Finding events sucks – and how I fixed it

This was again and again my experience when I was looking for, mostly in my case, Berlin startup events.

Using multiple sites, throwing keywords at them, getting back some nice results but layered between spammy stuff or random remote events.

I was never satisfied and had the impression that there aren’t that many events.

Today I know, there are actually a lot – I just missed them.

Why do I know? I hacked together a tiny crawler, commanded it to check for all relevant keywords on multiple sites and BAAAM I was flashed to learn that there are up to a dozen events per day!

I wrapped it in some really basic design, even sprinkled in a bit of AI for some basic tagging.

Voila, finally I had the thing I wanted: One simple list of all startup events in Berlin.

I’ve put it online and now updating it a few times per week to share the fun with everyone.

Let me know if you have feature wishes or feedback.

My missing sloppy.io Docs

For a customer project (craw.ly, you guess it a crawler) we are using sloppy.io. Sadly the docs are not that detailed and clear yet, especially for me – a developer, not a devops guy. So I want to share my findings, that they can help someone else. Or me, when I have forgotten most of them – in two weeks 😉

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Three tips of what to do in Tokyo if you don’t want to see concrete

Tokyo is amazing! And it has a lot of concrete. It is also quite crowded. And often you are in rooms without windows. That all can feel less amazing, especially if you are not used to it.

So what can you do if you want to see a bit of nature under a real sky and feel some free space? Here comes my three-plus recommendations, all personally tested:

Continue reading Three tips of what to do in Tokyo if you don’t want to see concrete

My most favorite battery: Heat

Once in a while, I am thinking about how to store energy. Concepts I was thinking about so far:

  • Double use the tower of wind turbines by lifting weights inside it: Sadly not really an option. Even if it would be possible, the capacity would be just ~10 minutes of buffering.
  • Using photovoltaics to pumping water into a reservoir on the roof of a building: Physically a similar idea than above, just more worse because we have to convert the electricity forth and back. So, no option either.
  • Store the energy of roof solar panels as heat: If we take a one meter cube filled with water and heat it to nearly boiling, that would make already 4000 cups of coffee or ~20 hot bathtubs. Impressive! think about if we use a whole cellar room as storage.
  • And what about batteries? Let’s compare: A Tesla Powerwall contains 13,5 kWh, that are a bit more than 500 cups of coffee. Not that bad, at least capacity wise.

Continue reading My most favorite battery: Heat

The calculator that can save you one day of your life

It is annoying: Let’s say you are typing a longer calculation with multiple numbers into a classical calculator. At the end – of course – you recognize that there was a mistake at the beginning. So you have to do everything all over again. And then another number changes …*

That was my starting point. Why can’t we have something like a notepad, where, when you write your problems, the results appear on their own? You can see what you calculated and you can change every step at any time and get immediately the new result?

Continue reading The calculator that can save you one day of your life