The beginning was a serious gym phase which eventually shifted to working out at home. I have also done about three far distance hikes and like riding my bycicle around the area, though that does not happen as often as I would like it to.

One sport that I have not really given a fair shot until this February was running. Though I was motivated to push through a non-competitive one hour run a handful of times over the course of several years, running never really stuck with me. There would be circa one practice session before the event and I would drop the sport either then and there upon finishing the actual run or soon afterwards.

This changed in February 2026! I decided that it was time to take a more serious shot at running. I grabbed an affordable pair of running shoes and took my phone out to track my runs.

The first run of this new season was, expectedly, rather lame. It lasted for 38 minutes and was good for getting accustomed to what I was going to put my body through regularly now.

I settled on the one hour run as the discipline of my choice. That's a good benchmark and it is more on the endurance side of the speed-endurance spectrum, aligning with personal preference. The second run went on for 11.00 km in 1:05:23. I probably went for an extra 5 minutes on top of the hour in order to convince myself that running for an hour straight would not be that bad to suffer through.

I have been in the habit of running until July now. It has been five months since I started. The general rule is one run per week, down from 7 runs in the first month. This is usually easy enough to find some time and motivation for, though it may happen that two runs fall into one week (for example, monday and saturday), while a break can span an entire week. Here and there, my running schedule gets bent around trips or other things that take priority.

The run itself still feels like a chore. Our psyche tends to shy away from effort - especially from hard effort over a long period of time. But I always feel great afterwards! And just as you can energize yourself to get started by watching motivational videos, you can push yourself to finish a run by playing the right mind games on yourself. What works for me to stay motivated in the second half is thinking about how much time is left, with thoughts like "Less than half of the hour to go", "Only a fourth left to go", "Only a tenth left to go" and so on.  Also, there is nothing quite like coming home all sweaty and rewarding myself with some homemade (honey-sweetened) ice cream! The runs have also been a good opportunity to listen to interesting long-form stuff. Though the effort of running is consuming some of my focus, much of it still gets through and it eases the pain.

No later than the middle of March, I had found a wet weather route. The ground on this one is made up of concrete, asphalt and pavement, which makes it an optimal second choice for times when it has been raining. The main (or dry weather) route is focused on getting out of town as soon as possible, with a little river crossing and much exposure to the sun. The ground there is uneven for a lot of the run, and it gets muddy and sticky when it rains. Hence, I settled on a route for dry weather and one for wet weather. Both of the options feature some uphill and downhill motion, especially the main one. Running in a stadium or some other artifical setting may yield faster times, but it feels good to have more variation instead. I have recently read a statement along the lines of "When running outdoors on natural surfaces, no two steps are the same", and this is how I want my runs to be. After all, we want to get in touch with the outdoors in a wholesome way with healthy variation. Enough of daily life already feels like a repetitive strain injury, so I want my runs to be an exception from that.

After just about a month of running, I seemingly beat my goal of 12 km in an hour. However, due to some goofy mishap, I put the tracking app into pause mode for about three minutes in the middle of the run. That means that the tracking result can go right into the bin. But it only took me one more run to finally hit 12 km on the wet weather route, and two runs after that to do the same on my main route.

Summer makes the body lose more water, which sounds bad for a long run. My wife found a cheap running belt that can carry two small bottles. I started running with a few sips of water in the belt, which seems to help. I have been performing below my best though, so it might be time to switch to a format that works better for the summer. Perhaps doing a 5K once or twice a week would be more suited for this season.

This week's run is not happening because I got some recurring pain in my left foot after not listening to my body's signals last time. "Running through the pain" sounds cool, but only until you are limping or hopping one one leg when you're back at home. Lesson noted!

Overall, I am happy about giving this sport a fair shot and I feel like this habit has improved my life. It is good to put the body through a challenge while getting better and better at something that is as natural to our bodies as running.

Most people with a higher affinity towards tech seem to be firmly convinced of the superiority of dark mode, which is very understandable. The mere mention of light mode may bring an unpleasant image of an older family member's phone at maximum screen brightness to your mind.

The battle between dark and light mode was fought on multiple fronts. Let me tell you what convinced me.

