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 …

After the bootstrap post of this series, I investigated quite some tools, and started building my initial framework of tools, just to play with the idea. Like mentioned, I used the mdnav vim plugin to make jumping between note files frictionless. I added some more patches to it, so it …

I have been thinking lately about how I organise my thoughts, notes, files, todo's, incoming messages, and much more. This was partly fed by Ryan Rix and his quest for the ultimate way of organising data, be it org-mode or a variant, TiddlyWiki, or something entirely self-built. I have quite …

It might be the time of the year, with its short days and long, dark nights, it might be kids causing us to pull our hair out, taking their emotional toll and sipping energy, and work is also a big energy sink (thankfully mostly a gratifying one), but I have …

Some people binge-watch series when taking some time off, some read books, some enjoy comics, some take time off from computers for a bit, and some spend some hours cleaning up their vim configuration file. This holiday, I did all of the above. Yesterday, instead of spending one day gaming …

Happy epoch day everyone! 50 years since the first of January, 1970. Time flies when you're typing in dark terminals.

I just merged a new version of my trusty old NS API Python library. Last year I would have thought to not be touching it for quite a while, as nowadays I'm in the luxurious position of being able to bike to work and not wanting to do basically a …

I finished watching Mr. Robot yesterday and it was amazing. If you like to watch an intriguing TV series, with good use of technology for once (ohai Hollywood, yes you suck at portraying real tech) and an unusual protagonist, treat yourself to the four seasons (45 episodes) of this mighty …

Ever needed to unzip a bunch of zip files into their own directory and you don't want to do so one by one? No? Well, here I have a oneliner for you anyway: ls -1 *.zip | while read zf; do echo ${zf::-4}; unzip "$zf" -d "${zf::-4}"; done This …

Today I've been busy with a family party and with a total restyle of this weblog based on Pelican Alchemy Bootstrap 4 and the Bootswatch Lux theme, with my own twist in dark-ish grey. Currently it is generating from my own fork with isso comment support and article images. Breakage …

Today I came across the forum post Don’t report bugs, contribute to bugs hunting about more directly helping (open source) developers help you. Developers really try to write working solutions and like Aurélien Pierre notes: We are the developers. That means we can guarantee you that the software works …

Editing and even viewing (raw) photographs can be a bit taxing on your CPU. If you have an Nvidia GPU, you can supercharge your photo editor by using its OpenCL extensions to offload operations to. Using darktable myself, I had to do a minor bit of research before it worked …

To be able to receive Sentry notifications on Telegram (without using the plugin which only works in the self-hosted Sentry server), one can use webhooks. As I have webhaak to ducttape together webhook all the things, I created a script to send messages to our dev chat, filtering away some …

Today I want to talk to you about the web and how it sometimes sucks. At least, the experience can suck a bit, especially when it is not open enough so you can set things to your own hands. Take for example YouTube, where overlays can ruin the end of …

Lately I've been making some changes in how I interact with social media, and also how I consume its news and blurps. I started using Mastodon and basically moved my interest there (I tend to double post to both Mastodon and Twitter, as Twitter is still where most of my …

I remember writing (yes, writing) short weblog updates in the train on my Sony Clie running PalmOS, using the fast glyphs of Graffiti, in 2004. I want to go back to that, realising that my weblog had turned into a collection of longer articles as of late, spaced quite far …

In my ~/.ssh/config file, I have been using a socket file for every host that I connect to, so TCP sessions can be re-used for faster connecting to a host I already am connected to. I had several iterations of the exact filename for this, as with longer hostnames …

Because it's Friday, I was bitten by a filled-up volume on my VPS again, because Prometheus somehow is randomly crashing my VPS, and because I like thinkering and Python, I wrote a little notification script. Yes, it checks for available disk space on your nodes, with configuration per hostname (it's …

As an enthusiast for technological things in general, and gadgets in particular, I like to use (and own) shiny devices. Be it a fast (and slightly big) smartphone with the latest OS, or a laptop with a lot of muscle and a 4K (touch)screen, I really can find a …