LostFocus

Hi, I'm Dominik Schwind, friend of the internet. And this is my blog.

A couple of ways you can follow me around on the internet.

The prefered way would probably be with a feed reader - here is my RSS feed.

If you need more direct access, you can follow me here with Mastodon or similar sites: @dominik@nona.social. You can also follow this blog via @dominik@lostfocus.de.

2026-W24: Endurance

Another big 24 hour race this week, this time the Le Mans one. I’m usually not a WEC guy but this one is special, of course. Otherwise this week was a calm one, again. (Next week won’t. Foreshadowing!)

Taskmaster Series 21 concluded, which is always a bit sad. The ten episodes are going by so fast. Before this series I usually watched it on the Friday in my lunch break, this time I stayed up on Thursday until it popped up on YouTube – and it is quite funny how different it feels as late night entertainment. I’m having my doubts about the cast of the next series, so let’s see how things go.

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Hashtag Motorsport

I very much prefer the fediverse aka Mastodon (yes, I know) over the other text-based social networks. Especially over the one that used to be so important to me.
But it does have it downsides and I usually notice them when I am trying to see who else besides the people I follow is talking about stuff. Especially during events like the Nürburgring 24h, LeMans this weekend, in general all motorsports events. The target demographics don’t seem to overlap all that much. (And no, it’s not because I’m on a small instance. It’s the same on the hashtags on mastodon.social.) I guess the chances of enthusiasts, the racing series, teams or even drivers finding their way to our corner of the internet is really small.
Bummer. But not enough to get me to look at that place again.

2026-W23: Nap Time

A calm and rather cool summer week. Not quite as rainy as forecast but not the hot temperatures of the last few weeks.
I didn’t do all that much – slept a lot, futzed around with my websites and learned more about Vietnamese addresses, reverse geocoding and the OpenStreetMap data model than I ever wanted to know.

Geocoding is complicated

This is a copy of an issue that I just created in the Nominatim repository. Sadly my skills in Python (and my knowledge of the OSM data model) aren’t good enough to poke around in the code on my own to figure out what is happening.

Reverse Geocoding in the Ho Chi Minh City center return wrong city

What did you search for?

https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=geojson&lat=10.7686020&lon=106.6900885

What result did you get?

The address field in the JSON response returns Thủ Đức as city:

{
    "address": {
        "amenity": "Little HaNoi Egg Coffee",
        "house_number": "212",
        "road": "Le Lai Street",
        "neighbourhood": "Khu phố 3",
        "suburb": "Ben Thanh",
        "city": "Thủ Đức",
        "ISO3166-2-lvl4": "VN-SG",
        "postcode": "70200",
        "country": "Vietnam",
        "country_code": "vn"
    }
}

This is a bit complicated as Thủ Đức currently exists twice in OSM: once as a (former) subdivision of HCMC and now a navigation marker: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/12925776412 (Which used to be a city) and as a suburb: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7138136 (Which is now a ward)

Both of them are not in the city center, though – they’re on the other side of the Saigon river.

What result did you expect?

I expected Ho Chi Minh City in the city field. The point is right in the middle of the Bến Thành suburb, which is correctly stated as the suburb in the json return

Bến Thành – https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/19260503 – has the correct relation to Ho Chi Minh City – https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1973756 (Alas to the district of Ho Chi Minh City, which includes many cities. I am aware that this stuff isn’t easy.)

Further details

I checked a point that is actually in Thủ Đức: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=geojson&lat=10.8466489&lon=106.7510356 – here we can find Thủ Đức both in the suburb and the city field.

A lot of the data on OSM is still a bit out of date since the 2025 Vietnamese administrative reforms

Getting old

You get old and you start thinking, “Oh, I better make the world around me miserable. Then I won’t mind leaving so much.” That’s what you got to fight against.
– Bob Mortimer

2026-W22: Classics

Can you believe it’s Sunday already? It’s still nice and sunny but the weather forecast (and a look outside) tells me that this is going to be over soon.

There was a lot of family this week – it would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday, so my aunts and a whole bunch of cousins were in town for a remembrance dinner. And because this is exactly the kind of situation where ideas can happen, one of my cousin decided to go to Zürich on the next day with his daughter for the Metallica concert and my sister and me decided to tag along. It was quite something to see these old men rock out in a stadium of 45’000 people.

Iron Core

This series is an incredible deep dive into the cryptic short codes that are behind flight bookings and how the systems behind the curtain work all the way until the passenger reaches the destination. I’ve read them all the way through yesterday and I’ll likely read through them again today. I already checked on the entries on my old flight tickets and some example booking on the Matrix Airfare Search and this is exactly the kind of look into big complicated systems that is extremely interesting to me.
My only (minor) complaint would be that I’d have liked more links to the sources for a more detailed deep-dive but it’s already quite something.

Yesterday I already linked to the second article in the series, (actually before noticing it is part of a series) after I found it via Bruce Lawson’s reading list.

2026-W21: Blueberry

A sunny Sunday, a few clouds in the sky, windows wide open, iced coffee, Italo disco on moderate volume, this is a good early summer morning.

My “cleaning out my personal side-projects”-project is moving very slowly. Mostly because I’m faster at having new ideas than being able to let go of the old ones.
Oh well.

100.000

Last night I played some New Age easy listening music while reading and this morning I found out that my 100.000th scrobble is now “Age Of Loneliness” by Enigma. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Great

I really managed to mess up my sleep schedule beyond anything resembling smart. I’m wide awake now. I won’t be tomorrow morning, quite the opposite.

Week notes

By now you might have noticed that I use week notes to keep myself from abandoning this blog. And yeah, I quite enjoy writing them, too, most week. Even though lately they’ve been a bit calmer than I’d like them to be. It is what it is.
On my travels through the internet I found a service for people who might like to do this as well but don’t have their own website. (Even though you really should!) I haven’t tested weeknotes.me but it does look nice and easy enough.

2026-W20: Neon

A week with a public holiday is a pretty good week. I got talked into going for an indoor miniature golf outing with my nieces and nephews which went about as well as expected.
I’ve been watching the Nürburgring 24h race and all the things around it for the last couple of days. Right now it’s still roughly four more hours and frankly, it got a bit boring on Saturday evening. I don’t regret going to bed at a normal time.

MusicBrainz

Back when we did things like “buy a cd and use iTunes to turn the music into mp3s” I used MusicBrainz Picard a lot to get all the metadata I needed. And then I kind of forgot about MusicBrainz.
Turns out: it is still going strong. It does lack quite a lot of the music I listen to, though. Which might not be so surprising because while I (mostly) listen to pop, there is also a whole bunch of dangdut and Luk thung. So I guess I’ll be doing a whole lot of editing MusicBrainz.

And don’t ask me why. It is mostly so that my ListenBrainz profile doesn’t look bad.

Morning Earworm #44: Things Can Only Get Better

I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.

This morning it was D:Ream with Things Can Only Get Better

2026-W19: May

Hm.

I moved all the little scripts I had running on a Raspberry Pi to my Mac Mini so I could install Home Assistant to it. So far I haven’t done anything wild with it, except created a bunch of dashboards. Who’d have known that the carbon dioxide level is directly influenced by humans and by open windows? (Yes, everybody. Including me. But now I have nice little lines in my browser to see it in almost real-time.)