As November in Germany is generally cold, gray and rainy, I like to escape south. After Porto in 2018, it was Athens this year, allowing me to cross another city off my Capitals of Europe list.
Traveling to Athens in mid-November turned out to be excellent. The main tourist season ends in October, so not only were there fewer people, many attractions were also half-off. And the weather was perfect, too: 25°C and blue skies almost every day.
Modern architecture at the SNFCC (Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center), which one can reach easily from the city center via their free shuttle bus.
I also went on a day-trip to Delphi, so see the place that my favorite programming language is named after.
The Super Car 8880 is, according to some, the pinnacle of old-school Lego Technic and I must agree. I mean look at these pictures: what could possibly eclipse it? This car already contains everything one could ask for: four-wheel steering, suspension, eight-cylinder engine block, three differentials, a working gear box…
I do not know much about cars, but after building this set, I understand a little better how they work. This is what Technic is all about.
I got this set used for 100 €, including all 1346 parts (except for one missing axle 3L), the instruction booklet and box, and a receipt from the original purchase for 150 DM in 1997. The wheels and white bricks show only slight discolorations.
Since moving from Lotus Notes to Outlook as my work email client, I have done away with organizing my emails into folders. Outlook’s search feature is so powerful and so quick that finding things is very cheap. Creating and managing folders, on the other hand, is a huge up-front investment that will never pay off.
Thus, I only have two folders and three states for emails:
Folder
State
Meaning
Inbox
Unread
Have not looked at it yet
Inbox
Read
Looked at it, but could not resolve right away.
Sent Item
Read
All emails I have sent and all emails I have received. Why keep sent/received emails in separate folders, when I can filter for “sender=me” to see the one’s I’ve sent? I’d rather see the whole communication in one place.
So when I check my inbox, I go over all emails in reverse chronological order (so I catch when things have resolved themselves) and do one of these things:
If it is spam or not relevant to my job, I move it to the trash. Del
If it is something I just need to read or some general interest email that I want to keep for later, I archive it, by marking it as read and moving it to Sent Items. For this, I have quick steps set up with a keyboard shortcut. Ctrl+Shift+1.
If it is something I need to delegate I forward and then archive the email (see above). Ctrl+F.
If I can resolve the query quickly, I will respond right away. Ctrl+R
If I need some more time, but think I can resolve the issue within the day, I will mark it as read, but keep it in my inbox, which acts as the to-do list for the day. Ctrl+Q (Ctrl+U to mark as unread if you did this accidentally)
If it is an issue that I will need to get back to later, I put it on my calendar. I do not use the to-do feature in Outlook, because I think having to-do items without also making time to work on them creates stress and results in to-dos staying on your to-do list for too long. I don’t know of a keyboard shortcut for this, but you can drag the message to your calendar icon to create a new calendar entry with the email’s body included.
To apply an action to multiple emails at once, I use a combination of the Ctrl, Shift and arrow keys to select multiple emails at one, as explained in this Microsoft documentation on Outlook keyboard shortcuts.
Additionally, I have a ton of inbox rules set up that keep irrelevant emails out of my inbox to begin with. But instead of deleting them right away I just move them to the trash. They stay there for 30 days before getting deleted automatically. So just in case the email rules catch something that was relevant after all, I have four weeks to get it back.
Using these methods, I have an empty inbox at the end of most days.
I was extremely lucky with the weather, as it was really foggy when I started the climb to St. Mary’s Column, making for some great shots. Unfortunately, I saw nothing of the view from up there.
Only when I had reached the Felsenpfad was I able to get a view of the city (see below).
Two months ago, I was building the Lego Technic crane 8854, some 30 years after I had last played with Lego. I really enjoyed the experience but said at the time “I will not be buying another set.”
Well, that turned out to be false, because after a few weeks I somehow got fascinated with it again. Somehow, the really cute looking Lego Technic Robot (8852) caught my eye. After a few days of hesitation and contemplation I bought it. I probably spent way too much on it, but when I saw that there was one on offer that came with the box, instructions and everything, I really wanted that one and none other.
Unfortunately, this model doesn’t have as many Technic functions as the crane, but those arms have some surprising moves, and the mechanism to keep the “head” always upright is really nice too. A number of connectors and axles appear to be mostly cosmetic, though.
