Life Update (September 2025)

In the time since the last post, which has been nearly a year, a lot has happened! While I haven’t been in the mood to drive this project forward, I have kept busy with work, visiting family, reading and activities related to church.

Health

Another thing I continued to pursue is working on my physical shape. My recipe has been taking the slow-and-steady route: exercising with my own weight at home in a way that does not take hours out of a day, and doing so frequently enough to hold or improve my shape. Theres a bunch of walking in lunch breaks and due to public transportation, too. Another factor has been staying away from cake and candy for most of the time, apart from birthdays and other rare exceptions (maybe once in two weeks). I also greatly reduced my coffee intake.

Personal Life

Currently, I’m catching up with my Greek and want to get to a point where it feels more natural to use it in daily life. This week, I brought my greek New Testament to a Bible study. We were working with a text that I’ve read in Greek previously and the situation was a good nudge to focus my eyes on the greek text and learn to process it better.

Another thing that has happened is that my closest friend moved into my town recently. He previously lived in a village nearby and we had plenty of opportunities to meet throughout the weeks anyways, but its still nice to live in walking distance from eachother. We haven’t made much of it until now, but we’ll see what the future brings.

As briefly touched in the section about health, there are multiple hours per week that I spend on public transport now. It started out as an experiment at the turn of the year and turned into a firm habit. One important benefit is that this saves us money, especially since it allowed us to ditch one of our cars. In addition to that, I spend much of these hours reading or studying. Both when in motion or waiting at the station. The downside are some annoying or disgusting experiences here and there and a need to be spontaneous when traffic happens to be messy. Afterall, german rail is notorious among Germans for being late und unreliable. Driving also has traffic jams, so there is not too much of a difference I guess. Overall, it has been an okay experience and the benefits outweigh the downsides for me.

Conquering The Phone

As an older member of Gen Z, I finally dealt a crushing blow to the digital snake that entangles our hands and minds too easily, too often. Namely: turning my phone to greyscale. After reading about it on a forum, I introduced this glorious upgrade into my life about a week or so ago and it seems to make a serious difference. There is plenty of stuff I have not watched on my YouTube’s “Watch Later” list, I have been reading a bunch and found the focus and clarity to redesign this site.

Who would have thought that doing things outside the phone becomes more interesting if you strip the colors away? Things are still very readable with this setting. The only problem I can think of so far are the blue checkmarks on WhatsApp. They can barely, if at all possible, be told apart from their grey counterparts. However, the colors quickly return at the press of a button to solve this minor issue. My wife said that my screen looks like a newspaper now, but I like it and prefer that over having my phone look like a highly stimulating gambling machine.

Another nice productivity strategy I found is the 2-Minute Rule: “If you can do a task in two minutes or less, do it immediately”.

Updating This Site

Since yesterday, ive found myself in a productive flow state regarding this site. I stayed inside for almost all of the day and finished what must be about 93% of a redesign, after work-work. Then, I finished the job earlier today and wrote this post. It feels really good to be back to speed, and the site is in a state that is more fun to work with now.

Leading up to the redesign, I grew somewhat apart from the entire indieweb-vibe, since much of the stuff in the indieweb context feels half baked or annoyingly political. In the end, indieweb it stayed. Afterall, we’re non-commercial here and there are enough sites that are digital business cards. Usually I don’t take “before and after”-pictures to track progress, but I remembered doing so this time! :D

Old design:

New design: