2022-09-12
All 5 of 6 Lamy nibs i got here were scratchy and mostly dry from the factory. The only exception is the 1.5 nib on my Lamy "Joy" fountain pen. Recently i ordered "no-name" replacement nibs, and they are smooth like glass. Back then, when i was going to school, i thought it was my fault. I started with a fountain pen from Pelikan in primary school. And now i know that the tools you have make the difference. My fountain pens from Faber-Castell and Moonman-Majohn have smooth nibs, and are a real joy.
I figured out how to fix scratchy nibs now. You need at least 2500 grit sandpaper and water. And you need to know what is causing the problem. You need to feel, hear, and watch. And go into the rough edges. There is not much pressure required. And be very gentle. A "nib meister" can be found in me somewhere for sure. I can tune a scratchy extra-fine nib to a smooth broad nib. I can make Lamy nibs write wet too.
In the past weeks i cleaned all my pens. They require maintenance regularly. I soaked them in water, brushed them with a toothbrush, dried them, and added silicone grease. I gave away three of them. Do kids still learn to write with fountain pens these days? I don't know. But i think they are an interesting experience. You also need less force while writing, compared to rollerball pens, if your fountain pen nib is up to the task.
I stopped using converters, and started using a syringe to fill empty cartridges. This way i can make better use of the room inside the fountain pens, and i'm not wasting space with a filling mechanism. It is also a lot cleaner, because you are not dunking a part of the pen or the converter into an ink bottle. Would i ever buy a Lamy "Safari" AL-star again? No. Because of their terrible nibs. And the ink windows are collecting dust. The only way to prevent this is to wrap tape around their holes.
2022-08-15
This year, my parents have been married for 40 years. My father's mother gave birth to 10 children, 3 boys and 7 girls. She is 94 years old and lives with my aunt. And my mother's mother gave birth to 15 children. She was 97 when she left in May 2021. My grandpas died before i was born.
My parents had to fly from Germany to Hong Kong to renew documents, last month. I had to organize most things, because the pandemic made things complicated. Looking at their photos, i can see mom wasn't that happy. Her mother wasn't there anymore. I got the voice message about her death from my youngest aunt. She was the one who took care of my grandma.
I didn't go, because i didn't take the Covid-19 vaccine. Hong Kong is very strict about that. It was also expensive, because visitors had to pay for their own quarantine room. While my parents were there, they also got to attend the wedding of a cousin. I don't need a big wedding. But i do want to be married and have children. I'm not complicated.
2022-07-07
This time i did it within 5 days. Last month, in June 2022, i folded another 1000 origami cranes. Now i have folded at least 14069 origami cranes in my life. I made them in 181 days. And i did it in 22 cities. My trail started in October 2013, almost 9 years ago. I'm really happy, again. YouTube can sometimes be buggy, and not all playlists are showing up. But you can still see all my origami cranes in "high speed" or in "real time", if you know the playlist ID.
I don't expect many people watching me do it in real time. Probably not possible for most. And it is actually "real time twice", because you get both points of view presented. Thanks to Google for hosting me, nobody else would. To see me folding all my origami cranes time-lapse style, you need only one playlist ID:
Without my video editing robot, i would still be sitting here processing. Every single origami crane has two raw videos, till 2019. Since 2020, every 50 origami cranes are recorded into two raw videos. They now consume more than 7 Terabyte, including the raw and edited files. To see me do it for real, use these playlist IDs:
2022-05-20
It took them 42 days, from ordering to delivery. As you know, they hiked the price not long ago, and what did i get? New colors and some layout changes. How much was it? 101,50 Euros for ID card and passport. At the end, still plastic and dead tree. I'm not impressed, to be honest. Things get more expensive and take more time. There is no real market, the basics are controlled, and mismanaged. Politicians are playing SimCity in real life. This reminds me of Sri Lanka. They have money for civil servants, but no foreign currency to buy fuel.
I had a classmate from Sri Lanka in primary school. Back then, in Ratingen, i had a book called "Alle meine Schulfreunde", literally translated to "All my school friends". My classmates have written their personal data into it, like birthday, and favorites. In 2011, i scanned the physical copy, and cut it up for the trash can. Why? To save space. I'm efficient, remember? Her name was Anjelli. Around 1997, she had to go back to her country, because the German government did not allow her to stay. Can you imagine borders? At least refugees don't know any these days.
I hope she is still alive. My last contact with her was on Social Media, a decade ago. But i stopped being there, just like i stopped doing many other things. Remember? I'm in Low Power Mode, to save battery life. She was a nice person, and smart. She liked math, art, and sport, according to her writings in my book. Maybe this changed. On the last page, Anjelli wrote that i'm the best friend she ever had. Next to it, she doodled five tiny stars. She wanted to become a physician, more than 25 years ago. Can you believe it? I can. She was mindful and vigilant.
If i had to rate my time at the Anne Frank Schule in Ratingen, i would give it 4 out of 5 stars. I could walk to the primary school within minutes. From 1993 to 1997, i was introduced to reading, writing, math, religion, sport, and art there. The school and our restaurant were on the same street. The place where we slept was behind Lotus Garden. The restaurant was our kitchen and living room, so to speak. This was convenient for playing and learning. But a hard time for my parents.
2022-04-07
We have been Deutsche Telekom customers continuously since more than 23 years. When we moved back to Bad Godesberg in 1998, my parents bought me a IBM desktop computer. And not much later, they also got me a dial-up internet connection. Back then, the web was not that bloated, so speed is relative. All those things were not cheap, but it got me where i'm today. I'm mostly a self-taught person. The internet makes it really easy these days. But this was not always the case.
