My Steamdeck in the day I got it, still in its case, all shiny and new.

(Almost) one year with the Steamdeck

When Valve announced the Steamdeck back in summer of 2021, I was immediately sold. At that point my primary gaming device - despite owning a quite capable PC with enough computing and graphics power to run even the latest AAA games at a decent enough quality - was my Nintendo Switch, simply because I was not particularly happy about spending my after hours in front of the same PC that I already spend my working hours on....

February 26, 2023 · 5 min
A daffodil flower breaking through a crack in the pavement.

On success

I originally published this in October 2020 as a Twitter thread. Even though it’s been a couple of years, the points still stand, so I decided to preserve it here as a short blog post. It’s easy to only see the success and also to only share the success in our journeys. But success is usually just the end of a long path of struggle, compromises, setbacks, failure. Over the years, I’ve talked about my journey a lot....

February 21, 2023 · 3 min
A picture of the Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color e-reader lying on a table. It's sleeping and its display is showing a fake book cover in the style of the O'Reilly programming books.

Review: Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color

I’ve always been a bookworm. As a child, my favourite past time was reading. I usually dragged my current book with me everywhere and would read at any opportunity1. So, when e-readers became a thing, I was very excited to save on a ton of shelf space in the future and got myself an Amazon Kindle at the first chance I got. Back then in 2010 I actually had to import my Kindle 3 Keyboard from the US since it wasn’t available in Germany yet....

January 27, 2023 · 13 min
A smartphone lying on a table, showing Markor in editing mode on the Markdown of this blog post.

Hugo, meet Android

One thing that kept me from blogging more so far was the difficulty in working on posts on my phone. So after switching this blog over to Hugo I decided to see if I couldn’t improve on this situation. I needed a solution that would allow me to Checkout my page’s git repository from GitHub Quickly create a new post, consisting of a new folder inside content/blog matching my chosen <year>-<month>-<day>-<title slug>/index....

January 21, 2023 · 5 min
A picture of a coastline. Blue sky with some clouds, dark blue rippled water, and gras growing on the shore.

Hello Hugo!

Two years ago I was into learning React, since that is what I’m planning to use for a future OctoPrint UI. And when I decided to reboot this webpage, I also figured I would use that as a reason for experimenting with new build tools and techstacks. So I built this site with next.js, Tailwind CSS and a bunch of other stuff, and spent a lot of time implementing basic content management tooling and rendering....

January 20, 2023 · 2 min
Colorful custom action buttons on the right side of a SteamDeck held up to the camera

Custom SteamDeck Buttons

Update from 2023-02-02 To answer the most common question I’ve gotten after publishing this right away: No, I do not plan on selling these. This is something I did for fun and out of love, I’m not interested in making money off of it, and I frankly already have my hands full enough as is without adding a custom button business to the mix as well. I’ve provided this write-up to give you an idea of how to do it yourself, and I hope you’ll enjoy it....

January 19, 2023 · Updated February 2, 2023 · 13 min
A TFA Dostmann CO2 sensor

TFA Dostmann meets ESPHome

I attended RC3 from December 27th until December 30th. While it was (once again) only a virtual edition of the Chaos Communication Congress, at least this time around I managed to have a similar experience to 36c3, as in, I spent the last two days mostly hanging out with a bunch of fellow geeks in a fun location (a jitsi conference that also included a camera pointing at an aquarium full of fish) and nerding out while tinkering around with electronics....

January 3, 2022 · Updated January 27, 2022 · 4 min
Two crutches leaning on a couch

Being patient with yourself is hard

I’ve been having knee issues all my life. I can’t remember a time when the occasional pain, stiffness and crunchy noises in both knees weren’t part of my regular experience. The past three years however the left knee got a ton worse, frequently hurting for days on end, getting hot, and overall just being a literal pain. That is why earlier this year I finally decided, enough is enough, got another opinion from my orthopedist and we scheduled a key hole surgery to fix what was suspected to be a very active plica syndrome....

September 28, 2021 · 4 min
My two Kratky grown Basil plants, next to the two Kratky grown Oregano plants

Hydroponics the Kratky way

Since my partner loves spicy food, earlier this year I got us a chili growing kit. What was meant as an experiment has since become a full blown pepper growing operation that has taken over my livingroom window sills and half the balcony and already yielded its first fruits. And because whenever I try something new I also tend to do way too much research on it, while getting the plants started the normal way in soil (and then promptly running into the first issues with fungus gnats) I started to look deeper into hydroponics....

September 12, 2021 · 5 min
The screenshot showing the issue -- a rendering defect in OctoPrint's GCode viewer

A debugging story

About a week ago I got a new bug report on OctoPrint’s issue tracker: GCode Viewer Visualisation Problem The problem The visualisation in GCode viewer ist not correct. The print is OK. See gcode file (zip) on Layer 43 to 47 and 49 And screenshot You already saw the included screenshot, and it shows that there was a spike being visualized in the GCode Viewer that wasn’t actually there. My first attempt at reproduction failed spectacularly – the file looked exactly like it was supposed to....

May 9, 2021 · 5 min