The Xbox 360 was my third console (first the SNES, second the Xbox classic). I purchased it in 2009 after a long period of consideration.

I was still a student and was happy when I could clear my head with video games.

Little by little, my game collection took on a large size. I bought a lot of used games on “eBay Kleinanzeigen”. That was cheap.

But little by little, the console gathered dust under my TV. I no longer paid any attention to it. However, I didn’t want to part with it either. There were still a lot of games that I had great experiences with: I still like to tell the story to a friend about how we unboxed the first “Read Dead Redemption” back then and played it with enthusiastic eyes for months. I haven’t experienced something that compelling in a long time. There are a number of games I’d like to finish or revisit to bring back old memories. There are also a few games I want to play through again.

Mostly I developing for the ESP32 board. I love the ESP32 because it has a big community (many helpful libraries and documentations) and have integrated Bluetooth and WiFi. But the programming is horrible with the Arduino Editor because some nice features I missed:

• package management (It’s not very easy to describe which libraries in which versions I have used at development for people who try to compile my projects from Github)
• modern code editor features like syntax highlighting, code auto completion (why the Arduino IDE can’t remember that I decleared some variables in the top??) and direct navigating to methods via mouse-click
• integrated support for version control

So I switched to the PlatformIO IDE quite quickly. It is easy to integrate as a plugin into VS Code and meets all my requirements.

When I was a kid in 1998, I was flipping through my gaming magazine and curiously put the magazine CD in my drive and came across the demo version of “Theme Hospital”, I couldn’t have guessed that this game would inspire me almost 20 years later.

“Theme Hospital” is a fun hospital simulation from Bullfrog at first glance: you create rooms, hire doctors and staff. Take care of patients with their diseases. But everything is on a very thoughtful and not serious level.

In this post I would like to look back to the origin of my PC affinity, which later influenced my professional career.

Technology enthusiast

It started quite early, in my childhood. Even at a young age, I was strongly excited and attracted by everything technical, electronic. Walking with my parents through the department store, left and right pretty clothes, all kinds of household utensils but I was driven to the game consoles: Here you could try out for myself and dive into strange worlds. Given my age, of course, I didn’t know a bit about how exactly this magic worked. It was like a medium from another planet for a 10 year old child, but I wish I had my own console for home.

I have had my Twitter account since 2009, when I created it for a university project. A whole time not actively used and only in my active time as a bike activist almost like an addict used. I’ve been upset by all the bad news for a long time, so I only check Twitter from time to time. At the moment I have three accounts. Each for its specific target group: one as a bicycle and do-gooder, one for the Ostworld podcast and one, still quite little used, for my development topics.

For the next version is planned to extend the alarm clock with a speaker. This should be able to play an alarm sound but also radio streams.

It will be an exciting extension, because I still have an experience with sound and ESP32. Also, it is not yet finally clarified how I implement the control.

Here is a recommendable introduction to ESP32 and audio by Adreas Spiess: