dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

Michiel Scholten Articles


Computer Ethics quotes

"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 …

shuttereye.org, a gallery

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 …
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Blog updates

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 …

Moved to Pelican

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 …
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Hello 2017

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 …
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Goodbye 2016

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 …

Happy 13th birthday, dear diary

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.


I made a thing: a simple bookmarking service

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 …
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When your Pebble doesn't want to talk web anymore

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 …


Nienke says "Hello World"

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 …
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dammIT: 12 years of rants

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 …


ssh config.d to tidy up that archeology-worthy ~/.ssh/config

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 …


How to smooth up your Firefox on Linux, including video

After having one of our Hangouts videocalls, I started looking into why the browser plugin takes so much CPU-time (and makes the laptop hot and breezy in the process). Is stumbled upon the article How to tell if you're using hardware acceleration and dove into my own about:support page …

Public service announcement on this Father's Day

You might remember Public service announcement on this Mother's Day which I posted, well, a little over two years ago. This post is a bit related to that old one. I present to you evidence piece C at the project launch on our family site. I guess my life really …
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Short story time

The ants didn't know what they had coming. I almost pitied the little critters. Almost. Finishing my whisky I went to bed, chuckling softly.