The Week in Review – 2026-25

✈️ I still have a few Raspberry Pi boards lying around here: some 3s and two 4s. They come from projects that are no longer active or now run in containers on a Raspberry Pi 5 (with its computing power and the 8 GB of RAM, you can get quite far).

So I grabbed one of the Raspberry Pi boards lying around and also bought one of those “Software Defined Radio” USB sticks together with a small antenna. I put the ADSB Feeder Image onto a μSD card, and now I have my own private flight tracker.

The antenna is still indoors on the windowsill facing west, but from here (south of Berlin) I can already “see” as far as Braunschweig.

The sky on Saturday morning. The jagged shape is the area from which data had already been received. You can see the imbalance toward the west: the antenna is at a window that faces west.

⌨️ Not too long ago, I wrote about the switch from Espanso to Typinator.

Now, a few months later, Typinator suddenly just stops working out of nowhere on Friday morning: neither were abbreviations replaced nor could I insert snippets via the quick search.

I went through all the steps in the troubleshooting guide, including three computer restarts – no chance, it simply no longer worked.

Since time is valuable and I wanted to be productive again at some point, I quickly replaced Typinator with Espanso once more. I exported the snippets as TSV from Typinator and merged them with the still existing YAML configs from Espanso. That went reasonably quickly and required only minimal manual adjustments afterward, e.g. the different control characters for the cursor position after insertion, etc.

By the way, the reason for the previous switch from Espanso to Typinator was that Espanso behaved strangely after the last big macOS update. But that seems to be fixed by now.

It is good to always have at least one alternative to choose from.

📖 I stumbled across it on Mastodon last week, but I didn’t save the post and can therefore unfortunately not give credit now:

Someone explained that the “reading time” estimates for articles on the web are not particularly useful, since reading speed varies quite a lot from person to person. A word counter would be better, because then each person can estimate for themselves how long they will need for the article (provided their own reading speed is known).

I found that sensible and immediately built such a counter here on the blog.

🩸 Last week I also went to give blood again: at the last suitable appointment I had to sit one out because of a cold.

🚵‍♂️ On Friday I thought, I’ll just do a little after-work bike ride around the area. At 35 degrees in the shade, after a few kilometers I noticed, though, that after a full workday I was already missing some energy and was quite a bit away from 100% performance.

I then decided at short notice to just roll once to the airport, look around a bit, and then ride back home. Well, the end of the story was a complete circuit of the airport and more kilometers on the odometer than the originally planned route (which was actually too strenuous for me).

I was pretty wiped out in the evening after all, but the detour was worth it: I was able to watch a go-around live as well as directly witness the wind-related change in direction of the runways.

🦠 Almost missed it: When I rode past the old terminal in Schönefeld on Friday during the bike tour described above, I remembered that I got my first COVID-19 vaccination exactly there almost exactly five years ago.

I remember that I felt an incredible sense of relief back then.

📆 Another small meta update here on the blog: Under the weekly reviews, the editions from the same calendar week in other years are now linked.

So far, I have occasionally changed the year in the address bar by hand to see what I wrote a year ago.

Manually changing the address is no longer necessary; the other editions are accessible with one click.

🔊 Listened to this week:

Questions or comments?