Blog

In my last post I told you that I’ve been very much interested into video game development for a while now, and just never got around it until the personal Gamejam gift from my partner. Due to this interest I’ve also been subscribed to a bunch of game design and documentary specific YouTube channels for a few years now, and since I consider their content pretty interesting – even if you are not interested in game development and just games in general! – I thought I might just share my list here. So let’s go! ...

For my 40th birthday a few weeks ago, I got a pretty amazing gift from my partner: a coupon for a personal 4-day Gamejam/Gamedev experience, just the two of us. I’ve been a gamer pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a coder pretty much my whole life, but I never so far managed to combine these things. Apart from copying some Star Trek game code in BASIC from a book in my teens, the probably quite common tinkering around with the parameters in gorilla.bas, and a Snake clone in GLUT in preparation for a 3d graphics course in university, I never so far got into game development. It has been something high on my bucket list however, and I’ve been fascinated by the concept of gamejams like Ludum Dare, GMTK Jam etc., where you build a game matching a provided topic within a set time limit (usually between two to ten days) and within a set of rules (e.g. do you need to do everything yourself, including graphics and music, or are you allowed to use certain existing assets, do you need to use a specific game engine etc). Add to that the fact that these days I’m way more into playing indie games than the AAA stuff from the big players1, a love for learning new stuff and the release of the latest major version 4 of the fully open source Godot Engine that has made me curious for a while now, and you might see why this really WAS an absolutely amazing gift by my partner. ...

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. Sitting on the couch and playing something in handheld mode while my partner was playing something on his gaming laptop or the PS4 turned out to be an “alone time together” scenario we both enjoy very much, and was an additional reason I didn’t want to spend hours alone in front of my PC. So, when the reservations opened on July 16th 2021 at 19:00 CEST, I was prepared and spent the next 22min frantically trying and finally succeeding to reserve my spot in the EU 256GB queue. And then the waiting began. ...

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. About the kind of measures I took and continue to take to protect my physical and mental health from the effects of running a project like OctoPrint. ...

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. And since then I’ve gone through a couple of e-readers, all of them Kindles. But all the time I was a bit annoyed at two things: ...

Update from 2026-06-19: I went through these steps again after getting a new phone and had to change some things here and there while also improving other bits. You can find an update here. 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. This surgery happened on September 20th and it made me learn a LOT about myself. ...