#weeklyreview 11/2026

Summary

Vintage Hardware, community college again, first idea of walls in #project25 and planting tomatoes and chillies.

Vintage Hardware

This week was apparently the week of vintage hardware. My very good friend Slamr gifted me an old PlayStation Portable that was so old that it’s still using mini discs as game cartridges apparently. They’re called UMD a Universal Media Disc or something like that. Really cool thing and a few games: Gangs of London Grand Theft Auto and so on I just had to swap out the battery as the old battery was a little bit swollen and I had to fear that that thing explodes during low charging and now it’s perfectly working again. That is really fun.

The other thing that I had to replace this week was my old trusty home server. I was trying to upgrade to PeerTube v8 and that wouldn’t run on my old CPU which is a Intel Core 2 Duo. I tried to recompile the software but that also didn’t work because inside a docker container it would dynamically pull some other software that isn’t compiled for these old CPUs. So Moellus coerced me into finally buying a bit newer hardware and recommending the Lenovo ThinkCenters. These I also have already seen recommended by Jan Wildeboer of RedHat so I finally gave in and found one on eBay and got a ThinkCenter M910x something with an Intel Core i5 CPU and 8 GB of RAM. That was pretty nice and that came on Saturday and I just really had to swap the SSD hard disk from the old machine to the new machine and it booted after I switched the BIOS to legacy support. The only other thing I had to change was a hard-coded network interface name and then it just worked. New machine shiny and new not really new right? It’s a used machine off of eBay though, but for my home lab it’s new and yeah it’s running. I can just use the Peertube latest official images, don’t have to fiddle with the CPU, don’t have to recompile for myself. This is pretty neat actually.

#project25

Project25 progressed to the point that we now can see the actual walls up in the attic. Last week, we finally found an acceptable solution for everyone to put the walls up and where all the pipes would go for the bathroom and stuff like that. And yeah, now we have the scaffolding, the structure for the walls ready, and on the weekend, we were hauling up the drywalls to the attic so that the craftsmen can actually put them in place. Yeah, it’s coming together finally.

Community College

On Thursday, I gave another session on the community college in Templin. The topic was privacy and alternatives to large corporate capitalist media services, obviously. We were in the local cafe El Caribe in Templin. There were a total of 8 people including me and the host. It was a good crowd. The right size for the bar, and it was a lively discussion. People were interested in what are the alternatives. I talked about Mastodon and the Fediverse in general, and we were talking about how to get into the Fediverse because there are still some hurdles to overcome. The first thing you have to decide on is which server to join and all these things. But I tried to explain to them why one should take that effort and make it a conscious decision, and not just go the convenient route. Because I am convinced this is a sustainable thing, the Fediverse, and it’s worth the effort to build a natural social network there. Yup, that was fun!

Plant season started

We’ve started to grow chilies and tomatoes again quite a few weeks ago already. They were large enough on the weekend, so we could repot them into the first soil-based pots. That’s what we did on Saturday to put these little plants into their new homes and keep growing them inside still because it’s still too cold outside. But they will make for a nice jungle in the summer in front of the house.

#weeklyreview 09/2026

Summary

finally some warmer weather. Good progress on #project25. BnP and Bagpiper at the open stage in Templin.

Is it Spring yet?

The temperatures steeply climbed from well below -10º C to almost 20º within the last 14 days. That led to large scale thawing and new lakes and rivers. As the ground is largely still frozen the thawed water doesn’t seep into ground. I saw several streets and paths being flooded and large puddles on the fields.

The lake in Templin still had about 20cm of ice on top.

#foodporn

Got the kiddo hooked on dried bananas. As the kids only eat the perfect spotless Pantone 13-0941 TCX colored Bananas, we usually have many bananas left the kids wouldn’t normally eat. So I put them in the dehydrator and then they can’t snacked away easily.

On Thursday we had another session of the Beer & Burger crew… alas this time we met in a Pizza restaurant and had Pizzas. Also nice for a change.

MeshCore

Gute Zusammenfassung und Erklärung der Regions und Scopes in MeshCore https://meshcore-de.fyi/meshcore:allgemeines:regions Damit soll das Grundrauschen im MeshCore Radionetzwerk reduziert werden und weiterhin eine hohe Zuverlässigkeit der Paketübertragung gewährleistet werden. #meshcore @falko

#project25

Did an impromptu wrecking session on Saturday to take out the old floor in the attic and remove the super brittle styrofoam. Set up a signal group for all people who carelessly offered help in the past. And to no one’s surprise they actually showed up and helped getting the work done by about lunch time.

