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 …

If your target audience is a general population, you should not be using icons alone to convey anything meaningful. By doing so, you have made assumptions that are unlikely to be appropriate to a general audience. You should not assume icons or UI elements are known to your users, as …

When I described the Responsible AI team’s work to other experts on AI ethics and human rights, they noted the incongruity between the problems it was tackling and those, like misinformation, for which Facebook is most notorious. “This seems to be so oddly removed from Facebook as a product …

If you maintain an open-source project in the range of 10k-200k lines of code, I strongly encourage you to add an ARCHITECTURE document next to README and CONTRIBUTING. Before going into the details of why and how, I want to emphasize that this is not another “docs are good, write …

I do not endorse piracy and stealing. On the other hand, I always found it odd to have so much scientific results locked away behind paywalls, that are even prohibitive even for 'wealthy' western students/scientists, let alone people from third-world countries and such that could benefit greatly from, and …

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.

Commenting had been broken since the 19th of December because of the host having upgraded to Python 3.9 and isso breaking. I tried installing it anew from pip, but there is still a really old version on there; installing it as egg directly from its Git repository1 kind …

If you are even remotely using the same workflows as me, you will be using vim quite a bunch, and not limited to one machine with a given operating system. You might also have taken a liking to YouCompleteMe to serve as the code/word completion solution of choice. The …

Great archive footage from the famous year 2000, about how to deal with hackers, crackers, phone phreaks. Also, great trip down memory lane with the hardware tour in the virtual tour, seen in the first part, from about 34:30 on. This program examines the investigation and supervision of defendants …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …