The Zone

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  • Paddling in paradise

    I’m spending a week or so in Slovenia’s Soča valley, one of Europe’s best spots for whitewater kayaking. This morning, we had a lovely fun run on the Koritnica river this morning. Good water level at 126cm / 7m3. This is such a beautiful creek! It starts out with a rapid. At the end, you…

  • Reviewing the Zuriga E2-S espresso machine

    Content warning: Blatant consumerism. This is a post about espresso machines. Nobody NEEDS an espresso machine in their home. These things are an expensive luxury, and a superfluous indulgence. There are better ways to spend your money, for example by giving it to people who have less than you. The decision to buy one isn’t…

  • Recipe: Kimchi crunchies

    One of the people I follow on the Fedi shared a food pic of a starter they’d had in a vegan restaurant in Lisbon. I was hungry, so I decided to reverse engineer the thing. As it happened, I had almost all required ingredients around. This is a starter that comes with strong flavours. It…

  • I did the jeans thing, and I liked it

    Let me start with a confession. I’m a lazy dresser, even by German standards. Ideally, I don’t need to spend much (or any) time thinking about what to wear. And I’m certainly not very aware of trends. I’m also trying to buy fewer clothes, and wear them for longer. When I heard about dry selvage…

  • Mulled wine

    When December comes in Germany, mulled wine is everywhere. Every town has its Christmas market, and at each of them, you´ll find several stalls that sell the cheap red plonk with a few spices and lots of sugar. But there´s a cup of mulled wine that is especially dear to my heart. Let me tell…

  • Making notebooks

    I live my life in a bunch of different contexts. I’m a father, and a husband. I’m a professional in my job, and an amateur in a million things. I’m an outdoors person. I have little bunny rabbits in my brain that constantly hop every which way, and come up with ideas anytime they like.…

  • Finding the sun

    (February 2025) It’s been grey and overcast here for a while. Last Saturday I simply couldn’t take it anymore. Something had to be done! So I put on my hiking boots, and went up a mountain. If the sun didn’t come to me, I would just have to go and find the sun! The Brünnstein…

  • Freeing up disk space on Debian

    [This post is above all for my own reference, so I’ll know what to do the next time this problem occurs.] My Thinkpad’s SSD has an impolite tendency to run out of disk space, even though I might not really be adding lots of data. It seems to be mostly cruft that Debian accumulates, perhaps…

  • Airdrop for the rest of us

    Serving files from an iPhone via http Those of us living in Apple’s golden cage know that the fruity phones offer a pretty decent user experience. But try rattling the bars, and you’ll find out that Cupertino has done a solid job of locking you into their system. One of the nicer functionalities of iOS…