Flight mode is the best mode. I learned this once the battery of my six year old phone started becoming weaker about a year ago. The cellular connection was draining most of the energy, resulting in a standby time of about half a day. This was not very practical. Switching to flight mode would extend it to about a full day, which was just enough to get back to a charger. It was not until I used flight mode every day that I realized how calm everything got. No more interruptions. No more blinking LED craving for attention. No more longing for the phone to check for new messages since there just could not be any new message at all.

The Qualcomm MDM9215M 2G/3G/4G Modem in my Galaxy S3 is best when off ;-)

Switching from silent mode to flight mode is a big difference. In silent mode, you subconsciously know that there may be some content waiting for you. And your mind urges you to take a look. Just a very brief one. Just a moment. But like any other drug, it never is just a moment. When in flight mode, the hurdle is higher. The phone takes a while to log again into the network. The apps take a couple of seconds to retrieve the latest update. It does not feel anymore as if checking for updates would just be a tiny bit of time. It is like putting the cookie jar in the highest shelf of the kitchen. You can still reach it, but you will do it less often if you need to climb on a chair every time to get it.

The camara of my Galaxy S3: better than many of my earlier compact digital camaras

However, I have to admit that a standby time of barely a day is not much. And six years is a very reasonable lifetime for a smartphone. It was running Android 4.4.3 and we are now at version 9.0.0. Most apps were hopelessly outdated. The GMail app crashed when replying to long e-mail conversations. Google Maps had a delay of up to tens of seconds when navigating. I could not join the local bike sharing program because my version of the app was too old to pay. After a long dispute with myself to find out whether I really needed a new phone, I decided that it was about time. Still, I decided not to go for a high end model.

An unplugged RF connector for one of the antennas of the Galaxy S3

I bought my beloved Samsung Galaxy S3 exactly six years ago, in January 2013. I paid 497.98 € for it, which translates into less than 7 € per month over its lifetime. The screen never broke. All buttons still work. It has a few scratches but that is it. The mainboard died after about three years in February 2016 but I fixed it with a new one from AliExpress for 36.06 € that still works like the first day. I am very happy with the overall cost of the old phone. The new phone is a BQ Aquaris X2 Pro with Dual Sim. The battery lasts what seems an eternity to me, but I still plan to turn it into flight mode regularly. For the peace and quiet.

I took all of the above pictures when I changed the mainboard of my old phone in 2016

The challenge is fairly simple. Each Sunday, write down on a piece of paper all of the good things that happened during the past week. Then, fold the paper and put it in a jar. On New Year's Eve, empty the jar and review the bright side of the year. I started this challenge twelve months ago and today I looked at the result. It was great. Most of the things I wrote down are somehow related to the people with whom I have shared this year. Very often this came in the form of nice and insightful conversations. Other notes capture instants in time which were particularly revealing or beautiful. And then there are a few that reflect the sheer good luck that I had in certain situations. One should more often look at the bright side :)

One piece of paper for each week of the year 2018, from S1 to S52

The jar

Make every second count. Every single one. And by making it count, I do not mean being active all the time but doing meaningful things. And that can be many things. Sleeping is meaningful. Mind-wandering is meaningful. Even not doing anything for a while is meaningful. But also working on motivating personal projects, sharing time with the people that are important to us, and creating instead of consuming. Time is a scarce resource. And it is not renewable. It is too valuable to spend it scrolling through an infinite sea of random content which, like a painkiller, is designed to provide temporal relief from repetitive daily routines.

During break times at school, I sometimes dreamt of inventions that I would love to become true at some point in time. One of them was a tiny aircraft that I could control remotely and that could fly around the playground. I imagined how it would take off, circle around the buildings, maybe enter one of them via a window, exit via another window, land on the rooftop, and so on. Most importantly, the aircraft would have a small camera that would allow me to see in real-time on the remote control what the tiny pilot would see. At that time, I thought that building such an aircraft may be feasible but that having the camera was definitely just a dream.

The view from the air reveals so many new and exciting perspectives

More than twenty years later, I finally realized that dream. The aircraft I dreamt about turned out to be what we now call a drone, and having a real-time video stream happens to be standard. I had tried a number of affordable drones before but all of them were hard to control and were not even close to my dreams as a school kid. Finally, last week I rented a DJI Mavic Air. The experience was amazing. I did not fly it around my old school buildings as I once had imagined but at a very special location, namely, the Tower of Aschbacherhof. Please find below a short flight summary in gorgeous 4K :)

It is hard to believe that half a year has passed since I moved to Munich for a new job, a new home, a new everything. During these six months, I continously felt that I did not have enough time to do all the things that I wanted to do. And I think that is a great thing because it means that I had the urge to go out and do not just one but many new things. While my to-do list keeps growing just as in Madrid, it is more diverse than before. In particular, I am very happy that it now allows more giving back to others, which is the shortest path to happiness that I know. I am still far away from there, but at least now there appears to be a way forward :)

Happiness in simplicity

A twelve-hour ride on a night bus from Munich to Lyon. That sounded like a plan to me. On the bright side, I slept significantly more than I expected on that bus. On the not-so-bright side, the bus stopped what felt like a million times, which means that I also woke up again and again. Mais a la fin, on est arrivé en France! The slogan of the city is "Only Lyon" and indeed, we only saw Lyon ;-) On the way back, I drove all the way to Munich myself by car. This made me feel how far both cities actually are. While we were faster than the bus, it still took the whole day... and a lot of traffic jams, which at night had of course not been there!

