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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 with the ppa's to bring me Gnome 3.16 (gnome3-team and gnome3-staging). After a bit of fiddling (removing some old extensions and packages), I got it to show me GDM. After getting into the desktop, there were some odd issues though. These issues also …

You need meetings. No really, you do. Your team has to line up, get and stay on target and decisions have to be made. The same goes with your stakeholders. However, everyone knows about those meetings that seem to go on forever, have too many participants and/or seem to …

After Chromebook: for fun and profit? @ 2014-10-05 I got myself an Acer C720p for cheap. It's new, just cheap, as that's how Chromebooks go :) It has a new-fangled touchscreen, which I actually tend to use while on Chrome OS. I hadn't thought I would do so (hey, it's a laptop …

Corp: let's have open-plan offices so people interact Employees: but it's loud Corp: here, noise-cancelling 'phones so you can't hear anyone

If you get an ugly rectangular dropshadow in Ubuntu Gnome 14.10 with the gnome-staging ppa (because Gnome 3.14 is so slick), install the Intel graphics driver from ppa:mgedmin/ppa; this ppa has a patched xserver-xorg-video-intel that fixes this for Utopic users. source

When your laptop is sitting on a table and you're doing some other stuff in the meanwhile, it might quietly be running out of battery. In that case, you likely want to be nudged to find it a power outlet before it has to shut down or hibernate. Wouldn't it …