Open Stage Templin

Another very session of the open stage in Templin. Awesome performances by a just 14-year old girl, a bag piping bus driver, the school band of the local Gymnasium and even some professional musician (of course he performed for free as all the others).

Always great to see the enthusiasm and talent the people on stage display. But also heartwarming to see how much sweat the organising team puts into this event. Unfortunately too few people seem to appreciate this little gem of entertainment as there were still some seats left in the audience.

For something this good and for free I expect the house to be overcrowded on every occasion.

Digital Independence Day Uckermark

Last preparations for our first session of the Digital Independence Day on the weekend in Templin. I’ve set up a Wiki to collect material an populate as we go.

#weeklyreview 07/2026

Very busy week again with several projects in parallel. Highlight was certainly the “Heros” show at the Berliner Ensemble with the whole family. Sorry only a brief update this week

2026-02-15 08:58:35

A rare weekend in Berlin. Haven’t spend time in Berlin on the weekend in ages. Roamed through the Simon-Dach Kiez and it still seems bustling with live. Many good bars and restaurants and shops from the looks of it. @falko

2026-02-16 22:25:56

“Heroes” mit Alexander Scheer im Berliner Ensemble. Es war eine großartige Mischung aus Musik, Theater, Geschichte und Literatur. @falko

On Friday I was invited to a German tradition “Feuerzangenbowle” over a friends house. One of those weird customs where you soak a sugar cane with rum and set it on fire. The sugar will partially melt and seep into the underlying pot with hot and spiced wine. The whole things was garnished with good friends and delicious food

#project25 update

Insulation in the attic almost finished. And it’s working quite well already. Given the record low temperatures this week.

#weeklyreview 07/2026

February 8th – 14th, 2026

Summary

Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.

AI, AI and more AI

This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.

Fediverse journaling plugin

With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.

I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.

I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.

Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.

The code can be found here.

Some snippets from this weeks journal:

2026-02-11 17:37:06

I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko

2026-02-12 12:59:10

@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falko

I’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.

Project Management in the age of vibe everything

To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.

Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.

It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.

Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.

The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.

What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.

But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.

Rural restaurants

On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉

That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.

It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.

New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.

China here we come

The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.

#project25 update

This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.

Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.

I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.

14 at last

Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂

Learning

Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.

Reading

no changes over last week

#weeklyreview 06/2026

Februar 1st – 7th, 2026

Summary

Kind of hectic week with weird weather lots of AI stuff and some ancient sticky tape found on the attic.

#project25

I had to remove some planks on the attic to peek underneath the floor. Discovered this ancient piece of GDR sticky tape. Still optically intact. I even found a museum page that describes the original product. Must be some 50 years old that stuff.

We finally convinced our desired craftsmen to start the insulation and drywalling of the attic. Ordered the material and looking forward to the delivery.

Walking on ice

The weather this week was crazy. Two weeks of severe frost had all the ground frozen. Walked into the office on Tuesday at -8º C nevertheless. It was nice. Later the week I even took the bike one time. It was good to finally be able to ride my bike again. Although downhill at the Volkspark was still rather dangerous as the bike lanes were not fully cleared of ice. There were still small patches with buckling ice.

Met a good friend to borrow him an old NOKIA phone I unearthed from one of my famous cable drawers. As it’s custom for a NOKIA phone etwas still working and had a half full battery although it hadn’t been used in ages 🤣

#DIday preparation

Worked on our instance of the digital independency day. Planning to hold it on March 1st in Templin #uckermark.

My daughter provided a sweet drawing of a Mastodon taking care of “f” and “X”.

AI Stuff

I’ve created a little script that can update the images in a WordPress media library with image descriptions. It also updates the those in the postings that use the updated images. Of course I vibe coded this thing as it’s much faster than I could do this myself.

At work we’re trying to prepare the workforce for the use of AI. This is not a trivial thing and I’m glad the company is taking a dedicated effort to make the introduction of a AI a deliberate decision and is incorporating the general workforce.

This field is developing at incredible speed and whether you like it or not, AI tools are pushed by your vendors and partners all over the place. Employees asking for AI tools to help with their work. And last not least managers are susceptible to the famous “management by magazine“.

