Writing — 144 posts
Self-written, for good or for worse
I always wanted a remote for PowerPoint that would allow me to use the phone as the laser pointer. So, I’ve made …
I keep Fantastical and Things on my second macOS space, and everything else on the first. However, there’s a bug …
In a previous post, I described how uv can now protect you from supply-chain attacks with the exclude-newer feature. …
I bought an Elgato Key Light during Covid, and lately I was operating it with Lolgato app. Since a couple of weeks, …
I’m pretty stoked that this very blog was added to Kagi’s Small Web initiative. As a result, traffic from …
The other day, I stumbled upon the GNOME-only app Hieroglyphic, that finds LaTeX and typst symbols when you draw them on …
Since having a notch on my MacBook, I cannot fit all the icons in my menu bar. I’ve tried heaps of apps to make it …
LiteLLM was recently victim of a supply-chain exploit, where an attacker was able to run arbitrary code on infected …
Minifeed is a nifty website by Rakhim Davletkaliyev, who added this blog there today. The tagline for Minifeed is: …
Killer quote by John Siracusa on the (possible) existential dread programmers are experiencing because of tools as …
Recently, Michael Lopp wrote I Hate Fish in which he outlined his approach to getting work done. The simplicity to …
Slack’s /feed command is really useful; it allows you to subscribe to an XML feed and receive updates in any …
I stumbled upon this beautiful utility to create minimalist posters of the (water)ways of a city. If you have uv, …
Today, I asked a simple question to Microsoft Copilot in Excel: In Sheet1, add a table that looks into the other sheets …
It’s been millennia since humankind realized that, if you follow the advice of medicine, you can live a better and …
I just stumbled upon Mole, a utility to clean and optimize Macs. What stood out to me is fact that it packs a bunch of …
I recently started using Marked 2 again with some of my markdown files. The app works great and it can strip YAML from …
This post is so great, I want to frame it If you’re an engineer opposed to AI coding—or if you haven’t started yet—read …
The folks at Astral have released ty, which they define as: An extremely fast Python type checker and language server, …
Since posting about how I use llm to check my grammar, Dr. Drang took inspiration from my setup and wrote about how he …
Just before Christmas, I got an email from Bitbucket saying that inactive workspaces will be deleted. Almost 20 years …
We’re moving from Slack to here. This way we can use an open source app that’s part of the open web — and we can have …
When starting this blog, I didn’t think about adding tags. As time passed, I wondered about adding them, but …
UPDATE: There’s a more refined version of this in a new post. Today, Dr. Drang asked on Mastodon about my setup to …
The promise of AI for engineers is getting rid of engineers. Tools like GitHub’s Copilot write code, specs, review, and …
However, whenever a customer went beyond the rigid scripts, the chat had to be routed to a person, only to reset the …
I just stumbled upon this (free) app, called Concurrent, that lets you benchmark different LLMs across speed, cost, and …
What a marvelously succinct article about typography with a punchy take-home message! And never choose times new roman …
Use agents, they said. You will save time, they said. Tools like Anthropic Claude CLI, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, etc. …
David Smith, colloquially known as _, has compared iOS 18 with iOS 26 adoption. Today, he tooted that someone at Apple …
I just written what has been, to date, my most popular LinkedIn post. I did not expect it when writing it–it is …
I get plenty of annoying spam emails from so-called legitimate business. My favorite way to get rid of them is this …
I recently bought the Preonic keyboard, as my two Model 01 were not really portable. The Preonic is a superb keyboard …
Sad news if the trends continue until the official release of macOS Tahoe: FireWire will not be supported by newer …
Yesterday, I attended the AWS GenAI for Healthcare Summit in Lisbon, hosted by the Champalimaud Foundation Here’s …
Last year, I blogged about the Binepad BNK8, a macropad by Binepad. This week, I received the larger brother, the …
One of the gripes I have with Helix is not having automatic list continuation when writing Markdown. Until last week, …
Reading Simon Willison‘s excellent blog on “Things we learned about LLMs in 2024”, made me realize why we’re not seeing …
Recently, the major browsers introduced the capability to go to a webpage highlighting and scrolling to a particular …
A thoughtful, as often, article by the Economist on how the usual defenders of free speech (the liberals) are not …
Beautiful macropad by Binepad. Imagine the possibilities when customizing the firmware via Via and QMK! A render of the …
Up to today, I’ve been bothered by having local https websites served by Caddy, whose certificates were not …
Insightful linked post from John Gruber on why the AI pin flopped. This bit stood out to me as particularly insightful: …
I recently started using docker_isbg, a container bundling isbg and imapfilter to filter out spam from a remote IMAP …
For more than 10 years, I’ve been a happy client of Tweak (how long will that link work?). One of the many …
I am building a Telegram chatbot to remind me to take out the trash. I’m overengineering it, so of course it has …