We even received a twentieth anniversary letter from Deutsche Telekom, with a chocolate heart attached. But last month we cancelled. And i'm back in the cloud. Our cake is not getting bigger, so i decided who gets to eat the piece instead. There were just too many disconnections. Years ago, they changed how the landline telephone works, making all our devices obsolete, and we have not relied on it ever since.
DSL is very fragile. For example, if you have a neighbour using Powerline Ethernet, this will affect your internet connection, by adding more noise to the system. And since this relies on a physical line, there are many other ways where it can fail. Someone might bump into your cable somewhere while changing things. Starting next month, we will rely here on radio waves only. 4G LTE is mature enough.
I have not left the building for 951 days. From 30. August 2019 to 06. April 2022 i stayed inside. And i only went outside today to renew my ID card and passport. The world is distorted. I invested my time in developing tools. I also read many books, and stopped after i detected enough patterns. Just like i stopped listening to music a long time ago. By the way, our trash can came back two weeks later.
2022-03-27
What have people done before the internet? For example, i have collected stamps since primary school. In theory even before that. Because my aunts and uncle sent packages and letters from Hong Kong to Germany when i was young. And we kept those envelopes intact, including postage stamps. They sent a lot of office supplies and learning material for me. My parents were too busy running the restaurant, so i never learned to read or write Chinese with all these inputs. But i found use for the colored crayons and pencils, for school and recreation.
In recent days, i detached many stamps from their envelopes, so they take less space to store. They now fill an area of 25 A4 papers, adding to my already processed collection. Mostly German stamps, but some are from more exotic places too. They have more of a sentimental value. I don't remember exactly from whom i got them. I haven't seen real stamps on an envelope since a really long time.
Last week, on Friday, my internet connection from Deutsche Telekom stopped working for 23 hours. The lady at the hotline said my Fritzbox 3390 is too old, so i replaced it with a new Fritzbox 7590. And the DSL connection still could not be established. And at the end of the call she tried to sell me an upgrade too, which i found irritating, because their telecommunications services are not that reliable for me. My internet has been unstable since 8 days. If you can't reach my web services, you now know why. I don't want to go back to Amazon AWS, and have to pay for it with hard earned money. Because i don't have the income to make it viable.
2022-02-23
One year ago, i put a Raspberry Pi camera into an upcycled Ferrero Rocher Chocolate plastic container. I have not touched it since then. It survived the weather conditions really well, because it doesn't get directly hit by the Sun. The view is still clear, and water has not found a way in. Today i can proudly read the "365 days" uptime in my health logs. I wish i would get paid enough for that, i could do this forever.
I have been shooting time-lapse photography for more than four years exclusively with Raspberry Pi cameras. My code is stable and has been tested through time. From triggering the camera, to checking the health of the system, to recovering from failure, to archiving the images, to production of the videos, and to publishing the results. My solution is complete and designed to get the job done, without breaking the wallet.
All parts fit together and are automated. This particular setup also has a website with a live view for everyone to follow. The picture there is updated every hour, since almost two years. Like with my Remote Door Opening System, this required my experience with hardware and software, to develop something that just works. With my time-lapse videos, you don't need to understand technology to acknowledge system reliability.
FYI, in my final 6 years of school, i never missed a single day in the classroom. For this achievement i was given a large bottle of champagne on my last day at the Gesamtschule in Bad Godesberg, 16 years ago. I never wanted to drink it, so my parents gave it to our landlord years later.
On another note, one of our trash cans disappeared after it was taken out for emptying by the waste collection. I will remember this trick, because those provide pretty solid shelters, compared to a camping tent. And there are many other things that can be done with them too. So i'm rather surprised that they don't get stolen more often.
2022-02-07
I have been running my services for more than one year exclusively on a Raspberry Pi. How did i do it? In more than two decades i figured out what is really needed. I tried a lot of different things, and optimized my knowledge, my tools, and myself. I'm my own researcher and scientist, hoping to learn something new all the time. I have reduced costs by reducing complexity, resulting in less load on the hardware.
Most files that are called by the browser are static on the server. Only if you want to save new data or open specific data, then the files received by the browser are dynamically generated, like for storing messages, flipping through older pages or for searching names to fill in. And the refresh rate depends on how active you are, to reduce bandwidth usage. Another example, you just copy and paste HTML code to use my chat widget. And i automated many processes to help me be a good admin. Just imagine that i was the only person who prepares and serves food at a well run McDonalds, basically scaling to the size of the building, only limited by physics.
In the past four years the traffic has gone down, because people are spending their time mostly on smartphone messaging apps, and are not surfing the web like it used to be. I would not know how to monetize users anyway. In the distant past i relied on affiliate programs and Google Adsense. But this doesn't keep the lights on, so i stopped going that path. I could have kept it in the cloud, like on Amazon AWS. But a lower tier Lightsail instance is basically a Raspberry Pi connected to the internet. And since i'm not going anywhere, i was willing to get my hands dirty by literally running everything from my bedroom. By doing this i consolidated my skills.
How to reduce complexity? Just imagine a homeless man next to a politician. Do you get my point? One is struck by life just surviving, and the other throws his puppets to see what sticks. For example, you don't need to sign up for anything. If someone chooses the same name as you, a number will be added to it. And no cookies are getting harmed too. You will be mostly remembered or identified via your browser selection, screen resolution, and IP range. PETA would be proud of me.
Or let us try another picture. My animation tool enabled me to produce more GIFs than before, because i took the time to simplify the use of math formulas. Their input and output became easily accessible for further combinations, to create more unique results, without having to think too much about the actual numbers. And the heartbeat i developed made all layers and parts loop smooth and in sync, regardless of the length of their paths and their moves.
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18