As with many things in life, what really matters is the marathon rather than the sprint. The sprint can be a YouTube session on my phone in the evening. No bright lights, no trouble. The marathon is daily life in the long term. A pleasant sprint is one thing, but setting yourself up for a successful marathon is another. Of course, it is possible to just switch between dark and light modes throughout the day. But I prefer to stick with a default and to not change things around too much.

Problem 1: leftover brightness

A dark mode is only as dark as its brightest component. Ideally, you will have a well themed desktop where your web browser, your email client and all of your other software tools look more or less the same. A cohesive desktop landscape without any big, bright spots. So far so good.

This idyll sadly falls apart as soon as you bump into any piece of software that only has a light theme. One example I remember is the browser version of Microsoft OneNote at some point in the past (not sure if they solved that by now). In this case, we are talking about a tool made by a multi-billion dollar corporation that, for some reason, had no dark mode. Nothing prevents a more obscure piece of software (or a website) from giving your eyes a tough time. You may end up with something like a 90:10 ratio of dark and light components throughout your desktop, which means that you are regularily getting a blast of strong light into your darkness-adjusted eyes.

Even if you go out of your way to meticulously theme each and every last software component on your desktop, you may be far from done. If you are surrounded by white walls or if you have a window behind your screen, that can be a real symmetry breaker next to even the best and most cohesive dark theme. So, rather than continuing to put effort into dimming my surroundings, I made the switch. So far, it feels more harmonic and wholesome. Afterall, we need light.

The problem of bright surfaces around and behind your screen carries over to using your phone outside. On a sunny day, any bright or reflective surfaces can really upset your dark mode experience.

Problem 2: privacy screen protectors

As someone who uses public transportation here in Germany, I often find myself sitting in a train with people around me. In 2026, we have good and modern screens with seriously good viewing angle stability. That makes it really easy to see what is on your neighbor's phone screen. To navigate around this issue, I got these privacy screen protectors for some of my devices. With these on, they have a significantly narrower viewing angle. If someone is looking from too much of an angle (let's say 30+ degrees), they will see a darkened and muddied version of my screen - or nothing at all.

While this solution is quite effective, it comes with a downside. It decreases my phone's overall brightness, making the screen even harder to read when the dark theme is enabled. In addition to that, I have set my phone to greyscale in order to make it less stimulating, which further decreases the screen's readability. So, light mode it is!

How it is going so far

The draft for this post was created a bit over 2 weeks before posting it. So far, no regrets :)

The camcorder is quite impressive for its time (it even has night vision!) and the video quality is pretty good. I have 25 of these cassettes in the closet behind me and already did plenty of work to digitize what we have. With about two cassettes, there was no audio (anymore?), and it would be a shame to have more of the material succumb to the elements.

Even though I will be focusing on 8mm Video Cassettes (Video8, Hi8, Digital8), the process should be nearly identical for other, comparable types of media. Essentially, you need to plug your camcorder into your computer and record the input with software. There are appearently modern, one-device options for digitizing a cassette, though they seem more expensive. This guide shows a process that does not rely on any such devices.

The Equipment

Firstly, you need a computer and a device that is capable of playing your old, analog media. I am assuming you have a  computer, and you likely have access to a playback device. If not, you can look for used camcorder or cassette player on the internet. I will be using our old camcorder, which still works well enough for the job.

The next thing you'll need is a way to plug your camcorder or player into your computer. Congratulations if this somehow works without the need for additional hardware! In my case, I bought something called a "video grabber" from amazon, which allows me to convert the signal from my camcorder's RCA and S-Video output to USB input. You can get one of these for about 10€ (about 12 USD) on Amazon. Here is what is looks like:

If your camcorder or cassette player has a different set of connectors, you will have to get a matching video grabber. Also, make sure you have the proper cables. I had to order the S-Video cable (the one without colored connectors in the picture blow), because I want to use it instead of RCA-Yellow. Though, I still use red and white RCA for the audio channels. 

And that's about it. The only other thing we need is a recording software. I think my video grabber came with some sort of proprietary recording tool, but I prefer to use OBS, since that is linux compatible, free and less sketchy. 

So in total, you may be spending something like 10 to 150 USD on everything you need, depending on what you already have and what kind of deal you strike for a camcorder or video player. Here's all of the hardware in one picture:

Getting Ready to Record

Now that we have all of our equipment, we can start with the actual "work". The first things you'll have to do are plugging your pieces of equipment into eachother and figuring out the proper recording settings. Since I use OBS for this, I will show you my setup and comment on it.

