Which amount of money would improve my life significantly? => 5k per month in cash flow? 1mio networth? Why do I think would this improve my life? => Buying X? Increasing feeling of security? How can I get these improvements without money? => Decreasing expenses? Creating community of people I can ask for help?
I updated my AI setup. Because Gemma 4 works really well, I use it for most tasks locally. It's not very fast, around 15t/s, but privacy means a lot to me. I use llamacpp-cli with a custom caveman system prompt and set the reasoning budget manually, mostly to 500 tokens. From time to time I use duck.ai if I'm in a hurry.
I like the book "The Sovereign Child" by Aaron Stuple. My best ideas from the book: create safe spaces to learn on their own safety vs. freedom/learning guesswork as a reliable source of knowledge all knowledge comes from within, knowledge is created, not consumed childhood as a period of supported knowledge growth until a person is capable of solving life’s problems on their own knowledge…
Widely-known topics: I use lumo by Proton for these topics because of the privacy aspects. Niche topics (e.g. Nix or bike related stuff) and math: I use lmarena in side-by-side mode with the powerful llms like gemini-2.5 or claude-opus to compare the results. From time to time I use lmarena with smaller models like qwen-30b or claude-haiku just to try out smaller models to be up-to-date about…
So I tried a lot of programming languages: Pascal, Delphi, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Visual Basic, and some more. Golang is my current favorite. As you probably know about me, I like simplicity and minimalism a lot. Golang is simple by design. Minimalistic not in the sense of "I can't do that much stuff", but more in the sense of "There is one way literally everyone is doing a specific…
After a stressful day, one of the best activities to do is going out for a bike ride. Letting the tension flow out of my body and mind.
I keep money simple: a two fund portfolio. 90% global equities: FTSE All-World Index 10% global bonds: Global Aggregate Bond Index There is some non-positive correlation, meaning when one goes up the other does not, so there is some risk-minimizing. Every ~6 months I rebalance to have my desired 90%/10% asset allocation. Boglehead
06.30: getting up, making breakfast for family, household chores 07.30: feeding kids, having breakfast, talking to SO 08.30: leaving for work (bike/train/car) 15.15: arriving from work, eating, relaxing 16.00: household chores, playing with kids 17.30: feeding kids, cooking, dinner 18.30: making kids ready for bed, household chores, preparing for tomorrow 19.30: watching a show, reading…
Where have all the Third places gone? When I was a kid, after school, I went to my friend, rang his door bell and we went to our third place - the soccer park. On most days, there were some other kids too. We enjoyed a lot of free play, no parents involved (!). Do these third places still exist for kids?
Seeing my children smile at me when I come home is one of the best moments of my day.
Some interesting links: about AT Protocol and Open Social The Right Kind of Abstraction
In den letzten Monaten mit Kindern ist das für mich ein drückendes Thema: Wie kann ich alle Dinge erledigen, die ich erledigen möchte? Ich denke dabei an einen Raum. Kommt nun Neues hinzu (bspw. Partner, Kinder, fordernderer Job) und bleibt die Größe des Raums gleichzeitig gleich, dann steigt die Dichte. Im Durchschnitt (!) bekommen alle bisherigen Teile weniger Raum. Es kann vorkommen, dass…
Why is this stuff in my life? Why do I think I need this? Why do I do this? "Why" questions can go very deep. I don't find an answer for every question. But most of the time I feel very enlightened afterwards.
Since I have children now, I have to learn to set my priorities more strictly and rigidly. I have around 50 books that I still want to read, but not that much time. My personal solution is to remove most books from my list. I remove them completely, I don't put them on hold, I don't move them to another list. I let them go! That's also what I'm doing with some other activities…
If you want to find your own way, at some point you have to leave the well-trodden path of others. It's no longer about working through someone else's step-by-step list. These steps feel comfortable and safe, but they are an illusion on your desired path. They are just busy-ness, a distraction from asking the right questions and doing the right things. You have to become your own guide.…
Der Morgen gibt mir viel Wunderbares. Stille. Raum. Energie. Deshalb stehe ich gerne früh auf.
We will have two kids at the end of the year. I'm very happy about that and feel very enthusiastic about our future family life.
Six months since my last post. I've been thinking and writing a lot, but never published a new post. Mostly because of my feeling that the post should be somehow interesting. But actually, I think it's the reader's freedom to decide what they find interesting or not. So I will try to pick up the habit of posting again.
