It's a sunny saturday. I am sitting in my favorite café, enjoying a little bit of alone time with coffee and chocolate muffin. I got forced by my wife to finally take some me time again. I really needed it and so I am thankful for that. It's not one of my strenghts to demand or ask for something. Especially when that means someone else has to cover for me or has extra work.

So here I am, mindmaping and plotting how to get started with with doing, what I tried to start over and over again within the last few years.

I want to combine my passion of science and new technologies with the need for sharing this experience. Being an introvert, the best way of sharing definetly to write about it. I think a basic understanding of what is happening around us is fundamental in our present environment. There are so many new developments which directly affect us and our privat life, everybody deserves to at least be aware of it.

What are the technological topics I am interested in? Let's use this first post in a while to get a quick overview. These are the top3 I can think of right now.

Data Privacy and OpenSource

For a while, my dream was to work for google. I even applied for a specific job offering and got in contact with the person in charge. Well, it didn't work out back then. So I can't tell for sure, if it is out of disapointment, resentment or just independent from this event, that I then started to avoid google technology. Google services are amazing and they work very well! And they are for free! At least you don't have to pay money for it. You pay another currency, which is your personal data.

I know, we all think we don't have to hide anything and we are not interesting enough to be concerned about our data. Thinking and reading more and more about it, I got to the conclusion that I am interesting enough. Especially the events around Facebook made me think and change my mind.

So this is a big topic I hope, I can get more into detail soon!

Home Automation

I really am into that topic, too. For the reasons I mentioned before, I was very hesitant for a while to implement it in our house. The fact, that so many devices in my private space are permanently connected to a server of a big company, didn't appeal to me.

Then I found the OpenHAB project and finally felt like it was time to start! We now have several devices in our house, which work more or less. I am still learning and trying to improve things.

I learned a lot during that journey and would be happy to share my experience!

AI and Machine Learning

I took part in online training about self driving cars. One lesson was about machine learning, what it means and how to implement it. I haven't really used this technology since then. But only recently it came back into my mind with the appearance of ChatGPT. I was hesitant to use it, or to be excited about it. Then I gave it a try, I had to solve some software developing issues. And it was amazing, how quickly it helped me solve these problems. I am sure, in five years from now this technology will be totally normal to use in our daily routines.

But how to trust an an artificial intelligence, when I don't have any clue how it works? Everybody will use AI technology and I want to find out if it's scary or exciting!

These are only the first three things that came into my mind. And these are only geeky technological topics. I hope I can share even more and will keep on writing on a daily, or at least weekly basis!