2025: the liminal year. Inside of a Zwischenzustand, a chapter already finished a new one not yet started. My round-the-world trip. New experiences. Meeting most interesting people and moments of deep self examination.
My moral compass realigned to a hard north and resuming the search for honesty with my self. Eventually coming back to generous leniency as the maxim of my interactions with others. The dialectic has dominated my personal thoughts in most of 2025. It’s not easy to always hold on to both leniency and honesty when exhausted from rough nights traveling.
Saying no the wrong things is the first step of saying yes to the right things. Do I trust my gut? And Taste. Taste is my reflective intuition in application of internal honesty. So I try to hone my taste.
Of course plenty of missteps happened and will continue to happen. It is now clear to me that honesty as the foundation is oftentimes obscured by the typical hedonistic pleasure and comforts. But those come with an internal dissonance that made me deviate from my values. But I see the source again. It feels authentic to be in touch with my honesty again and can’t wait to see how it will evolve. I hope to stay in touch into the next year which will be filled with lots of new challenges.
A couple of words about gear and technology I used this year. This isn’t a top 10 list of things I liked, but just a few thoughts about artifacts that resonated with me in one way or another.
Smartphones
This might seem counterintuitive. I know that these days everyone wants to “be more offline” or “stop doomscrolling”. But in my travels and in my daily life, this is such an invaluable tool. Navigating and finding accommodation, having basically infinite entertainment while waiting 6 hours in an airport for your connecting flight, staying in touch with friends and family, getting information about a place, taking pictures or recording sounds etc. It is convenient as heck while traveling. Don’t get me wrong: I do think the current state of enshittified iOS and Android is awful. And planned obsolescence of the hardware is even worse. I hope we do better in the future. But don’t get it twisted: miniaturized all-purpose computers with all kinds of sensors and interfaces that fit in our pockets are an absolutely great thing.
AWK
I tried to use AWK a lot more and really get a feel for the language. Reading the book helped a ton. I already had tons of applications for it. It feels to me like a real boost to my shell fu.
Obsidian
This is still one of my absolute favorite tools for note-taking. Linking thoughts and notes is very much how I think. It’s also a real good WYSIWYG Markdown editor. The abundant ecosystem provides high quality plugins, and you can customize your vault into oblivion. I did set up a couple of global shortcuts like CMD/CTRL+Shift+B to open a quick note. I also used it for writing my blog posts. The browser extension is awesome to save quotes from pages. All in all - I wish this was around when I was studying in university. It is such a great tool. And even if one day I get tired of Obsidian itself: it’s just markdown and I could port it to vimwiki, Org Mode or Zed easily.
Speaking of …
Zed
This one is a bit more nuanced. I tried this code editor late in 2024 and loved it immediately. It’s superfast and felt just right. I used VSCode and Vim before, but I always felt that VSCode was slow, especially when used with lots of plugins. And Vim/NeoVim has problems with some systems clipboards when run in the terminal. I still use vim for shorter editing of code almost every day. But for bigger projects I began to use Zed heavily in the first half of 2025.
I ran in a lot of issues this last half year with Zed and at this point I am looking for an alternative. Issues I experienced were related to the Agentic/AI Integrations, the Git integration and sometimes even with saving files to different file systems or symlinked files. Maybe I just need a fresh install, but it seems that this editor is struggling a little bit.
Steam Deck
Kind of late to the party, I bought this around September 2025. There has only been a couple of days since then where I did not use it. What else is there to say that hasn’t been said already? It’s a great linux based handheld.
Circuit Tracks
It’s just such a great and intuitive little portable groovebox. Can’t wait to use it for a gig. Thinking about getting the Rhythm as well.
Travelers Notebook
I have yet to use it at work but I really like the refillable notebooks from Travelers Company.
Codeberg
Similar to Zed: I am not sure If I will stay on CB or if I will finally move away from it. It works great as a Githoster, but my experience with the workflows has been hit-and-miss. I might need to set up my own runner. I am not sure. I also should take a look at setting up my own instance of forgejo.
Bambu Lab A1 Mini
It might be a toy but oh boy it’s a really enjoyable toy. Be it risers, stands, knock boxes, housing for synths, cookie cutters, Christmas decorations and so, so much more. My brain is now wired to see a physical problem and somehow find a way to use the 3D Printer to solve it. Yeah, yeah, I know, everything looks like a nail.
I noticed my vacbot struggling with the height of my sofa and bumping into the side or getting caught underneath it. I decided to fix it using 3D printing.
I am still new to my A1 mini and even though I worked for a CAD-related software company for a while I actually don’t have a lot of experience creating parts. I heard good things about fusion and after reading a little bit and watching some tutorials I started to design my part.
It is a very basic height extender. A cylinder with a rectangular cut-out as a slot in the dimensions of the sofa foot.
I iterated over the design. Each time using the low 10% lightning type infill and a 0.20 mm layer height preset to speed up printing of these prototypes. My first attempt would have used way too much filament because the cylinder’s diameter surrounding the slot was way too big. Since I am such a 3D printing newbie, I could only appreciate these problems once the prototypes were printed. At least the slot fit perfectly from the start. When I got the diameter down to a more reasonable size, I finally used the fillet tool to round off the top to save on material and because I thought it looked cool.
Then it was time to slice: I was unsure what kind of infill to take so it could bear the load of the sofa and 1 to 2 people. I went for the triangle and 40% infill, which seemed a pretty good tradeoff between printing time and sturdiness. I printed two Sofadisks on a plate with the ‘by-object’ setting and used the auto-arrangement to make sure that the tools path between those two Sofadisks don’t intersect. I also added a brim because I wanted to have the best first layer adhesion possible.
And it worked great! The Sofadisk was a fun and easy afternoon project. From idea over prototypes that could be printed in 30 minutes to the final print in 3 hours.
Let’s see how it holds up or if I need to print it again with higher infill percentage.
All signs are pointing into the direction that my long term travel seems to be coming to an end. I am giddy as I’m getting to the point where I can finally unpack all my collected goodies in the new apartment. What makes me especially happy are the notebooks from travelers factory
and the leather keychain holders I found in Thailand. I still need a lot of time to furnish the apartment. But today I put down my first rug, and it really tied the room together.
I am sure my travels will continue but now in a more interlaced pattern between different obligations here. The default feed of the blog will be linking not just to travel in the future as I want to write about other topics as well. Life is still filled a lot of question marks at this point, but I am happy to have a place again.
I moved most of my repos away from GitHub. Forks that were used for contributions will stay on GitHub. Some repos emptied and now only contain a README.md with a link to the new location.
I also took a look at sourcehut
but in the end decided for codeberg.org
. I really like the idea of my open source code being hosted on a platform run by a non-profit organization. Codeberg is a German e.V. and well funded
is also inspiring confidence in the project.
The move was a great moment to take inventory of all the little repositories I have over the years on GitHub. I found a lot of one-off projects and tiny little tools. I decided to merge a big chunk of the repositories into mainly two monorepos(belt
and labs
).
git filter-repo --to-subdirectory-filter and git remotes were incredibly helpful to sort this out. I am not sure if I will continue using git lfs because it creates many problems. I might put the images on a storage and copy them directly from the store to my VPS.
All in all I am happy with my decision to move and Codeberg is very stable and usable.
My trusty Sambas. They have been with me since the start of the year and they have been once around the globe. They sure are starting to show signs of aging. But I usually wear my sambas until they fall apart. Where will they go next?
Having been back in Western Europe a couple of weeks now. I want to write down a couple of situations while these impressions are still fresh.
An elderly driver shouting overly angrily “do you have a death wish?” to a lady on a bike in Germany who overtook him while he was maneuvering into a tiny parking space.
A disheveled looking person clearly in psychological distress shouting curses at passengers waiting for the train to arrive. (Happened on more than one occasion and in different countries)
A cashier asking a homeless guy not to lean on the checkout conveyor belt because “that’s where people put their produce”. I did the same and leaned on the belt. She didn’t call me out. When it was my turn to pay she said: “I am sorry but I can’t change it.”
A group of drunk football/soccer fans harassing people on a metro.
People often in groups not making way on the sidewalk when you walk into them head on.(Happened on more than one occasion)
A young driver of a van shouting expletives for 5 minutes at jaywalkers that rushed over a red light in London. Finally driving off tires screeching.
After a couple of very interesting days in London I took the plane from LCY. The view from the small BA Embraer plane departing the tiny airport was breathtaking. I enjoy these daytime flights. I could even see the Thames Barrier
and it’s massive gates. As always, I’m fascinated by the UK and London in particular and can’t wait to come back soon and explore more. There is still so much to see.
It must have been 20 years or more, but I finally got the opportunity to take the Eurostar from Brussels to London again. The two hours were over quick. The seats were comfortable, and the ride was smooth. I couldn’t think of a better way of traveling to London. The Wi-Fi was spotty at best. Even parked in Gare du Midi.
Anyway, I would love to see a train from the south of Germany to London without a change in Paris. The prices could be better too. Most of the time, flying in Europe is cheaper than taking a bullet train. If you have direct connection, the train beats airplane in terms of travel time and comfort by a lot. I can’t wait to see how the European rail system evolves.
