And once more I am on my way to Berlin to check possible options as a new home for beyond tellerrand in Berlin.

First of all: congratulations to Bastian Allgeier and his team. Today is the day they were working so hard for and spend so much time on. Finally the new version, which is Kirby 3 is here!

What’s New

So much is new in Kirby 3, which you can all read in detail on the fresh and new site for and about Kirby 3. But here is a list of the new and updated features:

• a completely overhauled new panel
  • sections and tabs
  • better user account management
  • a Vue.js UI kit
  • improved fields
• drafts and custom publishing workflows
• a brand new plugin system
• REST API and Headless CMS
• virtual pages and external data sources
• an asynchronous media API
• shared collections
• a new email engine to easily send emails
• better caching
• … and much more

Congrats!

I had so many conversation with Bastian over the years and I think I can say, that I know how he is feeling today. But you know what, Bastian? You made it. I hope the new version takes off as it deserves it. I myself am already looking forward to updating my websites to the latest version soon (planned for February). Thanks for your work and effort, of pushing Kirby to what it is.

This morning I switched to Mozilla Firefox as my main browser on all my devices. I was using Chrome and I don’t have a real reason, other than not wanting Chrome to gain the absolute monopoly. So far I have to say, that Firefox feels so much faster than Chrome and I am impressed. I don’t get why not all extensions and the way I define my look for the browser is synced to all other devices, but I spent an hour to set it up on all my devices (including iPhone and iPad) and give it a chance now.

Just started reading the latest edition of the excellent and inspiring newsletter of Veerle Pieters. In her intro she says:

[…] Each bicycle ride was in boring grey skies and usually wet, dirty greasy muddy roads. Excellent times to test out bike cleaning tools and soaps :)

That made me smile, as I – a second before that – just thought who dull and grey it is outside during the last days or weeks and how I dislike this.

Good, that Veerle reminded me of what I often tell people: there is something positive in anything shit/negative. For Veerle it is, that she can test out her bike cleaning tools and soaps because of the shitty weather. That is the right attitude to go with ;)

Heydon Pickering always hits the right nerve for me to catch my attention. I love his books, I love his way of explaining things, I really love his talks and now he started a video series on Making Future Interfaces.

If you want to learn something and giggle and laugh while doing this, you definitely should check this series. So far he published:

• Unusual Shapes
• Custom Properties
• Algorithmic Interfaces

Having watched these, I am even more happy that he is part of the upcoming Düsseldorf edition of beyond tellerrand after being part in Berlin a few years ago.

Keep on this great stuff, Heydon! And thanks for producing all this …

Hello dear 2019. I am happy you are here, as 2018 left a strange taste. I can’t complain about your past really, but for some reason – which I can’t describe or grab – 2018 felt not good and everything felt heavy, clumsy and harder as usual.

Therefore I am happy that you are here, to hopefully change this again. I am looking forward to a year full of great things again. Another – hopefully – lovely event in Düsseldorf, a new home for Berlin’s 2019 edition and many other interesting things in the pipeline.

Not to forget my role as chairman of the Smashing Magazine supervisory board in which I am looking forward to being part of events in San Francisco, Toronto, Freiburg (even though not completely as my youngest nephew is going to get married) and New York. I am looking forward to meeting Vitaly and the team again and get those things kicked off. Some of the team, including me, have written a short end-of-year note as well.

Yesterday I had the first day looking at emails after two weeks again and today I wanted to work on my taxes. The door bell rang and I got a lovely present of Faculty, Chris Shiflett’s new-ish studio. What a lovely way to get back to work. ;)

Oh … and where we speak about kicking things off, when I made plans of running beyond tellerrand in Munich in January 2018, I have written about Simon and how much I liked his New Adventures as kick off for the year. Well, if you haven’t gotten any notice yet (you must live on the moon!): it’s back!!. In less than three weeks I am going to be in Nottingham and am sooo much looking forward to great talks and workshops. But mostly to meet all those people for the first time in 2019 and make the first new friends in this fresh and new year. There are still tickets left and you should get one to be part of it.

Anyways. Whether we meet at New Adventures or anywhere else, I am seriously looking forward to conversations and stories from everybody I meet in the upcoming year.

You wake up at 6:25 and are in a pretty grumpy mood. All kids leave the house, you take the little one to kindergarten and get out into the forest to walk the dog.

Back from the walk, you get yourself a coffee and sit down in front of your computer to start working on emails. Tweetbot pings you that people mention your event and I start smiling.

What a great morning if your Twitter timeline is full of people “complaining” about having to wear and use @btconf swag. hahaha … love you people 😘

4:30 in the morning is certainly not my time to get up. At the airport visit Berlin for the day. Having appointments at a few venues to check if anything fits to be the new home for beyond tellerrand in Berlin.

Anyone fancy breakfast or a coffee around 8:30 or 9:00 somewhere close to Neukölln? Ping me

I had a nice chat to Jakob of the organising team of this new event and it really sounds interesting, what they are planning. I got caught by the line …

Event about Technology, Design and their impact on Society

… and I am really interested to see what this means and how it turns out. The line-up looks promising and if you are interested in finding out more, I suggest you check their website and/or follow them on Twitter. And as Think About! is taking place after my 2019 Düsseldorf edition, I am definitley going to check it out.

Will we meet?

I just extended my subscription on Flickr for another two year. I guess only, because I have not managed to backup all my photos and those of the beyond tellerrand pool. I pay for their product and they don’t event provide a receipt or invoice. Poor.

What is so difficult with this? A PDF that states:

• What I paid
• What for I paid
• Their address
• My address

That’s more or less it. That can be easily automated and I think for a company like this, it is quite poor. I had a similar experience lately with IPvanish and I think that is really bad.

I already made the decision to leave Flickr and currently look into what I can use or maybe, if it is even enough to host the photos on my own site. But this really just makes me regretting I even paid for the two-year subscription recently.