Writing — 148 posts
Self-written, for good or for worse
Lovely image, found on the GitHub Copilot subreddit,1 showing what is keep on happening with LLM-based coding assistant …
I just found Kapal, a great app to get access to the essentials features of frigate. Highly recommended!
Paul Graham wrote on Twitter how realizing an email is written by AI makes him stop reading the mail (which is the …
A good piece on why AI pricing is changing Everyone who deals with road planning knows about is induced demand. Each new …
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 …