As an enthusiast for technological things in general, and gadgets in particular, I like to use (and own) shiny devices. Be it a fast (and slightly big) smartphone with the latest OS, or a laptop with a lot of muscle and a 4K (touch)screen, I really can find a …

Photos of the whole EuroPython 2017 conference are available at the EuroPython 2017 flickr group, the EuroPython 2017 website, and my photo gallery. Videos (lifestream captures for now) are at YouTube, more will go live later at the EuroPython YouTube Channel. Recommended. Day three, Wednesday We kicked off with the …

EuroPython 2017 (Needs editing after I get some sleep and more time) This post also appeared on the Sanoma Technology weblog. Day zero, Sunday After a rather pleasant flight on Sunday morning, where out of 80 passengers, I sat next to the only other EuroPython visitor, I took a nicely …

"I have said that this new development has unbound possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samual Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical …

I mentioned in a recent post that I was working on a new gallery, based on some project I started in december. This project grew out of an increasing dissatisfaction with other gallery software (gallery2 has been out of my system for quite a while, zenphoto keeps bugging out on …

It has been a few days since I relaunched this weblog and I have been doing some tweaking to make things even better. Apart from resurrecting images from the dead (my gallery2 instance has been gone for quite some years, for example, and I have been digging through my backups …

This weblog has always been a self-built affair. It started off in 2003 as a PHP website, and continued in that form for over thirteen years. I open sourced it a while ago (in March of 2014), with a colleague promptly finding a security issue in the admin code. Frankly …

I'm keeping a journal, was helped with this method and it makes me feel better about my life

The year 2017 has barely begun, but somehow it is already looking up. At least in my personal bubble. Son is suddenly confident enough to try a lot of new words, with mixed success in pronunciation or even correctness, but he is leaping forward amazingly. I am really happy with …

2016 was... interesting. Globally, it was overshadowed by some almost-disastrous events, and a lot of great and/or famous people left us (I won't even speak about the political... issues the world is having). Personally, the year was challenging. Having a second kid eliminates all chances of getting some decent …

Er, weblog. Lots happened this year, lots of good and some less good things. We enjoyed our little girl growing from baby to toddler. We less enjoyed the continuing broken nights. The world is a weird, scary, but also a wonderful place. Let's make 2017 great.

A while ago I wrote about getting notified on battery low. It is quite useful when you leave your laptop unattended for a while, to get a notification on your phone and/or smartwatch when that laptop is about to run out of juice. It has saved me a few …

A while back I started scratching an itch that I had and that wasn't relieved by some existing software or services I could find: a central place to keep track of interesting places on the web I wanted to follow up on, without having them saved as read-later in Pocket …

A few weeks ago I started noticing an odd problem: my Pebble Time Steel didn't want to update its various apps anymore. The watchface showed stale weather data, the public transports apps didn't want to tap into the latest departure times and so on. This of course annoyed me a …

Edit at 2017-01-21: see the comments about better ways, especially comment 6. Secure Settings (Google Play) is a really helpful app to help Tasker (Google Play) do things automatically on your Android device. However, it has not been updated for quite a while (January 2015 at the time of this …

In the night of Sunday to Monday, at 4:17, Nienke rushed into this world. Where Daan took his time being delivered, I was barely awake (Ineke woke me at 4:01) when Nienke saw her first lamplight. Needless to say, she was born at home, in the tub where …

Today it's 12 years ago I officially started this weblog and I finally have taken some steps to get the next generation of the codebase working on my server. It's getting there, looking forward to continue dammIT in its Django incarnation :) This year has been fascinating; junior went from barely …

I made a thing: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/nsapi. You can use it with my other thing at https://github.com/aquatix/ns-notifications to get notified when your train is late, or to know when you can do a sprint upstairs on the next station because your otherwise impossible …

You might be in that same situation as I was until recently: you open up your ssh config file and start scrolling through the long list of nicely aliased private machines, that organically grown list of work - project A and the comment-section-divided work - project B, work - misc, work - are these …

If you don't know Tasker go and check it out now. It's by far the greatest way to automate, well, about everything on your Android device and its surroundings. However, one thing it is not, is really easy to start with. If you tap through the interface for the first …