nerdy I’ll now use the ISO 8601 week date format for the title. Good god.
It was a pretty calm first week and I made sure of it. I didn’t have any plans for New Year’s Eve and was in bed way before twelve. The first two days at work were mercifully calm as well – for most people the work year starts tomorrow, so I had some time to clean up my work computer, do a bit of maintenance in a few projects, read up on some things I had obvious knowledge gaps before and so on. (I still have those knowledge gaps but at least now they’re known unknowns.)
I finally made it to another planet in Factorio and it’s all a bit of a slog. I have to start new? Things are different? I need to be a farmer? Huh.
There are a couple of bigger (and smaller) projects on my list that I haven’t made any progress what so ever. Number one would be to actually made that list so I have something new to ignore.
I finally managed to install Mosquitto on a Raspberry Pi, now I just need to make use of it. I’ve been using OwnTracks for what feels forever to post my current location to an HTTP endpoint. But every time I have a more advanced idea what I could be doing with it, I noticed that MQTT would be probably more useful. So I guess that’s my next project.