Die Becherhalter im Skoda Enyaq (Modelljahr 2027) sind überraschend schmal und ich tue mich schwer, einen passenden Thermo-Kaffeebecher dafür zu finden. Mein schöner Isolierbecher von LARS NYSØM, den ich geschenkt bekommen habe, passt leider nicht hinein :-/

Ich habe den Durchmesser ausgemessen und komme auf 6,8 cm:

Das Problem nun ist, dass man zwar einige Becher finden kann, die unten einen Durchmesse von 6,8 cm haben, dieser hier zum Beispiel ist aber nicht zylindrisch, sondern konisch und passt deshalb nicht vollständig hinein:

Zudem ist dieses spezielle Modell (von 720 Degree) etwas unpraktisch, da der Kaffee rundherum unter dem Deckel austreten kann, so dass er mir auf breiter Front in den Mund läuft und ich aufpassen muss, dass es mir nicht neben dem Mundwinkel heraustropft.

Der Becher passt auch nicht ganz in den Becherhalter, aber immerhin so weit, dass er nicht wackelt und auch nicht herauszufallen droht:

Ich werde die Augen weiter offen halten, vielleicht finde ich ja irgendwann einen schmalen Becher für meinen Weg zu Arbeit… Der im übrigen im Enyaq sehr angenehm ist.

Das mit dem Becherhalter ist irgendwie wenig clever, meiner Meinung nach.

Nachtrag vom 1.8.2026: Leider ist der Deckel dieses Kaffeebechers so konstruiert, dass der Inhalt sehr “breit” aus der Zirkumferenz herauskommt. Sozusagen ein Anti-Schnabelbecher mit automatischer Mundwinkel- und Wangenbefeuchtung. Nachdem ich mich jetzt 2x beim Autofahren mit Kaffee besudelt habe, wird dieser Becher leider nicht mehr mit mir mitkommen. Schade.

My machine is a Fedora 44 KDE box, but the procedure should be the same or at least very similar on other Linux systems.

Prerequisites

Let’s assume the following:

1. An Outlook archive file named archive.pst.
2. Inside this archive file: An email folder structure with first-level folders in the style of MyFolder1, MyFolder2 etc. and subfolder MyFolder1/MyFolder1Subfolder1 and so on.

I use the venerable readpst tool to extract folders and emails from the archive file. It’s included in common Linux distributions, but at least on Fedora you don’t install it directly, but rather the libpst package:

sudo dnf install libpst

# dnf info libpst
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Installed packages
Name            : libpst
Epoch           : 0
Version         : 0.6.76
Release         : 28.fc44
Architecture    : x86_64
Installed size  : 192.7 KiB
Source          : libpst-0.6.76-28.fc44.src.rpm
From repository : <unknown>
Summary         : Utilities to convert Outlook .pst files to other formats
URL             : http://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/
License         : GPL-2.0-or-later
Description     : The Libpst utilities include readpst which can convert email messages
                : to both mbox and MH mailbox formats, pst2ldif which can convert the
                : contacts to .ldif format for import into ldap databases, and pst2dii
                : which can convert email messages to the DII load file format used by
                : Summation.
Vendor          : Fedora Project

Working solution as of 2026

Modern KMail does not store emails in the traditional storage formats such as Maildir or Mbox. It uses KDE’s Akonadi database system. Therefore, we need to first export all folders and emails from the Outlook data file, then import these into KMail’s database using the File > Import Messages... command.

At first, I struggled a bit to find the correct output format option to make it work. readpst offers a number of different formats – basically various flavors of the MH/maildir and the mbox structures. It did not work with the -k option that is meant to produce a dedicated KMail format. I ended up using the simple -e option that produces a directory structure according to the folders in the Outlook archive, with one separate file for each email message.

1. Export folders and emails from the Outlook data file:

   readpst -e archive.pst
   

   There is no need to create and specifiy a dedicated directory, because readpst will create a directory structure with a generic top-level directory (in German, this directory is called “Outlook-Datendatei”, Outlook data file).

2. Import the folder structure and emails into KMail:

   a. In the File menu, choose Import Messages....

   b. In the Import dialog that appears, choose “Import KMail Maildirs and Folder Structure”.

