I might still write these up in more detail here, but I've been documenting some of my recent beers in the German homebrewers forum already, with lots of pictures. So if you are interested in this kind of thing, head over there for my Fruit & Sour Beers and the Norwegian Råøl. The corresponding recipe for the latter is also available here and I uploaded another one for a White IPA with Kveik.

I have been brewing several more beers with different Kveik strains and very much like the fact that they can be dried and thus stored for a long time before using them again.

The question I asked myself almost three years ago, what new laptop to get, finally got resolved a few weeks ago. The old Thinkpad X230 still has not broken down, but I need to compile things at work more often nowadays, so a more modern machine made sense.

Thus, after some more agonizing, I bought a Dell Latitude 5401 with an Intel i7-9850H, 32Gb of RAM and a fast SSD. The not-tiny formfactor suits me well and I like the larger screen. Skipping the Microsoft-tax by ordering it with Ubuntu pre-installed is a plus. So far it does its job well enough and I do not regret the choice.

This site no longer runs on a small virtual server in some data center, but it just moved home. Literally home that is, it now runs from my old RaspberryPi3 that sits on top of my fridge. This became possible because we got fast internet into our cottage in the middle of the Swedish forest.

With government subsidies and spreading costs over the local association, getting connected cost us 1800 EUR in total, which is a steal because they had to dig an extra kilometer just to get to us. Yes, there is an acutal glass fiber running all the way into our kitchen and I could get 1GBit/s up and down, if I had the use for it.

I was shortly considering switching back to Wordpress here, but decided against it, even though there did not seem to be a performance problem on the RasPi. I might still do it eventually for the comments and easier posting from mobile, but I would have to write a script to insert the posts that I made in the meantime from the markdown files into the database, since the RSS-import of WP fails.

Caddy is no longer just a proxy for nginx to get automatic LetsEncrypt certificates, but it serves the files itself now and interfaces with fastcgi, among other things for my instance of TT-RSS that I use as my main news and blog aggregator.

I saw a claim on Twitter that made me think:

If you think it's crazy how much a child's life is affected by being born into a religion, wait until you hear about class!

(my translation from Swedish)

My first reaction was, No way! Religions are much more restrictive. But then again, I guess it depends very much on the context. Even in secular societies it can be hard to break out of a cultish religious context, but I won't deny that class might be more limiting for most. To make the same case for other places in the world, like women in the middle east and central asia, would be more difficult.

2019 is a good year for butterflies, at least in Sweden.

Spending a week in a cabin is fun, but the cross-country skiing itself does not fill the whole day, so there is ample opportunity for board games. The latest additions to our collection are azul and Deep Sea Adventure.

We awoke to -20°C this morning in Bruksvallarna, after spending much of yesterday driving northward to get here. Still, here in the region of Härjedalen we are only in the middle of Sweden, when it comes to it's large north-south extent.

Bruksvallarna is known for cross-country skiing. The tracks were a bit icy today, but the forecast promises fresh snow for tomorrow.

Since I just mentioned it, maybe it's time to comment on how well, or not, we like our electric Nissan Leaf, now that we have had it for 15 months, going into the second Swedish winter with it.

We bought it used, very reasonably priced, since it's the base model with no frills, from 2013, still the early days of electric cars. Plus, it has a quirky history, being imported from California. This brings a few minor annoyances with it, like the AC temperature setting in Fahrenheit, or that the car cannot be convinced to recognize the European tire-pressure sensors in our winter tires.

But overall we're very happy with it. It's a comfortable ride and covers my commute (2x20km) plus the occasional detour without causing "range anxiety". In summer, a full charge would last for two trips to town and back, so I mostly charge to 80% only then. In winter, the number of charge percentage points needed for a single trip increases from ~20% to ~30%, which still leaves a comfortable margin.

I use the app LeafSpy to read the car's internal information and it tells me that the battery is at 82%, which after more than five years lifetime seems to be slightly above average, when comparing to statistics.

But all the numbers are not what's important. I found driving to work became more relaxing with the Leaf. Stop-and-go traffic is much less stressful than with a stick-shift and the lack of combustion engine decreases the noise-level, which in turn means that I can listen to my podcasts or audiobooks at lover volume - again preventing stress.

In addition, mileage is cheaper (less than half the cost) and less polluting than a fossil car. So we can feel smug about that, too.