The easiest way to see how much you need a blog is to do this thought exercise. Imagine going back in time to a 21-year-old in 1952 and asking them what their opinions are, and where you could find a book of those opinions. Here’s what they would say …

Today I was hanging around in #nlhomeautomation on IRC as one does, and for some reason we started talking about alarm clocks. I wake up with a self-built wake-up light that is triggered by my Home Assistant instance and manifests as a nicely glowing bowl on my night stand that …

The belief that we could save endlessly online turned us all into information hoarders. What society needs instead is better systems for preserving public knowledge. One interesting find from this article: Perma which minimises link rot by converting hyperlinks in scholarly documents into “reliable, unbreakable link(s) to an unalterable …

This weekend we did a big migration of our stack at work to a new data centre and I am stoked about how our applications and their virtual machines are set up now. Quite a bunch is already automated and having a decent base image is such a nice thing …

I'll just leave this here: 22-02-2022 #numbers

I have things to say about our attention spans, about how they are getting influenced by certain things, but I can't currently focus on typing a blog post so I guess it will be done later. Adds to todo list

The dark days of the year I'm always reminded by my body that I really prefer brighter days over the gloomy ones. I don't mind the dark per se, but my energy level goes down noticeably when the gloom continues for too long. A day with sun really helps my …

I just finally finished Under the Dome by Stephen King. For several reasons it took me from last June till today to finish it; for one, I've been playing more games than in the ten years before combined (still not that much, but as my evenings are short, it eats …

Today I cloned the dammit.nl repo on my phone, as apparently I hadn't done that just yet. I had wanted to post a short blurp on December 31th saying goodbye to 2021, but I was fresh out of laptop. I put it on my phone mostly to be able …

With a whole load of things being the new 'normal', wishing y'all a 'normal 2022' might not sound like how I intend it to. What I mean is, lets hope we get more of the normal that we were used to before that little virus found its way across the …

Today is a good day. We had some (well-spaced) fun at the office, our new TV arrived to allow us to spend some good times together oggling at inky blacks, and this sweet little website of mine turned eighteen, meaning it's now officially legal. Or doesn't it work that way …

I stumbled upon this post by Vermyndax earlier today and felt the urge to type. His problem is one that I'm familiar with; I don't pretend to have a magic answer, but I learned some tricks to get myself started. First of all: I don't think it's weird to want …

Yesterday evening, my little gaming group came together online to play some Counter Strike: Global Offence (CS:GO), as a deviation from our regular battles in OpenRA (which is great fun by the way). We played CS:GO before, but for some reason when I launched it from Steam now …

Went on a walk with my loved ones in our very sunny dunes. Shot some mushrooms in the process. I so love dew drops.

I just love me some fog.

One of the ways I am attempting to keep my sanity, is by taking morning walks. Those walks serve both as some light exercise when working from home, and as a way of waking up and resetting my head by submitting myself to the fractals of nature, found in the …

Draft has been collecting dust for a while, but I'd like to present you this from the COVID archives. This is a bit of an odd one. I normally do not write or even talk much about clothing, but something jumped to me: the sheer amount of sweatpants I notice …

You might be acquainted with the Celery Distributed Task Queue, which is a proven way to process vast amounts of messages. Messages containing tasks for your software stack to eventually finish doing, for example. However, Celery is slightly cumbersome to set up (no rocket surgery, but the RabbitMQ message broker …

Interesting research to the Fermi Paradox and how fast settlement of our Galaxy can be done in various scenario's. Also, animations! The simulation shows a significant fraction of a galaxy can be settled in a relatively short period of time, even with ships traveling no faster than the Voyager spacecraft …

According to manpage, the column command “columnate lists”. In simple words, the column is a simple utility that can format your output into a column format (rows and fields) based on the structure of your source file. The column command is part of the util-linux package.