I just did some awk to filter through my caddy logs. So actually someone/something is reading my stuff. Count URL ----- --------------- 57916 "/" 10703 "/atom.xml" 4939 "/robots.txt" 1065 "/main.css" 913 "/favicon.ico" 478 "/uses/" 370 "/about/" 346 "/sitemap.xml" 327 "/more/" 321 "/wp-login.php" 283 "/2021-10-18/" 272…
As I stated in many posts, I like simple tools. I'm a person of few browser tabs and few bookmarks, but I still love to simplify my life. That's why I implemented a simple bookmarking feature on my computer, copied from Luke Smith: simple bookmarks So in the end my workflow is like that: Saving bookmark: Press Ctrl+L to highlight URL bar Press Ctrl+C to copy URL Press Alt+Delete to save…
I love the idea of the Renaissance man . After re-reading some great books (e.g. "Radical Simplicity", "Early Retirement Extreme", "Your Money or Your Life"), I invested more and more time in the last few months to re-evaluate some of my thoughts about money in general, skills, trading etc. Most of my thoughts revolved around my general real-life skills, especially compared to my very handy…
I finally made it through Clean Craftsmanship by Uncle Bob. I've read all his other books, so I'm coming to the conclusion, that Clean Craftsmanship is the best fitting book for an individual software engineer. For beginners, it includes the most important parts of Clean Code in the Refactoring chapter, while overall focusing on the more important strategic parts. Great book about the…
Now with local, privacy-respecting AI available, I started playing around with it. What I did: Installed ollama with Docker (probably the easiest way, should work on all platforms) Searched for and installed some basic models (the "AI"). Customized a prompt to make the AI behave like in an specific environment ("as a grandma", "as a engineer", "as a copywriter"). I'm currently running…
Although I have a dedicated page for the stuff I use, I reply to kevquirk's post . to-do: pen and paper calendar: pen and paper reading: pen and paper shopping lists: pen and paper notes: vim with markdown files contacts: vim with vcf files word processing: vim with markdown files spreadsheets: gnumeric personal finance: gnumeric presentations: vscodium (one file per slide) code editor:…
I just recently setup our tablet device from scratch. One thing that repeatedly came to the surface: software bloat. After a factory reset, I deleted dozens of useless Android packages via Universal Android Debloater . Even the default applications are bloat, e.g. the Huawei file manager requires 137 megabytes of storage, but Little File Explorer just requires 137 KILObytes. This is 1000 times…
Things I do differently: I prefer simple things: dinner: bread, quark, veggies; commuting: bicycle; todos: pen and paper; clock: Casio wristwatch etc. I mostly work laying down: I lay down, laptop on my lap. After 30-45 minutes I stand up and move. No neck, eye, back, shoulder pain, because I move all the time. I use a 12.5 inch laptop from 2012: I use a tiling windows manager in tabbed mode, so…
I am a human. You are a human. The person, who cleans the street, is a human. The person, who sells me a coffee, is a human. The person, who cuts my line, is a human.
Nowadays everyone is talking about AI. Twitter, Linkedin etc. is full of professional AI folks, who want me to sell their shit. Making some quick bucks by selling some hot, but not-so-much-proven takes, seems to be very unsustainable business.
Back when I coached some soccer kids, I had this heuristic: The kid with the best equipment was mostly not the best player, mostly not even in the upper third. But these 12-15 year olds talked so much about their equipment. I think about this heuristic a lot. My wardrobe only contains one same outfit for every sport I do. (strength training, biking, soccer, volleyball) Why? I don't want to…
I don't watch that much stuff, but when I watch something, it's Arte, a French/German TV station: Wikipedia Invidious
After all the dark days full of sleep, spring is awakening. Chirping birds in the morning - messengers of a new day. Nature shows itself in a new guise - things have gone, new ones are coming. The sounds of nature soothe me and awaken me. I love spring.
I'm currently a lot into conceptual thinking. One concept I really love is automation. Automation frees energy for more valuable stuff. Automation removes the probability of errors. Automation leads to faster iteration cycles. This doesn't have to be technically. Every evening, I make some oatmeal for me and my girlfriend. Boiling water, mixing the ingredients. Every morning, I pack it…
My last post is 5 months old. Most of the time I started writing, then it blew up and was totally incomprehensible, so I postponed publishing it (to never). I didn't stop writing, I actually wrote so much stuff. But now it feels wrong to publish yesterday's thoughts.
