December 2022
It’s time for Olliebollen. Thanks, dad, for making them.
I’ve cooked the last dinner of the year: Mashed potatoes with a meat sauce and steamed carrots. And a non-meat sauce alternative for my daughter. I’m incredibly proud of that sauce – based on a mushroom extract, a new skill I’ve learned this year.
I started watching 🎥 The Takeover. A dutch movie Netflix recommended to me. It was hard to understand everything, especially as I also used the dutch dub and subtitles. It reminds me of the “Girl with the dragon tattoo.”
I don’t do yearly themes, but looking back over the current year, the word for this year was: health. And looking forward to next year, it will be change.
Change, such as removing bad habits and getting out of my comfort zone.
Books read in 2022
I felt that I did not read so much this year when I started writing this post. But now that I have looked at the number, I’m surprised that I still read over 30 books this year. And this is not an optimized number 📚.
I successfully played the piano most days this year! I had six perfect months on to another year now.
Damica's Journal: Day 42 of 365 Somewhere over an arid place on the earth
📝 We are flying over arid land today. It is day 42 since we started with our homebuilt airship. You are wondering who we are and why we are doing that. Keep reading, and you will find the answer.
The airship Malay over the beach while the sun is going down. The airship is drawn by me and the background was generated using DiffusionBee.
My dinner for today (a drawing of a burger by my daughter).
Visiting the real live bookstore. I like the fake second story.
I’ve liked reading this article a lot. And I think David raises good points regarding how much a manager should be in the field. Having a manager who understands the craft is helpful. But at the same time it is not his job to actually work in the field.
Watching the local rescue swimmer brigade swimming down the river with torches in their hands.
Like father like daughter. Braided spaghetti from our lunch today.
The updated obsidian canvas with my main index. I think I should stop now and use it and see how it works out. I already seen that it helps with my navigation in my notes.
Cool gift wrapping paper with small deer heads on it.
I finally found a plugin to customise the file name display everywhere in Obsidian: Front Matter Title. With this I can hide my date based filename and show the first heading instead. I’m short happy right now!
I’ve got a new mug from my daughter (The mug is handmade and says “Papi”).
Does anybody perhaps have a version of GarageBand which still runs on macOS Catalina? My daughter would want to play with it. And Apple does no longer offer it for download via the AppStore. It would need to run on an old MacBook Pro Retina from mid 2012.
@V_ I've managed to download - with the help of my brother - it in the meantime. The solution was to sign out of the AppStore account and then we used the account of my brother and then the normal flow worked. It gave an error that the current version does not work and offered to download the older version. We are not clear why this did not work on my account. But something is strange here anyway.
by V_ on
It looks like that our Christmas dinner is cancelled due to illness of the host.
@V_ That sucks, hopefully you have something else you can put together at home.
by pimoore on
I love my morning pages. For the last month, they always were very short and not so helpful. But today, I hit the jackpot: I wrote over a thousand words today and gained some real insights into my head.
I had an exciting moment in the restaurant yesterday when the owner declined my tip and said it was too much (around 10% of the bill). He then reduced it to a smaller amount and offered us drinks on the house.
If you are ever in the vicinity of Baden, I highly recommend China City. It has been our favorite restaurant for many years.
We had a good dinner in our favourite Chinese restaurant today!
I should stop playing with my food. But why it makes a lot of fun
(the image shows two schnitzels on top of each other with citron quarters for eyes, and it looks like a frog)
Ready for food. Now I need to fry them (the image show a stack of homemade schnitzel).
I played around with the new canvas feature in Obsidian. I certainly see me using that feature and it could lead to me using Obsidian also at work – instead of OmniGraffle for Mindmapping.
The screenshot shows my index notes on a single canvas.
@V_ nice! So would you use this kind of canvas as like a daily dashboard or something?
by joshuapsteele on
@joshuapsteele, that would be one use. I need to check it it works out. Another usage case I'm thinking of is to create one for each of my active projects. Serving as a visual entry point into the project topic.
by V_ on
@joshuapsteele @v_ now that’s a smart use of the canvas tool. I’ve only just started playing around with it and I’m categorising a whole load of visual frameworks.
by ChrisJWilson on
@ChrisJWilson what do you understand under "visual frameworks"? Tools to mindmap or for note taking?
by V_ on
@V_ I would see a visual framework as a layout to help guide your thinking and decisions. A classic would be a mountain with three peaks. This would guide your thinking to “what’s our end goal, what are the points we need to reach on the way.” A mindmap is a form a framework as it guides you to just get ideas out and organize by type, but I’d classify it as “just” a layout as it’s isn’t very prescriptive. In truth there’s little between layouts and frameworks but I find the prompt of “what does this structure guide me towards.” To be useful.
by ChrisJWilson on
Should I be worried about these visual artifacts on my computer screen? They happen randomly when I switch between applications. And come and go (flickering), the computer is not reacting to any inputs while it is happening (image of my desktop showing Black outlines).
