In der Schule machten wir oft Ausflüge nach Berlin. Ob Besuche in Museen oder des Weihnachtsmarktes am Alexanderplatz (da wo heute das ALEXA steht). Mit meinem Vater auf die Internationale Funkaufstellung die Neusten Technikerrungenschaften bestaunen oder Shoppen mit Freunden. Berlin war immer die große Stadt von der ich auf eine Art fasziniert war, weil man dort alles bekommen konnte (Online Shopping war noch Anfang der 2000er noch nicht sehr stark verbreitet). Auf der anderen Seite: Laut, hektisch und extreme Armut. Zu der Zeit als ich noch Abiturent gewesen bin, konnte ich mir bei Leibe nicht vorstellen, einmal nach Berlin zu ziehen.

The Xbox 360 was my third console (first the SNES, second the Xbox classic). I purchased it in 2009 after a long period of consideration.

I was still a student and was happy when I could clear my head with video games.

Little by little, my game collection took on a large size. I bought a lot of used games on “eBay Kleinanzeigen”. That was cheap.

But little by little, the console gathered dust under my TV. I no longer paid any attention to it. However, I didn’t want to part with it either. There were still a lot of games that I had great experiences with: I still like to tell the story to a friend about how we unboxed the first “Read Dead Redemption” back then and played it with enthusiastic eyes for months. I haven’t experienced something that compelling in a long time. There are a number of games I’d like to finish or revisit to bring back old memories. There are also a few games I want to play through again.

Mostly I developing for the ESP32 board. I love the ESP32 because it has a big community (many helpful libraries and documentations) and have integrated Bluetooth and WiFi. But the programming is horrible with the Arduino Editor because some nice features I missed:

• package management (It’s not very easy to describe which libraries in which versions I have used at development for people who try to compile my projects from Github)
• modern code editor features like syntax highlighting, code auto completion (why the Arduino IDE can’t remember that I decleared some variables in the top??) and direct navigating to methods via mouse-click
• integrated support for version control

So I switched to the PlatformIO IDE quite quickly. It is easy to integrate as a plugin into VS Code and meets all my requirements.

When I was a kid in 1998, I was flipping through my gaming magazine and curiously put the magazine CD in my drive and came across the demo version of “Theme Hospital”, I couldn’t have guessed that this game would inspire me almost 20 years later.

“Theme Hospital” is a fun hospital simulation from Bullfrog at first glance: you create rooms, hire doctors and staff. Take care of patients with their diseases. But everything is on a very thoughtful and not serious level.

In this post I would like to look back to the origin of my PC affinity, which later influenced my professional career.

Technology enthusiast

It started quite early, in my childhood. Even at a young age, I was strongly excited and attracted by everything technical, electronic. Walking with my parents through the department store, left and right pretty clothes, all kinds of household utensils but I was driven to the game consoles: Here you could try out for myself and dive into strange worlds. Given my age, of course, I didn’t know a bit about how exactly this magic worked. It was like a medium from another planet for a 10 year old child, but I wish I had my own console for home.

I have had my Twitter account since 2009, when I created it for a university project. A whole time not actively used and only in my active time as a bike activist almost like an addict used. I’ve been upset by all the bad news for a long time, so I only check Twitter from time to time. At the moment I have three accounts. Each for its specific target group: one as a bicycle and do-gooder, one for the Ostworld podcast and one, still quite little used, for my development topics.