In the eternal struggle for the optimal desk, I built a screen shelf over the week-end. It's made of material from the 1890s, left over after recent reconstruction of our small house. I treated it with some linseed oil which has a more noticable smell than I expected, but not in a bad way.
Last night I bottled our second homebrew batch, an Irish red ale. The nice 0.75l bottles with latches come from an excellent French beer, Brasserie Du Mont Blanc.
In case you don't already know these, here are a few of the Youtube channels that I can wholeheartedly recommend, not just for their recent videos but also they backlog. List in no particular order.
Two Minute Papers, enthusiastic computer science paper summaries.
Kurzgesagt, fantastically animated science topics.
Welch's Intro to Machine Learning covers both the math and the hands on implementation.
Nerdwriter, more about film.
CGP Grey, fast-paced knowledge about things you never thought you wanted to know.
I no longer carry my laptop home most days, just an Android tablet. To be able to blog with that setup, I installed Termux which provides a nice self-contained Linux environment with Apt to install more software goodies. The "Hacker Keyboard" makes vim and the command line more usable on a tablet and now I can quite comfortably edit blog entries in Markdown, commit and push to the server where Pelican re-builds the HTML site automatically.
For blogging pictures and URLs, they can be shared to Termux from other Adroid apps, I just had to drop a small script that writes the URL from the clipboard to a text file.
Germany is about to get a new president. He — yes, the position has been male-exclusive so far — does have mostly representative duties and not much power, and gets elected by an extended parliarment. Since the majority parties already have agreed upon a common candidate, current foreign minister Steinmeier, he is most likely to succeed president Gauck.
The reason I write this is the question asked by SpiegelOnline in their pay-walled section (not worth a link): Can Steinmeier's wife keep her job as a judge when she becomes "first lady"?
What the hell, SpOn? Well done propagating the antiquated norm that women should give up their careers whenever it fits the husband. What about asking whether Steinmeier can take the job, if his wife's profession really poses a conflict of interest?
