+ +

- -

404

oh no, something went wrong...?

- I am a software engineer based in Berlin. -

- Come back later... maybe I have come up with something clever to put here - :) -

- By the way... you can download a complete dump of this page: - ↪ here -

Gear

OKM II
Rode AI Micro
EasySoundRecorder (Android)

Recordings

- ↪ playlist -

- - - - - -

gsix = gentoo + s6

+ + 2023-11-05 (3 days) @@ -50,16 +55,20 @@

rainy drive home

rainy otaru

+ + 2023-07-08 (3 days) @@ -52,16 +57,20 @@

asking for a spoon for choco spread

old cherry blossom tree in chiba

In 2023 I went to Japan for 12 months

@@ -61,16 +66,19 @@

shikoku

hokkaido

- -

journal

- -

+ + 2023-04-22 @@ -128,16 +133,20 @@ target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dtoku-in↩︎

+ +

dithered sakura

here’s some stuff i like:

@@ -74,16 +79,20 @@ href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250524012154/https://www.joanwestenberg.com/ target="_blank">^[?]

+ + 2023-06-08 (4 days) @@ -56,16 +61,20 @@

awesome little bath next w/ view on shinkansen tracks

onigiri snacks in lawson parking lot

+ +

After getting up, there is obviously breakfast first. The room fee includes a full course Japanese breakfast, so rice and various side -dishes

At this point I still don’t know how to get to my planned destination -for today, the Senjogahara wet lands, 10km from the hotel.

The other problem I am faced with is how to make it back to the station in time for the train back to Utsunomiya and eventually Tokyo. At the front desk I get told that the hotel provides a free bus back to @@ -238,16 +243,20 @@ with some notes around the setup and some recordings here: ↩︎

+ +

2025-11-12 — varlink
2025-05-14 — porta
2025-01-10 — sony-wf1000xm3-battery
2025-01-08 — pyonji

- -

2025

2024

+ + 2025-01-24 @@ -73,16 +78,20 @@ target="_blank">here.

2025-01-24: default, pointer, text, crosshair and progress are done

+ +

Porta

↪ https://git.sr.ht/~robertgzr/porta

@@ -57,16 +62,20 @@ the commands used for reading and writing secrets.

href="https://git.sr.ht/~robertgzr/portage/tree/master/sys-apps/porta/" class="uri" target="_blank">https://git.sr.ht/~robertgzr/portage/tree/master/sys-apps/porta/

+ + 2025-01-08 @@ -71,16 +76,20 @@ target="_blank">–cover-from-description

that make working with it easier for me: https://git.sr.ht/~robertgzr/pyonji/log/devel

- - -

2026

now

Testaments, Margaret Atwood
Freiheitsschock, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk

march

Babel, R.F. Kuang
The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, Clarissa Goenawan

january

Circe, Madeline Miller

- fun way to get into greek mythology -

- -

2025

december

In the Miso Soup, Ryu Murakami

november

Tod in Venedig, Thomas Mann

- at the start the style of writing was preventing me from getting into - the story fully, as i was reading i got used to it and by the end found - myself quite enjoying it. apart from the style i find nothing - particularly special about it. the conclusion is quite unexpected - though. i found the epilog by terence james reed contextualised the - writing of the book in thomas manns life really useful. -

october

The Burning Shore, Wilbur Smith

- while it kept me awake until 3am for 3 days i really disliked the - tonal shift between the second and third acts. how can he portray the - lifestyle of the san the way he does and then have centaine tear up - their sacred place of ancestor worship for diamonds. then the in-world - justification, that it will provide "good water" for her son. to me is - just blatant sugarcoating of an act that clearly violates the memory - and principles of the people she has her life to thank for. though she - had already all but forgotten them, when it was time for the story to - move on from including o'wa and h'ani. -
- another gripe with the writing i've had is the way the female lead is - written. it is so obvious, that the author is a man of the last - century... centaine in both instances immediately falls for the male, - that is so clearly set up to be her love-interest. -
- The book - is - from 1985, that might put some of this into perspective. -

september

The Passage, Justin Cronin

- i can't quite remember where i even found this book. specifically the - part after the timeskip pulled me in and i just needed to know what - happens next. the book sets up a series and i am quite curious what - else they are going to do with the characters - i am personally happy - with what they did and wouldn't - need - more. -
- one small detail from the epilog i like is that apparently he co-wrote - the concept for the book together with his daughter. -

august

Abroad in Japan, Chris Broad

- after reading the first half, i would already recommend this - book. even without any context on the author or japan, this has - some really funny stories. i also like how i can almost hear - chris' voice in the writing. -