While using a static site generator is a low-maintenance endeavor, it also means that complex requirements need to be …
In the quoted toot, Lyz Lenz offers the wrong solution to a wide-spread societal problem: men who have remained …
I’ve added a page about my public appearances throughout the years. I still have to figure out how to make it load …
What’s happening in China is really interesting. If we trust their official figures and estimates, the economy was …
Today, I read Terence Eden’s article about the abundance of Microsoft’s safelinks systems. One example he …
I often listen to Apple Music in the background and sometimes I casually listen to a song I want to add to my favorites. …
Too often universities reflexively try to mollify students rather than have them grapple with ideas they find …
Lately, I’ve been playing around with helix, a relatively new modal editor. One of the things I was missing was an …
By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is …
I’ve been bitten by this bug since getting a new Apple Watch. Unfortunately, I had to revert to resetting all my …
While reading Scaling People, specifically this passage: “The conversation then turned to how the person might mitigate …
Very happy to share that I’ve passed the Professional Communication: Business Writing and Storytelling course by …
Superb article by the Economist on the success of super-strict classrooms in Britain. The fascinating points: Pupils …
Amazing new release of fish adding Control - R to open the command history in the pager. It’s fully searchable and …
If you have 2 hours to spare, read Nietzsche and the Nazis by Stephen Hicks. Fantastic, to-the-point, book about the …
Beautiful quote from Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? book: “When I began …
A small utility to — unobtrusively — scan your macOS disk to remove caches and other files and folder that can be clean …
Two years ago I replaced my Airpods with the Airpods Pro. The upgrade was significant and necessary, as after 2-3 years, …
OpenAI has just open sourced Whisper, an automatic speech recognition. I just tried it out and I’m blown away. …
Caddy is an open source web server that can be used to, among others, proxy other sorts of server adding https with …
One of the features of my favourite email client, Mailmate, is the ability to copy a unique link per message. Upon …
I recently upgraded to a new M1 Pro Macbook Pro and the computer is managed by the company. It means that — for one …
Have you ever thought why the flight attendants bother giving safety instructions? Do you listen to them? Flight …
Algorithms can have serious consequences on the lives of people around you. The Dutch tax office used the second …
The recent Monterey update (12.2), introduced a bug that drains the battery of my laptop while sleeping. A fix is to …
My password-manager of choice, 1Password, doesn’t care about the consumer market anymore. Read their Series C …
If you work with Python on macOS and are trying to let your kids play with things like turtle you will encounter errors …
Since having changed my main business title on LinkedIn away from Shoe Designer, I got my good share of recruiters …
On Wednesday July the 10th, the Dutch website NOS broke the news that people employed by or through Google, listen to …
I love the job ad for the new Africa writer for the the Economist. They don’t care if you’re a journalist, …
Today HBR published an article about some causes of burnout1. One struck a cord with me, and, as a physicist that went …
Brent Simmons doesn’t mince words when he talks about algorithms to drive engagement, honed and …
I forgot to link to this very good article from David. Having almost 6 kids, I am usually not bothered by noise outside …
A couple of days ago I moved the blog and the website over to Netlify. The reasons are simple: The site was previously …
This is another post that is totally a note for my future self. I don’t write on this blog often. But what I do, a …
This is totally a note for my future self. Sometimes when working with git I find myself having to create a patch, …
The Mac vs PC debate is practically as old as the youngest of the two platform. I’ve tried to take a biased look …
I always hoped app.net would have become a new Twitter. Not only was it friendlier than Twitter towards developers and …
Yesterday somebody called my wife. She didn’t pick up. Today (Saturday), upon picking up, the voice on the other …
Sometimes, instead of using NeoVim, I do like to use Visual Studio Code (with Vim keybindings). Visual Studio Code is a …
In case you are playing around with the Windows Subsystem for Linux and jupyter, you might have notice this error: …
Approximately a month ago I fell for the new Dell XPS 15. It had the right price/spec combination (I went for the …
Today I was sifting through the documentation for itertools.count Return a count object whose .next() method returns …
I consider myself an advanced Vim user. But I always found annoying the multiple cursors support that Vim has (through …
When searching for a good restaurant, I found Bij Brons in Almere. As it was the highest rated restaurant in Almere, I …
It seems like, right now, I only write in this blog when a get a new child or when I speak at some public event. Not …
It took more than 9 months (9 months and four days to be precise), but Elia Lanzani is now here. He’s a healthy …
I was honored to have been invited at NoSQL matters Dublin 2014 as a speaker. The title of the talk was Real time data …