We try to rein this in as good as possible and have a hard look where it adds business value and were not. I’m trying to inject scepticism wherever possible and demand we’re looking at facts and figures instead of just marketing material. I’d be already happy if people understand when NOT to use AI. As I’ve seen quite a bunch of people using the provided tools for problems that are absolutely not ones that should be solved with AI tools.

My friend Hans wrote an article on his perception of the AI hype this week. Resonates well with me.

playing with open fire

Also came across this article by Federico Viticci which made me finally test OpenClaw, that currently hyped AI tool that changed its name twice in just one month from Clawbot to Moltbot and currently OpenClaw. There is much talk around its lack of security features and capability of its agent to engage in reddit like interactions on a forum site called Moltbook.

AI agents can “discuss” topics on Moltbook and apparently “learn” from each other. And of course tech bro’s get really excited about the capabilities of such tools.

In my eyes the utility value of OpenClaw is only of theoretical nature. While the thing can do everything you can do with a computer, the application is only theoretically practical. Because to wield that power, you have to trust the tool with all your data. And here is the thing… not only your data, but also your friends and partners data. Because the proposed utility values comes from the fact that you give the tool access to everything. It could book hotels for you, it could message your friends automatically etc. You get the point.

But since the tool also goes out to the internet and talks to other agents and gets “solutions” to problems from them, the door is wide open for abuse. And this happens with OpenClaw already. At scale. Malicious agent recipes have been injected into the Moltbook marketplace where agents fetch “skills”. Infecting thousands of computer running OpenClaw exfiltrating data at scale.

This tool is like inviting a random stranger into your house to do the chores and leave them free hand at inviting random people at their will. You just leave the door wide open and hope for the best. Let’s phrase it optimistically: There is a chance that some chores get done.

My OpenClaw sits inside a virtual machine that I’ve explicitly set up for this purpose. It only contains the necessary tools and Internet access is only possible via proxies. Hooked it up to a Telegram bot. Even in that minimal restricted setup I can see some advantage. You can “talk” to the think via Telegram messenger on the go and executes the coding almost autonomously. I can see the appeal of that. But there is no chance I give this thing access to anything else in my home. Especially not to messengers other than Telegram which I only use for bots and doesn’t have any contact access.

Learning

Still learning and practicing my tmux skills. Also extending my flash card deck of the Vienna Circle while reading the book.

Reading

Still on the book about the Vienna Circle. I like it very much.

Maybe scientists, knowing when to stop, were wiser than philosophers: “Science has progressed almost more through deciding what to ignore than through deciding what to study.”

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 38)

The late Ernst Mach was on point

Was #Trump und #Project25 halt auch zeigen: das Primat der Politik über die Wirtschaft ist¹ durchaus gegeben, wenn die Politik nur will. Die großen Firmen kuschen alle, Kapitalistys kaufen sich Plätze an Trumps Buffet², die SuperBowl-Show³ ist weichgespült, nur nicht auffallen, nur nicht aufmucken. Und die TechBros feiern.

Wir müssen lernen, Steuerung und Kontrolle globalisierter Wirtschaft demokratisch zu gestalten nud dürfen uns nicht von irgendwelchen kapitalistischen Zwängen treiben lassen.

__
¹in großen Teilen
²weil sie Geld verdienen und/oder Oligarchys sein wollen
³Werbung

#pol #uspol #depol #Wirtschaftspolitik

#weeklyreview 05/2026

Summary:

Week 05 centred largely around frozen water. First in the form of our frozen lake, then black ice on my way to the office and eventually in beautiful frozen leaves on the weekend.

Sprinkle in some tinkering with flashcards, my new thermal camera and the usual food porn pictures. But there are also some pieces on chronic illness and updates on my reading.

Frozen Water

Sunday

On Sunday the brave winter swimming group gathered on the frozen lake and axed a square hole into the surface. After several weeks of constant below 0º C temperatures the ice thickness was close to 20 cm. With joined forces we managed to get it open with large axes and sledge hammers. A few of us took a refreshing dip in the water. I did not. I’m swimmer… not so much a sitting duck or floater 😀 I must be able to move to try and produce at leaste a little body heat and especially to distract myself from the freakin’ cold.

We left the ice shield right next to the hole and thought thats obvious enough that there is a hole. Unfortunately still a kid later managed to fall into the hole. Fortunately it “just got wet” as the hole isn’t that deep. But still a shock of course. We then tried to mark the hole more clearly with branches and spray paint.

