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3/3 💉Next one will hopefully be omicron ready.

After more than a year, the Icro CI/CD pipeline is working again. Also got access to Xcode cloud. CI times for Icro on free Githib Actions: 5m59s, Xcode Cloud: 6m30s

Early on while learning Japanese, I started looking for flashcard Apps to memorize Hiragana, Katakana, and basic vocabulary. Because I am me, I wanted a simple and native iOS App for it. I landed on FlashCard.app and started adding many flashcards. After a while, I got frustrated with the lack of repeating memorization strategies and started using Anki.app.

FlashCard.app does not offer a real export feature, not interested in adding hundreds of flashcards again, I started digging with Proxyman on iOS.

Not a tutorial, just sharing the basic idea:

When FlashCard.app downloads new flashcards sets with the Discover feature, the data is transmitted using a .tsv response body. By sharing your flashcards using the classroom feature, you can download your cards again on a different device. Using Proxyman, you can then fish out your own sets as a .tsv data. After removing the meta-data lines, you can then import this data into Anki by configuring your fields to match with the data inside the .tsv.

It’s been a while…just a few updates of what happened in the few months.

After 6 years of living in our cozy Altbau flat in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, we moved to our own apartment in June. Even though it is is newly built, we still had to invest a lot of time getting small defects fixed by coordinating with construction companies. Selecting, ordering, and installing all the new furniture also took longer than expected. The global supply chain situation didn’t help here. We just received our bed a week ago. Still, a mattress on the floor was surprisingly comfortable.

I also left my previous job after more than 4.5 years and joined Reddit as a Senior iOS Engineer in September. Working on a product that I have used daily for well over 10 years is exciting, especially with a team that is highly competent and welcoming.

Slowly things become more ordered and there are countless things I want to focus on more in my spare time: Continuing learning Japanese, finally shipping the long-promised Icro updates, finishing one of the few new Apps I started. Let’s see what it will be.

It’s the long Easter break here in Germany and I really needed those few days off from work. Before the pandemic, we always travelled when taking vacation. Being on the go and constantly in a new environment makes it easier for me to switch off work and mentally relax. It took a while to acknowledge that vacations are still needed, even though you are 24/7 in your “office”.

PC

See…, in comparison to previous posts, I dropped the Gaming in front of the headline. I remembered I still had good SSDs built in a retired Mac Mini from 2012. I decided to extract it and also install it in the PC, as I wanted to set up a Linux/Dev environment without messing with the Windows/Bootloader installation. A dedicated second drive makes this just simpler. I have been interested in trying out elementary OS after reading about it from Orta. Installation was quick, setting up VS Code and the Rust environment was also easy enough. I’m still struggling with the text-editing shortcuts, especially on a Mac keyboard, but I will get used to it. Let’s see if and how I’m going to use this setup for actual productive tasks.

Blog

Many more micro-posts have been moved to the log. I slowly start experimenting with migrating this site, trying to keep all deep links and URLs in place.

Bye!

The past week just flew by and really didn’t leave too much room for anything besides my jobby-job work. The DST-Change yesterday also doesn’t help to free up space in the day for side projects. Let’s start this better new week, public holidays ahead.

Gaming PC

I finished installing the last few missing bits and pieces. One case fan and dust filters were missing. It’s now fully complete, and I still have only played Rocket League on it. I hope to tackle some other games over the Easter-break. I’m also starting to monitor the prices for some higher-end graphics cards but no rush to upgrade.

Blog

I have this long-term plan to migrate this blog to Zola and maintain an extra place for my short, tweet-like posts. The extra place already exists at log and I started moving hundreds of old posts already over. Doing this split now should make the final migration of the full blog easier.

Reading

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates: This book lays out the hard facts about our current climate change situation and what technology and policies we need in order to avoid an even bigger catastrophe. I would have enjoyed this book more if it went deeper into the technological problems and solutions currently in development, but this would have lessened it’s mass-appeal. I would suggest not reading the comments for this book on Goodreads, it made me wonder if I read a totally different book.

Bye.

It’s almost inconceivable that the global Covid19-pandemic is ongoing for more than a year and Germany is running in full-speed towards another “lockdown” and a third wave while all vaccination efforts appear to be stalling. I hope the German language soon has a word for the yen to get a vaccine, similar to “Fernweh”.

Gaming PC

As mentioned last week, I ordered all individual parts to build a gaming PC. I used the PC configurator at alternate.de to select fitting parts around the Razer Tomahawk Mini-ITX¹ case and an AMD Ryzen 5 3600. I only bought an Nvidia 1650 GTX, as higher end graphics are currently just hopelessly overpriced. This will be easy to upgrade in the future. The parts arrived within a day and the build process was pretty smooth. This is not my first computer I ever built from scratch, and it felt way easier than the last time, 15 years ago. I only encountered 2 issues during the build. The ram required surprisingly more force to snap in place. This lead to plugging in the PC and starting it up without an image first. The power supply didn’t really fit inside the case and I needed to order a replacement. First tests were made with the power supply just sitting on the floor. The build is now finished, the case looks good enough for a typical gaming-style hardware and everything runs as expected. It’s now time to play some new games, or more Rocket League.

Reading

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell: I only heard about Virginia Hall in one of the other spy-books before, but had no understanding about who she was or what she achieved. It’s a fascinating story about spying and guerrilla warfare in WW2 France.

Bye!

Alright, #10 of the weekly posts. Another short one as I didn’t manage to finish a book this week.

Development

The work on Loc continued. I was implementing an iOS 14 Widget and tried to submit the first TestFlight build. It got rejected due to unclear purpose and function of the App. Well, I guess it’s time for a small intro-video. I need to say, working with SwiftPM in such a small and controlled project is a delight. Splitting out modules to be used in other packages/targets is a matter of seconds.

Gaming PC

I guess driven by the pandemic, I’m spending more time playing video games again…who am I kidding, I’m just playing Rocket League. I started playing the game on my PS4 but transitioned to bootcamp on my MacBook Pro 16” for the quicker loading times, custom map support and better latency. The performance on the MacBook Pro isn’t really great and gets more flaky the hotter the machine get. For those reasons, I just ordered the parts to build a gaming PC from scratch! In an upcoming post, I want to write more about the build process, the parts and the games I’m interested in.

Bye!