Lot of bookmarks this time: postman A command-line utility written in Go for batch-sending email. Ma (negative space) …
As announced (you heard it here first!) I talked at PyData Berlin 2014. You can find the slides at Speakerdeck and a …
I need to be on vacation in a house without internet connectivity1 to catch up with what is happening on the web. So two …
I am thrilled to announce that I will speak this next July (25th and 26th, to be precise) at Pydata Berlin 2014, about …
In case you’re in the Netherlands (or nearby! Hello Belgians), and are interested in big data and data science, …
Depends on what you think about this snippet of code:1 let square y = y * y; limit = 100 in [(x, y, z) | y <- …
Learn Web Development From Scratch - SlideRule Udacity’s awesome course, CS 253 - Web Development, by Steve Huffman, …
My first machine was some IBM 286, which a neighbour gave to my father when I was a kid. At work they were upgrading to, …
git-prune-merged Prune all those pesky branches that you have already merged, both locally and from remotes. On GitHub. …
A short list of links I’ve bookmarked this week This is why OneNote is awesome: Maybe a bit over the top, but …
A la Brett Terpstra, a short list of links I’ve bookmarked this week Neovim: vim’s rebirth for the 21st …
Here’s an interesting project by Peter Bengtsson of Mozilla to get an overview of the pull requests for a given …
I’ve finally bit it and started using Twitter bootstrap for my website and the blog. It was a bit of work …
In the past few weeks I’ve written a couple of blog posts at the GoDataDriven blog: Convert chararray user …
The other day I set up the App.net Comments widget on this blog. Comments require an App.net or Facebook account, as the …
This is my professional advise, and if you need more proof, here is a Detective giving the same advice on youtube. …
It has been almost two years since my last blog post. My new year resolution is to not let that happen again. I have …
If you always wanted to automate the tedious process of exporting your collection of papers in Papers to BibTeX …
You have to admit that, even though most of the news point and can be found elsewhere, Hacker News (HN from now on) is a …
This is a true story about Dutch doctors. It seems scary, and frankly it scares the shit out of me, since I live in the …
When we got our first computer, 20 years ago, we managed our backups with floppy disks. We had maybe two or three of …
A new shiny app by Brett Terpstra, creator of NValt. Only available at the App Store. I’ve been using it since it …
Ben Brooks asks: if you would have to rebuy all of your software, which would be the order of buying? Here’s mine …
Well, the screenshots speak from themselves. Gorgeous Twitter client from tapbots. Now I long for a Mac version.
I really like Growl. It’s the kind of thing that ‘just works’, and they do it nicely. It tells me when …
It’s time to pick up a whiteboard marker and think fresh. There are other problems/opportunities in the world that need …
If you wish to keep an offsite Time Machine backup in a place which you don’t consider safe (for me it’s my …
Also, now added to the places I like to visit, two for joy, in Amsterdam.
Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot …
I hate computers. It’s ironic, because I spend most of my time with them. Thomas Troppenz
This is kind of a prediction, since at the time I’m writing this, Papers 2.0 is not out yet. But I think it all …
See, I started in this business because this is what I wanted to do. I knew I wasn’t going to write the great …
Everybody these days is chatting about the forthcoming iPad 2. In particular, people are wondering whether it will have …
Check this out if you use LaTeX. A lot of insightful tips.
If you have problems with Illustrator and PSfrag, that’s probably because you can’t have psfrag replace tags …
Art is a generous action—it’s when a human connects to another human and makes a change. Seth Godin
Well, why would I wanto to do that? Because in general djvu’s take up less space. Anyway, if you have a Mac with …
Nice article by Garry Reynolds on presentation openings. Must read if you care about your audience.
Very nice article by Shawn. Take home message: re-writing, re-editing. And repeat. Repeat. Repeat. With respect to this, …
Just as the meaning of Japanese cuisine goes far beyond sustenance, the significance of the bath goes far beyond merely …
Great article from Garr about the lessons we can learn from bamboo. Be sure to check out it’s blog for a lot of …
As written previously, here’s the second post about writing scientific articles. So the objective is to have …
As a PhD student for FOM I’m offered to follow some soft-skill courses during my career. These included the …
While leaving Amsterdam behind me, driving, I was listening to Radio 1. They were interviewing Jos Baijens, high-school …
If you work a lot with emails, then you should watch (or hear) this talk by Merlin Mann.
Today I stumbled upon a Lifehacker article which explained how to change the background color in Adobe Reader, when …
To add a shortcut for the Menu Item Copy as PDF you have to do the following (with a Mac) go to …
To use Leiden ezproxy with Leiden university you have to do the following. Open with Textedit.app the file …
If you also have experienced some problem accessing fonts presents in /System/Library/Fonts with X11 applications (like …
One of the issues I still had with this blog was that the syntax highlighting for code blocks was static and generated …