After four years without a car of my own, I am a car owner again. I just picked up this 2025 Hyundai i10 with about 4000 km on the odometer. I still dream of a world where individual cars aren’t necessary, but we’re not there yet. My fiancée needs a car for her job, which starts in August. In a few years, when there is better charging infrastructure, we might switch to an electric vehicle. Let’s see!

Not only the sun is rising, my mood as well! 🌄

The only positive thing about this insomnia is getting out into nature for a bit in the morning. It reminds me of the time I deliberately woke up early in the morning to be in the office by 7 am after a 10-kilometer run and breakfast.

It was the first birthday of my favorite bike, my Cube Hyde Race! So, I used this Saturday, home alone, to do another long bike ride – 58 km this time. I took the Weser-Harz-Heide-Radweg (I’ve written about other parts of it before) towards the Harz low mountain range and the city of Goslar. The sun was shining, and it got up to 32°C, but I managed to finish without problems. For the way back, I took the train, which I just managed to catch in time.

I really love this bike! It’s not one I can casually ride at 30 km/h, but I can easily use it on paths with a bit more gravel, which is great. And it also works great for riding through the city! I’m really happy I decided on this bike instead of a racing bike. I don’t like riding next to roads (unless there’s a bike path in excellent condition), but I love exploring nature.

P.S.: It was also a good decision to choose a bike with a belt drive. There have been no issues so far. 👌 And in case there should be any issues, I have an insurance with a service, where they will come and fix my bike or pick me up and bring me home.

Enjoying nature and walking through this green and calm scenery. 🌳🚶‍♂️🌳

New watch. My old one was still fine and will probably be on sale soon, but this refurbished Galaxy Watch 7 has LTE. I can set up fall detection and use the emergency SOS feature in case of an emergency when my phone is out of reach or broken. Safety first. I can also leave my phone at home and still receive or make calls.

My music listening is inconsistent. I don’t listen to much music, sometimes weeks without any music streaming at all. And when I do, I often listen to some automatic playlists with recommendations from YouTube. I don’t have any specific artists I always listen too. Furthermore, I don’t even have a specific genre I like the most, often it’s something electronic.

However, it appears that I listened to a lot of ambient or atmospheric electronic music lately. One artist popping up in my automatic playlists that I like quite a bit, is The Ambientalist (YouTube | Bandcamp).

Documenting it here on my blog, to maybe find it again in a few years and remember back. 🎧

As everyone recommends Signal as a Telegram alternative, I actually gave it a try again. Turns out it still does not support multiple devices, even unlike WhatsApp.

But after some more research, I found Molly, a Signal fork for Android that adds some features like multi-device support, but uses the Signal servers. I am not sure if it violates the Signal Terms of Service. But as long as Signal only supports Desktop or iPad as linked devices, I need to use this, as I want to be reachable on my second phone as well.

Before I start annoying friends and family, though, let’s test it first. You are welcome to message me and say hello! 😊

https://jlel.se/signal (I might invalidate this link though, when I receive too much spam.)

Today, I did my longest bike tour this year so far. I went north to a lake in a neighboring district, mostly following the Weser-Harz-Heide route, which I already partly followed on my journey from Kassel to Braunschweig last year. There I sat down on a bench for half an hour and then returned. I had plenty of headwinds on the way there and a bit of tailwind on the way back, although the wind was mostly from the side. This time, I luckily did not mess up the OsmAnd tracking. Despite the wind, it was a lot of fun!

If you’re reading this, it seems that my GoBlog Telegram Bot (just another embedded plugin) is working!

This new bot probably has no real use, but it was a good experimental project to try and get a bit more familiar with the current state of GitHub Copilot, especially as we can now use it at work.

Probably the biggest use is for uploading photos from my phone. I can just send them as files and get a link back. But I can also send text and it publishes it. Even with frontmatter to configure parameters for the post.

Regarding Copilot: For whatever reason (maybe my adblocking DNS?) the VSCode extension keeps asking me to log in again, but still works for the non-chat features.

However, I am still a little worried that AI will make my work obsolete.