Leatherman (Vagabond)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leatherman_(vagabond)

#HackerNews #Leatherman #Vagabond #Travel #Adventure #Exploration #History

Before my first bout with cancer in 2016, I weighed over 300 lbs. I'm sure as a child I must have started small, but in my memory, and in my (Health app) records, I have never weighed under 200. At that weight, of course I'm #Diabetic. Since 2016 and for many reasons, my weight has slowly (oh so slowly) been going down. For a while now, I've take a #GLP1, specifically for diabetes. I started on #Ozempic. I eventually moved to #Mounjaro, and have reached the full 15mg dose and been on it for a little over a month now. The combination of a Glp1 and the exercise I've been doing has finally gotten me down to under 200 lbs (well ... just under, I guess. Recently I was at 194.5). I can't tell you how happy I am. How great I feel. How weird my face looks in the mirror. How much my wife complains about my legs being way too skinny.

At this new size, none of my clothes fit. For shirts, that's not too bad. For pants, it's disastrous.

I **am** buying smaller and smaller pants, but in the meanwhile, I've been using a ratcheting #Belt; #RatchetingBelt. I love this thing. It's always the right size. It holds my pants up; and it's stiff enough I can hang my #Leatherman off of it. I recently added a flashlight, too! (My friend @jammcq
thinks I'm going overboard).
I use the #KoreEssentials webbing belt in black with an X5 buckle. Here's the page: https://www.koreessentials.com/products/x-series-buckle-usa-made-black-tactical-nylon-gun-belt-1-5?variant=42026049339451. This belt makes wearing my existing pants possible. Kind of "bunchy", but possible. And as I lose weight, I can cut the belt down to fit my smaller waist.

If you need any of these features: stiff, ratcheting, strong enough to hang stuff off of, good looking, one size fits all ... I **strongly** recommend this belt. I don't know if it's considered pricey or not. Never bought belts much before; but I **can** tell you I would have paid significantly more and still been happy.

Hello everyone, how's it going? While looking for my sharpening stones I came across this Leatherman I completely forgot I had. My FIL gave it to me 12 years ago. Just for fun I sent pictures over to an electrician buddy and Leatherman nut, he has 7 or 8 with the new expensive Arc being one. Apparently this camo model is rare and has titanium scales. They didn't sell well and are extremely hard to find. There's one on eBay for $650.

Nice Sunday find.

Have a wonderful day!

#today #leatherman

#weeklyreview 31/2025

vintage shoes

On Sunday we took a visit to the forest with the little pond in the nearby village. Kiddo unearthed an old GDR soccer shoe. Turns out that old brand “Zeha” has been revived and is now offering hand-made shoes again.

50 at last

celebrated the day with cutting down 2 large dead trees on our property. Family and friends helped. It’s always fun having these old folks around and do some work. Reminds me of my childhood where we had to work every weekend on some family members construction site. Of course I’m exaggerating. But we there always seemed to be some construction going on somewhere. And since all family members were some sort of craftsperson, everyone joined in to lend a hand. While at times it was annoying to not have time for friends or just being lazy on these weekends, I have fond memories of jokes and laughter and learning with the my cousins, aunts, uncles, grand parents and many others. Everyone joined in because for refurbishing a house you couldn’t just hire a company in the GDR. There were no companies for hire for private projects.

The two trees were about 25m high. Our property is on a hill and goes down towards the lake. We had to put the trees down towards the lake for safety reasons. Now I have to haul up all the pieces to the street. Thats quite a bit of an exercise. Took me one hour to carry up 43 pieces of log individually. Since the terrain is rough and overgrown, no wheelbarrow or other tools are of any use. Only good old human labor.

I also started to cut back all the grass, bushes and weeds to uncover the second entrance and claim back some space on the property. Powertools with blades and circular saw blades for the win. Friend calls it the ankle grinder. It’s powerful and dangerous. Just as I like it 🙈

Biking in the small town

On Wednesday I took bike trip into the city. Just 8 minutes to my parents. And just 5 minutes from there to the hardware store. Subjectively thats closer than anything in Berlin. Maybe because there are almost no traffic lights in the little town (compared to Berlin).

I like the drive from our place. Our place is almost in the woods. Just surrounded by lake, fields and forrest. A sand path through the forest leads to a proper street. Some houses in the forest tell that civilisation is about to begin here. Then the street with some houses, still the lake in the background. And finally some more streets (even traffic lights), and shops and restaurants – a city. And all that journey in just 5 minutes on a bike. I like it.

Stupid hot fixes

I was putting up an old washing machine that we had standing around in the cellar for some years in the new house. Fixed the pipes and started a first test load. When it came to the tumbling dry phase I wondered that the machines make quite loud noises and seems to jump around in the bathroom. I hopped on it to secure it in place and prevent it from ripping of the pipes.

Then I noticed my rookie mistake. The transportation bolts to secure the drum were still in place. They have to be removed before using the machine so the drum can wiggle inside the housing if needed and not move the whole machine.

