2022 Retrospective My last year wasn't great. Lots of anxiety about the state of the world. I cut the news a couple of years ago. I mostly quit Twitter, but of course that doesn't mean I notice what's going on. The steady rise of fascism. The unaddressed climate disaster. War, inflation, energy prices, supply chains. All within the death cult of capitalism.… ▶

Oculus Quest SQL I own a Oculus Meta Quest 2 now and I got it in a weird way... My girlfriend went to a devlead conference recently and came across a booth by Skiller Whale. They offer customized e-learning and skill assessment for teams and hiring. And they ran a contest to win a Oculus Quest.… ▶

Woodturning Lathe A while ago my dad asked me if I'd like to have his old wood turning tools. Of course I said yes. Because free tools, right? So I ended up with a big box: Now this was cool and all. But I did not own a lathe. And to be honest, I wasn't sure if I should get one. Not because I didn't want to give wood turning a try, but because I wasn't sure how to fit such a large tool into my small workshop.… ▶

Maker Mark When I was a kid, my parents had a print of Albrecht Dürer's famous Young Hare on their walls and I adopted his AD signature for my own scribbles. I still use it occasionally. For example you can see it on my oil paintings. With my recent woodworking hobby I wanted a kind of signature as well. I was first looking into branding irons, but I wanted to… ▶

DIY Sliding Door When we renovated the house, we replaced all the doors. Except for the one between the mudroom and the hallway. We always loosely planned to add a sliding door there later. Today we finally installed it. I wanted to build the door myself and it took a couple of weekends to do so, but I think it came out super nice.… ▶

LED Matrix with ESPHome & HomeAssistant When I'm in the workshop, I usually wear my hearing protection all the time. That's good for my ears, but it drives Kaddi nuts when she wants to talk to me. Because I will neither hear her shout, nor will I notice my phone buzzing in my pockets… ▶

Return to Monkey Island More than three decades after my first visit, I finally found the Secret of Monkey Island™. Return to Monkey Island picks up right from where Monkey Island 2 ended in a quite clever way. It is filled with absurd, but never illogical puzzles, brings you back to many familiar but also many new places, let's you meet old and new characters and is just a wonderful nostalgic game. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to any fan of the series.… ▶

Bandsaw Acquired A bandsaw was one of the few large power tools my workshop was missing. This has finally been remedied and I am now the owner of a Scheppach HBS261. It's probably the cheapest model available in it's size class (with a throat width of 12cm) and Scheppach isn't known for high quality tools. But I figured with a bit of careful tuning it should be okay.… ▶

Scrapwood Side Table From a recent project, I had a whole lot of weird off-cuts of rough construction lumber left. I hate throwing away wood, so when Kaddi asked for a small side table to use with the lawn chair I knew what to do. Each off-cut had an angle cut, so the idea was to arrange them in a circle. But since the cut had been done with a handheld saw at a weird angle, they didn't really line up:… ▶

Connecting a Split AC to WiFi/Tuya We recently bought a Bomann CL 6046 QC CB split inverter air conditioning. It comes with WiFi connectivity and of course I wanted it to be integrated into Home Assistant. The AC is one of those cheap Chinese ones that are sold under various brand names (TLC and Daikin seem to be similar). All of them use the Tuya Smart Life app and as always with these things the first connection is a… ▶