Author: wjl

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Confirmed: calcaneal fracture

So after two x-ray images which both didn’t show it, yesterday’s CT scan confirmed the diagnosis of the MRI (MRT): what I have is called a calcaneal fracture, which means my calcaneus (heel bone) is broken. The Wikipedia page in English about it has a nice animation showing that bone:

It’s not displaced, so it will only need non-surgical treatment – which will still last several weeks or months. And to prevent a thrombosis due to not moving that foot enough, I shall take heparin for as long as that lasts – a needle a day…

And the recommendation from yesterday’s doc at the hospital was to wear a VACOped Short orthotic for some 8 weeks at least – they look like this:

So today I have the next appointment with my ortopaedist, whom I should then see again after a few weeks, such was the further recommendation.

Let’s see.

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I’m WIP

As my foot problems didn’t seem to improve, I went back to the docs – first, my general “house” doc as we call them here, then to an orthopaedist, who in turn sent me to another clinic to get an MRI (MRT in German). There I had an appointment for yesterday, and their result was: broken calcaneus (heel bone). So they sent me to a nearby hospital, where I got another x-ray, with the result of: no fracture. Sigh… now I’ll have to go again tomorrow to get a ct scan. That will be the 7th visit to a doc or clinic – so I’m very much work in progress as it seems…

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I give up

Yes – I’ll have to let go, as Shi once sang so beautifully:

This track is embedded with the friendly permission by the creatives on wikiloops.com.

After that injury of my heel, I now got clutches:

And although I now can walk almost without feeling pain, my step counter wouldn’t recognize it as steps anymore. So after some 813 days in a row where I walked over 10k steps a day, and a total of over 10 million steps, I’ll have to let that go for the moment, and interrupt my cadence.

I’ll still have to get an MRT, and also visit the orthopedic doc again, and let’s see how long I’ll be handicapped enough to not even dream of getting 10k+ steps together in a day.

Anyhow – more time for music again, as someone suggested already… and as always, thanks for reading.

P.S.: Our cat Bella’s reaction was funny… looks like me, smells like me, but what strange kind of four-legged thing is this? 😉

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What Google should read. And what *you* should read.

Google should read this. And you should read this (I linked to the German version, but you can change languages right there). And then act accordingly. Unless, of course, if you’re a kid of Darth Vader…

Me? I’ll keep running GrapheneOS on my Pixel 6a. But I’m not sure if I’ll get another “smartphone” after 2027 (the end of support for mine).

Like always, thanks for reading.

P.S.: read this as well – couldn’t agree more, since I’ve lived through it before the term “internet” was known to most of us…

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Injured

On Easter Sunday, I did some kind of “false step” – trying to avoid stepping onto our cat which ran in my way unexpectedly. And some minutes later, walking around really hurt, getting worse…

… so yesterday I went to see my doc (in fact it was Mitchie’s doc, a very nice one). Her diagnosis was a sprained ankle, or as she wrote in Doctors’ German: an OSG Distorsion.

To make sure nothing was broken, she further sent me to another doc who performed an X-Ray on my left foot, but that turned out not to be the case, thankfully. And so I have to take it a bit slow at the moment.

Cracked the 10 million step mark on my fitness tracker anyway, but that one has now difficulties to correctly count my limping around – there’s no “hobbling” program in these… 😉

Anyway, thanks for reading.

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One more snapshot of Bella

One-handed snapshot of our cat Bella on my lap – out-of-camera b&w jpg image, based on the Fediverse (on my cupoftea-social account):

Like always, thanks for viewing.

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Happy 15th anniversary, Wikiloops!

Today 15 years ago, Richard officially started Wikiloops, a service for musicians to play and collaborate with each other, and I’m so glad he did. I joined in 2018 and soon after also became one of the moderators’ team on that site, trying to help out where I could.

Now Richard wrote a little note about Wikiloops’ 15th anniversary, and he also created an Android app one day prior to that – an iOS app is also ready, but due to delays with Apple, not in their app store yet. Here’s a QR code he published yesterday, which points to Google’s Play Store to get it (and it’s also accessible via the Aurora proxy, but it still needs Google’s play services and a login to run correctly as it seems):

So go ahead and try it – create a cost-free account to try it out either on its web page or via this app.

And congrats again to Wikiloops, and to all of its supporters, without whom it wouldn’t have been possible to go this far and wide. You guys & gals (and all other possible genders who are there) rock!

And as always, thanks for reading.

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DST, or TYCC* (the twice yearly collective craze)

Yep, it happened again. You wake up, or were woken up through your suntimes app on the phone, and it’s an hour late. You’d normally don’t even recognize it, because all computers, TVs, and radio wall clocks were adjusted automagically. Except of course those in our cars. Why don’t we stop this?

As always, thanks for reading.

* some would obviously call it BACC, like in biannual 😉 In German, this would rather be HJKW, like halbjährlicher kollektiver Wahnsinn. I don’t care, since time is man-made anyway…

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Learning every day…

… if you’re using Linux, and are interested enough, you’ll have quite the journey ahead. The latest “Aha!” moment for me was when I read a post on Planet Debian from Samuel Henrique titled “I use curl with ECH btw (in Debian)“. I hadn’t heard about ECH before, so that was great in itself. Turns out that this TLS Encrypted Client Hello routine took about 7 years and some 10-15k lines of code to be written – but it’s kind of important, so thanks to Stephen Farrell from Dublin for his patience and all of his work! Hear him talk about it on last years’ OpenSSL conference on the tube if you like.

And about Samuel Henrique, a Debian Developer: there’s more stuff to like on his site, for instance his also very interesting post called “Debian 13: My list of exciting new features“. So in case you’re interested in that, it’s a nice read as well.

Also on Planet Debian, and interesting as well:

“The Death of Twitter“, by Russell Coker, or

“systemd has not implemented age verification“, by Marco D’Itri

As always, thanks for reading.