Restructured the blog part of my website using Hugo. The older I get, the more I tend to make use of easier solutions. Moved from pure html to md files. Adding new posts has become a piece of cake and static pages are the fastest.

I am currently employed as a full time developer in the embedded field. My main task is maintaining the Ginzinger electronics embedded Linux distribution, in short GELin2. This entails spending endless hours building and debugging (CI) buildroot builds. Thankfully we have a lot of equipment here. Always a joy to play with toy projects on the boards developed and produced by the company in Weng. Our latest boards offer a 4k camera, 5g WIFI and the IMX8M+ chip, LVDS touch screen displays, and all sorts of interfaces (serial, can bus, usb, ethernet).

My latest electronics project is an ESP32 based alarm clock with integrated webserver for configuration and setting alarms. By default shortly after midnight my home server (Zima board) will determine if it is working day or a holiday and set the alarm clock accordingly. I can change the setting manually from my phone, via a ready-made app that lets you configure curl calls. The clock has three display modes: Normal time, countdown to alarm and Swatch Internet time.

For the first time in my career I’m fully using Linux on my working computer, as well as at home. I almost went the full ricing route. What stuck with me was the combination xorg, i3, gnome-terminal, thunar, polybar. Couldn’t fall in love with kitty nor alacritty. Wayland is too “secure” for my taste and doesn’t easily scripted automations, which are the basis of a good life on the terminal.

Our family loves Dr. Mario. That’s why I decided to write my own clone Dr. Vida. The 2025 Sars Covid edition is available for Miyoo Mini Plus and Esp32 cheap yellow display. Porting the game to Miyoo mini was a very interesting challenge, as this was my first program for this device. One needs a patched SDL library, because the display is built in upside down. See my early renderings. The ebook application that comes with Onion OS was a good starting point, as it already shows how to render to display and how to use the buttons.

Did a Gameboy original restoration. The repair kit was quite cheap, easy to use and also came with the necessary screw driver. Maybe I will also exchange the display some time in the future, as I couldn’t get rid of the banding despite trying my best with the soldering iron across the display cable.

After some months of relatively high mileage running my estimated Vo2Max has increased to 55ml/min/kg, a value I have never achieved previously in my whole life. Despite a few setbacks due to some short periods of minor illness I managed to stay in peak shape. As for coding I looked into Scala and brushed up my functional programming knowledge a bit. Added e-mail forwarding and stock value tracking to my telegram bot, which made several apps on my phone superfluous.

Today the website received a little overhaul. Among other things I added this blog page. So far the contact form has proven its stability as I received a lot of spam in the last couple of months but no real inquiries. Turns out that forms on the web are still an attractive target for spam bots. I’m not trying to protect myself from spam through any CAPTCHAs on here as this never ending arms race is a waste of time.

Another hardware project: I built a Sudoku console, including joystick and an E-Paper display. Right click video above to start playing. The most annoying part of the display is the poor refresh rate. Even using partial refresh, which took some time to implement the refresh time is now bearable. The power consumption of the device is almost non-existent. My father didn’t seem to enjoy his Birthday present later in the month as the fonts are too small for him to read.

As my predictions for the economy are all bearish I looked into options trading or rather put options warrants, as they are commonly used in Europe. The only company stocks that are rising at the moment are driven by the AI hype, which in my opinion isn’t going to last. Sure, there has been made a lot of progress with text, video and image processing but these algorithms can hardly be called intelligent.