The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

- this one took a while. started reading pretty much right after - Native Tongue at the end of march. the book works well for piece - meal reading, since it's a collection of stories set in a - shared world. my favorites were the one where 'and the moon be - still as bright' and 'the million year picnic'. - overall i think i prefer this over fahrenheit if i had to - recommend one. this one executes the almost educational tone - better while telling actually great scifi stories, which often - left me thinking about them later. -

march

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin

- read most of this in two long sessions while we were in - turkey. after a bit of a slow start i liked the spin on - "dystopian future-not-future society"; the world building - is reminiscent of handmaid's tale, but i felt like there - was more exploration of the inner workings of - why - society is that way; the feminist context shines through - especially towards the end, when the plot only works because the - men are all arrogant assholes, which was satisfying but a - bit one-dimensional. -

february

- started reading a weekly newspaper which had quite the - impact on my reading time. i have a test subscription for - 10 weeks, let's see if i can figure out how to balance my - reading out... -

january

Record of a Night too brief, Hiromi Kawakami

- the first half consists of surreal dreamlike short stories - that only refer to their protagonists as 'me' and 'the - girl'. second half is two longer stories. i enjoyed - interpreting what everything might mean, but wasn't - particularly drawn to the book because of the episodic - nature at the start. read the second half in one afternoon. -

- -

2024

december

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

- had I not read Ready Player One and Neuromancer before, - this would surely have left a better impression. - the part about the sumarian virus is creative but feels - forced at the end when it is used to resolve - everything. -

november

Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi

- read this while in iceland. basically a family history - focused on the women. i had no background on oman's - history or society. super interesting from that angle. - sometimes a bit slow and confusing, since it's jumping - around the timeline. -

Snow Country, Kawabata Yasunari

- i am a sucker for japanese novels and their erie vibe. - this one has it too. so many small details that feel - meaningless on the surface but add some much to the - experience of the book. -

october

Busy Doing Nothing, - Rek Bellum & Devine Lu Linvega

- somehow i fell down the rabbithole (lol) of rek & - devine's world this month. their log is fascinating and - inspiring. much of their stuff makes you want to set - out to sail yourself, and much of this book does too, - but then there is also details (like the wave incident) - that make you say: hell no. -

august

DROPPED - Illuminatus! Part 1: The Eye in the Pyramid, Robert Shea

- I did not like the meandering writing and whacky - storylines that kept looping back onto each other. -

july

Der stumme Tod, Volker Kutscher
At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft

- the story was mildly scary but entertaining. he kind of - overused "scary" adjective-noun pairs: cosmic fear, - blasphemous mountains. i don't understand how the pov - character thinks his report will hold back further - exploration of that region of antarctica. i would actually - expect it to inspire more attention. -

Only Human (Themis Files #3), Sylvain Neuvel

- i did not like this compared to the other two entries - to the series. mostly takes place on the world of the - creators of the "mechs". the style feels off compared - to the first novel when we were seeing the story evolve - through the eyes of the unnamed character. -

june

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Convenience Store Woman, Murata Sayaka

- i admit, i probably started this out of nostalgia after - coming back from japan. it's a cute little story that - nicely shows how weird japanese society can be. -

- i left my ereader at a cafe on the 1st of january of this year - while traveling in south korea. i only got a replacement in june. - that's why there is a 6 month gap where i did not read anything - this year. -

+ + 2023-10-01 (3 days) @@ -52,16 +57,20 @@

kanonji

takamatsu

+ + 2025-01-10 @@ -108,16 +113,20 @@ put them in the wrong way around.

alt="battery comparison" /> -

- - -

+ + 2023-07-21 (3 days) @@ -58,16 +63,20 @@

drive to shirakawa-go

drive to toyama

While working on my custom - Anki - cards for learning Japanese - and Turkish, I - found that my font of choice for Japanese - - IPAex - - was not - properly supporting glyphs used by - Turkish, like - ğ.

To fix this i am using a property of the - @font-face - rule - which limits custom fonts to source their glyphs from a subset of the - unicode range and force fallback to the next font in the set.

@font-face {
-    font-family: "IPAexGothic";
-    src:
-        local("IPAexGothic"),
-        url("_ipaexg.ttf");
-    unicode-range:
-        U+0020-007F,
-        U+3000-303f,
-        U+3040-309f,
-        U+30a0-30ff,
-        U+ff00-ffef,
-        U+4e00-9faf;
-}
-
-.card {
-    font-family:
-        IPAexGothic,
-        Noto Sans,
-        sans;
-}

+ +

varlink is a neat little standard for doing debuggable IPC. It takes some of the nice properties of DBUS, like the introspection capabilities, and combines @@ -71,16 +76,20 @@ the socket actually implements it.

Note the use of jq --raw-output0. It is possible to omit the jq invocations, the input JSON data should be followed by a NUL byte.

+ + 2023-05-20 (4 days) @@ -75,16 +80,20 @@

stuck in traffic

when did i visit the shrine in north fuji?

After getting up, there is obviously breakfast first. The room fee includes a full course Japanese breakfast, so rice and various side -dishes

At this point I still don’t know how to get to my planned destination -for today, the Senjogahara wet lands, 10km from the hotel.