Boat Noodles

Visiting the Grand Palace in Bangkok

The palace is at a considerable distance from my hotel. I decided to walk anyway. It is required to wear long pants and sleeved shirts, so I was already drenched in sweat when I got there. You can buy and rent elephant pants for the duration of your visit from one of the many vendors outside the entrance. Well, at least I do know that now.

Speaking of entrance: we had to walk through a park, down through a subterranean foyer and through a gate to finally be able to buy the (quite expensive) entrance ticket to the palace. It is well worth it, don’t get me wrong. By the time we arrived in the foyer we were a big crowd of visitors, but the lines for the ticket sale moved quick.

It’s crowded everywhere. I take off my shoes to go into the palace temple. No photos allowed inside. It is full of people. I barely find a place to sit. Everyone seems respectful. Don’t point your feet at the Buddha. I stay for about 20 minutes observing the foreigners and locals praying.

I get why it is such a popular place. It felt very exotic : Symbols, figures, ornament, and gold everywhere.

After a couple of hours wandering around the palace grounds I went to buy some water and onto the next destination. Wat Pho. I posted a picture of Wat Pho or Wat Pho before. I might post even more pictures in the future. It has many aesthetically pleasing spots. The main attraction is the reclining Buddha. Yep, it is… big. In all honesty, I was even more impressed by the amount of shear Buddha statues here.

Full of these new impressions I decided to also walk back the 3 km to my hotel. It didn’t rain. A great day.

Added tag categories and filters

For a while I have been working on introducing ✨tags✨ to the blog.

I went through all posts and retroactively tagged all of them.

The design has also changed a little bit. The filters for the tags can be found on top and the list of last N posts has been removed. For now the blog link in the main menu directly links to the list of travel tagged blog posts.

Staying in Bangkok Thonglor

The last week I have been staying in Thonglor. It is supposed to be a hip neighborhood especially colored by the Japanese diaspora and the affluent upper class of Bangkok. The mix sounded intriguing enough to make me book here a room for a whole week. Even between prenatal yoga classes, Japanese Kindergartens or the Donki mall you can still find some pretty amazing Thai street food. 100THB for a milk tea at the luxury mall or 20THB for a milk tea in the street?

The room itself might be not the best. The walls are thin as paper and I heard things in the night I’d rather forget. But the Thai staff is superb as ever and the location is hard to beat. The washer/dryer combo in my apartment basically ran non-stop the first couple of days. The gym is well-equipped and the pool is pleasantly cool and uncrowded. I still love being in Southeast Asia, but it’s time for a change soon.

Merging Blogs

I merged usysrc.dev and untilde.co into one. Don’t be afraid if you see more and more technical posts popping up!

In an attempt to simplify my digital life I have decided to scrap my usysrc.dev blog and move the posts here. I recently moved this blog to a VPS on Netcup and don’t want to be responsible for DNS, two Caddy servers containers, and all the other shenanigans. I liked the design of usysrc.dev, but there was never a lot of content on the site or the blog to begin with. So it just made sense to move all of it here. To be honest I like untilde better as a name anyway. I will most likely continue to use usysrc as the name for some code related stuff in the foreseeable future.

Watches and good news

Time is running out. I am now officially entering the last few months of my travel adventure. The good news arrived last week in the form of an E-Mail: My coop informed me that I won the housing lottery for the option on an apartment in Karlsruhe. The lease will start in September. That gives me ample time to conclude my travels as well as to prepare for my return to Germany.

Concerning the next weeks it’s probably sensible to stay in SEA for at least a little while longer. To keep my costs in check. I am still enjoying Bangkok. I explored many markets, temples, malls, small streets and parks over the last days. But it feels like my time to leave Bangkok comes soon. I am unsure where to go next. I did amass quite a bit of luggage over the last 2 months. One idea I had was to just store part of it here in Bangkok and go explore the north of Thailand. I am surprised that it’s such pleasant weather despite it being the rainy season.

