Fragments

Yesterday, we visited the Harry Potter Studios. Since it was quite far away from the center, it took some time to get there, and consequently most of the day. It was worth it. It’s one of those one in a lifetime experiences to see the actual set of one of your favorite franchises. And the butter beer was delicious 🍺!

More iconic even, was the visit to the Transport Museum Shop. Yes, to the shop and not to the museum itself. Sadly, we didn’t have time to visit the museum yesterday. I would say that this shop is quite dangerous for me since I like everything transit. I ended up buying what I think is the most iconic souvenir I could get: a pillow with the same fabric as the seats of the trains from the Elizabeth Line! I love it!

We arrived last night at St Pancras with the Eurostar. It’s the second time doing this trip using the train, and despite taking much longer than the flight, I’m glad I made that decision. It probably helps that I never took the flight from Eindhoven to London, which takes around 40 minutes.

The advantage of the train is, most often than not, that you can just hop in the train and not spend much time as you need to do in an airport. However, since we live in Eindhoven, we need to first go to Rotterdam, do passport control and security. Only then board the train. So the time argument is actually not in our favor, for us. Nevertheless, we still chose to do it.

I always forget how ginormous London is. According to Wikipedia, there’s around 8.8 million people living here. That’s almost as many as in Portugal and half of the Netherlands. It’s nice to be back.

I’m looking forward to enjoy the next few days in London visiting a friend of mine, and checking a few places where I haven’t been yet!

Today I had the nth appointment for my wrist. Yesterday, we had done an echo just to make sure that there’s no damage or cysts. Fortunately, when it comes to those types of abnormalities, everything seems fine. The conclusion seems to be that my wrists are slightly more mobile than they should and therefore it’s just much easier to get an injury. And that the tendons need to do a lot more work than they would usually need to…

The next steps were not fun: getting an injection directly in the inflamed tendon with some substance that is supposed to help it come to a more rested space. That was performed immediately. I wouldn’t recommend that.

At the end of the month I’m also getting a custom made brace to also ensure I can give my wrist proper rest. The injection plus the brace plus exercises to make sure that my wrist becomes stronger should do the trick. I’m cautiously optimistic.

In July 2017, something unexpected happened: I opened the trending page on the GitHub interface, under the Go language and saw my own project there. File Browser - then still called File Manager -, was trending in first place under the Go language!

At the time, that allowed the project to go from around 200 stars to over 700 during that week. Nowadays, this project I started long ago has over 22k GitHub stars ⭐️. Despite no longer maintaining it, I’m grateful to the current maintainers for continuing the project.

This is a portrait of mine done by Gonçalo Dias sometime in 2019 as a gift. Can’t necessarily remember if it was Christmas, or birthday. I think birthday. Definitely check out his work!

In May 2016, I decided to start taking a daily selfie for the next following years. A daily selfie of my life, a lifie. At the time, I did not really think about for how long I would want to do this. Sometimes I thought about stopping it, sometimes I thought about making a video. However, that time never came, until now.

I have just compiled around 7 years worth of pictures, taken daily. Yes, there are days missing, there are even 1 or 2 months missing at some point. Some pictures also do not perfectly match the frame. Nevertheless, it is quite crazy to see how I have changed over the past 6 years.

Below, you can see the video. This video started in my teenage years and ends as a young adult. Among everything else, you will be able to see 3 different pairs of glasses, 5 different places where I lived, many haircuts, as well as the time where I still wore braces.

It is quite crazy. Am I going to keep taking daily pictures? I don’t know. It doesn’t give me a lot of work, takes a few seconds every day. Chances are that I will. But I still have yet to decide.

I gave a lightening talk ⚡️ at IPFS þing 2023 on the 19th of April, about the progress we have made over the past months on building a website for the InterPlanetary Specifications of the IPFS ecosystem. Here’s the slides deck and the video.

I realize I spoke a bit too fast. It was supposed to be a lightening talk, but not necessarily a lightening² talk.

