Some fleeting and/or floating thoughts on those shortening days. Wind soaring through trees Birds flying diagonally Raindrops pelting down :: Dark forms looming high Lights float in the dusk afar A black landscape crossed Similar in Dutch: Vogels vliegen scheef Druppels op het raamkozijn Herfststorm blijft hangen :: Donkere vormen Lichten …

I am disappointed. One could even say I am peeved. Sad and slightly angry. Not very surprised though. Card holder on top of keyboard For several very convenient years I have been using my phone for contactless payments, to the point that I was frequently unsure of the exact whereabouts …

Have some very fine days with your loved ones. We sure as heck need them.

The brain fog is real. You know that feeling, when you have a cold or the flue, and aside from the incessant sniffling (or just total lack of air), you are aware that you are a magnitude less clever than your regular self? I call that brain fog. Fog messes …

I have a problem. I have too many hobbies. Thankfully, that's actually a pretty good problem to have, and it is not even the actual issue. The matter at hand is the limited time in a typical day. This is nothing new, but it provides certain... challenges when wanting to …

If you - like me - regularly check out sourcecode (read: Git) repositories of projects that you stumble across or use in a hobby project/product or at work, you will now and then find one or more issues in their tracker with a title similar to the above, often with remarks …

Today was the first day of a new year. 2023 is behind us, but we are not done with the things we started during it. It was a year of both struggles and good times. Sometimes simultaneously. 2024 should be a year of improvements. Improving the situation at home, improving …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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

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 …

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 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 …

I'll just leave this here: 22-02-2022 #numbers

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

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 …