Being prone to anxious thought patterns, I find that my planning always takes more energy than I anticipate. Counteracting that I tried to go into a new place with minimal to no information but that gets problematic real fast too. Being tired and stuck at an airport at 2am with no idea how to get to the accommodation is no fun too. When I land in a new place, it takes time for me to orient. I noticed that I am not as quick to adapt compared to some other travelers I met. Striking a balance between planning and “figure it out when I get there” is surprisingly challenging. Even after five months, I still make mistakes. I face challenging situations often: no clean shirt and no laundry in sight, the sink or bathroom is stinky or outright dirty, roaches saying hello, bad planning that leads to expensive refund of flight reservations, accidentally booking a room in a sketchy neighborhood or accidentally ordering food from questionable places. That is part of being a traveler, I guess. Even the best of planning doesn’t prevent mistakes. Stuff goes wrong, and I became used to it. Sometimes it’s my fault, sometimes it’s the circumstances. I learned to be ok with either and roll with the punches.

There’s less self-blame and less anxiety about it these days. I try to find a balance between planning and spontaneity. My new timeframe reset the focus, but I still embrace the slow-traveling mindset. I am never afraid that I could miss out on something. I can always come back to that specific country/region in the future for a dedicated visit. I am more relaxed and less stressed by smaller obstacles. If I compare myself now with me when I went to Santiago — I am way more laid-back and confident. In just a couple of months I developed a deep trust in my abilities to work through anything. I am so grateful to have this opportunity and the time to explore the world on my own terms. At the same time, I am looking forward to establishing a stable base in Karlsruhe in September.

Wat Pho

“Here no Ox can hide!”

Chatuchak Weekend Market

Time to do some tourist stuff in Bangkok! It took me a couple of hours to explore this famous market near the Mo Chit BTS station. It’s huge. You can get your usual cheap trinkets and souvenirs here but I was more interested in the section which had more handicrafts and local products. I bought a couple of things but not too much. The customized passport covers for around 100THB is a huge hit with us Farangs. I couldn’t resist to get one myself. This market is clearly aimed at tourists but feels very chill and you don’t get harassed by the vendors like in some parts of MBK Shopping Mall. There are also street food vendors everywhere. With a wonderful Pad Thai in my belly and a bag full of goodies I made my way back home.

How I blog in 2025

I want to take some time to describe the current technical process of blogging on untilde.co .

For me, it is important to be able to jot down ideas and posts as quickly as possible. I already use Obsidian for a number of different things. I do enjoy it for writing and editing. I even made and published a plugin for Obsidian . So I decided to house my blogs also in obsidian. This all evolved and continues to evolve in 2025.

A tale of two directories

I work with two significant directories:

• My Obsidian Vault
• Local Clone of the Hugo git repository

The Obsidian Vault

For better or for worse I have all my personal notes and the public blog content in the same Obsidian Vault. To not confuse posts with my private notes I have a special folder called public/ in my Obsidian Vault. The individual blogs live in a subdirectory here.

The Filetree in Obsidian:

+inbox/
	|-- a new personal note
notes/
	|-- an old personal note
attachments/
	|-- backpack.jpeg
public/
	|-- untilde/
	|-- 01 Knolling
	|-- 02 Packing
	....
	|--- usysrc/
templates/
	|-- blogpost

Some blog posts are numbered so that they can be sorted or appear in order in various file explorers. I guess that this is probably not future-proof, and they should be ordered by publish date or something else in the future. The built-in Obsidian file explorer is relevant during writing and editing for me.

The template for the blog post is applied using the Templater plugin . I use template tags to populate the date into the frontmatter:

---
title: <% tp.file.title %>
draft: false
date: <% tp.file.creation_date("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
tags:
slug:
---
Your blogpost here

To build the site from the markdown content, I use Hugo with a custom theme that I made from scratch called ‘untilde’. I usually have a preview server running with hugo server -D -t untilde.

Commander is a great plugin to execute the scripts from my ribbon or the command palette in Obsidian. These are needed to sync my writing from the public/untilde folder to the local copy of my blog. I have two buttons: Sync and Publish.