My trusty Leatherman pliers came to the rescue to unscrew the bolts and fixtures while the machine was running.

https://hub.uckermark.social/@maxheadroom/114925583828393722

Running

On Thursday evening my running partner that I used to run in the other village and in Berlin with joined me at the new place. We ran around the Stadtsee in Templin, which is a really nice track around the lake that is almost perfectly 10km long. Had pizza on the terrace afterwards with some alcohol free beers. Life’s good 🙂

Hauling wood again

Saturday we were driving the two trees we fell on Monday over to our other property in the village where it will eventually be split, stacked and used as firewood. But to make room for the new wood, one of the old stockpiles had to be moved into the empty compartment of the firewood shed. Kiddo and my wife did this over the course of the week.

We desperately need to organise this better. We touch that wood far too often before it gets burned.

SystemD Timers

Almost every old Linux user has a love-hate-Relationship with systemD. It’s the default in many modern distros nowadays. But it’s not SysV … I know. I recently read this article about the rise of systemD

I new it has a replacement for CRON and job queues, but I also shied away from looking into the configuration as everything systemD seem a little too complicated to old Linux admins who are used to having distinct binaries for single purposes instead of a behemoth doing everything.

My use case was to run a certain script (FediFetcher) on an hourly basis. But I wanted to make sure there only ever run’s once instance of the script (turned out FediFetcher maintains its own lock file). In the old days I would have written a Cronjob that submits a job to the systems job queue. Since the queue is processes sequentially it might get longer, but there is only ever one instance of my script running.

In systemD one has to use combination of Service and Timer to achieve this. The service describes what I want to get executed with a whole bunch of parameters to make it secure etc. The important bit for my use case though is the type of service: Type=oneshot

That means this is not run permanently and kept alive by systemD, but it runs only when explicitly triggered. The trigger could be a call to systemctl start fedifetcher.service or … a time.

This is the second part, a systemD timer that acts as a trigger to call the service on a regular interval.

The Service file goes into /etc/systemd/system/fedifetcher.service

[Unit]Description=FediFetcher ScriptAfter=network-online.target[Service]Type=oneshotExecStart=/usr/bin/bash /home/username/FediFetcher/FediFetcher.shWorkingDirectory=/home/username/FediFetcherUser=usernameGroup=groupnameStandardOutput=journalStandardError=journalTimeoutStartSec=2700TimeoutStopSec=60KillMode=control-groupRemainAfterExit=noSyslogIdentifier=fedifetcherProtectSystem=yes# ProtectHome=truePrivateTmp=trueNoNewPrivileges=trueReadWritePaths=/home/user/FediFetcherRestrictAddressFamilies=AF_INET AF_INET6 AF_UNIX

And the Time files goes to /etc/systemd/system/fedifetcher.timer

[Unit]Description=Run FedFetcher Script hourlyRequires=fedifetcher.service[Timer]OnCalendar=*:00/30Persistent=trueAccuracySec=1min[Install]WantedBy=timers.target

After a systemctl daemon-reload and this should run once every 30 min as described in the OnCalendar=*:00/30 line.

systemD will take care of ensuring that there is only ever one instance of the service running.

#enEN #leatherman #project25 #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wochenrueckblick #woodworking

Leatherman Charge Plus and Charge Plus TTi Multi-tools Have Protruding Knives. The knife blade tips do not completely fold into the took handle. #leatherman #chargeplus #multitool #knife #laceration #recall
https://www.instagram.com/p/DM8KcDPNLWZ/

Exhibit 17: remove the transport security bolts of a washing machine with the proper pliers of the #Leatherman #Multitool when you wonder why it's making funny noises and is jumping through the room 🙈 #DIY

I confess, I've never been able to bring myself to carry a multitool. For decades, I've owned a reasonable quality Leatherman knock-off, but I never carry it, and rarely use it. When I do, I just wish I'd picked up the right tool. I think it's in my car "emergency" tool kit now. Haven't used it there either.
#multitool #tools #maker #leatherman #handtools #workshop

#weeklyreview 29/2025

Coding LLMs = 3D Printers

After playing around for a while with coding assistants and prompt driven development I thought that this feels a little like 3D printing.

It’s exciting for nerds. You can quickly build things that look almost like the real thing. It takes a lot of tinkering and tweaking. You can make it look even better if you spent some money on more expensive tools.

But as cool as it is. It’s just not yet ready for mainstream. For serious work. Yes, there are first companies trying to print houses or rocket engines. But those are mere proof of concepts. Not ready for production.

Same for coding LLMs. Although the nerds wouldn’t admit it.

BookWyrm fixing

About two weeks ago I switched the object storage backend of my services from MinIO to Hetzner Object Storage. At first it looked like it was working fine for BookWyrm too. But after a while people complained that images were missing. I investigated a while and thought it’s BookWyrm not properly uploading to S3. But there were no error messages. Some images were working. Today I did some more systematic investigation and figured that the NGINX reverse proxying actually wasn’t working. The images which did work, were either served out of the NGINX cache or from the local image volume.

