Notes

Since Twitter is going to start charging for the usage of their API in a few days, I just removed all the Twitter related code from my website. To be fair, I haven’t even used any Twitter-relating tooling on my website in months, so it’s unlikely I will miss it.

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.

Albert Heijn, the largest chain of supermarkets in The Netherlands, is notorious for not accepting debit cards that aren’t Maestro or V-Pay. This is due to the Dutch system only using Maestro and V-Pay, instead of Mastercard of Visa. Fortunately, Maestro and V-Pay are going to be deprecated in a few months, and therefore merchants have to start accepting Mastercard and Visa.

Yesterday, I was at Albert Heijn and I had a feeling. I decided to try my Portuguese debit card, which, being Visa, has always been rejected at Albert Heijn. I was pleasantly surprised when it worked. That is some progress.

I really like the idea of Webmentions and Fediverse interactions, as well as displaying them in my website. However, sometimes I go through an old post and look at the webmentions, click on a few, and get a screaming 404 for all of them. That’s sad and I absolutely hate having dead links on my website, for I am aware I have too many, including to my own website. What I’m thinking is to hide webmentions for visitors: they will be visible for me as a logged in user, I always receive a notification when receiving one, so if it’s a reply, I can always react on it. However, I won’t display them on my website.

Despite everything that I heard and read, my latest experience with mobile data connection in Germany was very good. I had 5G everywhere in Aachen and on the way there. I must admit that the first time I went to Germany that wasn’t the case, but it was also in a different area of the country.

Programming is always a fun thing. And that’s what we, developers, do. Sometimes we also write functionalities that we never use, even if we think that we’re going to selfdogfood them. Some time ago, I added authentication to this website such that anyone with IndieAuth could log in in it. In addition, I added private posts. However, have I ever used them? Basically no. Yes, I have used some private posts in the past but that is not something I have done for a long while. In addition, if I want to share something with someone specific, chances are that we already have some communication channel that is easier to use for both of us other than my website. I’m now considering removing private posts and login from others than me. Less code to maintain, less vectors of attack and issues. What do you think?

I’ve been using Duolingo with Dutch since I moved here. I’ve noticed my comprehension skills have improved - albeit not as much as I wish but I also didn’t put the effort. I’m thinking of taking actual real classes soon. I think it’s important as I’m planning to stay here for the near future.

Folks at work recently released NAT hole punching in libp2p and are now trying to find people to try it out to collect some valuable data. Libp2p is a modular network stack for P2P applications. NAT traversal and hole punching are quite important topics when it comes to building p2p applications, since it enables different machines behind NATs to talk to each other. If you care about p2p applications, please join the experiment! There’s more details in the linked page about how it works and the data collected.

Yesterday, I boosted (announced) a post on ActivityPub. It was automatically sent to the instance of the original post, as well as the instance of my remaining followers. Requests were successful. However, the boost only shows up in the instance of the original post. I have absolutely no clue why. What’s the point of boosts if this is how it behaves? Maybe there’s something very obvious that I’m missing. What is it though?

Today, we are trying to finish painting 🎨 the walls of the living room and kitchen. Everything else, except for one wall in the bedroom which will have a different colour, is painted. Unfortunately, I can’t help much today because I have to rest my foot due to a tendinitis, which has been a bummer. Got it in Italy but it takes a long time to recover and last week it got a bit worse. My parents are also traveling today to The Netherlands and it’s their first time going to a foreign country and second time flying. Well… they have been to Spain next to the border but that doesn’t count. So I have to ensure that my foot is the most recovered as it can to show them around a bit over next week.