   

   c. At the bottom of the dialog where it says “Please select the folder to import to”, click on the folder icon. Choose the existing “Local Folders”. There is no need to create an extra folder for the import because KMail will create a folder “KMail-Import” just for you.

   d. Click on “Next” and choose your .pst file.

   e. Start the import process.

3. All imported messages are marked as unread at first, but this will go away after a while.

I’ve been looking for a card reader for my CFexpress Type B cards that I use in my camera. There are not very many devices on the market, but they have a large price span: around 10x.

Since I was wondering whether the price correlates with speed, I decided to perform some simple tests using my existing hardware:

• a UGREEN CFexpress Type B card reader
• a PGYTECH CreateMate CFE-B/SD card reader
• a Nextorage B1 Pro CFexpress Type B card with 165 GB capacity
• the built-in NVMe SSD of my Thinkpad laptop, a Samsung SSD 990 PRO with 2 TB storage capacity.

The two external card readers are attached via USB-C/USB 3.2 Gen 2 to my Thinkpad Thunderbolt 3 dock. I am generally happy with both of them, I think they have good quality.

By the way, why should I even look for a new card reader in the first place? Well, the CreateMate card reader is a bit bulky and heavy and I once forgot to take it with me on vacation. So I was looking for something smaller and lighter.

Sequential read and write tests

I did not want to overcomplicate things, just get an impression if there are any differences between card readers or not. Therefore I decided to perform sequential read and write tests using dd as described at Baeldung.com.

These are the commands that I used in Fish shell; Bash has slightly different syntax.

#!/usr/bin/fish
echo "*** Sequential write test ***"
for i in (seq 1 5); dd if=/dev/zero of=/run/media/daniel/NIKON\ Z6_3/tempfile bs=1M count=1024 conv=fdatasync; end
echo
echo "*** Sequential read test ***"
for in in (seq 1 5); sudo sh -c "/usr/bin/echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" && dd if=/run/media/daniel/NIKON\ Z6_3/tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024; end
rm /run/media/daniel/NIKON\ Z6_3/tempfile

Results

The graph below shows the means and standard deviations of 5 tests for each device. The “direct” label denotes tests with the card reader attached directly to a USB-C/USB 3.2 Gen 2 port of my Thinkpad P14s laptop, rather than via the Thunderbolt 3 dock.

When attached to the Thunderbolt dock, the PGYTECH CreateMate reads from the CFexpress card much faster than the UGREEN reader. It does also write a bit faster than the UGREEN reader.

Attaching the card readers directly to the laptop results in increased speeds overall, and the differences between the UGREEN and the PGYTECH readers seems negligible.

However, regardless of how the readers are connected to the laptop, both are left in the dust by the internal SSD!

Is the observed difference in read speeds between the UGREEN and the PGYTECH card readers “clinically relevant”? Does it justify spending a lot more money for the PGYTECH reader? Given the very large difference of both of these card readers to the internal SSD, I don’t really think so.

What to expect from a “USB-C” or rather, USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection

It should be noted that the USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard has a nominal transfer speed of 10 GBit/s or 1.25 GB/s. As stated in the Wikipedia article on USB 3.2, actual transfer rates are round 0.8-1.0 GB/s. Still higher than what I measured.

My Thinkpad’s USB-C ports a really Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports that should be capable of transferring up to 40 Gbit/s or 5 GB/s. This would be in the internal SSD’s ballpark. However, the card readers have “only” USB 3.2 Gen 2. PGYTECH claims 1000 MB/s for the CreateMate and UGREEN 1250 MB/s for their device. The card itself claims read speeds of up to 1950 MB/s and write speeds of up to 1900 MB/s, which roughly corresponds to 1.86 and 1.90 GB/s. Obviously, the 0.3 to 0.6 GB/s that I measured are nowhere near any of these numbers.

Using Darktable’s local copies feature

Evidently, nothing is faster than the internal NVMe SSD.

This reminds me that Darktable has a feature to copy image files to the built-in SSD. This not only allows for faster read and write speeds, but also makes it possible to work on the images without having the card reader attached to the laptop: Darktable’s user manual on local copies.

Local copies (or rather, the XMP sidecar files) are synchronized whenever the external storage is attached when Darktable is starting up. I don’t know if Darktable will automatically remove synchronized local copies in case disk space gets low.