@V_ Looks like you have an older iMac model same as my previous one at work. I can tell by the image retention which plagued those models before Apple ended up fixing it. I did see a few weird glitches on that machine, but nothing that bad. Best guess is a display or video card issue?
by pimoore on
@pimoore its a late 2014 model – I think one of the first retina ones. I was also thinking that it could be the graphics card. But it could also be the WindowServer, it mostly happens when I have many windows open and are switching between apps fast. And yes the retentions is also an issue. luckily it does not bother me to much, as the dock does hide it :-) It is only visible as during the glitch the Dock gets hidden somehow.
by V_ on
@V_ That’s the model I had at work, the retention was horrible on mine. Possible it’s software related, maybe a clean install would fix the issue?
by pimoore on
@pimoore for a start I've started closing my finder window. I ralized that I had a lot of them open. I hope, that I get around a clean install but when it does not get better that would then be the next thing to do – or perhaps a restart first as well.
by V_ on
@V_ Since this happens when you switch windows, I’m curious if enabling reduced motion in Accessibility settings would work in tandem with closing some Finder windows?
by pimoore on
@pimoore good recommendation – I have activated it and keep an eye out for it. The issue does not happen so often, so it could be hard to test it. I've also seen the "reduce transarency" option as well, could also be helpful. But have not activated it yet.
by V_ on
Food for my ill wife. Chicken soup with some curved meat.
Today I’ve automated our Christmas tree lights to automatically turn on when the sun goes down. And also turn off in the night.
And I extended my blogging app to also create a file in my digital brain each time I start reading a new book.
I finished reading Out of the software crisis by Baldur Bjarnason.📚
I just started reading A Shimmer of Magic: The Crystal Mages Trilogy book 1 by Jane Shand.📚
@V_ 😸 Malcolm in the Middle Fawlty Towers Katla (Icelandic sci-if mystery) The Magicians True Detective
by hollyhoneychurch on
@hollyhoneychurch I've started watching "The Magicans" as well but somehow did not keep on it. I've should also continue with the books OO I've watched some Malcome in the Middle when I was smaller, but not much. Mostley do not beeing allowed to watch much TV. It was very hard to reduce this list down to five :-) Most crime series / detective series did not make the cut. And now I just remembered that I've should have added Andromeda as well :-(
by V_ on
@V_ I know what you mean! Really, there are so many choices and we humans have so many facets that five isn’t enough 😆
by hollyhoneychurch on
Put some gears on it, and you have a prop for a steampunk movie! I like the style of the shower valve in my hotel room. Brass and big junky handles for the steam, eh water to flow through. Oh, and the water pressure was also good.
I went paragliding today. I like flying through the sky without any motor noise. And the view was amazing.
What makes a good book even better? Reading it outside on top of a mountain with snow and sun. And you just see the Matterhorn on the right side of the image. 📚
The Matterhorn is greeting. We have way better weather today.
@V_ 🏔️ 😍
by pimoore on
More construction details of the bridge. I like the small diagonal plates connecting to the bridge legs.
Safety net
A cool wooden staircase I found in Berne.
I started my holidays with a fresh load of snow. And now I’m traveling to the mountains, watching a snowy landscape drive past me outside the train window.
Car service done :-) I bought a small set of plastic replacement gears to fix a destroyed gear in my daughter’s RC car toy (the image shows the orange rc car toy l, it’s remote and the rest of the unused gears).
Some of the food from yesterday’s team launch. It also marked my last working say for this year (the image shows two small plates with vegetarian food to share). It was also the first or second time this year that the whole team was at the office.
I finally managed to listen to all the podcast episode in my player. There is nothing to listen to anymore. (The image shows a screenshot of the “Listen Now” view of the apple podcast app with no podcasts episodes – only some recommendation for other podcasts are visible).
