I have been in some kind of slump for a while on several aspects of my life. It makes me feel lethargic, slightly unhappy and unmotivated, all kinds of feelings and states I do not enjoy. Stuck though I was, and I had to do something about it. Earlier this …

Last Sunday it was the first day of Easter. So, I slept in, until my watch woke me at 4:45, because why not? (Well, lots of reasons...) Anyway, the idea was to photograph foxes during the early hours around sunrise. Yes, shooting is exclusively done through lenses here. I …

I have been having thoughts like this for quite a while now, but Andrew Murphy puts them into words way better than I've been doing. It's Tuesday morning. Your VP of Engineering is standing in front of a slide deck, vibrating with the kind of excitement usually reserved for people …

This weblog uses a bunch of other projects to deliver its contents to your eyeballs. Obviously, the first is Pelican which is the Python-based static site generator converting the source files to HTML and feeds to be read on the web and in your feed readers. However, HTML can be …

I can not remember that I ever bought a game on release day, but last Thursday I did just that. Earlier that day I was watching a YouTube video from early January about the racing games someone was looking for this year, as 2026 seems to be a pretty good …

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 …