David Baakman

I use Gnome as my desktop environment for my private laptop. As a Linux user, at the moment I was distro-hopping, I also tried different desktop environments: started with KDE: as everything is customizable, this gives a lot of options and possibilities. But also a lot of possibilities to screw-up (or at least, make everything inconsistent). For my use-case I found it a bit too customizable. then Gnome: maybe a bit too minimalistic. [Read More]

At this moment, I have an HP Microserver Gen8 as a NAS. Next to it, I have my old homeserver that I bought 10 years ago, to host Home Assistant and some Docker containers. This is a historical grown situations. I started with the Microserver just as a NAS. When thinking about running some applications on a server, a few options came along. Either I could upgrade my NAS (it fits a Xeon, and the memory could be increased), or buy something new. [Read More]

My first NAS was a Synology DS109. Apart from the fact that it didn’t have redundant disks (I actually bought a DS109j as well, to give to my parents and act as a replica, but in practice, I’ve never set up the replication), I really liked it. Synology’s support is outstanding, their latest firmware release is from 2017, 8 years after the device came to the market . But in 2015 support officially ended, still an impressive 6 years. [Read More]

I’ve bought my first SSD 13 years ago, in October 2009. For 199.98 euro, I bought the 80 GB Intel X25-M, to be used in my work laptop. Just before that, I had a chat with someone from our infra department, and asked them casually how much trouble I would get into if I swapped my harddrive in my laptop for an SSD (I learned - they didn’t really like it when I bridged my ethernet connection to connect my PDA to the network…). [Read More]

Somebody at work asked my input for good books for starting (Java) developers. As this is something that might be useful for others as well, I’ll post my list here as well. This list contains books that I found to be the most influencal to me - and are timeless. So, by design, I won’t include really specific books (the ‘how to use scrum’ of ‘spring 5.0’ type of books) and books that were really good, but I would not recommend in 2022 anymore (eg, ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, ‘Extreme Programming Explained’). [Read More]

There are a lot of good Youtube videos on steaming milk with your espresso machine. For example, these videos by James Hoffmann or Lance Hedrick. But everything I found, already started with the idea that you already have the proper milk pitcher. It is really hard to find the answer to the question which size milk pitcher (or pitchers) you should actually buy. As I obviously needed to buy something, I can now answer that question. [Read More]

When I learned Java 22 years ago, I could not know how much impact it would have on my career. At that time the language was only 3 years old (I certainly didn’t know that at that time…), but the University of Twente used it already for teaching their Object Oriented and Imperative Programming class (a lot of AWT (Swing didn’t exists yet), and Applets - that will be the future! [Read More]

“Do you really want a new hobby? Because that is what espresso at home is.” - James Hoffmann. Apparently I do, as I just bought an espresso machine, and don’t really like coffee… Twelve years ago I bought a Nespresso machine, and I’ve used that ever since. I was not really drinking that much coffee, drinking one cup every 2 weeks or so. But they stopped selling individually packaged Senseo packages, so I needed an alternative. [Read More]

Ok, for a few years I’m irritated by the following: See. When you have multiple ovens in your kitchen, it is impossible to set them to the exact same time. So, once in a while (every minute ;)), there is a period where there is discrepancy. And that irritates me. First of all you can question whether it is useful to have two clocks above each other, but that is a different story. [Read More]

After a few years, my box of sugar cubes started to become a bit empty. So, it was time to buy a new box. And this obviously means some research. It didn’t take long (hey, there are not that many options…) till I stumbled upon this claim: The smallest sugar cubes in The Netherlands (500/160 = 3.1 grams per cube). That is certainly a claim. Especially when on the same page, you can find this: [Read More]