I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
This morning it was I Can’t Stop Me by Twice and it is 100% because Instagram keeps showing me reels of that girl who screams along with it
Latest linkblog entries
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Dinosaurs of the Wild West | Official Kickstarter Trailer (4K) • I am very intrigued. #
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Ze Frank: Get Uncomfortable • Hank Green interviews Ze Frank. Such a delightful conversation, highly recommended #
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Farming is Why Humanity is Fucked • Maybe someone can time-travel to the inventors of farming and stop them? #
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Sea to Sky Hard Enduro 2025 | Mountain Race | Dieter Rudolf Full Race • Over three hours, this is absolutely bonkers. #
I added a dominik.md to a project that I only work on once in a while. It contains a list of things still unfinished and a documentation about my decisions I made so far and oh boy is one of my coworkers livid.
Frankly, in a time when people add markdown files for a mysterious person with a french first name who I have never seen at the office, this shouldn’t be too controversial.
The “Years Ago Today” plugin on my blog just reminded me that I linked to GTA V GeoGuesser four years ago. I clicked just for a laugh, oh, maybe I still remember, haha – and I wasn’t really prepared what a deep feeling of nostalgia and (I guess?) homesickness this would trigger.
A long time ago “hanging out in GTA Online with the boys” was my number one third place – there was a time when I just knew I could switch on my Xbox and Skype (yes, it was that long ago) and someone would be willing to just hang out. I mean, of course, we’d do the races and the heists and stuff like that, but the main reason to do that, really, was to chat about life and stuff. We’re spread out all over Germany and this gave us a reason to still be in contact.
Of course people’s circumstances and priorities change, life happens, and so surely but slowly this period in our lives came to an end.
But oh boy, clicking around in this virtual world, I sure do miss these hangout sessions with my friends.
(Now how is that for “too personal”?)
Another data point for my thoughts about blog posts and especially weeknotes being personal or not: Roy read my post and decided to be less personal. Which is interesting – he does also mention that he is writing a private journal as well, which I am not. Basically what I blog and what I remember organically are all that I can recall in the future, which might explain my predilection to post boring interna.
Meanwhile it’s been a weird week. While the heat wave might be over, the current weather does have actually more of an impact on my well-being than when it was really properly hot. Unless I had some proper external stimuli to kick my brain into gear I really struggled to concentrate on anything. I’m trying to understand what it is. It is still very warm and rather humid, but that usually doesn’t have much of an effect on me. In fact, I rather like it. (Even though probably more when I’m in a tropical country, but even so.) It might just be the light: we had a thin to medium layer of clouds most of the time and the light has a very weird diffuse quality to it.
For the last couple of days when it was really hot I had my big fan running almost 24/7: during the day to bring some respite through moving air and during the night to make sure that the cooler air from outside makes it into the parts of the apartment where there isn’t much of a natural flow of air.
So just for the record: today has been the first day in a while when I didn’t turn it on because frankly – it’s fresh enough as it is, even with the sun shining.
A few weeks ago I talked with Dirk about blogging and while this conversation got him to write a post about the state of the world he told me that week notes aren’t for him as they are too personal.
I’ve been thinking about this conversation a lot since then. I read a lot of blogs, through my feed reader, bubbles.town, Kagi Small Web, indieblog.page and more. There are a lot of people who write extremely personal things! And there are a lot of people who manage to write interesting posts almost on a daily basis and there’s still nothing obvious about them as a person in those posts. It is very fascinating.
Personally I don’t think my week notes are that personal but in general, yes, they take the place of a diary. I’ve said it quite often: I write my blog mainly for future me, to look back on what happened. And I often have the urge to overshare – after all, where if not here? It’s not like anyone in real life is particularly interested.
And then there’s of course always the old context problem. Given my well-developed Witzelsucht I know that it isn’t always easy to tell which things I am serious about and what is just a joke – sometimes not even for myself.
So I guess I’ll ponder this topic some more, while trying to find the right balance for me and my posts. It seems to be an ebb and flow anyway and in the end, being personal might just be the best part of having a personal website.
I guess it was the heat that got to people’s brains. This week I more than ever in the just about nine years I’ve been on Mastodon I had to block and mute and filter to keep my timeline halfway sane.
On Monday evening I went to a photo walk in Basel. The vibe in the city was great, everyone was in a relaxed evening mood.
I am spending most of the weekend watching the 24h of Spa, which should be the last of the 24h races of the year that I follow along. It’s been pretty exciting so far and there are still another 90 minutes to go.
