Great resource of science fiction books, recommended by author David Brin. Lots of really fascinating reads; I haven't read half of them yet, so will surely use this list for inspiration. Source: David Brin's science fiction recommendations

As my corona-counter ticks day 22, and our kids have been home schooled for three weeks now, we decided to invest in some device to convert electrons into glyphs on paper. We have not had a printer at home for about 15 years, as most of our stuff could be …

For years I've had Google Analytics and a self-hosted Piwik/Matomo instance to keep track of visitors. Fun fact: I barely ever looked at the stats. Other fun fact: my own presence did not even register, as my adblocker denied the requests to both. Yeah. It wasn't a really hard …

We live in interesting times. Countries are in a situation they have not been for multiple decades, if at all. Lots of people will not even remember the last time a situation like this happened. Our prime minister had a historic speech on television (a good one, in my opinion …

After the bootstrap post of this series, I investigated quite some tools, and started building my initial framework of tools, just to play with the idea. Like mentioned, I used the mdnav vim plugin to make jumping between note files frictionless. I added some more patches to it, so it …

I have been thinking lately about how I organise my thoughts, notes, files, todo's, incoming messages, and much more. This was partly fed by Ryan Rix and his quest for the ultimate way of organising data, be it org-mode or a variant, TiddlyWiki, or something entirely self-built. I have quite …

Draft digging time! Something I've had in my drafts since the 25th of October, 2014, apparently: Roundcube is a decent self-hosted webmail solution, which benefits from integrating Google Contacts so you do not have to duplicate your address books (assuming you use Google for yours). Luckily someone wrote a plugin …

Biking home from work, I had this gorgously coloured dusk as my background. Certainly a good conclusion of a day where I fixed a bug with four lines of code after a debugging session of about four days. gallery link

An update about what I do with vim, making it more powerful and taking away some of the envy I have for the excellent IDE's out there (for example PyCharm and the rest of the IntelliJ family by JetBrains - try it, it's awesome). Also, it makes vim look a lot …

It might be the time of the year, with its short days and long, dark nights, it might be kids causing us to pull our hair out, taking their emotional toll and sipping energy, and work is also a big energy sink (thankfully mostly a gratifying one), but I have …

Fun post with some insightful (and slightly depressing) time period comparisons. Now I feel old :) Source: It’s 2020 and you’re in the future - Wait but Why

Some people binge-watch series when taking some time off, some read books, some enjoy comics, some take time off from computers for a bit, and some spend some hours cleaning up their vim configuration file. This holiday, I did all of the above. Yesterday, instead of spending one day gaming …

Happy epoch day everyone! 50 years since the first of January, 1970. Time flies when you're typing in dark terminals.

I just merged a new version of my trusty old NS API Python library. Last year I would have thought to not be touching it for quite a while, as nowadays I'm in the luxurious position of being able to bike to work and not wanting to do basically a …

While I'm taking some down time from work - which is rather a bunch on my mind lately, which is both a good and less good thing - I will be spending a lot of time with my loved ones. My intention is to almost not touch computers in the upcoming few …

I finished watching Mr. Robot yesterday and it was amazing. If you like to watch an intriguing TV series, with good use of technology for once (ohai Hollywood, yes you suck at portraying real tech) and an unusual protagonist, treat yourself to the four seasons (45 episodes) of this mighty …

Ever needed to unzip a bunch of zip files into their own directory and you don't want to do so one by one? No? Well, here I have a oneliner for you anyway: ls -1 *.zip | while read zf; do echo ${zf::-4}; unzip "$zf" -d "${zf::-4}"; done This …

Today this little web corner has existed for sixteen years. Funny thing is that 'sixteen years' does not even sound that long anymore in my ears, while it is enough for a newborn to grow into a person nearing maturity. While I would not say this weblog is really mature …

Do you know that cozy feeling of having thoughts of your work almost never leave your head? Waking up in the night and having your mind stray to unfinished tasks? Yeah? It sucks. (I need a vacation, and some more milestones behind me).

I like taking pictures, and having some of the nicer ones as a background to my daily computer shenanigans is a nice extension of this. Lately, I've been playing around a bit with having pictures show up differently (more abstractly, with less details so they distract less, like those nice …