known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
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 😅.
2022 marked the year that I went to my first actual concert. By actual concert I mean a concert that I paid for for an artist I wanted to see, in an actual concert hall. And, of course, I listened to a lot o songs thorough the year. This is the recap of 2022 in Music. Let’s see what I’ve been listening to this year.
December is concluding and with it, we’re closing in the end of 2022. With the end of this month, I am writing one more retrospective about the events that have happened in my life during the past month. I am still on the fence whether or not I am writing a “year in review”. I will likely do a post for music and one for movies and TV shows with some stats. But I’m not sure I will write a generic year in review.
Online services. We all have accounts on those. Be it Instagram, Facebook, Twitter Mastodon, or some other thing that is sucking the life out of us. Even though we are the same physical being behind all of those accounts, we don’t always come out the same way to all of them. We look different, we sound different. Maybe that’s the nature of what we post there. They are all online identities.
I started reading this book in June and, even though I was enjoying it, life happened and I started reading very infrequently. I feel like this is a cycle that happens every year: in the beginning of the year I read a lot, during winter, and spring. Then summer comes and I stop reading.
Last weekend, Christiaan and I went to the Christmas Market in Aachen. The first time I went to a Christmas Market was in 2019, in Zurich, during a work trip. Until then, I did not even know that Christmas Markets were a thing. Since moving to The Netherlands, I’ve been wanting to visit one of these magical markets, but, unfortunately, Covid-19 made that impossible. Fortunately, last weekend we made that wish come true.
Tom describes his experiences on implementing part of the ActivityPub specification on top of his Jekyll-based static website. It is indeed quite interesting to me to see how he achieved it, mostly through “serverless” lambdas and whatnot. He notices, very well, that ActivityPub can be quite messy and is very active when compared to other technologies, such as RSS.
Similarly, most dynamic functionalities of my website could be implemented on top of a static website (as they once were). However, I’m not following that route now. Who knows if in the future I won’t switch back. An interesting… continuous… food for thought.
