#English

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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: [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

As a Winamp user since 1998, today I replaced it with Songbird. Winamp has all the features I need (basically FLAC support and last.fm scrobbling :)), but it lacks an important feature I need in the near future: MacOS support. Today I briefly looked at some Winamp alternatives (thanks Guido!). Some lacked the multi-platform feature, others were just plain hideous (ok, I’m not going to make friends with this statement, but players in this category always had a Linux background…). [Read More]

Recently, I stumbled upon “Rework” by 37signals in my local bookshop. As an avid reader of Signal vs. Noise, buying it was a non-decision. The book adheres to their mantra less is more: it is only 273 pages, and about one third of them don’t contain text. The chapters are short and easy to read. You could read the whole book in an evening if you’d want (and then re-read it the evening after it). [Read More]

Yesterday, I saw a tweet from Joshua Bloch: Teaching to the test at M.I.T. http://tinyurl.com/cb4799 . But do they teach ethics? I’ve only read Handout 1, but I am puzzled by two thoughts: Do MIT students really need this? I consider MIT as one of the most prestigious universities in the world, with only super-smart students. I would expect that anyone with a MIT degree would be able to get into any company (solely based on capacity). [Read More]

When I bought my Miele Black Pearl 2000 back in 2005, I thought that that would be my only vacuum cleaner I would buy for a long time… But, apparently, I was wrong, because this week I bought a new one… The Roomba is not a ‘normal’ vacuum cleaner, it’s a robot! Not exactly like Rosie in The Jetsons, as he or she (I still don’t have a name for it, suggestions? [Read More]

Marc (for some reason you can only address another blogger by his first name, even if that other blogger did almost invent the Internet…) points to an article that describes why hybrid cars aren’t the future. The summary of that story is: people won’t pay 5000 dollars extra to save the environment. Although I do agree with that, I don’t think that that is a valid reason: – 5000 dollars more than what? [Read More]