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 …

A few weeks ago I started noticing an odd problem: my Pebble Time Steel didn't want to update its various apps anymore. The watchface showed stale weather data, the public transports apps didn't want to tap into the latest departure times and so on. This of course annoyed me a …

You might be in that same situation as I was until recently: you open up your ssh config file and start scrolling through the long list of nicely aliased private machines, that organically grown list of work - project A and the comment-section-divided work - project B, work - misc, work - are these …

After having one of our Hangouts videocalls, I started looking into why the browser plugin takes so much CPU-time (and makes the laptop hot and breezy in the process). Is stumbled upon the article How to tell if you're using hardware acceleration and dove into my own about:support page …

I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 with the ppa's to bring me Gnome 3.16 (gnome3-team and gnome3-staging). After a bit of fiddling (removing some old extensions and packages), I got it to show me GDM. After getting into the desktop, there were some odd issues though. These issues also …

You need meetings. No really, you do. Your team has to line up, get and stay on target and decisions have to be made. The same goes with your stakeholders. However, everyone knows about those meetings that seem to go on forever, have too many participants and/or seem to …

After Chromebook: for fun and profit? @ 2014-10-05 I got myself an Acer C720p for cheap. It's new, just cheap, as that's how Chromebooks go :) It has a new-fangled touchscreen, which I actually tend to use while on Chrome OS. I hadn't thought I would do so (hey, it's a laptop …

If you get an ugly rectangular dropshadow in Ubuntu Gnome 14.10 with the gnome-staging ppa (because Gnome 3.14 is so slick), install the Intel graphics driver from ppa:mgedmin/ppa; this ppa has a patched xserver-xorg-video-intel that fixes this for Utopic users. source

You have this interesting project, written in Django. Maybe even in the excellent Django Rest Framework. You want to run some tests on it to know how it will cope with load under stress. Or you just want to repeat a bunch of steps from the outside a lot of …

While I was standardising my dotfiles I wanted to have an easy and quick way to update my projects so repositories weren't out of date when I wanted to use them (for example when being offline on the train), and I didn't want to go through them by hand every …

I'm thinking about getting me one of those Chromebooks. Preferably a cheap, light, small one (the 11" Samsung for example), which I can almost literally throw into my backpack and take wherever I go. The first reason I'd do so is because I'm curious to the platform and the experience …

To counterweigh my professional life in which I (thankfully) build nice things in Python/Django, I have hobby projects in which I can thinker with whatever I want to build. Python is still my preferred language, but Django is not a necessity. I have some legacy projects of my own …

Sixteen years ago I had a pda. Not one of those nifty Palm devices or expensive Psion's. No, a regular organizer; a little electronic device with a whopping 128KB of storage which you could fold shut like a litte book. Opened, it provided a nice little qwerty-keyboard and about 4 …

Lately my work laptop has been acting up a bit after installation of a graphical driver went wonky. As I'm running a beta of Ubuntu Gnome on it, I don't blame anything but the flux in which the packages exist for the moment, so I took it in stride and …

We've all been there. Well, I've been there at least; before discovering the virtues of a real version control system, I just created a snapshot of my projects by tarring and compressing the directory tree. That way I've a bunch of histories locked inside backup dir per project. When I …