dammIT

A rantbox

Articles


There is no “software supply chain”

Good piece on how a (hardware) supply chain is something completely different from the software stack what we tend to call a 'software supply chain', but which really is not. The problem is mostly that the providers of the moving parts that people (read: companies) are so dependent on and …

Installing Firefox as a (real) .deb in Ubuntu 22.04

Canonical has a crush on snap. I don't. In Ubuntu 22.04 they replaced the native Firefox package with a snap package, making it slow and limited. It doesn't have to be that way. Mozilla's Firefox team has their own PPA for Firefox. As they use the same package name …

Prey (movie)

I think I've seen all Predator and (almost) all Alien movies, and some of them are... not good. However, yesterday we saw Prey and it's a movie I'd like to recommend for people looking for a nice thriller and/or action movie with actually a bit of substance. For those …


Strawberry moon

Yesterday evening instead of getting to bed when I really needed to, I stayed up a bit longer to shoot the Strawberry Moon.
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Why Everyone Needs a Blog

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 …
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Home Assistant: wake-up light

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 End of Infinite Data Storage Can Set You Free

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 …

Infrastructure automation: hype

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 …


Attention attenti-oh look, shiny

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

I run on solar energy

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 …
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Under the Dome

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 …
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Mobile blogging

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 …

Have a normal 2022

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 …

Happy 18th birthday, dear diary

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 …

Do it, do it now

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 …
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Fixing CS:GO on Ubuntu 21.10

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 …