We bought a House We bought a house. I'm a city boy. I grew up in Berlin. Always in a rented apartment. My parents had a garden house a little outside of Berlin. I spent many summer weekends and holidays there. It was nice enough, though I remember it being boring sometimes with my friends not living there. And as a weekender I never really made friends with the local kids.… ▶

Hiking Bavaria Last Thursday, I had a DokuWiki consulting job near Tegernsee in Bavaria and decided to stay a bit longer as a mini vacation. I did not plan anything. I had a rental car and picked hotels using Google Maps and the Booking.com app each day.… ▶

More Steam Link Adventures Two years ago I blogged about playing adventure games with Kaddi on the Steam Link. In the recent weeks we played a few more. So here's a quick summary of how we liked them. All of these games are indie adventures and cost less than 10 bucks and are often available for significantly less during sales.… ▶

Back to the Blogosphere With the redesign of my website and the introduction of the random button, I've read a lot of my old blog posts recently. One thing I miss from back then is the “blogosphere”. There was a time when people used blogs to post about their important and not so important things in live. A time before social media became mainstream. A time before Google Reader became the number one feed reader. A time before it got killed off… ▶

Honor 9 Battery Replacement My trusty Honor 9 phone recently split open at the back from a swollen battery. It still worked fine, but carrying a something in your front pocket that might decide to explode and burn a hole in your privates was a bit scary. So after living with it for weeks, I finally decided to order a new… ▶

Digitizing my Beer Can Collection Saturday November 11th, 1989 my parents took me for the very first visit in what was known back then as West Berlin. The Berlin Wall had come “down” rather suddenly just three days ago and this was the first weekend after that historical event. Streets were full of celebrating people… ▶

Electro Etching For same project I made the book for, I also needed some tokens. I recently had learned about electroetching, so this was a good time to give it a try. " Electroetching is a metal etching process that involves the use of a solution of an electrolyte, an anode, and a cathode.… ▶

DIY Book For a project I'm working on, I needed some kind of “monster manual” referencing the Cthulhu Mythos universe. So I spent a few days with making one. It's not the first time, I made a book. About 20 years ago I made a small book of my own short stories and poems. But back then I had to figure it out mostly by trial and error. This time I had YouTube to guide me… ▶

100% less Tentacles Unless you're reading this in a Feedreader (excellent!) or you're completely new here (welcome!) you will notice that everything looks different. Only ten years after the last redesign, I made a new look for this site. To be honest, I am quite surprised about what I ended up with. It seems more hipster than I thought myself to be 🙃.… ▶

RetroPie Revision 2 Not too long ago I built a Retropie based console. It was small and portable, but it still required an HDMI enabled TV or projector. And sometimes you will go places where that is not available - on a 3 week camper van vacation for example ;-). So during the last weeks I revisited the project to make it even more portable by adding a screen and builtin speaker.… ▶