Last year I went hiking in the Palatinate Forest. It was amazing!

I took a walk and a picture.

I’m a bit late — as always — but I decided to participate in this year’s Inktober. I’d like to present to you: The Radio!

Usually I use my iPad to read RSS feeds or comic books or watch movies. Since a few days I’m reading the probably most famous book by anthropologist David Graeber. I really enjoy it and for the first time I take notes in the exact same book using Apple Pencil. While I read the book in German, I write my notes in English so that I can scribble them. Taking notes this way is really fun!

Back in school teacher always told us that you didn’t really read a book unless you wrote notes in it or marked the most important or interesting parts.

Oh, the book is also interesting to read, although sometimes it feels quite academic and I’m not used to this at all.

Together with several hundred people I attended a leftist, antifascist demonstration in Berlin. Afterwards I watched the most recent episode of The Boys — I’m so full of contradictions — and wanted to do some programming now. But I’m way too tired and should go to bed.

All in all it was a great evening though.

I haven’t used Twitter for some weeks now — I actually deactivated my account — and I don’t miss it at all. Sure, I miss a thing or two and some friends, but it’s so much less stressful without the constant stream of information and opinions.

[Ich] Kritisier und du schreist „Zensur!“ immer der gleiche Mist Will dir nichts verbieten, will nur sagen, dass du Scheiße bist

Aus: In Flammen von Neonschwarz

So, Micro.blog 2.0 is here, obviously, and I just upgraded my account — the new bookmarking-feature convinced me to give it a try.

Together with my best friend I’m recording a German podcast about all things software development — we’re both software developers. And every episode we drink a beverage we never had before. When we’re done with the drink, we rate it and the episode’s over.

Today I went to a local store called Getränkefeinkost which was recommended to me by a former guest of the podcast. It’s a delicatessen store for beverages — craft beer, special lemonades and so on. They also sell my favorite cola, Premium-Cola, a soft drink made by a small collective and I’m a fan of them, their drinks and their way of doing business.

I just home-made some strawberry jam. For the first time ever — I’m so excited how it’s going to taste!

I really enjoyed livestreaming iOS-programming, especially, that I have to constantly think about my work when I talk about it on the Internet. So I’d love to do it again. But for tonight, I’m too tired. 😴

So: Join me tomorrow at 9 p.m. Berlin time (it’s UTC+2) on Twitch 🙂

And don’t forget to treat yourself with some snacks 🍪🍫🍿🥜 and a drink 🥃🥤🍺🧉

Well, those thirty minutes turned out to be two hours. In the end, I created another small Pull Request for Sunlit. Oh, and for the first time ever I spoke English on the Internet! In a livestream! On the Internet!

Watch me on Twitch how I try to fix some bugs in Sunlit for the next thirty minutes or so.

I guess, I won’t be lonely tonight.

I guess, that this merged PR for Sunlit makes me an open-source-developer now 🥳😅

It actually feels nice as contributing to an open-source-project has been on my bucket list for 2020.

I’m struggeling with the new Sleep Schedule in iOS 14. I’m wearing my Watch to track my sleep, but I want the alarm to go off on my iPhone so that I have to stand up to disable it. This was possible prior to iOS 14, but now it looks like that I must rely on the Watch for alarms when using the Sleep Schedule. This sucks, seriously.

Thankfully the Clock-app is still there so tomorrow I will try again not to oversleep.

Does any of you know how to use this Sleep-thing with a Watch, but with alarms going off on an iPhone?

Today I cycled through the city and stopped at Charlottenburg Palace. I took a little walk in the park and it was quite lovely.

My iPhone just showed me this sunset from nearly five years ago. In this exact moment I decided to keep the “Featured Photos”-widget although I’m aware of that the memories attached to lot of pictures will hurt from time to time. 📷

I just watched a man hiking 100 miles alone in Alaska. This twenty minute video was so relaxing and I really enjoyed it, well, except for the regular, numerous interruptions by Youtube-ads. Those just pissed me off. Regularly.

Yesterday I downloaded iPadOS 14 and wanted to test the new Scribble-feature that converts handwritten text to, you know, text. And so I’m writing this post (mostly) using my Apple Pencil and I have to admit that I’m a bit impressed. It works pretty well-ish. So far I’ve used an app called Good Notes to take handwritten notes, but there was no way to use the Pencil to enter text into textfields.

Although it’s nice at first glance, I’m annoyed by a couple of things:

• The screen that introduces this feature is a mix of German and English as you can see in the screenshot I attached. I use my iPad in German and this might look like a minor detail, but to me, this is an important one. In my mind either nobody cared or QA failed and both cases make me a bit sad. Hopefully this feature is available for German, too. I will test it immediately 🤓
• The second thing is that the underlying machine learning doesn’t recognize some characters correctly or at all, yet. 1 and I are just one example, special characters are another. Maybe this improves over time?
• When something goes wrong, like when a typo appears or so, I don’t know how to fix the error easily using the Pencil. I know that I can strike a word or whole paragraph to remove it but when it comes to changing just one letter, using the keyboard is far more convenient — and faster. Sometimes the text gets selected instead of being removed, this is another annoyance.

In conclusion I’d really like to like Scribble and maybe I should just give it a chance? If it fails the test of time I still can go back to my beloved keyboard.

Edit: I just found out, that English and Mandarin are the only supported languages at the moment. Hopefully this changes in the near future as I really like this feature! Reading a book and scribbling notes in there is just great!

📷

As promised: Here’s another picture from the Festival of Light. It’s the Berlin Cathedral.

The festival of lights is happening in Berlin again 🌃. This means, that I will ride my bike tonight to see some more of it.

I took a walk in the forest and apperently, there‘s some kind of art exhibition going on. At least I was a bit surprised to see three human sized bird boxes with bird names.

Until a few weeks ago, I used Strava to track my cycling and running. Seeing how far and how much I’ve ran really motivates me. Yeah, those ads for the Strava Subscription started getting on my nerves, but you know, giving kudos to friends and seeing some basic stats like the comparison among weeks made it worth nevertheless. Until a few weeks ago.

I imagine, that the investors told Strava to earn some more money, so they hired some growth hackers and then everything turned to shit. Those stats for example, how far I ran the past week? They’re gone. I gotta pay for them now. Like monthly. That’s a pitty, because to me, who runs once or twice a week, those stats are not worth more than like a buck or two.

Paying 60 bucks per year or 15 per month is way over the amount I’m willing to pay, so: Sorry Strava, I moved on and started using Activity with my Apple watch. There might be a small iOS-app incoming.