Almost a week ago, the massive Arecibo Telescope (part of the Arecibo Observatory) collapsed. It used to be an impressive dish lying flat in the lush green forests of Puerto Rico. The construction already was deemed dangerous and was planned to be demolished, but the event still came as a …

Recently we got a DVD. After turning it around in our hands a few times and giggling at our reflections, we ordered an external USB DVD/CD eater so we actually could ingest some of its contents. As the hip techy people we are, having this material available to us …

They are not blinking, but they are lights, and we all need some light in the darkness. Also, they are kind of pretty.

I tend to use computers a lot. This leads to having a not-so-great posture, to limbs that could use a bit more variety of movements, and a mind that's getting foggier the more things needing to be done. Years back, I found out that running (jogging) is not as bad …

A lot of people used the time spent at home improving said place. This of course had a variety of reasons: from having more time not spent sitting in traffic, to having a bit too much time by not be able to work at all (sucks) to being at home …

Today I had a conversation with an internet friend of mine (on Riot^H^H^H^HElement), and they confessed hating to blog. To me, that was interesting, as apparently they felt a pressure to write, but would very much prefer not to. Which I think is totally sane …

This excellent album by Shirobon gave me the energy to finish my day. I woke up with aching shoulders, neck, and upper back, so it was a fun day working at my desk. Listening to these retro-inspired tunes while cooking some dinner wrapped that part of the day up in …

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you …

Use web feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place. Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. You get the latest content …

I am digitally pretty well organised. I keep notes in places I can actually find them back, I use proper ways of keeping the codebases and projects I work on maintainable not only for myself, but for others (quite a fascinating thought), photo archives are sorted by date, subject, I …

It is no secret that I keep a journal (it might not be very well known too, but it is private anyway). It is not a fancy hard copy journal that some talented people fill with really neat doodles and such, but rather a boring collection of Markdown-formatted text files …

The abridged version of 2020 as we're nearing the end of the first half of it. What a time to be alive. Be sure to load the rest of the images when you're nearing the end.

This week, me and my colleagues started using the office again. It's a bit awkward, but also good to see each other in the real again. We keep the amount of people in the space low, so not everybody is here at the same time. Transparent dividers have been ordered …

Lately, I was thinking back to the time when I had my 15" CRT monitor (and later my whopping 19" flat CRT) tuned to the beats that Winamp was playing for me. It was a famous plugin called Milkdrop, and it provided nicely psychedelic looking visuals based on the audio …

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 …