Sorry for using some French here, but FUCK this. I have been using Omnivore since June this year as alternative for Pocket and have been loving it. I normally don't love (web)applications, but this one ticked a lot of boxes: it looked good while keeping out of the way …

At the start of this year I bought this cute little bugger: It replaced an ancient Netgear WNDR 3700v2 WiFi router running DD-WRT that had been serving our home internet for ages, but was showing fraying around the edges by not being able to fullfill QoS, for example when Steam …

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 …

Housefresh - an independent publisher and reviewer of air purifiers for your home - recently published a well-researched and damning article about how big media companies game the system by flooding Google with useless listicles of 'best product for X' without actually testing and reviewing them; 'content' is mostly based on Amazon …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

This weekend we did a big migration of our stack at work to a new data centre and I am stoked about how our applications and their virtual machines are set up now. Quite a bunch is already automated and having a decent base image is such a nice thing …

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

Today I cloned the dammit.nl repo on my phone, as apparently I hadn't done that just yet. I had wanted to post a short blurp on December 31th saying goodbye to 2021, but I was fresh out of laptop. I put it on my phone mostly to be able …

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 …

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 …

Recently I installed a new, unofficial Nexus 7 2013 ROM on my trusty old handheld. It practically revived the device for me, as previously it was crashing in a repeated way and I thought it was finally done with its (notoriously iffy) flash storage. Now it runs the latest version …