I always thought Teenage Engineering were expensive toys, with their (super
shiny) OP-1 and OP-XY , but the EP-40 series seems comparably cheap at € 400.
Of course, I wouldn't do much more with an EP-40 over an OP-1, but at €400
compared to €1200 , the expense is lower. Not buying either is still cheaper
and my rule of not buying a toy unless I have a concrete plan on when I'm going
to use it and what I'm going to do with it is still a money-saving rule.
I saw Kraftklub 2019 on their "Keine Nacht für Niemand" tour, also in the
Festhalle and came back for their 2026 tour. They are still rocking the house
and are really great as a live performance. The sound is still the same
as on their first albums, but it is a good, pushing sound.
They invested a lot in the stage and lighting. The projections worked well,
especially for a band that does a lot of guitar and non-electronic music.
They lived up to their credo of being a live band and had great interaction
with the audience. Moving into and through the audience two times with
songs that worked really well and other interactions with the audience
also were great.
The pictures were taken from the upper levels, as I feel too old for
going into the pit. Thus I missed out on the band going off-stage
and moving through the audience.
The acoustics in the Festhalle were bad as usual. Understanding the song
texts was hard, but I think it's not easy to work with the echoes in the
hall. But they certainly were not worse than other bands I've seen there.
A surprisingly complex tower defense. It has the appeal of the
GemCraft series, but
the mechanics are different. You build your defense towers along a path on
hexagonal terrain and at the same time build up the economy of your village
to provide for more resources to build more towers. The first games you play
are spent on unlocking all the buildings in some kind of meta-game. Once you
have unlocked all the buildings, there is a change to the whole game dynamic
as now you can chase beating the game to level 30, when all hex tiles are
exhausted. After beating level 30, there is the chase of high-scores by getting
your economy and defense good enough to survive wave after wave.
The game could be better, as the first 10 to 15 rounds of a game are mainly about kickstarting your economy, and that slog gets somewhat repetitive. Instead of having to play through these rounds, the game could start you in round 8 (or whatever) with ample resources instead. Otherwise, there is lots of strategy involved combining the right kinds of towers to find synergies. There is the bad luck of drawing bad tiles, but that usually isn't too punishing.
If you like tower defense games, this one is certainly one of the best in the last 5 years.
Why?
Still using z.ai GLM as my main model, I was looking
at other harnesses for using the model. Opencode
is an Open Source coding harness that supports z.ai. The harness still has
UI problems, which is the main point of a harness, so I likely won't be using
it in the near time. I wonder if it will ever get away from the fancy slop
machine, but maybe if most of your time with a program is watching the model in
it output text, then having some colourful distractions / blinking lights is
attractive for people.
How it should look:
How it looks:
No option for making the UI monochrome:
Opencode has had some bad defaults in the name of user convenience, like
sending all prompts to Groks free tier
just for coming up with chat summaries for the UI. It seems that now
the defaults don't do that anymore,
but this weakens my trust in the harness.
Installation
Installing Opencode client just follows the default installation via npm.
Config setup
I did the model configuration within Opencode as outlined
in the z.ai OpenCode instructions:
opencode auth login
and entered there a fresh API token from
the z.ai API key page.
Afterwards I had to actively select the GLM 4.7 model.
Containerfile creating a container for CC-with-GLM4.7
The Containerfile I used for this harness is as follows:
FROM docker.io/library/debian:trixie-slim
# debian-trixie-slim
RUN <<EOF
apt update
# Install our packages
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive TZ=Etc/UTC apt-get install -y npm perl build-essential imagemagick git apache2 wireguard wget curl cpanminus liblocal-lib-perl ripgrep
EOF
RUN <<EOF
# Install opencode
npm install -g opencode-ai
# Set up our directories to be mountable from the outside
mkdir -p /work
mkdir -p /tools
mkdir -p /root/.config/opencode
# Now you need to login manually with opencode :-/
# opencode auth login
EOF
# Add claude to the search path
ENV PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/root/.local/bin"
ENTRYPOINT ["bash"]
CMD ["-i"]
launched as
podman run --rm -it -v /home/corion/agents/claude/mailagent-meeting-setup:/work -v /home/corion/agents/opencode/.opencode:/root/.opencode -e IS_SANDBOX=1 -e FORCE_COLOR=0 opencode-runner:latest
Last week, the Perl community came together for the 28th German Perl Workshop. This year,
it was held at the Heilandskirche in Berlin Moabit. Excitingly, we had the nave for the presentations.
While the name is still German Perl Workshop, we now draw attendees from all over the globe.
Presenters came from India, the US and various European countries. Maybe it is time to announce
it as a more international conference again.
Bringing the infrastructure to a Perl Workshop is a lot of additional hardware that we hopefully won't need,
like looong HDMI cables, various adapters to HDMI, a bundle extension cords and duct tape of the
non-Perl variant. Lee also brought the EPO recording set for recording the presentations. The set
came back with me from Berlin, as its main use is nowadays recording
the talks at a German Perl Workshop for later publication.
Organizing
a conference usually means that my attention is divided between running the
event, chatting with attendees and giving a presentation or two. Luckily other
members of Frankfurt.pm and other long-time attendees are always there
to lend a hand.
Over the years, we have organized the German Perl Workshop many times. Local organizers for 2027
already stepped up. Next year, we aim for the city of Hannover. We don't have the contract for a venue
signed, so watch https://www.perl-workshop.de/news
for announcements.
Such an event can't happen without the sponsors who support us financially.
Let me quickly show their logos here:
