dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#energy Articles


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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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 …

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 …



Fall dawn in 2021

One of the ways I am attempting to keep my sanity, is by taking morning walks. Those walks serve both as some light exercise when working from home, and as a way of waking up and resetting my head by submitting myself to the fractals of nature, found in the …
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RQ Python queuing system

You might be acquainted with the Celery Distributed Task Queue, which is a proven way to process vast amounts of messages. Messages containing tasks for your software stack to eventually finish doing, for example. However, Celery is slightly cumbersome to set up (no rocket surgery, but the RabbitMQ message broker …

Sagas

It was a pretty good week this week. At work, a big project is nearing realisation, kids have been spending their energy playing outside, and I finally finished two sagas. The first was Battlestar Galactica which for numerous reasons was a multiyear endeavour for me. But what a finale! Suitable …
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Morning walks

Morning walks are my way of staying sane(ish) in these times. Good for recharging and stretching the legs, starting the day by waking up with some fresh air in my face, maybe even some sun, or - even better - a lovely blanket of fog.
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In need of recharging

It's easy to have the blues and be out of energy in these times. Being confined to our homes, changing our ways and lives; not all bad, but a challenge to juggle young kids, work from home and other things. On the other hand, one might find more free time …
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Love for keycaps

I know it is a material thing, but I can become rather happy from a good-looking keyboard. The plus side of many mechanical keyboards is that one can change their looks with a different set of key caps. So I did. In the process I cleaned this keyboard up majorly …
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NestDrop: Presets Collection – Cream of the Crop

After my piece on projectM last year, I installed it on several computers, not really thinking about extra .milk preset files (which contain the animations). Today, after some short searching thinking there might be more out there, I found this little gem of a collection: Presets Collection – Cream of the …
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Modern retro computer terminals

3D printed, retro-futuristic looking computer terminals. Not all as practical as the other, but inspiring and great looking at the least. I now kind of want an ultrawidescreen terminal on our table now.
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Hello 2021

The plague year 2020 has passed. It has been a wild ride, and not all of it bad. Working from home want pretty well, I upgraded my nerdcave quite a bit in the progress, cleaning up a lot of the mess of stuff I assembled there, and even started a …

Seventeen years of dammIT

Well, that experiment obviously didn't work out as planned. I'm not even going to pretend I posted something in between the Wintergatan link and this post1, but I am going to celebrate this little platform of mine. It has been serving me for seventeen years now, and my use …

Wintergatan

There's this Martin Molin guy that is a wonderful nerdy musician. He build the original Marble Machine and has been building a Marble Machine X ever since. His channel is a really nice documentary of the process and progress of this project, and provides a lot of detail of the …

Morning stroll through frozen fog

This morning I took a stroll through a park nearby in the kind of weather that is on my little list of favourites: foggy (and cold). The cold part became a hindrance when my fingers started freezing taking pictures, but it sure was refreshing. Swan eating in freezing water Colour …
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Tired, or not enough time

So I'm chronically tired for a while now. It is mainly my own fault, not going to bed early enough. This has a whole spectrum of reasons, some of which hobby-related (evenings are for doing stuff, right?), others kids-related ("go to sleep already"), and there are work emergencies that occur …