Monday

In the night to Monday, after several days of really cold weather it suddenly started to rain. Instantly a thick layer of black ice formed and made the city really slippery and dangerous. Finally I could put my snow chains for shoes to use. They were sitting in our closet for a decade I think and waiting for their chance. Now it was the time. Strapped them to my boots and happily walked into the office. The trains were not going anyway because of the ice on the tracks and power lines. And biking would have been suicidal (still some people tried… I hope they made it)

Throughout the week it remained really dangerously slippery outside. One day I was brave (or stupid) enough to try the bike. It went OK and I survived. But can’t really recommend.

Saturday

As it continued to be below freezing point all the plants were covered with a visible layer of clear ice. On some plants that lead to beautiful ice sculptures that could be carefully peeled off the leaves. I collected a few of them and took photos graphs. Of course posted it on Mastodon as well and that post really got a lot of attention.

Tazzie

Finally my friend is back from Tasmania and brought me some sweet gifts. Among those is this super cool Tasmanian devil oven mitten. How cool is that!?

Food porn

I’m a fan of the “nose to tail” philosophy when it comes to meat. If an animal has to die, then we should use as much as possible of it.

On Sunday we had a classic German dish (I’d say): fried chicken liver with Potatoes and glazed onion rings. That was cheap dish my mother used to cook on Saturdays for us. For whatever reason liver was considered less valuable meat. Maybe for the distinctive taste. That’s why it was on Saturdays (an almost normal working day in the GDR) and not for Sundays.

On Monday is was over at a friends place for dinner. She’s a marvellous cook and fixed us chicken roasted on a bed of (basically) leek, white bean and bacon stew. I brought my famous New York Cheesecake for dessert 🙂

During the week kiddo demanded Schnitzel. Another famous staple of my mother. So it was Schnitzel with potatoes and a classic roux sauce and a side of beans.

New Toy

I’ve got myself a little thermal camera to toy with. I was always fascinated with being able to visualise invisible to the human eye things with tech. A thermal camera reveals infrared heat radiation. Now that we’re building out #project25 attic and do the insulation I thought it was a good time to give in and get such a camera (settled for a Thermal Master P1). It’s simply attached to my phone and the accompanying app produces images with various color themes and can also overlay the image from the phone camera. Really nifty toy 🙂

Cronic Illness

My favourite author right now – Kristie De Garis – wrote another brilliant piece last week. This time about her chronic illness and how it’s perceived in society. Again a very on point and reflective post. Honest, concise and easy to read.

It resonates so much with me as my wife is suffering from chronic illness as well and describes the same issue. Chronic illness is not getting better. It’s fighting every day to not get worse. And that fight isn’t usually seen and even less understood by people without chronic illness.

Learning

As complained about last week that I didn’t learn enough I tried to make an explicit effort. Always wanted to learn to use the Linux terminal multiplexer tmux properly. So I looked into it. But quickly my brain veered off into ideas on how to make this into a flashcard. So I started vibe coding a script that would generate printable flashcards from a Markdown file and published it on my Forgejo instance.

But … I eventually also learned about tmux by using my flashcards. Also found a flashcard application for my phone and thought it’s a neat idea to build flashcards while I’m reading a book. So I’m now building a set of flashcards for the Vienna Circle

Reading

I’ve finished the “Manual for Cleaning Woman” by Lucia Berlin. It was a fun read. Unusual writing style for me and at times a little confusing to follow whether it’s autobiographical chapter or a story about someone else.

I’ve now picked up a book about the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis) by Karl Sigmund (with the help of Douglas R. Hofstadter … the author of the famous Gödel, Escher, Bach). The title is “Exact thinking in demented times” and it’s about that gilded age in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th centuries and the breathtaking discoveries that were made by those famous scientists all at the same time fascism and Nazis rose to power in Germany and other European countries.

Still manage to keep my daily reading streak for this year… but then again it’s just January 🤦🏻‍♂️

Terra X fasst nach nur 1 Jahr Trump zusammen, wie weit der das #Project25 bereits umgesetzt hat. Nichts Neues für Menschen, die aufpassen. Aber in der Kompaktheit harter Tobak. Mal sehen, ob es da eine englischsprachige Version geben wird.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9CAQVGLv1s