Conclusion

In practice, I am going to create local copies of my images and select and work on the local copies. Yes, the initial process of copying the files will take a few seconds less with the PGYTECH reader than with the UGREEN reader, but that is negligible given the amount of time that I spend on selecting the images and working on the RAW file development in total.

Therefore, if I decide to purchase a new reader, I will focus on the size and build, and the UGREEN reader is a strong contender when it comes to small size.

Aqua Mail worked perfectly well with both my personal as well as my university email accounts. But now it refused to connect to the university’s IMAP server:

The German error message says (somewhat clumsily): “Error Messages being synchronized: Invalid security certificate (SSL): No peer certificates.”

I suspected the mail server to be at fault. After all, my setup used to work. However, my laptop mail client was able to connect to the IMAP server without any problem.

Web search with “Aqua Mail no peer certificates” wasn’t helpful at all, either.

So I manually initiated an IMAP session with the server from the command line:

openssl s_client -connect $REDACTED:993 -crlf

This went well – I simply terminated the session by issuing

a logout

(If you, like me, are not fluent in IMAP – the a in front of the logout command is an arbitrary, but required identifying prefix.)

The output started with these lines:

Connecting to [REDACTED]
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=2 C=GR, O=Hellenic Academic and Research Institutions CA, CN=HARICA TLS RSA Root CA 2021
verify return:1
depth=1 C=GR, O=Hellenic Academic and Research Institutions CA, CN=GEANT TLS RSA 1
verify return:1
depth=0 C=DE, ST=[REDACTED], O=[REDACTED], CN=[REDACTED]
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
# ...

This caught my eye. I remembered an announcement that the university was going to obtain their certificates from HARICA in the future, and evidently, the future is now.

Sure enough, I did not find the root certificate “HARICA TLS RSA Root CA 2021” in the root certificate store of my phone. There were 3 HARICA certificates, but not the required one “HARICA TLS RSA Root CA 2021”.

From there, the solution was simple. I downloaded the missing root certificate from HARICA’s repository to my phone and installed it from there.

Now Aqua Mail happily syncs my uni mail account again.

Sometimes it pays off to try and teach an old dog new tricks!

Happy New Year.

The above was edited as usual in Darktable. I wanted to let the lights in the windows glow a bit and have them contrast with the otherwise rather dark scene. I did not have a mist filter on my camera, so I attempted to simulate one with Darktable’s Diffuse or Sharpen module. In my opinion, the effect of mist filters can quickly destroy an image, it’s like emptying an entire bottle of ketchup all at once onto your fries. I was wary of that and attempted to make it subtle. Don’t know if this was the way to go.

See my Diffuse or Sharpen mist filter preset over at github.com/bovender/darktable-presets-and-styles.

The screenshot above shows the mask overlay in Darktable. The screenshow below shows the settings of the ‘g’ channel: I want to exclude dark image areas from the filter effect.

The next screenshot shows the ‘hz’ channel, which I adjusted to include warmish colors only.

Finally, I applied a large blurring radius so that I can achieve a glowing effect.

I’m not sure yet whether to exclude the moon from the mist filter effect or not.

Original image developed in Darktable. Raw image file available upon reasonable request. All rights reserved.

Here’s one of several video tutorials on the Diffuse or Sharpen module by Boris Hajdukovic. He’s a master of image editing with Darktable. Highly recommended.

Images developed in Darktable. Raw image file available upon reasonable request. All rights reserved.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6351-3706

Ladungsfähige Anschrift bei meinem Arbeitgeber: Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 162, 69120 Heidelberg. Dies ist eine rein private Homepage und in keiner Weise von meinem Arbeitgeber beworben oder unterstützt. Meine Privatanschrift ist zu meinem persönlichen Schutz und dem Schutz meiner Familie hier nicht veröffentlicht. Ich bitte, von Anrufen abzusehen. Über Mail oder die verlinkten sozialen Netzwerke (siehe Icons) bin ich i.d.R. kurzfristig erreichbar.