As a tribute to the race I’ve done my own little enduro this morning – three hours in Automobilista 2 in a Porsche in Spa. I’ve managed to end up third which is pretty good, given that I got punted out after the first hour and had to fight my way back up to the front.
I have linked to videos from OTR a few times on my link blog but this one deserves a post on here. It’s a feature-length documentary about the “Golden Triangle” within Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, the history how it became the center of the global drug trade and how it in many ways still is. A fascinating story of lost armies, hill tribes, gangsters and – of course, because it is OTR – food.
Very much worth the time.
I mostly spend this week up in Cologne. A bunch of in-person meetings, a bit of hanging out with friends and coworkers, good (and some not so good) food and the days went by very quickly.
For the first time in quite some while I took the train instead of driving and frankly – when it works and once you’re in the train, it is really a nice way to travel distances like this. Train stations are a bit of a slog, though.
Now over the weekend I’m slowly acclimating myself to the warm weather that will be around for quite a few days.
I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
(This one I really can’t explain. It’s not my kind of music. I can’t remember hearing it anywhere lately. And yet here we are.) This morning it was Senza Una Donna by Zucchero and Paul Young – and frankly, I hope I can exorcise it by writing this blog post.
Another big 24 hour race this week, this time the Le Mans one. I’m usually not a WEC guy but this one is special, of course. Otherwise this week was a calm one, again. (Next week won’t. Foreshadowing!)
Taskmaster Series 21 concluded, which is always a bit sad. The ten episodes are going by so fast. Before this series I usually watched it on the Friday in my lunch break, this time I stayed up on Thursday until it popped up on YouTube – and it is quite funny how different it feels as late night entertainment. I’m having my doubts about the cast of the next series, so let’s see how things go.
I very much prefer the fediverse aka Mastodon (yes, I know) over the other text-based social networks. Especially over the one that used to be so important to me.
But it does have it downsides and I usually notice them when I am trying to see who else besides the people I follow is talking about stuff. Especially during events like the Nürburgring 24h, LeMans this weekend, in general all motorsports events. The target demographics don’t seem to overlap all that much. (And no, it’s not because I’m on a small instance. It’s the same on the hashtags on mastodon.social.) I guess the chances of enthusiasts, the racing series, teams or even drivers finding their way to our corner of the internet is really small.
Bummer. But not enough to get me to look at that place again.
A calm and rather cool summer week. Not quite as rainy as forecast but not the hot temperatures of the last few weeks.
I didn’t do all that much – slept a lot, futzed around with my websites and learned more about Vietnamese addresses, reverse geocoding and the OpenStreetMap data model than I ever wanted to know.
This is a copy of an issue that I just created in the Nominatim repository. Sadly my skills in Python (and my knowledge of the OSM data model) aren’t good enough to poke around in the code on my own to figure out what is happening.
Reverse Geocoding in the Ho Chi Minh City center return wrong city
What did you search for?
https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=geojson&lat=10.7686020&lon=106.6900885
What result did you get?
The address field in the JSON response returns Thủ Đức as city:
{
"address": {
"amenity": "Little HaNoi Egg Coffee",
"house_number": "212",
"road": "Le Lai Street",
"neighbourhood": "Khu phố 3",
"suburb": "Ben Thanh",
"city": "Thủ Đức",
"ISO3166-2-lvl4": "VN-SG",
"postcode": "70200",
"country": "Vietnam",
"country_code": "vn"
}
}This is a bit complicated as Thủ Đức currently exists twice in OSM: once as a (former) subdivision of HCMC and now a navigation marker: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/12925776412 (Which used to be a city) and as a suburb: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7138136 (Which is now a ward)
Both of them are not in the city center, though – they’re on the other side of the Saigon river.
What result did you expect?
I expected Ho Chi Minh City in the city field. The point is right in the middle of the Bến Thành suburb, which is correctly stated as the suburb in the json return
Bến Thành – https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/19260503 – has the correct relation to Ho Chi Minh City – https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1973756 (Alas to the district of Ho Chi Minh City, which includes many cities. I am aware that this stuff isn’t easy.)
Further details
I checked a point that is actually in Thủ Đức: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=geojson&lat=10.8466489&lon=106.7510356 – here we can find Thủ Đức both in the suburb and the city field.
A lot of the data on OSM is still a bit out of date since the 2025 Vietnamese administrative reforms
You get old and you start thinking, “Oh, I better make the world around me miserable. Then I won’t mind leaving so much.” That’s what you got to fight against.
– Bob Mortimer
