Category: Random

The other week we were hanging out with our friends K. Adam and Emily, and K. Adam shared with us some delicious Italian cookies he had made. Their texture and almond flavor reminded me of my favorite German Christmas cookies, called “Vanillekipferl”. Maybe you’ve seen them or even had them before – they’re half moon-shaped cookies with somewhat crumbly dough, usually topped with powdered sugar (or “snow”).

Vanillekipferl have been a staple in my life for as long as I can remember, and every Christmas I would eat far too many of them. Every Christmas I would love to come home to my parents and eat my mom’s Vanillekipferl. But when I moved to the US and then COVID hit, gone was my ability to go home for Christmas – which is when I made them myself (or rather, with my then-girlfriend, now wife 😊) for the first time and asked my mom for the recipe. They were and still are my favorite Christmas cookies after all.

So as we were talking about the cookies the other week, K. Adam asked me for the recipe for Vanillekipferl, but all the instructions I had were in German, and also were missing some explanations that my mom had just told me in addition. This led me to think that I should write down this recipe, in English, with all the ingredients and amounts and temperatures translated too. To share them with others of course, but even to help myself when I make them here in the US – yay for the imperial system. 😂

So in this post I’m sharing with you my mom’s recipe for my favorite Vanillekipferl.

Read more

This past weekend, my girlfriend and I walked the 17 mile-long San Francisco Crosstown Trail, which spans from the southeast end to the northwest end of the city. It was an amazing experience and I can totally recommend it to anybody living in or visiting San Francisco. It presented completely new areas of the city to us, and I’m sure that it will even allow long-term San Franciscans that haven’t yet walked it to rediscover their city.

With all our impressions and photos taken, this made the perfect case for a web story – the open web version of those visual stories we’ve all come to know through platforms like Snapchat or Instagram. If you are interested in creating this kind of immersive content as integrated part of your website as well, try the Web Stories editor plugin for WordPress.

Read more

I cannot believe that my most-listened track is actually a German song.

Music is a very important part of my life. I’m sure that is the case for many people, yet I wanted to explicitly mention it in this post. I listen to music during almost my entire work day, I have been playing piano since I was 8 years old and I also write songs occasionally and produce a few things using tools like Cubase and such. So yesterday I had the thought of looking back and thinking about the songs that I have listened to over all the years, songs that may even have shaped me in a way. I asked myself whether I could determine a song for every year that I associate the most with that time in my life. Things like that are just something I’m interested in, for example I’ve also been keeping track of my musical listening habits through Last.fm since 2007. It was also very nice to take some time to dive into old memories. So in this post I’m putting the list of songs out there. This is kind of a very personal post in some cases; maybe you’re just interested in such things the same way as I am, or you are curious about music recommendations, or you would like to know me better. For me the reason of writing this is that I simply want to keep track – after all, people used to call blogs weblogs, and that’s what I’m doing here – logging my favorite songs for each year of my life. Well, not my entire life: I will start with the year 2000 (I was 10 years old then), since I can’t quite recall anything before that and it would mostly have been entirely charts music anyway – and you will notice that especially in the first years of the list, my musical taste was still evolving. 🙂 By the way, to start things off, I’m pretty sure that I can say that German band Rammstein has been the only constant for as long as I can remember: Although none of their songs is present in the following list, I have listened to them at the same time I listened to Britney Spears, and I still listen to them now from time to time. But now, here’s the list of my favorite songs for each year as far as I can remember. Some of the years I would say there was more than 1 song I could have put there, but I think what I have there is a pretty good representation of my taste in music and also events in my life. Please note in advance that the songs represent what I’ve listened to for each year – it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was released in that year.

Read more

A while ago I thought about having my Spotify playlists streamed to my Playstation 3. My sound system is connected to that device, placed in my living room, so I needed to find a way to stream the whole sound output (also called “Stereo Mix”) from my Mac to the PS3. In this article I will explain how you can stream any sound from your Mac, for example Spotify, to any local device using WLAN, in this case my Playstation 3.

Read more

Okay, this short article kind of falls out of the ordinary topics, but I simply think it’s important. In this article you will find out how to solve the WLAN connection problems of the Fritzbox 6320 Cable provided by Unitymedia. Please skip to the last paragraph to see all the necessary steps in a list.

Read more