After years of reading Ars Technica I felt it's been enough. The tone of this site turned overly negative and cynical that it gives a rather depressing aftertaste after each visit. I used to read about gadgets, operating systems, security and privacy, which were well covered over there. But now, it seems more about the incompetency of governments in the United States and other countries and megalomane CEO's of big tech. But maybe my interest in tech has decreased in favor of other interests (and...

What happened to my good habits and best intentions for the next year? What happened to my reading habit, writing, developing intellectually? Slither happened. God, this game is addictive and it sucks up all your free time if you lack the discipline to put the phone down and do something useful. It's a bit of a mysterious game to me, but it shines in simplicity. Choose a nickname, a color and off you go; go collect some colorful orbs. No sounds, no chat, even no login, there's only a disk-sha...

I rediscovered the Loop Habits app, I think for the third time. I think I abandoned it previously because I set the barrier too high: too many items with too high frequencies. I rebooted the usage of this app with only 5 items and with a reasonable frequency. Because, I do like the application: it's open source, straight forward, privacy friendly, no bells and whistles. Also it has a nice mathematical feature by calculating the score for each habit, using an exponential moving average. It has...

I keep on reading and thinking about Zettelkasten systems, although my first attempt (which I tried for a considerable amount of time) didn't really work out. I think the overhead that such a system incurs doesn't pay out. I'm more summarizing, breaking down and mechanically linking things together, but not really thinking it through. After a while I abandoned the system and accepted that I cannot capture everything due to scalability issues. Maybe I did it wrong, I didn't stand still and thin...

Today I installed Obsidian to see what it looks like. There's a lot of buzz around this application so at least I should take a look. I must say, it looks slick, better than Standard Notes. Linking and embedding content is more straight-forward. And there's the note graph to get a visual representation on how notes are linked. All in all, quite feature rich. But, it isn't open source and it doesn't store content centrally, it seems. Syncing functionality has to be bought at $36 / year. About ...

I came across this interesting article on saving your own copy of an article. At first I thought, it's a waste of effort and disk space to store it and spend time migrating it to a new future platform. But the nostalgia argument hit me, actually. Saving a news article that caught my interest today may not be very interesting tomorrow, next week or even next year. But in 10 years or more, it might give insight in the life I lived and what was going on in the world, and how we progressed from th...

The website They See Your Photos lets you upload a picture and returns a description generated by the Google Vision API. For every picture it provides a description of what is at display, and if available some EXIF based data points such as date, location and camera device. The description is what a person looks like, their emotional state, race, social class and probably some other properties. I would never submit by own family photos to this service, as the data is relayed through the Google...

It's the Monday after the weekend where I discovered Excalidraw, which looks useful for professional purposes as well. But alas, our security overlords deemed Excalidraw.com unsafe so Thou Shall Not Pass. Someone at the IT security department must have had a good morning, leaning back and sipping his coffee. Another case of potential IP violations prevented! They have no idea that the tool runs local and offline, no need to leak IP. But perhaps that requires too much understanding while it's e...

I love it when people put thought into a product. One of those examples I encountered recently is Excalidraw, an open source and free drawing/diagram tool. I discovered it through Standard Notes which offers it as a plugin. But it's just a web app and an open file format (JSON) and therefore deployable anywhere else, e.g. standalone or part of Obsidian. And apparently also part of Standard Notes. Which means the drawings are private and yet immediately synchronized to all my devices. No effort...

Just when I wanted to write about the 100 day writing challenge, I failed that day. So back to square one. Life keeps me busy, I barely have bandwidth to think ahead. Professionally and on personal level. It's always easy to make plans and goals for the future, but the road towards such goals is not a straight road, but it tends to turn towards other's priorities as well. It's like these dreams where you run by moving your legs but you're not going anywhere. It feels like I'm doing this. Looki...

