Seeing that devastated family house basement left a big impression on me. The destruction level of a flooded basement full of family memories was really high. 99% of everything in that basement is lost after a couple weeks in dirty, mucky river water and slick. Furniture destroyed after it floated freely in the dark water. When the water eventually recided, all of the stuff, even the heavy furniture pieces, got thrown around the rooms. A photo projector and dias, all in there containers, probably 40 years old, all destroyed. Photo albums completely returned to sticky pulp as the water dissolved the paper. When you try to pick it up, it all falls apart. Old board games, puzzle pieces, even a whole set of the classic electronic Battlefield game, all scattered around the water and covered in muck. The pieces kept coming towards the vacuum cleaner head while I was working to suck out the lower levels of the basement. We managed to get about 100 buckets of stinky dark river water out. Books were everywhere and also completely destroyed. It really hurt me emotionally to see all these family memoriabilia scattered and destroyed like that. Perhaps as a dad, it is one of my worst nightmares that our family memories would be returned to only that ... memories which eventually will be all forgotten and lost.
Never keep your precious things in your basement!
@jackyalcine The hardest "Meta" app to ditch for me and my family will be WhatsApp - it's the only thing my parents in law are accepting right now as chat app. We have about 7GB worth of picture files in our family group. I backed these up, but still will be hard to replace with anything else.
Really impressed with YunoHost and NextCloud as a solution for our family online presence.
Папа, поверь — Dad, believe
"After a post on Instagram complaining about his father’s disbelief went viral, he launched a website, papapover.com, which means “Papa, believe,” with instructions for Ukrainians about how to speak to their family members about the war.
“There are 11 million Russians who have relatives in Ukraine,” he said. “With 11 million people, everything can happen — from revolution to at least some resistance.”"
You keep your passwords and secrets secure in a password manager. But what happens when you lose access to the password manager, or when something bad happens to you and your family needs access to something really important only you knew the secret password for? I use a DiceKey. https://
What I've realized in the last year is that social media is very overrated. Family and real life friends matter more than any digital-only connection.
Had a great family weekend! Having an almost four year old tell you he loves you is the best feeling in the world.
Family is everything.
Donated blood at the Düsseldorf Uniklinik with the family today. Happy it worked out as the last time was June 2020...
Flood Destruction
Do not trust your basement
2 min read
Never-ever store irreplaceable family valuables in a basement or sou-terrain if you have the option. Today, I witnessed the utter destruction of a flooded basement full of family relics and memorabilia, two weeks after the flooding. Photo albums, photo slides and a projector, nothing stands the test of being submerged in water and being left in a damp moldy basement. Not even a model rail-way ...
Was feeling a bit down but watching some family videos and pictures from last year brightened me up. Good night.
The process was done faster than initially estimated. Took about 1,5 hours. Used the BurnAware free software.
Happy that it worked since these M-Discs by Verbatim don't come cheap. But if you look at archiving precious data like family pictures it still is worth the effort and money.
Currently burning 81GB worth of family pictures on to a 100GB M-Disc Blue Ray disc.The process will take 2,5 hours to complete.
Had a great day at the Leverkusen Neuland park and the Langenfeld Wasserski place with my family!
A beloved colleague passed away after a terrible car accident a couple of days ago. My thoughts go to her family and colleagues.
Enjoying a great spring day in Köln with the family.
Had a great Easter day with my family; we didn't leave the house - but enjoyed the chocolates and had a lot of fun with the new toys the Easter Bunny brought in exchange for my son's pacifiers. He was really brave about giving the pacifiers to the Easter Bunny so the new babies could also have theirs. So proud of him.
Tomorrow my family is finally going to visit a zoo again!
The origin of asking people to set a user name was in simpler times when people didn't have a gazillion other services or not a billion other people were using the same service already. Personally I don't mind it. As an early-adopter and someone with a fairly unique first and family name combination, I don't often have the problem of user names that already taken.
This week is turning out to be one of those periods where it would be really nice to have family nearby.