known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
It is, yet again, that time of the month to write a bit about what’s been happening lately. April went by relatively fast and it was quite packed with some events, both regarding personal and work life. In addition, the weather is definitely getting so much better than a few months ago.
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.
Recently, I have been working with Open Telemetry tracing at work, namely on adding tracing support to multiple web services in order to understand where time is being spent. Since it has been quite an interesting experience, I decided it could be a great idea to write about it, with a tiny demo.
March is almost gone and here we are again, at one more recap of what has happened over the last month. Compared to February, March has been a pretty eventless month, at least on the surface.
I haven’t written a single article this month. However, I’ve thought about doing so quite a few times. Despite that, none of the articles I have in my drafts section felt exciting enough to complete. But today I was talking to a friend and I remembered this story I’ve told a few friends of mine. It’s the story of the time I “hacked” my school’s library computers. Hacked… with quotes.
February has been a total rollercoaster. Nice things and not so nice things have happened during this month. But overall, let’s keep a positive attitude towards the future. Let’s dive into the events that constituted this month.
Last month, I traveled from The Netherlands 🇳🇱 to Switzerland 🇨🇭 by train. More specifically, I traveled from Eindhoven to Engelberg, which is a small alpine town in the centre of Switzerland. When I wrote this post for the first time, it was mostly a rant, but now that some time has passed, I decided to rewrite it and finally publish it.
Some time ago, I decided to buy a gratitude journal 📓. I have been writing on and off on it for quite some time, definitely over a year and maybe two. Over this time, I think I can say that this has been beneficial for me. And I wanted to share this experience with others.
My thesis, specifically the part regarding Vertical Federated Learning, has been turned into a paper which has been presented during the UbiSec 2022 conference. Now, it has been published. It is called BlockLearning: A Modular Framework for Blockchain-Based Vertical Federated Learning.
This is quite an interesting article. The author goes over the process of reverse-engineering the contents encoded in the Aztec code of the UK mobile rail tickets, which, of course, does not follow the European standard. In addition, eta also published a tool where you can scan your UK tickets and see their contents. Now it would be very interesting to read something similar with the European standard and, of course, a similar tool. Maybe that’s an idea for a post.
January, the infamous first month of the year, is reaching an end. It was a very eventful month, but, by this time, I feel like I say that for every month that passes. I am honestly hoping that February will be a slightly more boring month in that sense.
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.
This is the story on how whipped cream and cocoa powder have stressed me over the last two weeks. I hope that that is a seemingly weird enough sentence to keep you on reading. Or not. If you don’t want to keep going, it’s also fine. But let me tell you more.
Haven’t used Windows in quite some time, but I like to keep following the news as it was the OS that accompanied my childhood, most specifically Windows XP and Windows 7. Somehow I managed to skip Windows Vista, apart from some few interactions in someone else’s computer. Then, Windows 8 came and Windows 10 and I ended up moving to macos for some other reasons and so far, haven’t gone back. I always enjoyed Window UI, at least to some extend.
This article shows UI elements present in Windows 11 that date to older versions of Windows. I expected to see things that dated back to Windows XP. However, I was surprised to see that you can still find UI elements from Windows 3.1 on Windows 11!
A few years ago, I published an article where I did a small analysis of my Trakt data, which contains the shows and movies I have watched. I decided to bring that back again under the name “Year in Popcorn”. I considered “Year in Movies & Shows” but I thought that was too long and unappealing 😅.
