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.

Worrying Signs of Getting Old

I’ve noticed these signs of getting old in the last few days:

  • Weird technology mistakes: on Saturday I just wanted to add one of our family gatherings to my calendar on the iPhone. I typed “Family gathering” and the phone helpfully used all the information from an old family gathering, (2019!) copied them into the new entry – and then sent out an invitation everyone who was invited back then. At least it was the right side of the family and nobody was shunned since then, it would have been even more embarrassing.
  • Change feels like a personal attack: “my” grocery store has new fridges and they used that fact to reorganise the charcuterie and ice cream sections. I can’t find anything anymore! This is an outrage. Oh. And the section for cold drinks. Good god, what is the world coming to?
  • Young people these days: when I went to Munich last weekend, the young boys behind the hotel counter used “Du” with me. Listen up, you little punk with your thin blonde moustache and your weird 30s haircut – you’re still staff. Ehm. Sorry.
  • Unnecessary nostalgia: yesterday I was actually very blue about the twenty years since my first Tweet thing. And about the web we had, so full of hope and weird CSS hacks.
  • Forgetfulness: I know I had a fifth thing when I had the idea for this blog post this morning but now I can’t recall. (This one is a bit of a cop-out. I know for sure that this would have happened to me at any age.)

Latest linkblog entries

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Twttr

20 years ago I joined Twitter. I miss the old days of the internet.

2026-W29: Journey

It was the best of times, it was the wurst of times. The first two days of the week were being spend in Munich, a friend of mine had a stopover there and we planned to have dinner for a few months already. The time I wasn’t eating wurst with her, her friend and her brother, I spent at the amazing Deutsches Museum, marveling at all the old planes, trains and automobiles.
After a short work week, there was more wurst last night – my uncle invited friends and family to his hut in the middle of the forest for a little summer party and what a jolly time we had, as my slight headache this morning can attest.

2026-W28: Passages

A birthday, a funeral and a train journey that actually went just fine filled the week that was over faster than I could look around. Just like I mentioned last week, the current weather has a bigger effect on me than the one during the heat wave so everything has been a bit of a blur. I did do some touristy things on Sunday, which was nice, walked around, had a beer, as one does and that was that.

Morning Earworm #45: I Can’t Stop Me

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

This morning it was I Can’t Stop Me by Twice and it is 100% because Instagram keeps showing me reels of that girl who screams along with it

Agent

I added a dominik.md to a project that I only work on once in a while. It contains a list of things still unfinished and a documentation about my decisions I made so far and oh boy is one of my coworkers livid.
Frankly, in a time when people add markdown files for a mysterious person with a french first name who I have never seen at the office, this shouldn’t be too controversial.

Homesick for virtual places

The “Years Ago Today” plugin on my blog just reminded me that I linked to GTA V GeoGuesser four years ago. I clicked just for a laugh, oh, maybe I still remember, haha – and I wasn’t really prepared what a deep feeling of nostalgia and (I guess?) homesickness this would trigger.
A long time ago “hanging out in GTA Online with the boys” was my number one third place – there was a time when I just knew I could switch on my Xbox and Skype (yes, it was that long ago) and someone would be willing to just hang out. I mean, of course, we’d do the races and the heists and stuff like that, but the main reason to do that, really, was to chat about life and stuff. We’re spread out all over Germany and this gave us a reason to still be in contact.
Of course people’s circumstances and priorities change, life happens, and so surely but slowly this period in our lives came to an end.

But oh boy, clicking around in this virtual world, I sure do miss these hangout sessions with my friends.

(Now how is that for “too personal”?)

2026-W27: Blur

Another data point for my thoughts about blog posts and especially weeknotes being personal or not: Roy read my post and decided to be less personal. Which is interesting – he does also mention that he is writing a private journal as well, which I am not. Basically what I blog and what I remember organically are all that I can recall in the future, which might explain my predilection to post boring interna.

Meanwhile it’s been a weird week. While the heat wave might be over, the current weather does have actually more of an impact on my well-being than when it was really properly hot. Unless I had some proper external stimuli to kick my brain into gear I really struggled to concentrate on anything. I’m trying to understand what it is. It is still very warm and rather humid, but that usually doesn’t have much of an effect on me. In fact, I rather like it. (Even though probably more when I’m in a tropical country, but even so.) It might just be the light: we had a thin to medium layer of clouds most of the time and the light has a very weird diffuse quality to it.

Fan

For the last couple of days when it was really hot I had my big fan running almost 24/7: during the day to bring some respite through moving air and during the night to make sure that the cooler air from outside makes it into the parts of the apartment where there isn’t much of a natural flow of air.
So just for the record: today has been the first day in a while when I didn’t turn it on because frankly – it’s fresh enough as it is, even with the sun shining.

Too Personal

A few weeks ago I talked with Dirk about blogging and while this conversation got him to write a post about the state of the world he told me that week notes aren’t for him as they are too personal.

I’ve been thinking about this conversation a lot since then. I read a lot of blogs, through my feed reader, bubbles.town, Kagi Small Web, indieblog.page and more. There are a lot of people who write extremely personal things! And there are a lot of people who manage to write interesting posts almost on a daily basis and there’s still nothing obvious about them as a person in those posts. It is very fascinating.

Personally I don’t think my week notes are that personal but in general, yes, they take the place of a diary. I’ve said it quite often: I write my blog mainly for future me, to look back on what happened. And I often have the urge to overshare – after all, where if not here? It’s not like anyone in real life is particularly interested.
And then there’s of course always the old context problem. Given my well-developed Witzelsucht I know that it isn’t always easy to tell which things I am serious about and what is just a joke – sometimes not even for myself.

So I guess I’ll ponder this topic some more, while trying to find the right balance for me and my posts. It seems to be an ebb and flow anyway and in the end, being personal might just be the best part of having a personal website.

2026-W26: Mute

I guess it was the heat that got to people’s brains. This week I more than ever in the just about nine years I’ve been on Mastodon I had to block and mute and filter to keep my timeline halfway sane.

On Monday evening I went to a photo walk in Basel. The vibe in the city was great, everyone was in a relaxed evening mood.

I am spending most of the weekend watching the 24h of Spa, which should be the last of the 24h races of the year that I follow along. It’s been pretty exciting so far and there are still another 90 minutes to go.
As a tribute to the race I’ve done my own little enduro this morning – three hours in Automobilista 2 in a Porsche in Spa. I’ve managed to end up third which is pretty good, given that I got punted out after the first hour and had to fight my way back up to the front.

The Golden Triangle

I have linked to videos from OTR a few times on my link blog but this one deserves a post on here. It’s a feature-length documentary about the “Golden Triangle” within Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, the history how it became the center of the global drug trade and how it in many ways still is. A fascinating story of lost armies, hill tribes, gangsters and – of course, because it is OTR – food.

Very much worth the time.

2026-W25: Transport and Sandwiches

I mostly spend this week up in Cologne. A bunch of in-person meetings, a bit of hanging out with friends and coworkers, good (and some not so good) food and the days went by very quickly.

For the first time in quite some while I took the train instead of driving and frankly – when it works and once you’re in the train, it is really a nice way to travel distances like this. Train stations are a bit of a slog, though.

Now over the weekend I’m slowly acclimating myself to the warm weather that will be around for quite a few days.

Morning Earworm #45: Senza Una Donna

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

(This one I really can’t explain. It’s not my kind of music. I can’t remember hearing it anywhere lately. And yet here we are.) This morning it was Senza Una Donna by Zucchero and Paul Young – and frankly, I hope I can exorcise it by writing this blog post.

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.