mastodon 4.7.3Freelance software plumber. Cyclist, coffee addict, nature-lover, bread maker, masochist train traveler. He/him. English/Deutsch/magyar.
Goodreads has recently introduced "quarter of a star" granularity for rating books. What a terrible, half-assed UI to do that!
And what a missed opportunity to do "fifth of a star" instead, and visualize it by filling the five points of the star separately...
My name almost made it through Trenitalia’s name validation regex. Almost.
Animal encounter of the day: a caterpillar dressed in high visibility fur :)
One of my most memorable bird encounters was this juvenile robin at a camp site few weeks ago in Slovenia. It probably hatched and grew up there, accustomed to and not afraid of (probably fed by) humans. It visited our tent several times a day and stared at us expectantly… (and we indeed offered some oat flakes, unable to resist).
Can't get enough long tailed tit pics :) So many cute looks, so much fluff! 🐥 ❄️
#LongTailedTit #Birds #BirdPhotography #Photography #Schwanzmeise #Őszapó
Sure, sunrise pics are cliché but I almost never get to see it over the true horizon, so here is one. Sorry notsorry.
So I bought this fancy camping pot with heat exchanger hoping to speed up cooking in small quantities.
I was suspicious seeing the spot welding on the exchanger so I made a test at home to compare how much faster it boils 250ml water, compared to a basic steel cup with tinfoil lid, using my Esbit stove.
Results were underwhelming: basic steel cup beat fancy cup by 10 seconds (5 min 20s vs 5 min 30).
I was wondering why we did not get any hosting requests on #Warmshowers all summer, while we normally get at least 1-2 inquiries every week in peak season.
When I signed in today, I realized Warmshowers got a drastic redesign, and I had to get though a password reset an re-onboarding process.
Which makes me wonder if they screwed up and inactivated all accounts in the new system until everyone signed in the first time :D Would not surprise me tbh.
I really hope the EU will soon force the hands of the railway companies to get their shit together and come up with reasonable ways to book international train tickets.
I took me almost 2 hours to realize there is no way for me to find a reasonable route to get to the French Mediterranean coast by train, taking bikes from Hungary.
As it is one of the very few plants still blossoming in the wild around us after 3 months of no rain, I transplanted a few yarrows to our garden. I hope they will thrive here next summer! “Normal” people consider it as weed…
A flock of long tailed tits visited our tiny garden right while we were having coffee on the terrace. They spent a few minutes surveying the garden, looking every corner, then left. Interestingly, a great tit also joined the gang. This is the best shot I was able to get.
Autumn crocus season in ON. 🌷
They’d look even prettier in front of a green backdrop, but that’s not what we have after this record breaking hot and dry summer :(
Went to the local open air #cinema today (which sounds more fun than it is thanks to smokers), saw Hen directed by György Pálfi, which is the best weird movie I’ve seen lately:) Starring an actual hen (many of them as the protagonist), fox and other animals, and some human trafficking at the Greek countryside never visited by tourists. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
#movies #cinema #hen
I finally got to publish my revised bikepacking packing list \o/
Unfortunately I ran out of CR2032 cells for my scale last time I went for a trip so I don't know the total weight but I can lift the loaded bike with one hand, can carry it on stairs and board any train without removing anything from the bike.
What gear do you use?
https://blog.salomvary.hu/2026/09/05/my-bikepacking-packing-list-2026.html
Are these AI generated posters/ads/billboards the modern equivalent of using Comic Sans and MS Office clipart pictures in Word for the same purpose?
(Pics from different nearby venues and events in Nagymaros, Hungary.)
People with a green lawn like this after a near-zero-rain summer should be publicly shamed.
It took me quite a few attempts to set up a minimal Git over HTTP server, mainly because Apache HTTP Server is a beast and my httpd.conf skills are rusty, but here is a Docker compose.yml if someone ever needs this: https://gist.github.com/salomvary/17f9c0fb01733c84f33edd882aae88a3
Speaking of #gardening, I was about to free up roughly a square meter of ground to plant wildflower seeds for next year, but had to give up because the soil is so dry and hard as rock. The holes for the three small yarrows took 15 minutes of hard work. I hope it will get soaked enough in autumn before it gets frozen…
TIL there is a movie shot in 2025 on a 2008 Sony Ericsson phone at 144p.
Local cinema will screen it on a big screen, and I wonder if it'd be bearable to watch or would I die from complications from visual horrors?
Today in #programming:
- Tried to connect GitHub Copilot in PyCharm to an MCP server (Figma) - a first MCP thing for me - gave up after 2 hours
- Tried to figure out why some of our GitHub Actions are stalling, gave up after 2 hours
- Spent 2 hours fixing some flaky Playwright tests (as usual, unlike humans, Playwright can click on things before they are ready to be clicked on)
Not a fun day.
Collected my Strava activities from my recent bikepacking trip in Slovenia and Italy, embedded on a single blog post. I would love to write proper travel diaries, but I never find the time. This is better than nothing: https://blog.salomvary.hu/2026/08/12/bikepacking-ljubljana-dolomites.html
Which country am I in now?
The annual swarming of burrowing mayflies (Ephoron virgo, Uferaas, dunavirág) has started on the Danube.
They were extinct in Hungary due to water pollution for 40 years and only returned in 2012.
🎄 season is apparently ON.
Took a lot of patience to succeed at watching a movie that I foolishly did not download in advance in Apple TV. Seems like the folks in Cupertino can’t afford to test their shit on non-highspeed connection. There were more bugs surfacing in the UI than features.
Ps. go watch Arrival, it’s a good movie.
Had a minor #WildCamping incident last night: a fox stole the trash bag from the covered entrance of my tent, and as a revenge for chasing it away (I got woken up by the noise), it chewed through the plastic straps of two hiking poles we left outside :D
Dandelions decided for a late blossoming 🌼
Which made me think about growing them indoors for spring vibes on dark winter days. Would that work?
Today was the last hot day of this awful summer. It was hot as fuck and we did not have a significant (as in not evaporated in a few hours) rain since May. Also no thunderstorms at all.
And they say this it the mildest summer of all the remaining summers I get to see…
I was afraid iOS 26 will be the Kiss of Death to my iPhone 13 Mini, and indeed it is. Battery life (new battery, 3 months old) is a laughable 4 hours at moderate usage, apps are lagging, some take dozens of seconds to start, sometimes end up in bizarre “should not happen” states, interactions sometimes handled after half a second to seconds of freeze :(
Not sure what my next move will be, seriously considering moving into a cave.
