Twenty years ago - not long after the turn of the century - I was tinkering with some PHP code to replace a static HTML page I had been experimenting with. It was becoming my private website, in the classic sense of the word: where I put stuff I am interested in …

I get way too much 'kick' out of a good font, and the Nerd Fonts project has been doing an awesome job at combining about every monospace font with glyphs/icons from FontAwesome, Devicons etc, for use in vim, terminal prompts and more. Of course I combine my frequent use …

Recently I acquired the Linux gaming handheld better known as the Valve Steam Deck, pictured above sitting on top of a cozy plaid as winter is here. Getting one was kind of a gamble for me, as I was not entirely sure I would be into handheld gaming, but I …

Today I got an email from the Google Search Console about a page, or pages on dammIT that are "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". That generally means that a website has two (very) similar pages that contain the same content, without having a element in the duplicating pages …

As some of you might know, GitHub with their GitHubNext team recently released their own monospace font, Monaspace in five variants. I was intrigued, because they actually made for an interesting take on the concept, and it was not just one font, but a whole family with each their own …

Internet 'fundamentalist' Louis Rossmann on YouTube, adblocking and the state of the ad-supported internet that's currently our reality. There are some good points made about how the internet turned to shit, basically because the race to the bottom we made with for example jumping on Gmail in 2004 with its …

Remember Free Public WiFi? Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student …

Why I have zero interest in trying Threads, even read-only. Mosseri’s take here is strange and fairly alarming for a few reasons. For one, it echoes some of the anodyne ways that Facebook has described itself over the years: just a big, friendly, neutral place where people could “connect …

Are you tired of doing everything by hand, having to remote into a build server to switch to that certain user account, then type in a bunch of commands, looking them up in your shell's history? Or has your CI failed you again? Is the company behind it forcing some …

News is, by definition, something that doesn’t last. It exists for only a moment before it changes. As news has become easier to distribute and cheaper to produce, the quality has decreased, and the quantity has increased, making it nearly impossible to find the signal in the noise. So …

Views that make me happy.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a …

Recently, I wanted to split off a few files from a Git repository in which I keep notes to a repository of their own. Reason was that they served an entirely different purpose than the rest, so it made more sense to separate the two sets. However, they had quite …

The year 2022 has been an interesting one for me personally. At work, we had a lot of interesting developments, most of which I'm pretty happy with. On a personal level, we had some breakthroughs with matters we have been struggling with for quite some years now. I think I'll …

Verse 1: In the land of the hackers, Where the code never sleeps, There's an editor that rules them all, The one they call Vim. Chorus: Vim, Vim, the editor of choice, For those who crave speed and power, With its shortcuts and commands, It will make you a coding …

As of about 15 minutes ago, I finally have styled admonitions here at dammIT HQ. If you are unsure about what those are, you might have seen them in the wild but just didn't know their name. Behold: Warning Note that this code is 100% organically grown at home and …

I'm worried that this is going to be seen as a reason to not take "CRITICAL" disclosures seriously at first glance like we should. A "CRITICAL" bug MUST be treated as if it was critically bad. From a community health perspective, people have been told that something really bad is …

Last Friday my better half and me went to a concert. The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra was playing a contemporary piece (Con Brio, surprisingly nice with musicians using their instruments as percussion and such), the Violin Concerto by Dvořák and the First Symphony of Brahms. The very reason we went there …

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 …

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 …