The "Musée des Confluences" is at the "confluence" of the Saône and the Rhône

The facade of the museum: each triangle has a slightly different orientation

At the other end of the city, facades are not that modern

Pixel art for non-french speakers ;-)

But not all of the street art in Lyon is pixelized

¡Cuidado con la pelusa!

Pushing the button will be "taken into account", which does not sound very promising

The metro line we took was fully automatic

Rail of one of the funiculars that travels up the mountain on one side of the city

A very popular but rather new church awaits at the top of the mountain

The first day, the house was really empty. A wardrobe and a shelf that I had bought from the previous tenant. That's it. But I loved how uncomplicated and simple it felt. A few walls, a few windows, and the bright sunshine filling the room with light. At that time, I was reading "Everything That Remains" by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. It is a wonderful book about minimalism and my house at that point in time was really minimalistic. I decided to do an experiment. Instead of going to IKEA and buying everything that I thought I needed, I would buy it on demand and only after being sure that I needed it.

I do recommend this book :)

The first time I ordered at IKEA, I bought a bed. That seemed quite necessary. But I did not own a table nor chairs until two weeks later, which made me really be aware of the value of having dinner sitting instead of standing. I have done my best at only buying things that I need or that I really enjoy. I never actually went to IKEA since I knew that the moment I entered the store, I would be bombarded with things that I apparently "need" at all cost. I only went once to a physical store to buy a vacuum cleaner and I still regret it. The salesman did not let loose until I did buy the more expensive model that I did not really want.

Minimalism explained

I do not agree with everything in the above book, but most of it makes a lot of sense. As they say, "the problem with homes, however, is that once we establish a long-term dwelling, it's easy to accumulate a bunch of junk we don't need". The problem with that is that "the more you have, the more you stand to lose". Thus it is better to only have the things that actually add value to our lifes. And most importantly, "Love people, use things. The opposite doesn't work."

The office of my new job in Munich is literally in the middle of a park. The nearest train stop is at the edge of the park, which means that I must walk about seven minutes through the park to reach the station. At first I thought this was a disadvantage, but then I realized that otherwise I would never take such a walk on a daily basis. A lake surrounds the office buildings and the trains float past the wide park greenery as if it were toy trains on a model railway. Ducks and gooses live in and around the lake. One can literally see the little ducks grow as weeks pass by. That park is the best refresher one can have after a full day of productive work.

The lake surrounds all of the twelve buildings that form the campus

The sun sets over the train station at the border of the campus

The many paths that cross the park are great for a short walk after lunch on sunny days

A duck swims in the lake as the sun sets behind the clouds

Two months sounded like a lot of time to find an apartment. Well, not in Munich, or at least not to a reasonable price. At one point, I even started meeting the same candidates at the different houses I visited, and we wished each other luck. It is no one's fault that the demand exceeds the offer by far. The good news is that in most cases the offer is on average better than in Madrid. The bad news is that it is very hard to get. Fortunately, the search ended well and just in time before the two months of temporary housing are over. It has been a nice place to stay for the start of my new bavarian adventure :) Before I move out, here a few pictures of my nice but unreasonably expensive flat in trendy Haidhausen:

When I arrived, I was surprised that the kitchen had wooden floor! Now it seems normal :)

The living room is the largest space in the house

All of the rooms face south, where a square with trees allows for a green view

But it was not always green: a comparison when I arrived end of March (bottom) vs. now (top)  

Snow. A lot of it. All around us, everything was white. We had underestimated the hike to Jägerkamp, a summit at 1746 meters near lake Spitzingsee in the Bavarian Prealps. While spring had arrived to Munich at the beginning of April, it had not yet melted the thick layer of snow (~2 to 3 meters) that covered the mountains. The trail was by far not visible, but we followed the frozen footsteps that others had left. The views were breathtaking but we were running out of daylight. In a painfull rush, we managed to reach a road clear of snow in the last minutes of dusk. The relief as we escaped the dangerous snow was enormous. We learned the lesson.

The greenery at the bottom of the picture are not bushes but tree crowns buried in snow

A few hundred meters below the summit, everything looked like spring

Near the summit, one could get a "hiking stamp" but the ink was long dry

The view from the top of Jägerkamp