From Düsseldorf it was almost exactly twelve hours by public transportation: bus to the train station, ICE to Munich, EC to Bolzano, bus to Seis am Schlern, and then the gondola lift up to Compatsch from where it was just a few minutes on foot to our hotel.
From there you can take another bus to get further into the alm, but we mostly walked everywhere. For example, this one morning we hiked about an hour to this spot on the Eastern edge to catch the sunrise.
While the light at sunrise and sunset is just magical, even during the day Seiser Alm is gorgeous. I could not stop taking pictures of the rolling hills and the perfect greens and blues 💚 💙.
As I kid loved Lego and especially Lego Technic. But that was some 30 years ago. I hadn’t really followed what was happening with Lego until this weekend when YouTube presented me with a number of Lego-related videos and I got sucked into this world again.
I quickly noticed that a lot had changed. The Lego of today is not the Lego I knew and loved as a kid: there are a lot more colors, more specialized bricks and generally sets are a lot closer to reality with smoother surfaces and more rounded corners.
I realized I didn’t care for this new Lego. My nostalgia longed for the Lego of my youth. Where sets were smaller, more abstract and challenged your creativity more.
So, I started looking for an old set to buy used. I quickly zoomed in on the Power Crane 8854 from 1989. At 518 pieces it would be reasonably quick to assemble and not take up too much space. Yet it had a lot of functions, which is what Lego Technic is really all about for me.
Ready. Set. Go.One hour later.
Two days later this set in mint-condition came in the mail. The assembly was pretty easy, and I completed it in less than two hours. There were just a few situations where I needed a minute to figure out how to complete a build step. For instance, can you tell where in step 18 the Light Gray Technic Bush 1/2 Toothed, Four Interior Ridges (4265a) is supposed to go?
Looking at the manuals for current Technic sets on the Lego website, this has changed: there seem to be fewer pieces per build step these days and because connectors, gears and wheels now come in more colors than just light gray it is probably easier to see which pieces have to be added in each step.
For me, this challenge was part of the fun, but in general it is probably a good thing to make the building process more accessible for more people.
In the end, I enjoyed the experience of building a Lego set again, but not as much as I had thought. I will not be buying another set and definitely not one of the current ones. But I might take this one apart to build the b model from the same set.
Even though it’s the smallest category on this blog, Theater is a big passion of mine. And when our Light Commander II 24/6 lighting console started showing its age, I figured why not write my own program to control the 40+ lights we have. I had looked at other open-source options, but none offered the ease-of-use that I value in our Light Commander.
And thus the idea for Aula Light Commander (or AuLiCom for short) was born. It began last Saturday afternoon with a little C# program as a proof-of-concept (PoC) to see whether I could implement what I needed of the DMX512 protocol in a few hours.
That turned out to be really easy, in fact. Using a 20€ USB-DMX-Adapter and the SerialPort class from System.IO.Ports you just need to send a byte array where each byte represents the value of one DMX channel.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Every day for the past week I’ve spent several hours after work to build out the backend of AuLiCom. I don’t think I’ve been this excited about coding since my first Turbo Pascal project as a highschooler: TaRech7 (which by the way, you can view on GitHub, but please don’t look at the code too closely; It’s a mess).
I eventually would like AuLiCom to have a graphical user interface where it shows you the lights on top of a pictures of the lighting rig, but for the PoC I settled for a command-line interface AuLiComCli.
After I recently looked into ExcelDNA for a work project and was so impressed by how easy it was to integrate C# applications with Excel, I added AuLiComXL. This way you can have a list of your lights in Excel (which I have anyway), see their current DMX channel values and also change them. You can also create named scenes from a list of channel values.
Next, I’m working on opening up AuLiCom to VBA, because initializing AuLiCom from a function inside a cell is not a very natural user interface.
After taking in Berlin’s modern architecture on my Berlin city trip, I took the S-Bahn to the Tegeler Fließ for some hiking where once the GDR border was.
It was 2003 when I was last in Berlin, so I figured it was time to pay the German capital a visit again. Thanks to the Deutschland Ticket introduced a few days before, I was able to get around in the city using public transportation for free.
The first thing that was new compared to 2003: I got off the train not at Bahnhof Zoo, but at Berlin Hauptbahnhof where you are presented with this view of the city:
Day1: Walking tour around the city to see its modern architecture.
Personal Nexus 