Mailserver bovender.de

Der Mailserver bovender.de ist zuständig für die Domains:

• bantel-stiftung.de
• bantelstiftung.de
• bovender.de
• gemeinsam-gegen-armut.org
• ggap-ev.org
• mainzer-niere.de
• neph.social
• nephrowiki.de
• nierenverein.de
• xltoolbox.net

Datenverarbeitung aus berechtigtem Interesse (Art. 6 Abs. 1 lit. f DSGVO)

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Sie haben die Möglichkeit, der Speicherung eines Cookies zu widersprechen, indem Sie auf den entsprechenden Button unten auf der Seite klicken. Dass Sie geklickt haben, wird als sog. “Local Storage” im Browser hinterlegt – hierbei handelt es sich nicht um persönliche Daten, es wird lediglich das Wort “accepted” oder “declined” gespeichert.

Bis zum Klicken des Buttons “Akzeptieren” oder wenn Sie der Speicherung eines Cookies widersprochen haben, erfolgt keine anonymisierte Erfassung Ihres Besuchs auf der Website.

Current status: —

Die Website und die anonymisierte statistische Erfassung (matomo.bovender.de) befinden sich auf ein und demselben Server unter administrativer Kontrolle von Daniel Kraus.

Dank

Besonderer Dank an Christian Heilmann für das Script mastodon-share, um Links leicht auf Mastodon zu posten.

As for the recipe and the way we eat pickled eggs in my family: read on.

How many eggs?

How many eggs you want to prepare depends on the number of people who want to eat the pickled eggs, the number of days you want to have them for breakfast (or any other meal to your liking) and last, but not least, what size of jar you have to prepare them in.

My 1.5 L Weck jar holds 13 medium-sized eggs.

Typically an adult will have 2 of those eggs for breakfast. With 13 eggs, this leaves one spare egg (and toast), but there’s usually a kid or two who doesn’t eat these eggs in pairs (if at all).

Recipe

Ingredients and materials

This recipe is for 13 eggs and a 1.5 L jar.

• 13 eggs
• 0.75 L water
• 50 g salt
• 1-2 tablespoons of caraway seeds (if you like)
• 1.5 L Weck jar (doesn’t need to be original Weck brand, of course, but must be sealed tight)
• 13 slices of toast
• butter
• oil, e.g. rapeseed oil, to your liking
• vinegar, e.g. any herb-flavored variant, to your liking

Directions

You should prepare the pickled eggs a few days before you want to eat them. In my family we typically do this 7 days before Easter, i.e. on Palm Sunday.

1. Boil the eggs so they get hard. I usually place the eggs in a pot, cover them with water, and then slowly heat the water until it boils. Let it boil until 10 minutes have passed since the eggs were placed on the stove. Your mileage may vary depending on your stove.
2. Pour out the hot water and shock the eggs with cold tap water.
3. Place the eggs into the jar using a clean spoon (not your hands!). I usually let them drop into the jar so they get nice little cracks, this makes for beautiful texture inside the eggs (see image).
4. Add the salt and caraway seeds to the jar.
5. Bring the water to boiling and pour it over the eggs in the jar.
6. Close the jar.
7. Invert the jar a couple of times (you may want to wear gloves while doing this, the jar is hot!).
8. Store the jar in a cool place – in our house, this is usually the basement.

How to eat Soleier

There seem to be two fundamentally different ways to eat a Solei.

Our way of eating Soleier

My family’s tradition is to peel two eggs, place them on a dish, cut them into pieces, then pour some oil and vinegar over the pieces and mash the eggs with a fork. This leaves an ugly mess on the plate and I will update this post with a picture of this year’s appearance.

Brown two slices of toast, spread butter on them, and eat the Solei mash/mess using a fork while intermittently taking a bite from the bread.

The more sophisticated way to eat Soleier

There is an alternative way to have your pickled eggs that supposedly is less messy. The German Wikipedia article claims it’s the ‘proper’ or let’s say usual way to eat these eggs. I tried it once and I was totally unhappy with the experience, so I stick with our traditional way.

Peel two eggs, cut the eggs into halves, remove the egg yolk and mash the egg yolk with oil and vinegar. Transfer the mashed egg yolk back into the eggs. I will look slightly less ugly, but I promise you will have a hard time getting all the egg yolk–oil–vinegar mixture back into the eggs, the plate will look like someone’s been having Soleier the traditional way, and when trying to put the egg halves into your mouth, be prepared for everyone else who sits at the table with you bursting into spontaneous laughter. At least that’s what happened to me one time… ;-)

I use Yubikeys and Nitrokeys as a second factor during 2FA authentication.