In the beginning of the month, I wrote about being a foreigner in the country you’re living in, and the struggles we have to find ingredients to make dishes from our home country. It can be so frustrating! And well… it happened again!

Yesterday, I was making Arroz Doce 🍚, which literally translates to “sweet rice”. It is a Portuguese rice-pudding-like dessert. It asks for arroz carolino, which is a rice only cultivated in Portugal. That would be quite hard to find, so I checked a Dutch recipe and they said I could use dessert rice instead. I tried it, the taste is there, but the consistency is very far away from what I expected. The grains are so much smaller and it’s barely noticeable it is rice. Next time it’ll be better!

Also, fun fact: Portugal has the highest rice consumption in Europe and we cultivate our own rice. You can read more about it if you’re interested.

Two days ago I shared that I was able to engrave my name in the Alumni Avenue. I now share some pictures from the graduation ceremony that took place on Monday. During the ceremony, each supervisor makes a little speech about each student. Even though I knew that was a costume here in The Netherlands, I was still surprised by it. I’m now sharing the pictures and video with you. They are, after all, public. I am really glad this chapter is concluded and I’m looking forward for the future.

Note: photos and video are copyrighted by TU/e. Photos are originally on Flickr, and video is originally on YouTube.

My university has this thing called “Alumni Avenue”. It’s one of the air bridges between buildings, but this one is special. On this one, old masters students can engrave their names in the glass. On Monday, it was my turn, right before the graduation ceremony. It was quite an intriguing experience: I’ve never engraved anything in glass, so it took quite some time to make sure it was clear and visible 😅 There’s some pictures from the graduation, which I will post once I have access to them!

A few days ago, we had the Lustrum Gala of Dekate Mousa, the photography association and it was a very nice experience! During the gala, we all had the opportunity to see the Lustrum Exhibition! Today at 8pm, the exhibition officially opens for the public at the CKE in Eindhoven. I’m so proud to have 3 of my pictures hanging there, even though it’s such a small thing. If you are in Eindhoven during this and next week, don’t hesitate! It’s free and there’s very very very nice works.

Today I had quite some adventures with Matrix and decentralised messaging protocols. I thought about self-hosting an instance so I tried Synapse, which is the de facto Matrix implementation with all the features available. Quickly I understood that Synapse was too slow for a very tiny VPS so I tried Dendrite which claims to be much more efficient.

So… It run, but it was consuming 100% of all the 2 cores of the CPU of my VPS and yet it didn’t manage to load previous messages of the chats (perhaps that’s a limitation as it doesn’t have all the features yet). As that was a continuous high consumption for over 2 hours, I decided to take it down and create an account at a hosted Matrix instance. I chose tchncs.de, which is hosted in Germany. I didn’t want to go for the default matrix.org because that’s where everyone is and that goes against the decentralisation aspect of the thing.

When - and if - the protocol matures, I hope to see a more efficient implementation tailored for single users or small communities that can still do federation with other instances without dying. I also added my Matrix contact to my contacts page ✨

Now that I’ve crossed the English Channel (or Canal da Mancha, in Portuguese) by train twice, I must say that it was a very nice experience. From Rotterdam to London, it takes approximately 3h30m, including a ~30 minutes stop in Brussels.

However, I also have some notes that may not apply to everyone: (1) it would be much quicker to get a flight directly from Eindhoven that takes 1h to get to London, (2) the security and border procedures at Rotterdam are quick, (3) the security and border procedures in London are a bit slower, (4) you need to be some time in advance at the station, just like the airport.

Nevertheless, it was a good experience and I would recommend it! It’s much more comfortable than a plane and better for the environment. Unfortunately, it’s also much more expensive! If you buy it in advance though, it can be worth it!

I’ve shared this piece in the past in a post where I talked about trying pixel art. However, I feel it deserves its own micro post. Hereby I present you the chemistry tower of my previous university in Portugal 🇵🇹!

Found this beautiful Pirilampos Mágicos (magical fireflies) from April 2019.