The last couple of days I have this nagging thought whether software engineering is still as enjoyable as it was to me 20 years ago. Professionally I'm not writing code anymore, and before that I was only 'owning' code, that means mostly understanding, reviewing and making sure no one does anything stupid. And moving tickets around. In private life I'm also a bit stuck software engineering wise. So I tried Visual Studio Code to write a simple extension, but the ecosystem is huge, full with blo...

Proton VPN makes it quite easy to switch location to many countries. It has a nice side effect that services like YouTube or Netflix shows content or ads you've never seen before. It's not very useful but at least it stimulates some neurons inside my skull. ...

Today I've seen the worst movie in cinema I've seen in a long while. Poor story, poor acting, annoying personalities and full with distractive product placement. But, my son liked it, so it was an hour well spent. ...

Until recently I lived my digital life with open source software, self-hosting, driven by privacy, encryption and owning my data. You get the feeling you're contributing to a better world with more freedom and less 'capitalistic' practices. It didn't cost me much, except time and some 'overhead' in my operations. On the other side we have services that aren't free (as in beer), but provide cross-platform services with immediate synchronization. And with throw-away mail addresses you don't have ...

All meetings and no work makes me a dull boy. But it's a matter of expectation management to myself: office days are not for doing work, it's about talking about work. Good thing I still have three work from home days in a week. ...

I've been experimenting VS Code since a little while. The editor itself is probably not that bad, it just needs some time to adjust the editor to me and adjust myself to the editor. Quite soon I noticed that viewing plain diff files is a bit lacking: no outline is shown to jump from file to file. I learned this can be achieved by writing an extension. But how to write one? Well, I still haven't a working extension, but I installed Docker so I can use a 500 MB image which contains yeoman to gen...

Watched this movie - Wicked Little Letters - the other day, about someone in Little Hampton who sends anonymous little letters full with profanity to people in town. Based on a true story. Nice movie and I appreciate having this little writing spot, where I can write whatever crosses my mind. Although with less profanity. ...

I used to be on social media but I think I'm done with it. I left Twitter before it turned into a total hell-hole which is X today. I've spent a little while on a Mastodon instance but when that one announced its shutdown I was pretty much done with it. Twitter has racists and other disturbing personalities, Mastodon seems to be a more friendly place on the surface but there's this elitist undertone. But maybe it's just me and I just don't like people. My Mastodon profile was pretty much techni...

I like Kagi Smallweb, a site which shows random recent posts from a list of (niche) blogs. The topics tend to be biased towards technology, but art and travelling are recurring topics as well. Today's highlight for me was winterbloed.be, a site with art as a result from 'creative coding'. It was inspiring, given the level of detail in these generated arts. It reminded me of some 'random art' I generated some 15 years ago, but it was not as sophisticated as Winterbloed. But it made me curious t...

Most of the TV material I've seen today either involves trains or alien investigations. It occurs to me you barely see these topics in tandem in one TV show. These smug greys always come here by air in some fancy saucer, but have they don't seem to consider more sustainable alternatives, like a train. ...

Winter is my least favorite season. The cold, the frozen windshields and slippery roads. Granted, a thin layer of snow makes a nice view, but that's about it. And it's holiday season, the time of the year we spend our hard earned money on useless presents and boatloads of food. No, I'd rather enjoy a very hot summer so I don't have to wear any clothes. ...

The 100 days writing challenge seems interesting to me. Initially I thought I wouldn't be able to come up with any words, but give me 30 minutes of undistracted walking and it seems to generate some muse. Although I like the tool and the platform, I do have a bit of a doubt if anyone would read it here. Perhaps I'm this guy in the woods screaming but no one hears it. Except maybe for the AI bots that seem to be well-present here on Listed.to. It's a shame, this takes away some of the authentic...

I feel I should write more. Standard Notes may the right tool and platform for this: open source, privacy first, cross platform and therefore it provides a low barrier to write. I also like the simplism of the tool and the Listed platform. And also for myself I should keep it simple. No sophisticated tooling for writing and publication, or set up a completely useless Zettelkasten which promises an unlimited stream of 'ideas', only if you spend the first 5000 hours filling it with sensible idea...