The size of a milk pitcher
December 28, 2021

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.

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25 years of Java (and all I got was my Java 11 certification)
May 3, 2021

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!). I still have my copy of Deitel & Deitel - Java: How to program, 2nd edition.

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Gaggia Classic Pro and Eureka Mignon Specialita
February 22, 2021

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. The initial set of cups that I bought with a discount (200 pieces) lasted me about 2 years (and most of them were used by guests…). Anyway, over the years I started drinking a bit more (once a week, few times a week, almost every working day), but most of it was at work. Well, and then I suddenly was working-from-home…. So, then suddenly my Nespresso machine was used daily…

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Synchronizing clocks
April 25, 2020

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. But how hard could it be to synchronize them somehow? That shouldn’t be extremely hard, and considering that the combined cost of two mid-tier ovens is around 2000 euro, the few cents / euro to get this done shouldn’t be an issue.

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The smallest sugar cube
February 9, 2020

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:

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New Laptop
February 2, 2020

At Jibes I was in the fortunate situation that I was provided with a top-of-the-line laptop with full rights that I could also use privately. And at Quinity I still used a regular PC at home. So, until recently, I never had to buy a private laptop (I did bought some private laptops in the past, but those were always as an ’extra’).

So, this time, I needed to buy a primary laptop for private use.

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Hacking the Ikea 365 Holder for Container
November 14, 2019

Some time ago, we needed some new containers to store food leftovers. And we we’re at Ikea to buy - I don’t know anymore, but I’m sure it was something else :)

Anyway, we bought some Ikea 365 containers. In the shop we also saw an interesting way to hang them under a kitchen shelf. Didn’t really gave to much attention, but at home, we thought: he, that might be something for us, on the shelf where we store those containers, we don’t use all the space.

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Hosting by GitLab Pages
August 9, 2019

After using the same hosting provider for the weblog for 16 years, I finally switched to a new one. 16 years ago I registered the domain and got a hosting package at freerider.nl. After a few renamed and takeovers, the company is now called oxilion.nl.

In the beginning everything the things they provided was exactly what I was looking for:

  • Cheap :)
  • Webhosting
  • PHP + MySQL support
  • Email
  • A few Megabytes of storage, and 1-2 Gigabytes of traffic
  • FTP access

But, nowadays, my needs are a bit different:

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Migrated to Hugo
January 4, 2018

So, that migration to Medium didn’t really worked out in the end. Never got the custom domain working, and I really didn’t like the password-less-login (every time you login, you have to request a mail…)

So, next attempt ;): migrating to Hugo, a static site generator.

For this, I enabled Wordpress again, to install a plugin, to export all content to Markdown files that can be used with Hugo. After that, it was finding a good theme, changing a few things, fixing some encoding problems. And removing all fixed url’s, so I could use (the same) permalinks.

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Migrated to Medium
January 7, 2017

After a 5-year hiatus, I ‘rebooted’ my blog… so, welcome back ;)

Back in 2011, I suddenly received an invoice from my webhoster for excess data usage. Looking at the statistics, it was clear that my domain/weblog-URL was included in a list used by botnet to mass-spam. So, I received thousands and thousands of visitors (bots) that would download a complete page and try to comment on that page. This generated more than a gigabyte of traffic per day… So, quickly made the decision to take down the complete blog.

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