I have to confess, I'm a bit of a nerd. I like statistics, and keeping track of things. Like for example, my movements. Close-up of the flame of a purple candle, reflected by the material of the candle itself. As a teenager, I had one of those bicycle computers that …

Recently some of my websites suddenly stopped working correctly. They all showed a dirlisting with an Apache 'it works' html page linked inside. That was... interesting. I was confused for a bit, as I had not changed their configurations for quite a bit. What did change, was the Apache version …

I think we can agree that 'boring' would be pretty swell for a change? Happy holidays everyone, and have a boring 2026. A close-up of a winter piece made from various greenery, stars and little lights on a spherical cover. In front, the text "May 2026 be lovely boring" as …

It is amazing how many people I see claiming that AI has one good use. No one seems to agree on what that one good use is, and there's always a hell of a lot of goalpost shifting and special pleading involved. For some reason a lot of folks quite …

When I joined GitHub in 2012, it was for developers, made by developers. It felt good, and it felt like an open community. That ship has long sailed. Rats fleeing the GitHub ship - yes, generated by AI, as I thought that would be funny You probably know why people are …

It's that time of the year again: short days, long dark nights that magically bleed into working days, the Steam Wintersale to get more material for your game backlog that you will Really Eventually Play (somewhere after 2042), and the anniversary of this weblog. Quite amazing that I have been …

Some fleeting and/or floating thoughts on those shortening days. Wind soaring through trees Birds flying diagonally Raindrops pelting down :: Dark forms looming high Lights float in the dusk afar A black landscape crossed Similar in Dutch: Vogels vliegen scheef Druppels op het raamkozijn Herfststorm blijft hangen :: Donkere vormen Lichten …

I like to tinker with user interfaces and especially typefaces (fonts) have fascinated me for a long time. Not long ago, I rolled out Literata on this weblog and a lot of other places where I read long-form texts (wait, it has been over a year already?!). Late 2023 I …

I am disappointed. One could even say I am peeved. Sad and slightly angry. Not very surprised though. Card holder on top of keyboard For several very convenient years I have been using my phone for contactless payments, to the point that I was frequently unsure of the exact whereabouts …

Recently I came across an article I couldn't stop nodding along with while reading. 'Enshittification' is a term we have learned the last years about platform decay and things in general just become worse (hopefully after having peeked at all). The level of quality in software development is degenerating too …

I heard you like copying, so I put some copy buttons in my codes. As you may have noticed, I am fond of sharing code snippets, which I put inside blocks and which are then automagically highlighted by highlight.js, often even correctly so. Copying of those snippets …

If you have an existing database - for example from an older application, or a dataset you downloaded - and want to use it with Python, you might want to have SQLAlchemy ORM models for it for easier querying. Enter sqlacodegen: This is a tool that reads the structure of an existing …

Remember when I wrote I was going to the WHY2025 hacker camp? Because I totally went there and it was great! I totally missed out on the opportunity to post on my weblog from there, but at least I shared a few pics on Mastodon when camping - did I mention …

Google AI Overview Sales tool, image by HouseFresh But are AI Overviews leading you to the best results on the web? Or is this just a new prime spot for selling you products you will regret buying? And how does this change affect the websites that made Google’s AI …

I have been running a Git server for over a decade now (before that it was mercurial and before that versioning system I rocked SVN, dating back at least twenty years). It has hosted my private repositories and served as a mirror for my GitHub projects. More recently though I …

Did I mention that I'm going to a hackercon? Because I'm going. To a hacker conference. It's going to be rad. If you are also visiting WHY2025 in August this year, it might be interesting meeting up! Feel free to drop me a line or mention the village you're going …

This howto has been stewing for the greater part of a decade, and I finally came around to writing it as I was freshly installing Ubuntu 25.04 on my ThinkPad T480s hacktop. Most of the tweaks apply for Gnome 48 (and probably 47 still) on whatever distribution you like …

Shall I tell you something nifty? You know you can create and run containers really easily on any Linux machine, no Docker, LXC or Kubernetes (gasp!) needed? Frozen leaves inside ice Maybe you have seen the term chroot before but are not sure what it is, or maybe you are …

Last week I had a revelation. I had been having odd issues with my workstation for years, which I wrote down to storage being iffy. It ranged from games complaining about corrupt files (of course while trying to play them online, together with friends) to Firefox or Electron apps suddenly …

Normally I don't write book reviews, because I do not have much to add to the thousands of reviews already out there, and would rather spend my time in the next book than typing words about what I just read. Still. Recently I finally was able to break my dry …