Starting Hugo

I want to see my posts locally before I put them out there in the big scary internet. I usually pull up a new pane in Zellij and run:

hugo server -D -t untilde

This way I get to see all my posts even the ones that are still marked as draft. They appear very, very similar to how they would ‘in production’ and I typically do another round of proofreading here if I have the time and energy.

The Sync command

It executes a python script that lives in the repo of the blog. This script is the actual workhorse in this process. Essentially it copies files and transforms the markdown from Obsidian-style markdown to Hugo-style markdown. It changes the links, updates image embeds to the right path, optimizes the images and more. The length of the script grew a lot over time but since it is straight forward procedural code it’s easy to extend.

The Publish command

What it does:

• changes the working directory to the local copy of my Hugo blog repo
• creates a new git commit
• push to the remote(s)

The GitHub action is triggered by pushes:

name: Deploy to Production
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  prod-deploy:
    name: prod-deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: get latest
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Setup Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v3
        with:
          hugo-version: "0.139.4"
      - name: Build
        run: hugo --minify
      - name: sync files
        uses: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@4.3.0
        with:
          server: ${{ secrets.ftp_server }}
          username: ${{ secrets.ftp_user }}
          password: ${{ secrets.ftp_password }}
          local-dir: "public/"

When this is done our new or edited blogposts appear on the site.

I currently use echofeed to syndicate posts from my blog to mastodon. It runs every x minutes to check for new entries in the RSS of my site and then crafts a toot including the images from the post.

Is this a good approach?

I am happy that the .git folder is not blowing up my Obsidian Vault or the Vault metadata blowing up the git repo. But I am still not 100% sure that this is the best approach. There are many things that could certainly be improved about my ‘workflow’, but it… works, and it makes it super easy to publish something. I usually need a keyboard anyway to edit blog posts so it’s no problem that I am not able to publish something from a smartphone. Having all my writing in markdown files at least gives me the option to switch to a different process in the future.

Life without a home is easy / is hard

For some reason, I saw the trailer for City Slickers today: “For Mitch Robbins turning 39 wasn’t the end of the world. It just felt like it”. This was a movie that was shown on RTL all the time in the 90s. Can you believe Jack Palance won an Academy Award for his role in that movie? As corny as the movie is: Being 39 myself and having too much time on my hands, I also had some existential thoughts. Most relevant, the ‘where’ and ‘how’ of living in my near future. In the end of the movie, Mitch Robbin’s monomyth hero’s journey is completed as expected. My own travel journey is slowly, slowly coming to an end as well. The next steps have to be carefully considered.

I could make a home anywhere, sure. But it draws me back to the city in Germany that I have been living in since my 20s. Seeing so many possibilities out there, I realized that it’s not the worst place in the world. It has very good public transportation. Karlsruhe, being a college town it is pretty bike friendly and I coincidentally do like biking. It has most the amenities you’d want, friendly people and (pretty important) lots of employment options for computer nerds like me. A close contender is Berlin, which is even more enticing in terms of employment, but it is a cold place and I even when I lived there I never felt at home.

My thoughts keep coming back to Karlsruhe. With a little patience, I would also be able to get an apartment through the housing co-op that I am a member of. It all just makes sense. I sometimes resented living in Karlsruhe for various reasons. Reminding myself that the perfect place doesn’t exist. Traveling has shown me a lot of the positives of living in Germany. And I realized that in my core I am an urban creature.

With these feelings in mind, I entered the monthly housing lottery of my co-op this week. Might take a couple of tries before I win, but I am looking forward to having a home again.

Of course, you always want what you don’t have. Same time last year, I couldn’t wait to get rid of the apartment. But I realized that for me, it is really restricting to live out of a backpack for an extended amount of time. Having a place where to put things sounds nice.

And it was never meant to last forever. Travel will of course end. I don’t regret anything. The trip is amazing. And it was great that I purged so much stuff before I went on this (now 5 months long) trip. I can restart my settled life there with hopefully less clutter in a new apartment. Maybe in a new part of town. Fingers crossed.