I eventually swapped out NGINX for Caddy as I had done already for my Mastodon instances. This fixed the BookWyrm issues and probably also made it more stable and quicker now. NGINX was hanging about once a day on some static file. I haven’t seen that behaviour with Caddy yet.

Getting Things Done

I was working with LLMs a lot the last few weeks. Wrote a tool using vibe coding to analyse Jira tickets.

Then I thought I could possibly use an LLM to to help with my Getting Things Done setup.

The idea behind GTD (in my interpretation) is to capture all stuff centrally in an Inbox. Then process the inbox on a frequent basis to decide whether the task can be done immediately (if it takes less than 5 minutes to finish) or need to be planned out further.

The planning is basically to identify what is the task that moves this thing forward to conclusion? Where the task should be atomic. Means it should have enough context to be executed without dependency to other tasks or information. Such dependencies might be their own task.

The planning is the “thinking” exercise to make the execution as smooth and efficient as possible. A good analogy is to think of the execution as a delegation to someone who doesn’t have the whole project context. Example:

Project is: bake a New York Cheesecake
Task is: get ingredients

This would be a very bad task description. Because a person lacking context wouldn’t know which ingredients in what amount need to be acquired. A better description would be:

Task is: get 2 packs of cookies, 530g creme cheese, two eggs, 250g brown sugar.

Now any person knowing how to grocery shop can fulfil this task.

Task execution should ideally require next to no thinking, just doing. This way, you can get into “the flow” when executing.

So I thought I could write a prompt to have an LLM help me refine my inbox items. But quickly realised it’s not worth the effort. Because it would have to be a back and forth with the LLM to refine a task until the level of clarity is reached I’d desire. Eventually I’d be quicker doing the actual thinking myself right away instead of calling an LLM tool, paste in my raw task and keep answering questions to the LLM until the task is split up into actionable tasks with enough context.

There are no shortcuts to good work…

Village anniversary Gollin

On Friday we’ve attended a little theatre play in the church Gollin. The village had their 650 year anniversary and nicely decorated everything and had a proper party on Saturday. The theatre was “Gar nicht lügen ist auch keine Lösung” of Heike Feist & Astrid Kohrs. Quite funny.

The disco part on Saturday was also quite nice. There was food and music and everyone enjoyed themselves. The dance floor was always full. So the DJ did a good job

And of course I had another opportunity to put my #Leatherman to good use fixing the cross in the church after the theatre 😉

#BookWyrm #enEN #GTD #leatherman #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

I don't have a problem. YOU have a problem.

#leatherman

Exhibit 16: fixing the cross in the local church after a theatre event
#leatherman

Eventually fixed my bikes headlight as it fell off after 10 years. Of course I macgyvered the wiring with my #Leatherman and heatshrink pipes

#weeklyreview 27/2025

Back in the office after 2 weeks of #COVID … that was annoying to isolate while basically feeling OK. I had symptoms only the first 2 days and then another 4-5 days of occasional coughing. But the positive test dragged on until last Saturday. Sunday I finally tested negative and also on the next two days. So I hope this is formally over now. Taking it slow with sport for the next two weeks though. Just to make sure.

#project25 update

Did a whole lot of cleaning on the weekend. Vacuumed the floor, the walls, the ceiling. The house sat empty for about 4 years now. Nature tried to claw it back and generations of insects were trying to call it theirs. Kiddo was uncovering the path to the house under the weeds and moss.

We put up a hammock and took a swim on the lake. It’s taking shape…

Amazon Q Developer Workshop

On Thursday we had a workshop with AWS about their AWS Q Developer tool. Basically a CLI/Shell with an LLM backend to help coding. The interesting part was the the “prompt driven development script” they provided. This large prompt guided me through the “development process” starting with a rough idea all the way to generating the needed code. It started with asking a whole bunch of sensible questions about the rough idea to refine it and capture all aspects of it. Then it went on to come up with a high level design and did some research on feasibility, possible existing alternatives etc. Finally it generated a set of detailed prompts that would generate the code, the tests, the documentation.

I didn’t had to write a single line of code. In the process the tool documented everything in Markdown documents so that one could start at any point or hand it over to someone else.

Of course the generated code did not work out of the box. Although the tool generated and executed a whole bunch of tests, a good amount of refinement was needed.

Frying

Got myself a proper spiral cutting tool for veggies and made a bunch of deep-fried potatoes chips. Kids liked it.

Repairing the oven again

At our usage the heating element of the over only seem to last about half a year… had to replace it again with my trusty #leatherman.

#COVID #enEN #food #leatherman #project25 #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview

Exhibit 15: have a proper cutting knife when the party only supplies dull plywood knifes
#Leatherman