- Fri 08 October 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
Michiel Scholten Articles
- Sun 03 October 2021
- Home, or a park rather
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- Michiel Scholten
Fall dawn in 2021
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 …

- Tue 28 September 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
Get dressed to work
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 …
- Tue 28 September 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
RQ Python queuing system
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 …
- Mon 28 June 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
Fermi Paradox: Here’s What an Alien Civilization Settling the Galaxy Looks Like
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 …
- Sun 16 May 2021
- What do you think?
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- Michiel Scholten
Different Ways to Use Column Command in Linux
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.
- Sat 01 May 2021
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- howto
- Michiel Scholten
Making a LEGO Domino Machine
Building and testing a LEGO machine for making domino runs. Each 'domino' is a stack of 5 1x3 LEGO bricks. Turn on captions for some insight into the design and build process. Skip to 5:14 to see the machine being used to set up a domino run.

- Sat 03 April 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
Sagas
It was a pretty good week this week. At work, a big project is nearing realisation, kids have been spending their energy playing outside, and I finally finished two sagas. The first was Battlestar Galactica which for numerous reasons was a multiyear endeavour for me. But what a finale! Suitable …

- Tue 30 March 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
Morning walks
Morning walks are my way of staying sane(ish) in these times. Good for recharging and stretching the legs, starting the day by waking up with some fresh air in my face, maybe even some sun, or - even better - a lovely blanket of fog.

- Sun 21 March 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
The Pocket Challenge
Recently I installed a new, unofficial Nexus 7 2013 ROM on my trusty old handheld. It practically revived the device for me, as previously it was crashing in a repeated way and I thought it was finally done with its (notoriously iffy) flash storage. Now it runs the latest version …

- Sun 21 March 2021
- Home, far from motels
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- Michiel Scholten
The Voyeur's Motel
Gerald Foos bought a motel in order to watch his guests having sex. He saw a lot more than that. Fascinating story, lots of (un?)expected things happening, and the author having to consider multiple times whether to intervene, contrary to his long-standing agreement with the owner. (Might need some …
- Sat 20 March 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
Presenting presenting
Tips and thoughts on preparing and giving engaging presentations. As a person who does not give presentations often (lots of reasons), the points and pointers in this article sound really helpful. Also, one of the better explanations about why a full, information dense slide is unhelpful: Now imagine the audience …
- Thu 18 March 2021
- Home, surrounded by icons
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- Michiel Scholten
The ineffectiveness of lonely icons
If your target audience is a general population, you should not be using icons alone to convey anything meaningful. By doing so, you have made assumptions that are unlikely to be appropriate to a general audience. You should not assume icons or UI elements are known to your users, as …
- Thu 18 March 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
In need of recharging
It's easy to have the blues and be out of energy in these times. Being confined to our homes, changing our ways and lives; not all bad, but a challenge to juggle young kids, work from home and other things. On the other hand, one might find more free time …

- Thu 18 March 2021
- Home, obviously. Aren't you?
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- Michiel Scholten
How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation
When I described the Responsible AI team’s work to other experts on AI ethics and human rights, they noted the incongruity between the problems it was tackling and those, like misinformation, for which Facebook is most notorious. “This seems to be so oddly removed from Facebook as a product …

- Sun 28 February 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
architecture.md
If you maintain an open-source project in the range of 10k-200k lines of code, I strongly encourage you to add an ARCHITECTURE document next to README and CONTRIBUTING. Before going into the details of why and how, I want to emphasize that this is not another “docs are good, write …
- Tue 16 February 2021
- Home, obviously
- responses
- Michiel Scholten
Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies
A few full days of searching for private package names belonging to some of the targeted companies revealed that many other names could be found on GitHub, as well as on the major package hosting services — inside internal packages which had been accidentally published — and even within posts on various …
- Thu 28 January 2021
- Home, old West
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- Michiel Scholten
OOM killer, gun for hire
shorberg | I think total war got confused... ↪ | it thinks I have, 133 758 976 MB of VRAM tadzik | it's possible if M stands for mili ↪ | this many milibytes is just over 128 megabytes shorberg | :P ↪ | let's hope it doesn't actually try to use that much aquatix | the OOM killer likes …
- Tue 26 January 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
Love for keycaps
I know it is a material thing, but I can become rather happy from a good-looking keyboard. The plus side of many mechanical keyboards is that one can change their looks with a different set of key caps. So I did. In the process I cleaned this keyboard up majorly …

- Thu 21 January 2021
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- Michiel Scholten
About Sci-Hub: A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over again
I do not endorse piracy and stealing. On the other hand, I always found it odd to have so much scientific results locked away behind paywalls, that are even prohibitive even for 'wealthy' western students/scientists, let alone people from third-world countries and such that could benefit greatly from, and …