known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
This is an unusual post: today I did not finish a book, but I decided to consciously stop reading it. And yet, I give it a 3 stars out of 5, which, for me, doesn’t mean it’s bad. It means it is good, but it is still lacking something for me.
July is now coming to an end, and so is summer in The Netherlands per the looks of it. It has been raining for two or three weeks already, and the prediction is that it’ll continue over during this week. This, of course, after a few days of what I would consider unusually high temperatures in The Netherlands. Let’s recap this month.
Some time ago, I wrote an article where I essentially complained and layed out the issues I have had with the Dutch digital identification (DigiD) system as a foreigner. In the meanwhile, there have been a few minor updates, and some other things that changed in my understanding. Hence, this new article.
June was a reasonably packed month: some times more eventful than others, but that’s how it always is. Let’s make a small recap of what has happened lately.
The author of this article had published two videos on Twitter where he showed an old Windows 3.1 and a new Windows 11 machines opening the same apps (command line, explorer, notepad). In this videos, Windows 3.1 was the fastest, which leads us to think: has any progress been made?
In this article, the author goes in more detail about what happened and why it happens. I do agree with the conclusion that the lack of focus and prioritisation on performance is likely the main reason why our OSes and applications have a lot of latency nowadays.
The author goes over the file format they use for tracking their own habits, or anything else in their life that they want. This can potentially be a good thing to do, and with a parser, some analysis can potentially be made out of the logging.
It seems that Apple Weather doesn’t use the same scale for air quality in all countries. While I’ve been seeing air qualified as bad day after day, the Germans, for example, see it as good air quality. I don’t think this helps us, as people, and citizens of our countries. Apple should either let us choose which scale we want to see, or be clear about this behaviour.
I wanted to write an article and, even though I have a list of drafts and ideas about things I want to write, I thought: hmm, I would like to do something more fun. That reminded me of the article I wrote about fractal snowflakes and how to generate them, which gave me an idea 💡!
Today I bring something not as conventional: a post about certain elements of my website you could say that are inspired or borrowed from other websites. Things that I found fascinating and included in my website too over the time. Let’s go!
This is just a quick post to alert that I have changed my PGP key. It doesn’t receive much use, but in the eventuality that someone may want to send me something potentially encrypted, I think it’s reasonably good to keep the record that I updated the key at some point. The contact page has been updated accordingly.
In April, I squeezed into my monthly article that I had come back to Hugo. However, I did not give much context about it. And to continue the “farewell” post saga, here it is. Why did I move back to Hugo? What caused that decision, and how hard was it?
Last night I thought: tomorrow morning I will finish reading The Creative Programmer, and so I did. I woke up this morning, had a light breakfast, made a coffee, and sat down in the balcony reading the last pages of Wouter’s book.
May is now approaching its end and the birds 🕊️ are chirping, filling the air with spring noises. Summer is almost there. There have been quite a few nice things to look back in this month. Let’s go.
A few days ago I started reading this book by Erin Meyer, The Culture Map. And, today, I finished it. Considering I don’t read many non-fiction books, I was quite surprised to see how much this book captivated my attention.
Today, I visited the Spoorwegmuseum, which literally translates to Railway Museum. As you can imagine, many historical wagons 🚃 and locomotives 🚂. This is among my all-time favorite museums. Last year, when I visited for the first time, I forgot my camera. In addition, I did not manage to visit everything. Now, I was back and with a camera and more time.
