Author: oliver

Ethics - IT - Family

Apps fluttering in my tummy

So I occasionally develop apps in my free time. My most recent concoction is a very simple app for kids to practice number bonds of 10 (e.g. 4+6=10, 8+2=10, etc.) and times tables to 10 (e.g. 3×5=15, 4×10=40). It has a variable daily goal for each mode to aid regular practice. Baking was done using…
Read more


July 31, 2021 0

Minecraft – the Lego of today?

I can not shake my generation’s gut feeling of digital media being a poor choice for child entertainment / play. I grew up with hours of building Lego cities, spaceships and creating fantasy worlds of heros, villans and village idiots. It was considered a suitable hobby. Fostered creative building, engineering skills and had enough degrees…
Read more


November 3, 2019 0

The Crystal Metaphor

Do you have children? Here is a small metaphor for them about character, virtues and the path of becoming a good person. A fine crystal is like a wonderful person. A fine crystal has a clear shape, sharp corners and a fine contour – a wonderful person has unshakable principles, integrity and knows what he/she…
Read more


January 10, 2019 0

NZ Update – Off, Off And Away!

  So it’s fixed. Flights are booked for 25th September 2018. Container will probably leave start of the month. Woohoo!   Concerning the visa After some communication with the EOI officers at immigration New Zealand it turned out I was eligible for a permanent resident visa. So we got that and then a visitor visas…
Read more


July 11, 2018 2

A story of two survivors

Objective and emotionally distant news is important. But it also reduces people to numbers and that can be dangerous. This TED talk is great because it takes the numbers we all know and gives them back their faces. It’s the story of Doaa and it is really worth seeing. It changed my relationship to those…
Read more


January 15, 2018 0

Artists and the Internet

  The internet is great (mostly for those adorable kitten videos) but it also has several flaws of which I’d like to address a specific one in this post. The difficulty for artists to actually make a living online. [epic background music] We’re in the dawn of automation and artificial intelligence. It will take a…
Read more


December 10, 2017 0

NZ Update – NZQA

  This post was created on the 26.11.2017. Mind you, things might change in future šŸ˜‰ If you’re planning to get into NZ in theĀ Skilled Migrant Category you’ll first have to create an Expression of Interest (EOI) and get an invitation to apply for the actual visa. Now getting past that EOI is not trivial…
Read more


November 26, 2017 0

My broken Care-o-Meter

The ProblemĀ  Humans, Emotions and Scale Emotionally, humans have a hard time handling large numbers. Examples: The universe ist huge. There are more stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of earth (check youtube). And yet there are more atoms in one grain of sand than there are stars in the…
Read more


November 19, 2017 3

Offspring loyalty vow

  This idea might seem a little odd or even bizarre to some of you. It has helped me though, so please bear with me…   Background I love the tradition and culture of marriage. I believe that stable families are the basis of a robust society and that the strong bond between partners is…
Read more


November 8, 2017 0

My first Android Library

  Yay, I just published my first open source Android Library for Android Wear! It’s just 137 lines of code so I’m probably not allowed to call it a real library; but hey! It’s a start. You’ll find it here on GitHub. I published it to bintray and linked the repository to jcenter (no maven…
Read more


November 8, 2017 0