#weeklyreview 15/2025

burger crafting

On Monday I spontaneously did some burgers as I had the bun’s left over from the weekend. Invited kiddo over and got some bacon, almost burned the buns and finally assembled the damn thing. The bacon makes the difference

Backup

Was looking into restic backup with rclone to nextcloud. Restic is a really fifty command line utility to do encrypted backups. Either to local directories or attached volumes or to remote destinations. Restic supports a whole bunch of remotes out of the box.

It can be extended to further destinations by using “rclone” … another command line utility that tries to provide an abstraction of remote filesystems.

My goal was to use a NextCloud file storage as restic destination. You can theoretically just the NextCloud desktop client and backup to the local folder that is synced to the NextCloud server. But this way you have to have the storage space for the original AND the backup available locally. I wanted to use NextCloud as a remote storage without syncing to the local files.

So I chose a folder on the NextCloud server which I have excluded from syncing to my local machine (you can do this in the settings of your NextCloud client). Created an rclone configuration for NextCloud following the documentation. And then just backup to the rclone destination:

restic -r rclone:nxtcld:restic-backups/work-macbook backup ./Downloads/Instagram-Backup

Why all this hassle? Because Hetzner is offering StorageShares based on NextCloud at a pretty good price point. Beside using it as mere document sharing space, one can also use it as a backup destination.

macOS Update issues

Im still struggling to update my personal macOS sitting on an external disk to the latest version of 15.4. Apparently Apple has an issue in that version with this particular update type as many others report the same problem. Updating macOS sitting on an external disk seems to fail. Some users claim success , but it’s unclear what they did differently. I’ve tried a whole bunch of attempts already that include turning off FileVault (as the issue seems to relate to encryption) and also installing from a USB stick. No luck so far

Heating repair

Our floor heating was broken since last year. It didn’t fully turn off in one room. Trying to find a company to repair this wasn’t easy. Most companies I contacted didn’t reply at all or never came back to me after a first attempt. So I had to pull the vitamin b card and call my cousin who runs a very successful plumbing company in the south of Berlin. They were sweet and nice, kept all the appointments and called back when promised. And not because their boss is my cousin. So eventually their guy was there this week to fix the probably broken actor motor of one of the valves. let’s see how long this fixes the issue.

US Colleagues visit

This week we also had two colleagues from the US over. First time in several years that work related travel in the “lower ranks” was approved. Been in a workshop with some AWS folks for two days. That was intense but also good to spend focused time with the whole team on a topic.

And of course there were the obligatory team dinners.

Dinner again

It almost became a tradition to have dinner over at my friends place. This week it was deliciously roasted chicken on the menu. Also some other substances were involved that I didn’t felt the effect of yet

Kiddo requested pasta with salmon and tomato cream sauce as she recently had in a restaurant. So we gave that recipe a try and kiddo approved. Super simple to make actually. We might see this more often now.

Spring finally

It’s getting warmer outside and finally the trees and bushes started to push leaves and blossoms. So I had to do my share of taking and posting pictures of blossoming trees and bushes. Here you go.

Back in the countryside I enjoyed coffee outside on the terrace with my glorious golden mug.

You can see our tomato and chilli seedlings in the background. They eagerly wait to get outside. But we need to be sure the nights are free of frost for sure. We but planted a few herbs and vegetables on the refurbished raised beets on the weekend and also started the well pump.

That pump started immediately to pump water without any fiddling. This also seems to reflect the high level of ground water this year. Although the surface soil is super dry as it hasn’t rained in quite a while substantially. But the trenches in the fields and in the forest are actually filled with water which I haven’t noticed in years in our area.

Knitting

Kiddo found an old blanket he had started several years ago but didn’t finish. So he picket it up and is running through quite some wool now.

New Hardware

It was about time to replace the old 2012 MacBook Air of my wife. With all this taxation kerfuffle going on, it might be a good time to get something new out. Also the current generation of MacBook Air M4 has just arrived and got really good reviews.