My experiences with Nitrokey devices have been mixed. Currently my 3A mini stopped working. I wanted to investigate what’s going on, only to find out that the commandline tool nitropy no longer worked on my machine either! :-(

Here’s how I got it to work again. I’m a Python noob, so maybe there’s a better way to install the dependencies. The operating system is Fedora 41.

sudo dnf install systemd-devel python3-devel
pipx install pynitrokey

Afterwards I was greeted with this:

$ nitropy nk3 test
Command line tool to interact with Nitrokey devices 0.8.1
Critical error:
No connected NK3 devices found

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Critical error occurred, exiting now
Unexpected? Is this a bug? Would you like to get support/help?
- You can report issues at: https://support.nitrokey.com/
- Writing an e-mail to support@nitrokey.com is also possible
- Please attach the log: '/tmp/nitropy.log._p6mpa3e' with any support/help request!
- Please check if you have udev rules installed: https://docs.nitrokey.com/nitrokeys/nitrokey3/firmware-update#troubleshooting-linux

I made sure that I had the abovementioned udev rules in place. The key is not detected by any system, be it my personal Linux laptop or any Windows machine that I could access. D’oh!

In den letzten Wochen habe ich ein paar Mal Fotoabzüge benötigt und bin mit einem USB-Stick zur örtlichen Drogerie. Zu meiner Überraschung konnten keinerlei Bilder auf dem Stick gefunden werden. Inzwischen habe ich das mit mehreren Sticks und an verschiedenen Foto-Stationen (aber immer in demselben Laden) probiert, Fehlanzeige. Interessanterweise hat es mit einer SD-Karte problemlos geklappt.

Offenbar bin ich weder der erste noch der einzige, der dieses Problem schon einmal hatte, es gibt zu einem ähnlichen Problem mit einer CEWE-Fotostation einen Forumsthread.

In diesem Blog-Beitrag sammele ich einfach mal meine Beobachtungen, vielleicht hilft es ja einmal jemandem. Von Mal zu Mal werde ich dies updaten.

Beispiele für “geht” und “geht nicht”

Ich hatte zuletzt zwei Speichermedien dabei, einen USB-Stick und eine SD-Karte:

$ lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL       UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda
└─sda1      exfat  1.0   [REDACTED]  E7F3-FDF9                             114,5G     0% /run/media/daniel/[REDACTED]
sdb
└─sdb1      exfat  1.0               7FDE-A701                               119G     0% /run/media/daniel/7FDE-A701

sda ist ein USB-Stick, den ich häufig in anderen Zusammenhängen im Einsatz habe. sdb ist eine ältere SD-Karte. Beide haben nominell 128 GB Kapazität, und beide haben eine Partitionstabelle im herkömmlichen MSDOS-Format und eine Primärpartition, die mit dem Dateisystem EXFAT formatiert ist. Das Dateisystem auf dem USB-Stick hat ein Label, welches aus wenigen Buchstaben ohne Sonderzeichen besteht.

Auf beiden Speichermedien hatte ich denselben Foto-Ordner kopiert, mit etwa einer Handvoll Fotos. Die Bilder lagen also auf beiden Medien in einem Unterorder.

Interessanterweise wurden die Bilder auf der SD-Karte gefunden, die Bilder auf dem USB-Stick jedoch nicht.

Hier meine Beobachtungen im einzelnen, denn entsprechende Überlegungen findet man auch im Netz:

Dateisystem

Bevor ich es sowohl mit dem Stick als auch mit der SD-Karte probierte, habe ich folgende Dateisysteme auf dem USB-Stick ausprobiert:

• EXFAT
• FAT32

Mit beiden Dateisystemen wurden keine Bilder gefunden.

Root-Verzeichnis vs. Unterverzeichnis

Es hat keinen Unterschied gemacht, ob ich die Bilder (JPG-Dateien) im Wurzelverzeichnis oder in einem Unterordner auf dem Stick hatte.

Verschiedene Terminals

Ich habe meinen USB-Stick an verschiedenen Foto-Terminals ausprobiert, an keinem von ihnen wurden die Bilder gefunden.