We own stuff. We work so that we can own stuff. But how much does this stuff cost? Let's say I buy a smartphone for 300€. Is this cheaper than another one for 900€? If everything else is equal: yes. But is everything else equal? Probably not. Maybe one phone breaks less often. Or the battery dies faster. Or the software doesn't get any updates. So I think saying stuff like "A phone for…
Most of us read the news. Some people even have news apps on their smartphones to stay up-to-date. Let's talk about the news. Visiting one big German news site (spiegel.de), two huge ads are welcoming me, eating around 30% of the whole screen. Scrolling down, one of them stays on the right side of the screen, forever. Why do I tell you this? Because the news site makes money out of this. No…
So when you are interested in something, you want to stay up-to-date. This is why we once invented notifications. "Hey, if you are interested, enable the notification and get the updates." Awesome, now I don't have to manually care about it anymore. But things changed. Adding business and money to the interwebs, we now have this landscape of user-hostile attention-hijacking notifications…
I just watched this interesting episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast with the social scientist Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media . When I talk about social media usage, I always argue for prohibiting it for kids until they are adults. People go like "You can't do this, because they will become social outcasts." or "All other kids do this too.". Jonathan Haidt has some interesting…
I love the wiki of Piotr Wozniak . Because I like wikis and publishing my knowledge, I did a lot of research about all the wiki softwares out there. There is actually a cool site to search for different features of wikis: WikiMatrix . I installed some of them: Wiki.js, MediaWiki and TiddlyWiki. Then I did nothing for weeks. The thing is, I already have a great tool to publish my knowledge: this…
Been away from the blog for some weeks. What I currently do: Hitting the gym everyday : I love simplicity, that's why I hit the gym every day . Press, row, deadlift. No need to think about if today is a gym day, which exercises to do and so on. Eating more : I try to have a light caloric plus of ~200 kilocalories daily. It's awesome, feeling strong. And yes, my fundamental meals are the…
Although I don't read that many books nowadays, because a lot of them feel like procrastination, I can recommend one: 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman I love hardship, but it's hard for me to talk about it, because I have the feeling that everyone around me loves convenience and comfort. I see some virtue in doing uncomfortable stuff, e.g. waking up at 5am, fasting for 36 hours, working…
Over the last few weeks I stepped up my (relational) database game. Did some video courses on coursera, read some books. My recommendations: Database design with UML and SQL SQL Antipatterns Why? Because just typing some SQL statement doesn't tell you anything about why you should type this. Both books explain a lot of fundamentals, solved problems and feedback included.
I love this one. If you spend 40 hours per week at your job (40% of your waking hours), you will partially become like your co-workers, managers and bosses. Choose wisely who you work for.
Got this letter from my bank: some products will get merged, I'll get a new card and so on. Reading through the terms of service, I just found out that it would stop me using ChipTAN and I would have to use their smartphone app. I see this more and more: smartphone apps become mandatory.
I started using dokku back in 2020, but because I didn't have that much knowledge about the concepts, I somehow quit using it. The last few months I became very unhappy with the tools I used - heroku and render. On heroku, I got 550 free hours without credit card, this means 23 full days for all my projects together. Furthermore heroku doesn't seem to offer file storage to use sqlite (I…
Since this invasion started, I read a lot of news about it. But why? I can't help. I don't know much about it. Although I had International relations as my major at university, I don't know much about the current conflict. I just know one thing: people suffer and die.
I love the boring stuff. Some years ago I was heavy into tech. Actually, I held some overclocking world records with the AMD Athlon XP back in ~2001-2002. I owned the newest gear, used the newest tools. Shiny stuff all over the place. But using shiny things has some big disadvantages, mostly because stuff breaks all the time and help and knowledge are hard to find. And I dislike the mindset of…
Which trackers do your smartphone apps have? You can check this with Warden. It is free and open-source. Code Download - You need to enable the installation from unknown sources. Maybe this will show you, how privacy-invasive most of your favorite apps are. People told me they've found over 100 trackers on their devices...
I've found a great tool on mastodon with which you can test your privacy awareness - privat-o-mat . You can change the language from German to English at the top of the page. My privacy weaknesses are: payments: I like to pay with my giro card so that I don't have to write some sort of household book to manage my finances shopping: I do online shopping instead of offline shopping (dating…
I used Nextcloud for ~2 years now. It's awesome. Actually everything you need to self-host your cloud for fun and privacy. But the older I get, the more I simplify my life - I don't need to sync all kind of data between dozens of devices. Data I don't create is data I don't have to secure. That's why I haven't been using cloud storage for a long time. I actually only…
I just love Cheapskate's Guide , it's a fantastic site. My favorite articles: The High Cost of Technological Illiteracy in Our Society The top most-used computer operating systems these days are Windows, Android, macOS, IOS, and Chrome. All were designed, not to give the user a great operating system for a reasonable price. They were designed by giant corporations to imprison their users…