Two leaves from our avocado tree. I like the pattering of them. The coloration creates a layered effect, making it look like an oak leaf inside the actual leaf. (The image shows two discolored leaves with different brown tones and a wavy black outline between the colors).
I started reading Out of the software crisis by Baldur Bjarnason last month.📚
The moon yesterday evening. It looks like the sun.
On the way to the vet with our neighbor’s cat.
I love that we are living in the future. Got a bunch of pdfs with text as images and needed to extract some text from it. Luckily Shortcuts has an action for that, and combined with some shell foo; all the files can be OCRd recursively.
Such a productive day so far. I have 12 new notes in my note inbox. I wonder what the reason for these explosion is. The past few weeks it was often only one or two new notes a day. And there are some longer notes in there as well not just short links. 📝
Not sure what I should think about this. It looks like a dream come true at first glance — but what are the long-term effects of recording your screen?
The search engine for your life. Find anything you've seen, said, or heard.
⤑ Rewind.
@V_ I love that the marketing assumes that everything you have ever seen, said, or heard is on a screen. (But I suppose the version for people whose best ideas come in the shower would be even more problematic.)
by dwalbert on
@dwalbert yes I'm with you but now combine this system with a Google glass or something similar. That would be magical but also create a lot of issues. In the end, it would help me remember what was said and allow for self-reflection — but it would also mean a world where nothing gets forgotten anymore.
by V_ on
@V_ …which is a dystopian science fiction story that probably has already been written.
by dwalbert on
@dwalbert yep, I remember at least one Dark Mirror episode with such a story line. I've also see another issue with this tool, when using it in video converences. In my place you are not allowed to record conversations with other persons without disclosing that first. But then I could certainly use a tool which generates transcripts of my calls automatically. Focusing on talking and making legible notes at the same time is hard.
by V_ on
I observed a vacuum digger today. I somehow find them fascinating (the image shows a red vacuum digger and two workers digging a hole in a street).
The end of my working year is in view – only two weeks to go!
I’m searching for a free replacement for server-side hosting (database & code) now that Heroku no longer offers a free entry tier. Do you have any recommendations? I need an option also to schedule a background task with at least a 15-minute resolution.
I’m now the proud owner of an artificial Christmas tree. I don’t want to kill a real tree yearly to have one in my living room for two weeks.
MBNOV Reprise 2
I’m staring at the mirror, observing my figure unhappy with what I see. I should start doing something for my body, so I’m looking for the best for the feast next month. It is the time to celebrate the renewal of my driving license. It was a long path, and I have a lot of admiration for everybody who managed to do this type of test without training. And nobody is exempt from taking such a test; otherwise, you can’t move around in this place.
I shake off the echo of the test, walk down to the kitchen, and start reading the newspaper to gain insight into the world. Not that I want to, but it is always helpful to be informed. The current consensus is that a certain famous minister displays unworthy conduct. And he is under heavy suspicion from the public and media. I don’t know how much of this is true. It sounds more like a lot of hot air.
I adjust my legs to prevent a cramp and leave the front page. Let’s ignore the messages of war and the aluminium crisis for now and look if there is anything about my favorite movie franchise in the culture section.
My tea water is ready, and I fill my mug. I found a unique cup in a barrel shape next to an old tire. That was last year when I visited an antique store. I’ve only bought the mug and a first-edition print of a novel. The story is strange, but I like it. It is about a group of humans repeating the same errors all the time. The plot is placed on an ice planet where they were apparently stranded some years ago. It is a crazy story but also a bit dated. But the author had some funny ideas about how they can survive, and they have a herd of sheep grazeing on some moss growing in an ice cave.
Drinking my tea, I need to update my schedule for today, so I can retain my sanity and my ritual downtime in the evening. I have some commitments today. But mostly, I can relax today, which helps my motivation.
The trend in my life lately was towards the strange. Last week I bought myself a pet fish. I fought it would help with my safety – but I’m still not sure which brain wave I was following at that moment.
Like the last time a creative text with all the words from this years MBNOV words. See MBNOV Reprise for my last one.
The “Christmas window” at my parent’s home. A sugary winter castle with little snowmen.
I’m unsure if I want one or not. It looks like fun. At least st on the small one.
I’ve watched 1899 last week and this week. I’ve enjoyed the story but I took a while until I was in there. I’ve liked the acting and the cast. And that not everybody was talking the same language. 📺
It feels strange not have a word promt for mbnov anymore :-)
@V_ Looks delicious!
by cygnoir on