Blog

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....

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....

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....

For a bit more than two years now I’ve been closely monitoring my network uplink. In the past I had a ton of issues with up- or download speeds not being what I paid for, packet loss issues and outright full blown outages. In order to put myself into a better position when reaching out to the ISP’s support hotline I figured it would be good to be able to proof not only the existence of these issues but to also be able to determine the exact times they happened at and also to verify and show that in fact it was only external connections that were suffering and it was not an issue with my own internal network....

The original version of this post was published as a Twitter thread on March 23rd 2020. I figured I should give it a more permanent home here since IMHO it was a quite fun story. Since everyone can use some entertainment right now, how about a battle story on how a year ago I spent almost two weeks trying to wrap my head around a really weird issue of a lagging GCODE viewer and overall print progress reporting in OctoPrint and finally figuring it out?...

I’ve been working full time from my home office since mid-2014 now. At the time of writing this post this is nearing 7 years. Naturally, considering how much time I spend there, I’ve also spent a lot of thought and money on making sure my workplace helps to keep the usual side effects of the mostly sedentary lifestyle of a developer at bay. Over the years I’ve had some run ins with RSI and backpain....

It’s been a couple years since I last tried to maintain a blog. Back then I was still living life as a corporate drone, employed as a Software Architect to consult other people on their IT problems. I rarely had anything I could blog about – either things were under NDA, or they were simply uninteresting. Since then my life has been turned completely on its head. In late 2012 I got myself a 3d printer, spent my Christmas break to develop a small web interface for it, that grew into a full sized Open Source project called OctoPrint and these days I work full time on it....