Put your cassette into your camcorder and use your cables to connect the player to your video grabber. Then, plug the video grabber into your computer. Note that I replaced RCA-Yellow with the black S-Video connector in the picture below. Your setup might look different, depending on the connectors of your hardware.

Open OBS  to set it up for recording. Add a video source and an audio source. Configure both to receive input from your video grabber. 

Get into your OBS video settings and set the proper resolution and FPS. Here you might need to do some research. 640x480p at 50 FPS looks good for my use case. This may vary for you depending on the kind of media you'll be recording. There even seem to be regional differences for the same type of casette, so you will probably need to do research. Also, you can right-click your video source and click the option "Resize output (source size)" if you can't quite fit your canvas to your video source.

Customize the rest of the settings to your liking. For example, I want my recording to be saved as an MKV video file. Remember that you can always come back later and review your settings if you are not fully satisfied with them. Here's what my OBS looks like, for comparison.

You'll probably want to set your recording quality at least to "Indistinguishable Quality" (like I did). This should offer you a good base for any sort of editing.

The actual recording process

Rewind your cassette to the very beginning, hit the play button on your camcorder and start your OBS recording. Make sure you remove or mute any unneeded audio sources. Else, you might accidentally record background noise!

This is the perfect moment to check if your settings are producing the proper result. Stop after a short while and see if the quality of your recording is looking good. If anything is wrong, try adjusting your settings or pop in another tape to see if the problem disappears.

If everything is looking good, proceed to do a full recording. You can just let your recording setup do its thing and come back to check the result later. It can happen that you come back to your desk long after the tape finished playing. In this case, OBS will have picked up plenty of black screen (or blue screen), since it does not know when to stop recording. In this case, you can just trim off anything unwanted from your output in a video editor. My choice for doing that is Kdenlive, which is free and open source.

Enjoy!

This is it! Even though it may take some time to figure everything out, the process is simple and straightforward once you get your recording settings down. Now, you can go on and archive your family memories for generations to come.

Though there are web-based and other tools that can help you to find the right code, using these can slow you down. With a bit of simple math, you'll be able to approximate color codes and insert them into your projects, or to edit an existing color code to shift it in the right direction.

The first thing to know is that these 6-digit codes are nothing more than red, green and blue values (RGB). The first two digits tell us how much red there is in the color. The two middle digits are the amount of green, and the last digits are the amount of blue.

Let us continue with #ff6087 as our example. The following graphic shows this color in decimal and hexadecimal notation.

At first, it may be confusing to see letters in the color code. There is a very easy way in which these letters function as numbers. The only letters that are used are a-f. The letter "a" is assigned a value of 10, "b" is assigned a value of 11, and so on until 15 ("f"). In essence, there letters extend our normal (decimal) numbering system right where it stops - giving us single digit representations for the numbers 10 to 15.

Once we identify the values behind the digits in our color code, we can do the simple maths to convert our hexadecimal code into a more readable, decimal RGB format.

Looking at #ff6087 again, remember that the first two digits are the amount of red in our color. You always need to multiply the first of the digits by 16. Then, you multiply the second digit by 1 and add the two results together.  This will give us a red value of 255 (15 x 16 + 15 x 1). See if you can follow the math in the following graphic with the information that I provided until now!

Here we go! After doing the same maths for the green and blue values, we arrive at our more readable, decimal RGB value. 

Multiplying by 16 and 1 may seem somewhat arbitrary, but the logic behind it is very simple. Remember that we are dealing with the hexadecimal system, which is the base-16-system. It gives us 16 digits, including zero. It makes us calculate with 16 and its multiples, just like the decimal system makes us calculate with 10 and its multiples. Our normal number 22 is nothing more than "2 x 10 + 2 x 1", if you break it down in the same way.

When you come across hex colors the next time, you can try to do some maths on them. And you can modify them by increasing or decreasing the red, green and blue values. The higher the values are, the brighter the color will also be. And vice versa. Also, you can use this knowledge to quickly come up with an approximate color code to quickly insert into one of your projects. You can start with a guess and fine-tune the value until you have what you are looking for.

Who came up with this system and why is it so widespread? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that 255 is the maximum number that can be represented by a single byte (11111111). Since any byte can be contained within just two hexadecimal digits, the resulting color codes are short and compact.