As always, thanks for watching 🙂
Some pictures and thoughts, end of March 2024
Okay, only one picture of the cat this time, a black & white one again, with her sitting outside on our veranda:
Bella, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
This month I got into a cat fight again, for the second time, and also for the second time I’ve got some marks to show. The first time was in the beginning of this year when the neighbours’ cat bit me in the foot, this time it was Bella who was scared enough to really bite my hand. “Only a scratch” I thought after the bleeding stopped, but then the hand got swollen, and I had to see the doctor to get another tetanus shot (after 20+ years), and had to take antibiotics until yesterday. This is what my hand looked like after my second visit to the doc, taken with my mobile phone:
It’s much better already, but like my wife said, that should probably teach me a lesson… 😉
Other than that, I still walk and have my little step counter on while doing so. And Gadgetbridge gets better and better and with each version it supports the device a little more. I started playing around with the software in January, but since end of January I also set my goal to 10,000 steps a day, which I’ve kept since then. This is from two days ago:
Not a miss since 60 days, and a total of some 800,000 steps since I use this software, which with a step length of pretty much exactly 75cm translates to 600km until now.
Not as much as Andersen’s Knud (from his “Under the willow tree” or in German “Unter dem Weidenbaum”) who went from Kjöge (near Køge in Denmark) all the way to Nürnberg and Milano and half way back) but seeing a radius of 600km from our place still makes me kind of proud:
If there would be a straight way to walk, I would have reached Vienna by now (Aaahh, Vienna, that reminds me of Billy Joel’s famous song about it – read the story here or listen to the original here).
Or I would be short before Genova by now, or – if you’d grant me a ferry ride since I can’t yet walk on the water – London. Pretty cool thought. So I’ll keep walking (Billy Joel has more songs about cool places, how about “Zanzibar” for instance? And yes, I know that he probably didn’t mean the island in this song, but still) 😉
Anyway, in case you’re a Christian I wish you Happy Easter, and in case you’re Muslims then Happy Ramadan instead. For all others, like always, have fun, and thanks for dropping by and reading.
Some pictures and thoughts, end of February 2024
So it’s a leap year again, and today is the leap day. Cool for those who are born on that day, they don’t age that fast 😉 Anyway, here are some photos of our cat, in the order that I took them during the month:
In other news, this month was also my birthday. And I’ve got a nice surprise present: the latest novel from Haruki Murakami. Cool; many thanks again! It’s wonderful like most of his work.
And since I have more or less everything I need, I didn’t have a real wish list – but also got a Raspberry Pi 5 which I used to set up with a Pi-Hole DNS sink / ad blocker / tracker blocker and a Wireguard PiVPN for the family already. The load (like in top) with that software installed and running is still 0-0-0, which means the machine is just yawning about these tasks, let’s see what else we can do with it. Cool little machine, the CPU is an ARM one like in your typical mobile phone (but 4 cores instead of 8 or more).
Also got the latest updates of Gadgetbridge on my phone which keeps getting better and better together with Xiaomi’s Smart Band 8.
Anyway, and as always, thanks for reading and viewing.
A photographer and his cat, end of January 2024
Two days ago I took a “selfie” again, using one of my studio strobes and converting the image with a Kodak Tri-X film simulation in Silver Efex:
And today I took a photo of Bella while she was outside on the fence (in front of a Kindergarten). This one I converted using an Ilford HP5 film simulation in RawTherapee:
So there you have it – two recent pictures of the cat and myself, both in black & white. Like always, thanks for viewing.
Season’s Greetings
Wishing all of you a very happy, healthy, and joyful new year 2024!
Now running…
- GrapheneOS on the Google Pixel 6a mobile phone
- DivestOS Mobile on the Google Pixel 3a mobile phone
- Debian on my self-built desktop computer (for “work”)
- Arch Linux on my self-built desktop computer (for “fun”, or to see the newest stuff)
Looks like this:
Oh, and of course I’m also running the latest jams on the Wikiloops radio. You can participate in these if you like, why not give it a try?
Like always, thanks for viewing, reading, listening, and all that 🙂 Happy holidays 🙂
Update, from Wed Dec 20th, 2023:
According to the German security expert Mike Kuketz, GrapheneOS is the gold standard of all Android operating systems. His article is in German, only the parts where he cites Daniel Micay, founder and lead developer of GrapheneOS are in English.
Privacy Guides has the same opinion and recommendation. See also at Eylenburg’s comparison. And at AndroidAuthority. And maybe the best one at PrivSec.
Be aware tho that in case you reject all Google services and apps, you’ll also lose some of their “AI” and capabilities. Your choice. In that case, user profiles might help – one owner profile without, and a user profile with Google services (still sandboxed in GrapheneOS). And thanks again for reading.
3 months of Bella today…
As of today, our little Bella is with us since three months exactly. And each day, she tells me/us: “Let me out, let me out!”:
And sometimes in November, when the weather was too bad, she’d gotten the “November Blues”:
In the evenings, just as right now as well, she’s waiting for Mitchie and Zuleikha to come home from work, like this:
There are times tho when we can’t let her out – the neighbours’ cats don’t like her that much, and now Bella got really protective about her home as well:
In that case, I try to play with her – although she’s really watching the veranda door then:
At the moment, like I wrote above, she’s sleeping. But a while ago we both sat on the sofa – I wanted to read a bit, and she came behind me. So here’s a selfie from my phone:
It’s wonderful to have her around… <3
And like always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
Bella from today (Nov 16th, 2023)
Out of camera photo:
Like always, thanks for viewing.
Happy birthday Bella
Today is Bella’s second birthday. We took a few photos, and Zuleikha made a collage of some of them:
I took the first one using my compact flash bounced over the ceiling, two of the collage were made with a studio strobe, and one with Zuleikha’s mobile phone with the normal room light on.
And like always, thanks for viewing.
Another Caturday, after ~ 6.5 weeks
We’re letting Bella out since 10 days, and she is making good use of it, going up to 5.5 hours exploring her new home, garden, and surroundings. And then she normally comes home to rest. I take pictures when I see something, like this one for instance which I took using my phone:
Or this one with my camera:
It’s a joy having her with us, and I’m always glad when she comes back.